Blue Bayou

Korean-American writer/director/actor Justin Chon has created in Blue Bayou an insistent modern fable set in New Orleans that packs devastating impact. In this beautiful and painful film, Chon plays Antonio LaBlanc, a Korean immigrant brought to American by adoptive parents when he was three and raised in Louisiana. Antonio is married to the loving and pregnant Kathy (Alicia Vikander), and is the doting step-father to Kathy's precocious daughter Jessie (Sydney Kowaslske). 

Events lead to an encounter with the police, among them Kathy's ex-husband and Jessie's father Ace (Mark O'Brien), who abandoned the family shortly after his daughter was born. Antonio, who makes "honest money" as a tattoo artist and "dirty money" boosting motorcycles, is threatened with deportation after the run-in with the cops and the vise of America's immigration policies begins to tighten around him and his family. 

Watching human and system failures is always gut-wrenching, but Chon mixes Antonio's personal agony with the story of a Vietnamese woman named Parker (Linh Dan Pham), who is dying of cancer. She wants a tattoo of a fleur-de-lis as it reminds of her home. From that encounter, Parker shares some of her life and wisdom about being both rooted and rootless, as so many of the Dreamers are. 

Chon, who is not an immigrant, has rich insight about the mental and emotional terrain inhabited by those who are brought to the land of opportunity, conditionally, and with little recourse if access is suddenly denied. All many of them have are tears and broken hearts -- much like the audiences for this wonderful picture.

Copshop (2021)

Joe Carnahan's grindhouse feature film Copshop is set in a remote Nevada police station but has as much to do with law and order, strictly speaking, as Swan Lake has to do with ornithology. The film's set up is a mysterious bad man (Frank Grillo) is being chased by a mysterious worse man (Gerard Butler) and Officer Val Young (Alexis Louder) is the only person standing between them and an even worse man (a brilliantly unhinged performance by Toby Huss), and the whole posse is in the sights of a bad cop. The rest is layer-upon-layer of vulgarity and balderdash between and among the officers of the station and the prisoners.

Carnahan and co-writers Kurt McLeod and Mark Williams have included red herrings and complications that are not fully explained or resolved; they just energize some action and place characters on needed markers. In other words, they're plot devices. The writers do seem to be interested in demonstrating how seemingly unstoppable criminal psychopaths can be, until confronting the proper force. They aren't extolling lawlessness in this brutal and bloody modernized Western showdown. Rather they are resurrecting the Lone Ranger mythos and merging it with Black Girl Magic.

Young, who is terrific as the Lone Ranger, is introduced in the film performing gunslinger quickdraw tricks for her boss (Chad L. Coleman of The Wire, The Expanse, Walking Dead) that will come in handy during the film's final reel, as everyone who has ever seen a movie would expect.

Dear Evan Hansen

 

No, Steven Chbosky's film adaptation of the Broadway musical sensation Dear Evan Hansen is not the horror-show some movie critics have deemed it. And star Ben Platt only sporadically looks too old for the role of the high school senior of the title. I found it entertaining and think the degree to which one will enjoy it will vary based on one's appreciation for the staginess of the show, the starkness of some of its viewpoints and the patness of its final act. The story itself might be revealing or off-putting, depending on an audience member's proximity to teenagers, depression or suicide.

The music by Justin Paul and Benj Pasek, the film's greatest asset, is tuneful and infectious, every performance on the money, and will likely lead many to set aside that the film is about an emotionally distressed young man, Evan Hansen, who crafts out of whole cloth a relationship with a classmate, Connor (star featured player Colton Ryan), who has killed himself. A letter Evan wrote to himself as part of his therapy is discovered and confiscated by Connor and later found in the dead boy's pockets. His parents (Amy Adams and Danny Pino), finding the letter, conclude Evan and Connor were friends and they press Evan for information about the son neither they nor their daughter Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), whom Evan is pining for, barely knew. Thus begins what is at first a dream and then a nightmare for Hansen.

