Joker / reflection

A critical and unsettling moment in the film Joker showed the slowly crazing clown-for-hire Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), who had just discovered a connection between his family and Gotham City's most powerful industrialist, reaching through the gates at stately Wayne Manor and using his thumbs to push a smile into young Bruce Wayne's face. It's sad and creepy and for this viewer a foreshadowing of the masked misery that lay ahead for both characters in the universe of Batman lore. But it also struck me as a larger statement from director / writer Todd Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver about the lack of authenticity in human interactions. We smile but aren't happy. Ask "how are you" but don't actually care. We clap, stand, kneel, march, weep as the crowd dictates and attack those who don't do as directed. Fleck / Joker laughed when he was nervous or upset because of faulty wiring and his condition brought on several beat downs because he was off-script and the world could not handle it. The madness that eventually led to societal chaos was not of Joker's making. It and he were products of society's relentless despair. The last scene of a "city on fire" was a metaphor for our current condition of deepening dysphoria.

Hustlers

Lorene Scafaria'sHustlers serves up heavy doses of social commentary and feminist homilies as it retells the story of a crew of underemployed pole dancers in post-economic  collapse New York who operate a scheme, directed by the crew's stripper goddess / badass Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), to entice, drug and fleece horny Wall Street traders and bankers to fill the ladies' empty designer purses. Constance Wu (Crazy, Rich Asians) plays Destiny / Dorothy,  the new dancer who is befriended and schooled by Ramona and becomes the crew's CFO. Though Scafaria tries to add layers to the women at the center of this story, the film never moves much beyond its two-dimensional cat-and-mouse construct. Both Ramona and Destiny have children but motherhood is more a device to soften the women than to actually reveal more about their capacities. They talk about their duality more than act within it, I feel, which isn't to say the picture is weak. Its message of empowerment and vindication are welcome, even if the glow fades pretty quickly.

Ad Astra

James Gray's space mission film Ad Astra (Latin for "to the stars") is intriguing because it successfully navigates on two planes -- the planetary exploration plane and the personal, existential plane. And Brad Pitt, in an exceptionally contemplative role, is the agent at the center of both of those stories. Gray, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ethan Gross, has set the action in the "near future," after the moon has been colonized by earthlings and turned into a bit of the Wild West with marauding bands of pirates robbing anyone who happens to wander away from the safe zone. From the moon, Pitt's Maj. Roy McBride hitches a ride to Mars to send a message to his father (Tommy Lee Jones), who captained an exploration to Neptune in search of life. Something has gone wrong with that party, and its cargo of anti-matter is fueling power surges that threaten all life in the solar system. During all of this doom and catastrophe, Pitt's McBride reflects on his interior life, his relationship, actually lack of one, with his father, and anyone else, for that matter. This has left him a highly functional clutch player for the space program but not much else. In this way, the film, which will no doubt remind some viewers of 2001: A Space Odyssey, is less in the mold of Kubrick's space masterpiece and more like last year's First Man, the story of a stony Neil Armstrong's personal quest to set foot on the moon and the human cost required for such a feat.

Fauve

Canadian director Jeremy Comte's disturbing French-language short Fauve follows two boys -- competing alpha males -- playing daring games in the environs of a Quebecois mine until one of them gets stuck in a pit, fun turns to fear and the natural world intrudes abruptly and definitely. The last 5 minutes, filled with expanses of barren grayness, are haunting.

It Chapter 2

The best of Stephen King relies more on the horror of being human than inhuman. The terror of Andy Muschietti's It Chapter Two is homegrown -- crash and slash abuse and neglect and enervating guilt and fear. Yes, there's a toothy clown (Bill Skarsgård) snacking on the children of Derry, Maine, but that's almost secondary to the hurting the townspeople are putting on themselves. Or maybe this hateful clown is feeding the town's nastiness.This message is introduced in Chapter Two with a lamentably tone-deaf gay bashing that opens the film. I found it a perplexing stunner that got me wondering if this is indeed the movie about the scary clown, until he appeared to finish the job the haters began. Yep, this is the place. This misstep along with the film's excessive length and jokiness (provided by Bill Harder and James Ransone) make for a long, strange trip -- and not in a good way.

Celine Dion

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Madre (Mother)

I took a 20-minute break from the hell that is Trump's America to visit the private hell of Madre, in which a Spanish mother gets a call from her 6-year-old son who has been abandoned by his father on a deserted

beach in France. Director Rodrigo Sorogoyen shot the incredible Oscar nom in nearly one single, unbroken take and it's an absolute nightmare. 

