"Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One"

    ☆☆☆☆½ 

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explain the plot of Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, a title as un-punctuatable as the movie is inexplicable. I wasn't 30 minutes into this latest Mission: Impossible movie before I gave up trying to follow along, and I'm not sure my experience was diminished in any way.

I've seen all of the other Mission: Impossible movies, and of them and their globe-hopping, labyrinthine plots, here are the things I remember: Tom Cruise hanging on to a train inside a Chunnel tunnel; Tom Cruise hanging from wires; Tom Cruise hanging from the side of the Burj Khalifa; Tom Cruise in a motorcycle chase through Paris; Tom Cruise hanging from the side of an airplane.

I don't much remember why, and most importantly, I don't really care. The Mission: Impossible films seem to transcend plot, which is not to say they don't have any. Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One (there's got to be some punctuation in there other than that colon?) has a whole lot of plot, and even more characters. In one of the film's pivotal scenes, about six of the characters all meet up and discuss who's going to do what to whom, and when, and although it's all fantastically well acted, you can imagine the performers crying out, "What did I just say?" as soon as the camera shut off.

But it doesn't matter, and whenever the plot seems to overwhelming (which is frequently), there's only one thing to keep in mind: There's something everyone wants. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, naturally) and his tiny team from the Impossible Mission Force are looking for it. So is everyone else. And if the wrong people find it, something really, really bad will happen.

This time around, that something relates to artificial intelligence, and watching the film suddenly made me wonder if all the latest hand-wringing about ChatGPT and other AI systems hasn't all been a very elaborate marketing scheme for this film.

There are so many unanswered questions—none of which I can actually write here for fear of spoilers—and so many characters with murky motivations that you might be excused for thinking I'm putting this one on par with the equally murky and convoluted Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. But I'm not, because Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One has all of the things Indy doesn't:

This movie is impeccably well made, terrifically suspenseful, and moves with unbelievable swiftness: Its running time of 2 hours, 45 minutes may well be bloated, yet there's never any time this movie lets up. On top of that, one of the best car chase scenes in many years, this one involving Rome's Spanish Steps, is also the source of entirely unexpected humor—I laughed a lot at Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, and also gasped and even squirmed in my seat a time or two, and really, what more can you ask from a movie? Well, except a coherent plot.

But the best thing about this movie is that even if you're thoroughly baffled by what's happening on screen, you won't have time or the inclination to notice. 

Oh, but if you are, and you've seen the film, here's a terrific, spoiler-filled exploration of what you might have missed—because, let's be honest, you almost certainly did miss at least some of it. And, let's also be honest, it doesn't much matter. In 20 years, you're going to remember Tom Cruise on that motorcycle, or Tom Cruise on that train, or Tom Cruise in Venice, and that's what you came for, anyway.

Viewed July 22, 2023 — AMC Universal

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"The Blackening"

     ☆☆☆½ 

With Get Out and Us, Jordan Peele managed to be scary and socially trenchant. With Cabin in the Woods, Drew Goddard managed to be scary, funny and meta. But with The Blackening, Tim Story has created a film that's all of those things — while still being an engaging thriller with a mystery whose final revelation is one I never saw coming.

The Blackening begins with a pre-credit sequence that recalls movies like Scream with an unnerving twist as a couple visiting a remote house in the woods (more than a cabin one of the characters points out) to prepare for a 10-year college reunion timed to Juneteenth discovers a mind-numbingly racist board game. They decide to play a round. Bad move.

More of their friends show up, unaware of what has happened. The gang is made up of ridiculous stereotypes, which fuels the concepts of the film, and ensures the scenes in which we learn about their histories seemingly don't require too much in the way of attention — but offer ample opportunity for well-written zingers and one-liners. Then, in grand Agatha Christie style, they find themselves at the center of a sinister, murderous plot.

They're nominally led by Lisa (Antoinette Robertson) and Allison (Grace Byers), though it's truly an ensemble cast. In the midst of laughs and screams—and there are plenty of both, though the film is relatively bloodless for a slasher satire—their personalities come through thanks to a game cast and clever direction.