I was bothered a bit that the narrative does not explore the cause(s) of the mental or emotional illness on display in the film's characters -- primarily Evan and Connor but also by a high-powered student leader Alana (the lovely Amandla Stenberg), who identifies with Evan's immobilizing fear but is on meds to treat it. Perhaps the reasons are too complex to deal with in 2 1/2 hours, but the storyline seems to point to divorce and abandonment and familial fragmentation. In fact, Evan's tearful confession to making up the lies refers to his desire to be a part of Connor's family, despite having a loving and dutiful mother of his own (a fantastic Julianne Moore).

That Evan was abetted in creating a history of email exchanges between himself and Connor by a jokey "family friend" named Jared (Nik Dodani) turns what began as misguided empathy into callous manipulation. This, more than anything, might set some viewers off.

The film is by no means for every taste. Many will likely avoid it because people do indeed break out in song as part of the movie's exposition. Others will object to the subject matter or Platt's hair. In the final analysis, its message about authenticity and connectedness are worth considering. And the songs are pretty.

Thoughts on a Tale of Two Faces

 

Thoughts on a Tale of Two Faces --

Ben Platt and Timothée Chalamet are roughly the same age (27 and 25, respectively) and they both attended Columbia but are occupying entirely difference spaces in the cinematic universe right now.

Platt is being savaged as the star of what many critics say is the grossest miscalculation in movie history, that is, turning the celebrated Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen, which starred Platt, into a movie musical starring Platt. Setting aside the subject matter -- mental illness and suicide among teens -- Platt's appearance is way out of character and because the film spends so much time on his face, the camera is not his friend, critics say.

On the other hand, there's Chalamet, who seems to go from strength to strength, moving between contemporary and period pieces, from comedy to drama, anchoring each performance in what appears to be studied discipline. His choice of material is age-appropriate; he plays the youthful Paul Atreides in the upcoming Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve. The film has received nothing but critical and movie-goer praise, mostly for Villeneuve's fresh and authentic treatment of the source material.

Platt is first and foremost a stage performer with a truly wonderful voice and he's a decent songwriter. He lacks Chalamet's striking visual presence and the younger man's acting range, but Platt's no chump.

Except, perhaps, for saying yes to playing Evan Hansen on the screen. It was no doubt a safe choice, in that he knew the role by heart and his father is one of the producers, but it probably wasn't wise.

Chalamet has demonstrated impressive professional wisdom in his choices, working primarily with auteurs -- Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, Woody Allen, Greta Gerwig, Luca Guadagnino, Wes Anderson. He is as sagacious a judge of material and his craft as they come. He also has a disarming, ingratiating manner that seems to come from a place of generosity. He may have the bone structure of a Grecian statue but he's no prima donna.

Platt, meanwhile, has responded to criticism of his film -- which, granted, has been brutal -- a bit more defensively than his agent would likely recommend. But I guess that's what happens when the distance between you and your role has shrunk to nearly nothing. Still, he has many fans and will weather this storm, wiser for the wear.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Director Michael Showalter's riveting The Eyes of Tammy Faye proposes that the Bakkers (Jim and the eponymous Tammy Faye) were lovable loons who turned piety and pity into a global bonanza first through The 700 Club and later The PTL network.

The film's tone is split between the parodic (delivered mainly by Andrew Garfield as the boyishly goofy Jim) and the pathetic (captured in Jessica Chastain's uncanny impersonation of Tammy Faye). Though Showalter skewers evangelistic arrogance and fraudulence on occasion, the film is not at all condemning. In fact, it feels sympathetic and quite often kind toward the highly flawed Bakkers, who fell from grace after taking millions from listeners and supporters for their own enrichment.

Showalter begins the film with young Tammy Faye's conversion, which invites the audience to see later events through the eyes of a person desperate for love, perhaps imitating the spirit baptisms she'd observed to show she was accepted by God, and so must be by his followers, namely her disapproving mother, Rachel (a wonderful Cherry Jones).