Marta Nieto plays the titular mother who unravels before the audience's eyes

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Timothée Chalamet

I'll be presenting a paper on Timothée Chalamet's breakout film Call Me By Your Name (2017) at the Popular Culture in the South con this month. I've analyzed how time is threaded through the film's narrative. For a young actor, Chalamet takes on some exceptionally difficult parts -- most of them with a lot of interior performance -- brooding, uncertainty, self-destruction. I don't know this film, The King, but Joel Edgerton, one of the most interesting writer / director / actors to come along since Mel Gibson, is attached to the picture so I expect it will be serious and well-crafted. Chalamet is also starring in Greta Gerwig's Little Women with Saoirse Ronan and Emma Watson, which will be released around Christmas.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3281548/?ref_=m_nv_sr_1

Gillian Anderson

I read Gillian Anderson will be playing battle-axe Maggie Thatcher on The Crown. That should be something to see. Anderson has been more interesting, at least to me, than her partner in crime solving David Duchovny, who's actually a pretty breezy writer. She's done more interesting films and series and has been nominated for Olivier awards for her stage work. But the real key to Anderson's allure is her being bidialectical, which means that Downton accent she uses in The Fall is authentically hers.

Ready or Not

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett borrow a bit of Get Out's relational paranoia and class warfare and mixes them with heaping helpings of survivalist lunacy in Ready or Not. Aussie actress Samara Weaving's Grace must outrun her cursed in-laws on her wedding night as the family of blue blood game board heirs hunt the new bride in their cavernous mansion with pistols and crossbows, thwarted not only by young Grace's chutzpah but their own familial dysfunction. Blood flows freely. It's a gas!

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

André Øvredal's Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark is a fairly solid creepy horror film with serviceable acting from its casts but production design befitting a stronger story. Zoe Margaret Colletti is a commendable lead as the motherless child Stella who finds a haunted book that scripts and executes all who trouble it. The story shimmers with Stephen King-like weirdness and will certainly strike some viewers as a bit of a retread of earlier (and better) movies. Still, the young actors who fall victim to the unhappy spirit's scorn are believably freaked out by the intrepid creatures (no doubt courtesy of producer Guillermo del Toro's imagination) who come for them.

Good Boys

 

Gene Stupnitsky's Good Boys features a trio of tweens stumbling through some fairly clever writing and robbing a film that should be more than outrageous of valuable cinematic weight. It feels gimmicky and exploitative. As talented as Jacob Tremblay (Room) is, his co-stars -- Keith L. Williams and Brady Noon -- are cute and energetic but only adequate line deliverers and in some scenes so off-key and out of synch it's painful. The plot is of little consequence but involves a kissing party to which Tremblay's Max has been invited and further to which his lifelong buds Lucas and Thor will accompany him as wing men IF they can replace Dad's destroyed drone and score some MDMA for a duo of teenage girls. The film was backed by the Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg stable of producers, which means the picture is verbose and profane and occasionally brilliantly. To that point, listening to 12-year-olds dropping f-bombs non-stop is fleetingly entertaining, pour moi, if you'll pardon my French. The deeper into the picture the more grating it becomes and one ends up feeling sorry for these kids who probably understood little about what they were saying and less about the marital aids they were juggling throughout.

Jeffrey Wright

You don't have to press very hard for me to admit that Jeffrey Wright is among my top five favorite actors -- Joaquin Phoenix, Tilda Swinton, Viola Davis, post-Potter Daniel Radcliffe being the other four. I've not seen everything Wright has done (he seems to be everywhere and in everything) but in all that I have seen he is immersed and controlled, no superfluous motion or affect, a joy to watch. I remember first seeing him in Ang Lee's Ride with the Devil, in which he played a former slave attached to a young Reb fighting Union soldiers in Missouri. I then went backwards and sought out Julian Schnabel's Basquiat, the biopic of the legendary street artist. I saw him in Topdog/Underdog on Broadway with Yasiin Bey (Mos Def at the time) in 2002 and a year later he was starring in Angels in America on HBO. Wright won a Golden Globe for playing multiple roles but primarily the nurse Belize, arguably playwright Tony Kushner's alter ego, and had won a Tony for his Broadway performances. I know nearly nothing about Wright aside from what I see on the screen ... and that he was also born in D.C. Homeboy.

The Peanut Butter Falcon

Tyler Nilson and Mike Schwartz's touching road movie The Peanut Butter Falcon stars Shia LaBeouf and Dakota Johnson, imperfect strangers helping an abandoned man with Down Syndrome (Zack Gottsagen) find family while searching for his hero, a minor wrestler in the North Carolina Tidewater. Nilson and Schwartz, who also wrote the screenplay, keep the tone light throughout but do not dull the picture's messages about acceptance and affirmation. An especially wonderful set piece midway through involves a blind backwater preacher and baptizer offering the travelers the chance to wash away the past and start new, a clear foreshadowing of the film's second act.