There's been no dearth of films with a similar approach recently: The Menu, Glass Onion, not to mention yet another Scream sequel, but The Blackening stands apart with its willingness to make cutting social observations and offer up some well-earned discomfort for viewers, while never forgetting its mission as a comedy, above all. At times you'll need to follow along closely, and by the end you may wish you had been listening just a little more closely at the start. The Blackening knows and appreciates that Black audiences will understand more of its references than non-Black audiences—and wears that knowledge proudly. Yet, few will ever really feel left out by its rare and winning combination of fun, games and just a little bit of gore.

Viewed July 4, 2023 — AMC Universal City

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"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"

          ☆☆        

"And I hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it,

But I probably will."

— Bruce Springsteen, "Glory Days"

When Raiders of the Lost Ark burst on the scene in 1981, it breathed entirely new life into an old, tired movie genre, turning cheesy Saturday-morning serials and slapdash adventure films into something grand and new. Four decades later, we have a new Indiana Jones film, and it's sad to say that it's more like the wheezing contrivances Raiders was sending up, and is nothing grand and new.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny calls to mind The Boss's lyrics of the embarrassing inevitability of looking back instead of moving forward. "Saturday matinées" are history themselves — today's audiences haven't known them and probably weren't born when Raiders of the Lost Ark or its first two sequels were released. Who is this film for? One audience only, that I can tell: Old guys who remember the glory days of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Considered entirely on its own merits, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny fails rather spectacularly. There's no sense of character or setting, no effort to evoke a sense of urgency or consequences, no forward momentum to a story that, for all its kinetic movement, feels oddly inert. The movie is filled with a sense of fan service, of obligation. Instead of an abiding, giddy desire to take us on a new adventure, there's a dutiful and dull responsibility to hit the marks and remember the lines.

Appearances by a couple of characters from previous films feel jammed in to a story that largely borders on incomprehensible. There is a "MacGuffin," as Hitchcock used to call it — a thing that everyone in the story is after — but it's a pretty dim one here: an ancient mechanism that, we are meant to believe, can identify previously unknown "fissures in time" that appear as big reverse funnel clouds in the sky. Since this film takes place in 1969 (it begins not just in 1969, but on the day of the moon landing, no less), you'd imagine that science might have observed these strange phenomena into which entire airplanes can fly, but, nope.

The chief bad guy is a Nazi (yes, again — that's Nazis in 60% of the Indiana Jones films so far) still alive and well in 1969 and working for the U.S. government designing the rockets that take men to the moon. Now, there's an interesting story: Indiana Jones working to expose the bad guy in NASA's ranks. But that's not at all what Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has in mind. The Nazi's motives are sketchy, but even cloudier are the motives and loyalties of Indiana Jones' goddaughter, Helena, who just happens to show up at exactly the right moment to set this convoluted story in motion.

It's impossible to fault Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny for never stopping — it is wall-to-wall action in a way that we like to recall the previous films being, even though they actually weren't. Until the final scene, there's not a moment of reflection or even explanation: when the film needs to explain something (which it frequently does), characters shout at each other while on the run.

Some characters, including one key "sidekick," appear and disappear seemingly at random, while another shows up at the last moment for a scene that tries hard to evoke real emotion, never minding that it undermines the only other moment of humanity in the film. It's false and fabricated, contrived to meet the expectations of fans, which so much of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny seems designed to do.

I've intentionally stayed away from revealing too much of the story for fear of spoiling the film for anyone yet to see it — but also because I'm not sure I understand much of it. Too many characters do and say too many things, to the point that the film seems to wind in on itself, and isn't even sure of its own trajectory. This is one strange, messy film that contains none of the assured storytelling and sharp wit that was the hallmark of the first three movies in the series.

As it nears its climax, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny goes in such a weird direction that I suddenly started thinking of the sharp and funny Bill and Ted movies. These scenes would be embarrassing except that they embrace their craziness so fully — and, oddly, they end up being the only ones in the movie I'm really likely to remember. For one weird, brief moment, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny comes fully to life, resulting in a massive choice for Indy to make. But he doesn't make it, and for the umpteenth time in an Indiana Jones movie, our hero is denied the chance to embrace his own story, deflating the film just as it should be reaching its climax.

