"Air"

    ☆☆☆ 

Air is a perfectly affable bit of marketing history, which is interesting in itself, as marketing initiatives don't normally merit the big-screen treatment. Air doesn't really feel like it believes it warrants the big-screen treatment, and it's no surprise at all that the film is directed by Ben Affleck for Amazon Studios. It feels like a streaming movie, a perfectly fine way to spend a couple of hours when there's nothing better to do.

Air is a little better than that, actually, because it features a late-in-the-game stunner, a sharp, impassioned, moving monologue that cuts to the heart of everything Air believes it's about: heroism, bravery, myth-making. What Air doesn't seem to believe it's about is crass profiteering, marketing meant to drive sales.

It's about a specific moment in time, 1984 to be precise, when still-fledgling Nike decided to get into the "basketball shoe" business by courting Michael Jordan to wear and promote its shoes. A lot turned on that moment — it led to the celebrity-obsessed, insanely big-money, captialism-on-steroids world we're in today. It wouldn't take much to argue that the heroes of Air aren't really heroes at all, they're just business people who (maybe) unintentionally opened the door to some pretty awful things for the world.

But Air lacks any hint of cynicism. This isn't Moneyball or Jerry Maguire, and it's definitely not scabrous like, say, Network or Ace in the Hole. It's nice. It believes its central characters are doing good things. Even when they're kind of rotten and kind of sarcastic, they're still nice — and Matt Damon's Sonny Vaccaro, an actual Nike executive who really did the things that happen in the movie (there are even photos in the credits to prove it), really seems to believe everything he says in that speech.

It's stirring. It's wonderful. It makes Air worth seeing, I think, even if though it's warm and moving when perhaps it should be just a little bit angrier than that. Air believes the only real arbiter of success is money — it just doesn't have the strength of conviction to come right out and say it.

Viewed April 30, 2023 — AMC Burbank 6

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"Beau Is Afraid"

   ☆☆½ 

In 1987, Woody Allen made a film in which an anxious, neurotic dweller in the big city encounters unexpected, surreal difficulties with his mother. The film was Oedipus Wrecks, included in New York Stories, and at 40 minutes it made its point, provided some amusement, and overstayed its welcome.

Now, Ari Aster, fresh off the undeniable (if divisive) arthouse horror hits Hereditary and Midsommar, has made a film in which an anxious, neurotic dweller in the big city encounters unexpected, surreal difficulties with his mother. Aster's film is ten minutes shy of three hours, and to say it overstays its welcome would be a drastic understatement.

Other than that most vague of summaries of Beau Is Afraid, there isn't much way to describe what happens in the movie, which takes place in some alternate universe of a MAGA-ites worst nightmares about urban violence and artistic theater types and a liberal's most ardent fever dreams about big business, suburbia and military veterans.

Within its rambling three hours are grotesque giant penises, enormous testicles, vomit, much blood, ample nudity, intense violence, questions of incest and sexual dysfunction, plus surreal moments played both for laughs and for artistic integrity — like a hypnotic (that's not necessarily a good thing) animated sequence that's simultaneously dazzling and dull.

There's one moment in the film in which one character — it's far too difficult to try to explain who — is doing a puzzle and Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) says he's found the piece she needs. Beau Is Afraid is a lot like a cinematic puzzle, or maybe an intellectual's film version of an escape room: It offers intriguing, sometimes genuinely tantalizing, individual pieces, but none of them add up to a whole or offer anything like a solution. There are hints at dystopian science fiction, weird echoes of corporate satire, and a lot of amusing and silly spoofs of popular culture ("Professor Marvelous!"  reads a poster on a bedroom wall, a dig at super-hero movies).

But what does it mean? A film doesn't necessarily need to offer any solutions — we've been scratching our collective heads over Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey for nearly 60 years. But there should be some point, some cohesive idea, not just a bunch of strange images and even weirder plot twists that never pay off. There are call-outs to The Truman Show, The Shining, Ex Machina and Defending Your Life (weirdly) throughout, yet none of it ever coalesces.

If it's meant to be a head-scratcher, it is. And except for that languorous animated sequence (both a marvel and a challenge to behold), it's never boring. Beau Is Afraid is compulsively watchable, I'll give it that — but what are we watching? And why? In the end, I am afraid the answer is: not much.

Viewed April 23, 2023 — AMC Topanga 12

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"How to Blow Up a Pipeline"

   ☆☆☆☆ 

It's hard to imagine a genre more difficult to pull off than the environmental thriller. The 1970s brought us the definitive one with The China Syndrome (a movie still as nerve-wracking and engrossing today as in 1979), and since then? I can think of dubious attempts: The Day After Tomorrow or the bizarre '80s experience of John Boorman's The Emerald Forest, but it's not done often.

