Poolman

 

Chris Pine’s directorial debut, Poolman, is a vanity project created by a Hollywood star devoid of professional vanity. The rather unflattering role Pine has written for himself is goofy and naive and totally winning, at least for me, but the story is a fevered mess of impressions and allusions.

Pine is the title character, a bearded, long-haired man-child in Los Angeles at some indeterminate time on a mission to challenge the city’s indifferent expansion and growth. He’s making a movie — isn’t everyone in LA? — about his crusade and is assisted by his loving analyst (Annette Bening) and her companion (Danny Devito).

When a beautiful council staffer (DeWanda Wise) comes to him with a tip about city corruption, Pine’s Darren Barrenman is fired up and begins a clumsy investigation that leads down many surprising avenues, some familiar from ‘74’s Chinatown, which is referred to many times.

Critics and audiences have been trashing Pine's Poolman as a star-studded mess. It is a bit of that. But I loved its untethered stream of consciousness and Zen master loopiness. I was perfectly content watching the zaniness without thought of the logic of the storylines or the plausibility of events. Many scenes are howlingly funny; Pine has impressive comedic chops.

I mostly enjoyed Poolman's message about citizen engagement and change through action not passive resistance.

The Fall Guy

 

Director and former stuntman David Leitch's crafty tribute to Hollywood stunt performers, The Fall Guy, is a movie buff's delight -- self-referential and loaded with cinematic Easter eggs -- with two highly appealing leads -- Emily Blunt as cinematographer Jody Moreno and Ryan Gosling as Colt Seavers, the title character.

Except for the many grueling stunts staged for Gosling by Leitch and company, the film is not a particularly challenging lift for Blunt or the other members of the strong cast -- Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham, Winston Duke, among them -- but everyone is having a hell of time.

In the opening minutes of the picture, Gosling's Colt is injured in a botched fall and retires for a year, without a word to Jody, with whom he was romantically involved. Waddingham's movie producer Gail invites Colt back to work on Jody's first picture as director, filming in Australia. Colt accepts, believing Jody has asked for him specifically. He hopes to rekindle their relationship.

When he arrives, he receives a chilly welcome from Jody, learns the actor for whom he has worked as stunt performer Tom Ryder (Taylor-Johnson) has disappeared and that Gail needs Colt to double for Tom on the set and search for the actor before the studio discovers he's missing.

This investigation leads Colt to one outrageous set piece of close-quarter combat and vehicular chase after another, with each subsequent bit more mind-blowing than what had come before.

Colt discovers a conspiracy and murder connected to Ryder's disappearance and finds himself a prime suspect.

It's all pretty ridiculous but is such a spirited endeavor that audiences aren't likely to mind one bit.

La Bête

 

French cinema polymath Bertrand Bonello's La Bête (The Beast) is a bilingual / time- and continent-leaping science fiction romance that is enjoyed best when reflecting on its many intriguing ideas and less as a single statement on identity, attachment and isolation.

It's a gorgeous but challenging work that will no doubt frustrate the impatient with its serpentine narrative structure that provides context and background to understand the characters or events only sparingly.

The wonderful French actress Léa Seydoux stars as Gabrielle, a young woman in a future world who appears to be exploring her options in a society that has little room for humans with "affect" (emotions) and offers limited employment possibilities because unemotional AI make better, unbiased decisions.

A disembodied counselor places Gabrielle in different virtual scenarios in different time periods -- pianist wife of a Victorian doll maker, contemporary fashion model -- to see if she is a likely candidate for realignment as a quasi-automaton, which would enhance her usefulness.

In these various virtual worlds, and there have been many, she meets a young man named Louis (George MacKay), whose purpose is not entirely certain even though his presence in her lives is clearly intentional.

The chemistry between these two attractive people -- whose verbal exchanges often shift from French to English and back again -- is palpable, and the passion that builds over the course of the picture is intense.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

 

Director Wes Ball's epic entry in the amazingly long-lived Planet of the Apes franchise shares with its predecessors a fascination with questions of humanity -- as concept AND practice.

Since the second film in the original series (1970's Beneath the Planet of the Ape), audiences have found the answer to those questions by watching the primates "ape" human prejudice, self-regard and destructiveness.

Like their human predecessors, the apes divide themselves into tribes -- scientists, clergy, warriors, common laborers -- with their competing / conflicting interests and ambitions. Though not particularly nuanced, the analogy is rich and fascinating.

The latest film takes up the story many years after the death of the ape's heroic liberator, Caesar, whom this generation has either never heard of or has forgotten. The elders have bastardized Caesar's generous teachings on cooperation with and compassion for humans and hunt them as game. (Parallels to religion are apparent.)

After a failed experiment that altered the primates into speaking beings that then took over the planet (thus the name), humans were left dim and dumb.

A village of ape falconers where young Noa (Owen Teague), the son of the clan's leader, lives is raided by marauders and the inhabitants enslaved to work for the belligerent and greedy King Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). Noa, presumed dead, escapes capture and sets out to find and free his family and friends.

On the way, he encounters an orangutan named Raka (Peter Macon), the last of the true followers of the original Caesar, who accompanies Noa on his journey to rescue his clan. Soon they discover they are being followed by a human woman (Freya Allan) on a mission of her own. The three join forces.

Even though the narrative feels familiar, Ball, a visual effects artist, has created an intricate and fully realized future world with highly relatable characters. He has staged extraordinary, vertiginous acrobatic set pieces, as well.

As has been true for all of the latest pictures in the series, the miracle of computer generation leaves no visible traces of the actors playing the apes. The seamlessness is worth the price of admission

Abigail (2024)

 

Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett's sardonic horror kick Abigail is a real bait and switch.

It's not that audiences don't know the movie about a darling ballerina with a secret (Alisha Weir) is a scare fest wrapped in a kidnapping plot. Bait and switch is actually the core of the springy story where we find six shady characters contracted by a mysterious envoy (the always welcome Giancarlo Esposito) to abduct the daughter of a tycoon and watch her in an abandoned mansion until the father (Matthew Goode) could pay the $50 million ransom.

The best thing about the picture is the whacked-out crew of delectable stereotypes (Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, William Catlett, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand and a stand-out Angus Cloud, who tragically died last year of a drug overdose).

As might be expected in such a picture, these half-dozen souls will be fodder for whatever awaits them overnight. The creature is revealed fairly early so much of this bloodily explosive adventure is watching the crew members get picked off and survivors try, with varying degrees of success, to outwit the smartest one in the house.

Much of the film, written by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, is howlingly funny, with a few tender moments, but mostly an open tap of raspberry jam and fake viscera.