Tammy Faye fed her need for love and attention through an ecstatic religious sect and later through amateurish puppetry, a marriage given to its own kind of fakery, mediocre vocalizing and make-up grotesqueries. Showalter's film sets Tammy Faye's life inside a frame of both devotion and delusion. And it's thoroughly captivating.

Cry Macho

Clint Eastwood's latest film is a sauntering tale of a broken-down bronco buster sent on a rescue mission to retrieve a friend's (Dwight Yoakum) renegade teenage son (Eduardo Minett), who is running wild in Mexico City with his fighting rooster, Macho. Most of the movie is about the old gringo and the young firebrand busting each other's chops on a circuitous journey to Texas.

Eastwood is a steady and reliable filmmaker, even with material as relatively uninspired as this. He has included some beautiful desert vistas and a sweet romance between Eastwood's aged saddle tramp and the winsome proprietress (Natalia Traven) of a homey cantina in a lonely Mexican village. That may be the picture's saving grace.

Cry Macho, while not up to Eastwood's usual standards, is warm and by-the-numbers, awash in dust and fading sunlight and charm.

The Card Counter

 

Those of us who have acquired a taste for director Paul Schrader's films -- especially those he also wrote -- know he sets many of his stories in the territory between the lead character's interior and exterior worlds. These men -- and they are almost always men -- are often struggling with self-examination while negotiating some troubling event or circumstance. The cerebral quality of Schrader's texts sometimes belie the films' reptilian intensity.

In The Card Counter, Schrader's subject is a pathologically fastidious professional gambler who calls himself Will Tell (it's unclear whether the irony is deliberate), played by Oscar Isaac. Tell joins the World Series of Poker casino caravan with the help of a gambling broker La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), who secures backers for Tell's high-stakes gaming. La Linda is curious about the circumspect Tell and tries, unsuccessfully, to get his story, but that doesn't keep sparks from igniting.

When Tell has a chance encounter with a young man named Cirk (pronounced Kirk), played by Tye Sheridan, we learn Tell was a guard at Abu Ghraib, under the supervision of the sadistic Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe). Cirk, recognizing Tell as one of the men who along with his now-dead father was prosecuted for torturing prisoners, invites Tell to join him in executing murderous retribution against Gordo, who was not prosecuted. Tell counter-offers by inviting Cirk to join him on the road, for reasons that become clearer as the story burns on it.

Schrader's pacing is deliberate, and the story is punctuated with voice-over notes from Tell taken from journal entries and others that explain gambling strategy. I did not find this gaming metaphor, if that is indeed what it is, altogether successful but the dynamic among the film's three principal players was interesting.

Haddish, who is not often cast in dramatic roles, was fine in a part that was oddly underwritten, especially in light of the film's final frame, and Sheridan's character was nearly as much of a puzzlement as Isaac's, with the young actor offering a combination of naivety and malice.

Malignant

James Wan's movies (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring) are not known for subtlety. In his horror-hackemup pictures, actors are walking, muttering bags of viscera, lurching from frame to frame, waiting to be gutted or bludgeoned. Everyone is fair game and the endless bloodletting is all in good fun.

For his latest film, Malignant, which he also co-wrote, Wan has cast a group of highly exchangeable, mostly unfamiliar faces, no doubt because a hairy, hateful demonic force in Seattle is laying waste to all who have crossed him, which means the audience shouldn't get attached to anyone.

Young Madison Mitchell (Annabelle Wallis), a tour guide to underground Seattle (who knew?) sees the killings as they are happening because she has a mysterious connection to the fiend, the explanation of which is the thread that drives the story.