An environmental movie must, at its heart, preach. Audiences aren't much for preaching, especially these days. And a thriller needs to thrill. Preaching and thrilling are usually not closely related.

All that makes How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a movie whose central plot and its general attitude are sharply conveyed in its in-your-face title, a real surprise. As a thriller, it's a genuine nail-biter. Its central thesis of irreversible damage caused by the oil industry is hardly a new concept, but here it's presented with alarming humanity.

The movie follows eight people in their 20s and 30s as they concoct a scheme to, you guessed it, blow up a pipeline. Each has a reason for being there, and some of the reasons are not at all what you might imagine as they're revealed, slowly, in intermittent flashbacks.

Some of the tension is the old-fashioned sort that would make Hitchcock light up with glee: bombs being built by someone who doesn't necessarily know how to build bombs; synchronized watches that count down the moments to the planned detonation; the inevitability of being caught doing bad deeds on federal land.

Each character is tightly drawn, and the movie has a sly way of withholding key information about some of the perpetrators until the very end, with revelations that cause us to rethink everything we thought we knew. Even a hardcore conservative who argues that these are nothing but punk kids who deserve anything that's coming to them will find it impossible not to be riveted by their exploits.

Though it lacks a certain finesse and sometimes seems a little too relaxed with some of its storytelling, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a real rarity: a thriller that thrills even while it gets its audiences to think.

Viewed April 19, 2023 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves"

  ☆☆☆☆½ 

When we stopped going to movie theaters 37 months ago, I said I was done writing this blog. Movies had moved to streaming, exhibitors had given up, and even studios — you know, the places that make movies — had given up. It was a dark time all around. For the last year or so, the movies have been back at something like half-speed, though there have been weeks at a time when our personal moviegoing (my husband and me, not the Royal We) has been back more or less to normal: Once, occasionally twice, a week. But the blog stayed dormant. There were some wonderful films in 2022, and I'd argue it was one of the better years for movies as a whole, but as streaming services seemed determined to kill movie theaters, and movie exhibitors seemed all too willing to oblige, a blog about going to the movies still seemed pointless.

Now comes Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, a movie with a title that sounds made up by corporate committee — no doubt I'm missing a ® or ™ symbol here or there. Going in, everything about D&D HAT seems calculated to fully prove the notion that movies are dead, that there is no imagination left, and that we might as well, 100 or so after modern cinema began, start giving up.

There’s a lot of trepidation going in. Still, go in. Because it turns out all those fears, while no doubt well founded, are, in this case at least, wrong. 

To be clear, Dungeons isn't the sole shining beacon that proves we are out of the moviegoing woods. Starting with that title, ending with a smash-crash-bash-em-up finale that is as poorly choreographed,  narratively murky and cinematically exhausting as any Marvel film, there are flaws.

But oh, there are such wonders.

Here is a film that revels in being a film. Though CG is evident throughout, sometimes abundantly, the first thing you may notice about D&D HAT is that it's gloriously, giddily physical. The people, the creatures, the castles (at least once we're inside the walls), the dungeons, the villages, the swords, the costumes are all delightfully tactile, which goes an awfully long way toward taking viewers into the world of the film.

It's a fanciful world, at the intersection of fairy tale and sword-and-sorcery adventure. Populating it are characters who are visually inhuman but recognizably human after all. They're all on a high-stakes, emotionally rich story redolent of Star Wars by way of The Wizard of Oz, but without the pretense of, say, Ridley Scott's Legend or the tacky silliness of The Beastmaster. It doesn't try too hard like Boorman's Excalibur nor become an outright comedy show like the Jumanji remake, a movie it sometimes resembles.

I've not mentioned the plot, because it's one best discovered fresh — ideally by the most cynical eyes possible, ones that are drooping and tired from imagining this going so very, very wrong, of becoming some new version of Transformers films. The less you believe Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves could be engaging, merry, grand, silly and still have an emotional, beating heart at its core, the more you'll resist it, the more you’ll share the perspective it brings to the proceedings, one that almost feels subverting. 

You don't have to know a single thing about Dungeons & Dragons the role-playing game to watch and be made happy by this irresistible film. It might even be best if you're the kind who scoffs at the game. If you are, then you, like me, will sit in front of this film, arms crossed, daring it to impress you, which it will do — and then, I hope, it will do the same thing to you that it did to me:

It will make you believe that movies can be fun again, that they can be (somewhat) original, truly surprising, and a pure delight from start to finish. As much as I liked the movies in 2022, it's been a long time since a film even hinted at the reasons I still love "the movies."