Blinded By The Light

Gurinder Chadha's Blinded By The Light takes giddy exuberance seriously in recreating the late '80s story of a Pakistani-British youth (a charmingly earnest Viveik Kalra) who is inspired by Bruce Springsteen's universalization of human life to dream of a world beyond his bigoted, stifling town. It’s not the freshest of storylines but Kalra’s young cast mates (Nell Williams, Aaron Phagura and Dean-Charles Chapman) are toothy and appealing, the conflicts and villains are broadly brushed and the closing 10 minutes a calculated weepfest of affirmation and reconciliation. No, there’s not enough of Springsteen’s music but enough synth pop to last several lifetimes.

True Detective Season Three

Mahershala Ali is a Hollywood A-lister whose performances exude discipline and craft. He strikes me as an actor who studies, prepares, presents, all with deliberation and precision. In True Detective Season Three, Ali is an Arkansas detective during three time periods in the complicated case of the disappearance of two children, a brother and sister. He and his partner (Stephen Dorff) follow clues, draw conclusions, chase red herrings, arrest, release, rethink and revisit, while the bodies of those surrounding the case pile up. This is a particularly challenging part because Ali's character must maintain the same fiercely individualistic core while being shaped by family, co-workers and criminals against a backdrop of personality politics, class and race. His most impressive work is as the aged detective, battling dementia while trying to answer lingering questions: primarily, what was done, by whom and why.

The Boys

Amazon Prime's The Boys' rattling cynicism about the human propensity for greed and deception (especially when those humans are "special") is balanced by the series' crackling humor and cockeyed proposition that "normal," clear-eyed folks who give a damn can indeed save the world.

Fast amd Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw

Director David Leitch's marauding Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw plows through a messy tale of biological re-engineering and tattered family ties without a hint of self-consciousness. It's all roaring engines, snapping alpha dogs and crushing close quarters combat. Fun.

Yesterday

 

Director Danny Boyle's hummably insightful morality tale, Yesterday, is a sure starmaker for amiable Hamish Patel, who plays a struggling Suffolk strummer who wakes after an accident during a worldwide blackout the only person who knows the Beatles songbook. He wouldn't! He does! He begins performing the songs, claiming them as his own, gets noticed by the recording industry machine and off he goes. But Boyle isn't only making statements about an individual's struggle with truth and authenticity but, as has also been reflected in his previous films, the unpredicatbility of LIFE, and how we all are accountable for our choices despite what the universe tosses at us. Like most of us, Patel's Jack Malick is not a bad person; he's just blessed, like most of us, with an abiding ordinariness -- and maybe that should be enough.

Midsommar

 

 

Florence Pugh (Fighting with My Family) carries the full, freaking weight of Ari Aster's second horrorshow, Midsommar, as a needy grad student whose beau (Jack Reynor) invites her along on a boys' trip to Sweden for an ancient festival of viscera, sacrifice and sex. But who knew? Aster's Hereditary was so unnerving because of its cold clincalility (not unlike the film's infamous dollhouse miniatures), its dispassion, its unaverted gaze at the horrors. Midsommar features the same meticulousness in creation of place and space, in the brutality of the sects rituals and in the simmering animus that alert audience members will sense from the moment the "family" is introduced in its idyllic woodland retreat.

Spider-Man: Far From Home

Director Jon Watts’ Spider-Man: Far From Home furiously swings for and clears the MCU fences as a rousing treatise on truth and lies in which star Tom Holland’s teenaged hero struggles with love, identity and duty while battling elemental evils during a class trip across Europe. Watts weaves into the story numerous references (not even thinly veiled) to public trust and deception and the power one wields with plausible deceit. An impressive set piece three-quarters of the way through the film depicts a green and naive Spider-Man being confronted and confounded by multiple holographic "realities," playing his nature against him time after time. It's not only a beautifuly crafted passage but the message resonates like the tolling of a bell.

Shaft (2019)

Tim Story's tribute to toxic masculinity, Shaft, gives filmgoers Samuel L. Jackson swaggering through frustratingly predictable gangland set pieces that portray him as invincible and his estranged FBI data analyst son (Jessie T. Usher) as an undersexed geek. Happy Father's Day.

John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum

Interestingly, even though Chad Stahelski's John Wick: Chapter 3 —Parabellum delivers deliciously brutal set pieces where our hero (Keanu Reeves) dispatches with zen master efficiency armies of bounty hunters, its biggest stomach-turner is a stoic ballerina pulling off a toenail.

Guava Island

Donald Glover's "This is America" was more Fela Kuti than minstrel provocateur to me. Glover continues his indictment of racial and cultural oppression in his peculiar but pleasing "Guava Island," where he is a guileless singer angering island bosses while lifting people's spirits.

Long Shot

Jonathan Levine's gushily giddy Long Shot is not pitching the believability of a lovely gov't officer (Charlize Theron) falling for an untidy news reporter (Seth Rogen), an old childhood friend. Rather it appears to be hawking principles over politics, a more interesting premise.