Madison is aided in her quest to greater or lesser degree by her sister Sydney (Maddie Hasson) and two Seattle police officers, the handsome and gutsy Detective Kekoa Shaw (George Young) and his older and short-tempered partner Detective Regina Moss (Michole Briana White). To say the big reveal is hair-raising is too bad of a pun to be avoided.

Wan's Malignant is riddled with plot holes and implausibilities that are outlandish even for a horror flick but, darn it, the picture still manages to be audaciously entertaining.

The Sparks Brothers

For the familiar, "idiosyncratic" does not begin to describe Ron and Russell Mael, better known as Sparks. Director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver), a smart and crafty Brit who is also a huge fan, uses the venerable band (50 years old and counting) to explore the nature of creativity and orthodoxy in a most engaging way in the loving documentary The Sparks Brothers.

I was introduced to the group's recordings while on staff at my college radio station. Sparks had released two albums --Kimono My House (a punning recast of the title of Eartha Kitt's Come On a My House) and Propaganda the year before -- that garnered much attention by the alternative music crowd for the cleverness and complexity of the songwriting. Ron Mael has been the principal songwriter of the group's enormous catalog (close to 1,000 songs) and Russell has been the indefatigably nimble singer (some of the vocalizations are herculean feats). 

Wright interviews the Maels, former band members, and other fans (many of them musicians with more prominent profiles, who were inspired by the group) to carry viewers through what is ostensibly the group's impressive discography of 25 studio albums. In so doing, Wright delves into the brothers' intuitive creative process, their hits (there have been several) and misses (more than a few), their need to push themselves and their vision, and, yes, Ron's mysterious moustache. (Hitler or Chaplin?)

It will be apparent from the film that Sparks has remained overwhelmingly the darlings of white audiences, despite their ventures into techno and dance music in the late '70s. Their image as a cult band for Euro posers may not have been helped by the tongue-in-cheek "White Women" on Big Beat (1976), whose chorus intoned

"White women everyday

To me it doesn't matter that their

skin's passe

As long as they're white

As long as they're white

As long as they're white from head to toe

As long as they're white

As long as they're white

As long as they're white I'll have a go"

Full disclosure, I mistook the song's meaning when I first heard it, failing to consider the entire album's edgy facetiousness and mockery of cultural standards. Wright argues that this and similar sharpness, which eluded many a record company, has endeared the "Sparks Brothers" to a core fan base that has aged and grown over the past two generations. In this way, the film is an affectionate biography of a group too outré for true commercial success and a statement on the nature of celebrity and compromise.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

 

Director Dustin Daniel Cretton's athletic, nimble and robust Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings amazes with cinematic acrobatics and warm family tension but doesn't quite stick the landing in an overlong climactic cacophony of dragon magic and blurry martial arts.

Simu Liu is every bit the leading man the picture needs as the fantastically gifted Chinese immigrant running from a tyrannical father (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung) who possesses the mystical rings of the title and has used them to extend his life and dominate the world (echoes of the Lord of the Rings). That father and son would ultimately face each other is a given, but the road to the battle royal, set in a hidden mythical realm that was the home of Shang-Chi's lustrous mother (Fala Chen), is circuitous and occasionally foggy.

Most mysterious is the presence of Shang's best friend Katy, a winning Awkwafina delivering her rat-a-rat comic timing and, as befitting perhaps the biggest player in the screen aside from the venerable Michelle Yeoh, getting to strike a winning blow for the good guys. Katy is not Shang's love interest and not quite a totem to feminine agency -- the picture has Chen, Yeoh and the wonderful Meng'er Zhang as Shang's sister, Xialing, bringing truckloads of Asian Girl Magic. Her role is unclear.

Katy's uncanny transformation into a warrior princess in the final reel pestered me, and indications that she will be Shang's companion through the rest of the enterprise is even more mysterious. It may be a brilliant calculation or nagging casing gaffe.

One thing is sure, Cretton's staging of the "Bus Boy" fight early in the film is for the ages and is not bested by any other action sequence in the picture.