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves did more than hint: It contains them all, and then some. It's the kind of film that makes you want to go see movies more and more often. It's a pure, unalloyed delight.

April 1, 2023 — AMC Burbank 16

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I Found it at the Movies

I spent 10,969 hours away from the movies.

In that time, I could have watched Titanic 3,375 times, and maybe by then I'd stop tearing up around the time she lets go, though that also means I would have heard Rose say the name "Jack" exactly 270,000 times and even for me that would be a bit much.

As much as I missed the movies, I wasn't really planning on going back quite yet, but last night my husband and I talked about the need to start doing things we might not entirely be ready to do, and how we have to trust that the vaccine really does work. The world might not be as safe as we used to think it was, but it's safer now than we knew it to be a year ago.

So, 457 days after I walked out of a matinée of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, blissfully, rather stupidly ignorant on February 29, 2020, that a pandemic was raging 7,000 miles away, completely unaware that it was the last time I would go to the movies for 15 months (would we be able to function effectively if we considered that this time could, potentially, be the last time for anything we do?), we sat in the dark again and we let ourselves be carried away.

The movie was A Quiet Place, Part II, which is a very good, exceedingly effective movie, made with care and precision and craft, even artistry, by John Krasinski. About 20 minutes into it, my husband turned to me, face back behind a mask having eaten our popcorn and followed the rules still in place in Los Angeles, and said, "My nerves are already shot."

He wondered, later, if this was quite the best movie to see just as we're (oh, let it be so) coming out of this terrifying pandemic. Oh, yes. It's the perfect movie.

Watch it and tense up. Watch it and be afraid for the people on screen. Watch it and (like me) actually scream and jump when one of those aliens with the flower for a head comes crashing right through -- well, no, don't let me spoil it for you. Just watch it. Ideally in a movie theater.

Because after the longest time I've ever spent away from the movies in my life, here is what I discovered:

There really is magic at the movies.

In the last 15 months, there's been a lot of discussion about whether the movies are dead. I found out today that they are gloriously alive. Oh, they are, they are -- they most certainly are.

We've gotten used, in these interminable, sometimes terrifying, months to watching movies at home. To calling the act of sitting down in front of a TV screen or, worse, a computer screen "watching a movie." And there's nothing wrong with that phrase. That's what you're doing.

But it's not going to the movies.

When you go to the movies, the lights go down and the screen comes alive, and if the movie is even remotely good enough it grips you and pulls you in and you are enveloped in the story in a way you can never, ever, ever be at home, not even if you have one of those big mansions with a purpose built 15-seat movie theater with a 160-inch screen. Then, you're still watching a movie at home.

You're not going to the movies.

Yes, I know, I know. You will say that the popcorn is too expensive and the floors are sticky and the staff is apathetic and the projection is off and the image isn't always great and the other people around you are talking and texting, and for all of that you have to pay somewhere between eight and 25 dollars. You could just microwave some popcorn and put it in a bowl and curl up with a blanket and watch something at home, where the image is sometimes even better and the sound sounds pretty good, relatively speaking, and if someone is texting you can tell them to put down the phone without fear of a fight breaking out (well, sometimes), and you don't have to put up with that hassle.

You're right. I can't argue any of that.

But if you're going to call it quits with the movies over those things, why do anything? Why go to a restaurant or get excited about seeing a play again or buy tickets for a concert or go to a baseball game or book a cruise or go to a theme park? Because the truth is, most of those things are, on some level, miserable experiences that never work out the way you want them to. But there's still something wonderful about them.

And they're not even magic.

No, the movies really are magic. It's not just a line. At the movies, the lights come down and you sit up in your chair and you maybe get a little closer (or wish you could) to the person you came with and you give yourself over to it.

You don't say, "Pause it for a minute, I'll be right back." You don't say, "If you don't like this, we can change it?" Mostly (there are exceptions) you shut up and two hours fly by and you laugh and you cry and you scream and you think very little about all the other things that are happening in your life, because here you are at the movies, in the dark, simultaneously in your chair and somewhere else entirely.

There is magic and it is real. It doesn't matter if you know how they do it, and you can be as cynical as you want to be about all of it – Lord knows that in the last year, I've turned as cynical about the movies as the worst of them as I've watched Hollywood seemingly work overtime to hasten the death of the very thing that made it into what we used to call "the dream factory," because in so many ways that really is what it is. Movies are dreams – someone else's dreams, your dreams, sometimes both things at once.