For the most part, Indiana Jones is a long, lumbering, confusing escape room puzzle. It often seems inspired less by its own predecessors than by The DaVinci Code and National Treasure. That both of those films were, in turn, trying to evoke the spirit of Indiana Jones films seems at once illuminating and awfully depressing.

Indiana Jones has had some glory days. Now, it really is past time for him to hang up that hat for good.

Viewed July 2, 2023 — AMC Topanga 12

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"Past Lives"

    ☆☆☆☆☆ 

Past Lives is the first great movie of 2023, a film of enormous ambition and epic, sweeping scope that is determined to remain grounded. Writer-director Celine Song is taking on nothing less than an entire philosophical conceit, but narrowing it to one small, specific story. Its characters continually insist they are ordinary and nothing special, but this extraordinary film is special, indeed.

Its story is one we've seen countless times: Two characters in love are separated, only to reunite decades later. On the surface, Past Lives tells its story in a quiet, straightforward way—so quiet that its deliberate pacing once or twice threatens to backfire, though never does. The characters here are Nora and Hae Sung, who meet as children in South Korea, just before her parents emigrate to Canada. Twenty-four years later, Nora (Greta Lee) is married to Arthur (John Magaro) and living in New York, when Hae Sung (Teo Woo) comes to visit, a situation as emotionally fraught as it is beautiful.

Woven throughout, with breathtaking style, is a Korean philosophy of "in yun," a long-haul destiny that explains but does not determine why two people might meet. Nora and Hae Sung have maintained their relationship in on-and-off, long-distance style for decades, and it's nothing her husband doesn't know about. "The guy flew 13 hours on a plane to see you, I'm not going to tell you not to see him," he reasons. Yet there's something much deeper, something both he and we sense, even while Nora and Arthur have a strong, committed marriage. It's a film that breathes a sense of magic: The Way We Were crossed with Lost in Translation — with the mildest hint of some of the loveliest ideas from Everything Everywhere All at Once. Past Lives builds to long and exquisitely unpredictable closing scene, one as wondrous and remarkable as everything else in this small bit of cinematic beauty.

Viewed May 10, 2023 — AMC Burbank 6

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"You Hurt My Feelings"

   ☆☆☆☆½ 

Nicole Holofcener's You Hurt My Feelings begins with simple white titles on a black screen that quickly cut to an elite, golden-hued New York City, and movie fans who grew up watching Woody Allen's witty, erudite comedies of the 1970s and 1980s will recognize both the place and the tone immediately. Holofcener's film is a spiritual twin to those movies, only slightly less anxious and barely less specific. Yet, You Hurt My Feelings stirs an entirely different sort of feelings than, say, Hannah and Her Sisters or Annie Hall, which is a relief and a surprise.

The film centers on Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a doubt-laden memoir writer who is moving into fiction without much success. Her therapist husband Don (Tobias Menzies) is, theoretically, at least, steeped in empathy—but what happens when a therapist goes through a midlife crisis? Beth's sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) and her husband Mark (Arian Moyaed) are facing their own uncertainties of self, so they're of little help when Beth overhears Don being both honest and less than kind when discussing her new book.

With such a narrow focus on a seemingly tiny problem faced by an affluent woman who wants for nothing in her life, You Hurt My Feelings would seem to have little to offer except some brilliant performances. Yet, this small film and its highly specific target winds up doing something unexpected and glorious: Without ever losing its sight on Beth and her circumstance, You Hurt My Feelings reassures viewers, with humor and empathy, that their own feelings of inadequacy and uncertainty are entirely normal. A hair over 90 minutes, You Hurt My Feelings isn't much longer than a therapy session—but it's infinitely cheaper, and maybe just as effective. With disarming humor (a small dinner-party scene has a few of the biggest laughs in recent memory, Holofcener's film takes something we are sure we've seen before and turns it into something entirely new—and entirely winning.

Viewed June 2, 2023 — AMC Century City

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"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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