In the classic movie structure, the kind of a plot we all know because it's embedded in the very fabric of these dreams, at the end of the second act, everything seems lost. Nothing could be worse for the hero of the story, whether it's a farm boy from a two-sun planet or a giddily singing nun or an alien lost and alone on earth. Things are as bad as they're ever going to get, and the outcome doesn't look very good.

That's not the way the movie ends, though.

Things get better.

It takes a while, but even if the boat sinks and the love of her life sinks with him, Rose is going to be fine, she's going to be on that horse on the beach in Santa Monica and she's going to throw the Heart of the Ocean back into the sea, and as a reward she will live happily with Jack on the Titanic that will always exist in her heart.

And it's sappy. And it may make your eyes roll. But it's going to work out, one way or another.

For the movies, too.

I found that out today.

To paraphrase Rick Blaine: We'll always have the movies. We didn't have, we lost them until you sat in that chair and the lights went down. We got them back.

So, stream all you want. Sometimes I'll even join you. But from now on, whenever I can, as long as I can, I'm going to once again (and always) be one of those wonderful people out there in the dark.

See you at the movies.

Catching Up: "Just Mercy"

 ☆☆☆☆½ 

The story of Just Mercy is so good, so compelling, and the movie is made and performed with such crackling intensity, that it may come as a surprise about two-thirds of the way through to realize it's actually based on a true story.

Just Mercy moves with the narrative thrust of a legal thriller – an idealistic young lawyer, fresh out of Harvard (Michael B. Jordan) moves to the Deep South to become an advocate for death row convicts.  It's the late 1980s, but in Monroeville, Ala., time has stopped, and other than the cars, the phones and some embarrassing hair choices, nothing has changed at all since long before the town's most famous resident, Harper Lee, wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. Townsfolk proudly tell the new black man in town, who they assume is visiting, not to miss the Mockingbird museum, proudly asserting that Atticus Finch was real.

As the lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, meets the men he wants to help, their stories stun him. Two in particular – a Vietnam veteran (Rob Morgan) so emotionally wounded by battle that he still cannot understand why he did what he did, and the hardened and embittered Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), who has come to believe it's irrelevant that he didn't actually commit the murder that sent him to prison. Truth, he knows, is merely an inconvenience. But Stevenson is determined, and he's helped by a young woman (Brie Larson) whose skin color is a distinct advantage in the "community" that only considers white people.

Just Mercy is indeed concerned with travesties of justice, which makes it achingly relevant. Director Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12) has set to to make a superior thriller, and it's because Just Mercy works so fantastically well at that level that it more than earns its disbelieving rage and clear-eyed anger. Just Mercy will get you worked up, but not at the expense of a captivating story told with impressive style and skill.



Viewed June 9, 2020 -- VOD

"The Vast of Night"

 ☆☆☆ 

To set us in the right frame of mind, The Vast of Night (exclusively on Amazon Prime) opens with a sly and inventive riff on Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone," pushing in to a mid-century television set that presents the story as a tale of the weird and unexplainable.

Indeed, much of The Vast of Night is deliciously weird and unexplainable, also visually stylish and suffused with the lonely, echoing feel of a distant AM radio station playing love songs at night.

That makes sense because the film, by first-time director Andrew Patterson (from a script by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger) is set in a remote, barren New Mexico town in the late 1950s, when thoughts of Sputnik and atomic war and monsters from beyond filled everyone's heads. Everett (Jake Horowitz) is the DJ at the local AM radio station and Fay (Sierra McCormick) is the overnight telephone operator. In a wonderfully acted, technically dazzling scene near the beginning of this brief, moody movie, Fay comes across a strange sound, and soon discovers that something even stranger seems to be happening outside of her little cubby hole of an office.

She and Everett begin to investigate, and stumble onto a complicated backstory related by two people in scenes that are not nearly as captivating as they should be. Because The Vast of Night was made on a minuscule budget, the film necessarily needs to tell more than than it can show. That may be all well and good for an indie drama, but if you're going to tell a sci-fi story like this as a movie, you need to be prepared to show more than The Vast of Night possibly can. In two uncomfortably long stretches, the screen turns black – and while that's unnerving and disorienting, it's also less effective than director Patterson hopes.

Another scene with a woman who may hold a key to understanding the mystery goes on far too long – it takes up about 20 percent of the movie's short running time, and the energy flags. The finale gives us more than might be reasonably expected, but after such a strong, mesmerizing start and such a bad fumble a third of the way in, The Vast of Night ends less with a bang than with a whimper.



Viewed May 31, 2020 – Amazon Prime