Green Book

As a major studio release, Green Book has the expected number of Hollywood moments -- those scenes where the emoting and speechifying take off. One that was edited for the trailer comes midpoint in the film. Dr. Donald Shirley, the black classically trained pianist, has just been admonished by his white driver and assistant, who earlier in the film displayed a penchant for racial prejudice, for essentially not being in touch with his, Shirley's, roots. According to the film, Shirley, incredibly, was unfamiliar with Little Richard and Aretha Franklin and much of African-American popular music, but, in the movie, performed something that approximated blues-inflected classical music in his concerts and lived in an apartment above Carnegie Hall that was a shrine to Africana. He actually met Tony wearing a regal tribal robe and sitting on a throne (compensation?). In the pivotal confrontation mid-film, the pianist and his driver are standing in the pouring rain, Shirley has been offended by Tony's remarks and is walking who knows where when he stops. "If I'm not black enough, and I'm not white enough, and I'm not man enough, then, Tony, what am I?" The trailer did not include the phrase "man enough," perhaps not to give away that Shirley was gay. He was depicted in the film naked at the YMCA, having been arrested with, presumably, a man he had met there. Little is made of Shirley's sexuality beyond this horrifyingly tin-eared scene, in which Tony bribes the police to let Shirley go. The choice for the edit is clear -- the producers did not want to introduce the sexuality element into the promotion for a film that offers NO insight into that dimension of Shirley's personality. Exploring the isolation that most certainly grew out of the intersection of race and sexuality and cultural upbringing would have been fascinating to me. I guess we'll have to wait a little longer for those stories from the majors.

Boy Erased

Boy Erased's excellence is not just in Lucas Hedges but in the evenness across the cast. Some films have a single stellar turn that offsets weaker deliveries. Here, every word and action rings true. None truer than Nicole Kidman as a mother battling to save her son and herself.

Bohemian Rhapsody

 

 

Thematically, "Somebody To Love" might have served as a better title for the Queen flick. "Bohemian Rhapsody" capsulizes the band's audacity but the song's unusual structure and fairly inscrutable lyrics made it more of a novelty -- albeit one helluva karaoke treat. "Somebody To Love" to me, speaks to Mercury's emotional isolation, which also underpins the movie's message. Mercury was searching for identity and trust and comfort and ultimately something called family. Though not a successful film, it is exhuberant and rather splendid when it isn't artificial and self-conscious in its depictions of excess. https://youtu.be/op07UzSCu4c

A Star is Born (2018)

Bradley Cooper's tuneful remake of the much-remade A Star is Born feels most true when the film's stars (Cooper as hard-drinking / hard-drugging country rocker Jack and Lady Gaga as drag show chanteuse and ballad-belter Ally) are off-stage, exploring the contours of each other's face. These elegantly crafted scenes, which Cooper both starred in and directed, display a refined emotional sensibility, behind and in front of the camera, that is highly evocative. Though the music performances are strong (how could they not be?), one of the film's greater contributions to the ASIB legacy, IMO, is its presentation of America's cultural diversity -- in this age of oppression and exclusion. Some might argue that the picture's rainbow is a bit too deliberate, too calculated; Ally's background too wispy; Jack's relationship with his manager / brother (Sam Elliott) more a dramatic device than a true narrative element; and Jack's meltdown too precipitous and, in one scene, too gauche. But, to me, Cooper has created a beautiful film of love found and lost that will break many a heart.

The Meg

Yes, Jon Turteltaub's The Meg borrows without apparent shame from the Spielberg, Cameron, Emmerich playbooks (Jaws, Jurassic Park, The Abyss, Godzilla) and goes on to load this familiar human v giant critter story with distracting "family fare" that adds little to the proceedings because the characters lack depth. Star Jason Statham's diver Jonas meets cute Bingbing Li's intrepid oceanographer Suyin and her precocious and curiously ever-present 8-year-old daughter on a billion-dollar deep-sea rig off the coast of China, where their benign explorations disturb the rest of a 90-foot prehistoric shark believed extinct, which leads to wholly predictable results. (The picture seems oddly anti-scientific inquiry). Turteltaub has populated the film with the usual array of factotums who deliver plot points when they're not being sacrificed to the voracious 90-foot shark of the tile. And, as expected, it's the chomp-chomp and Statham's close calls that are the most fun. In my screening, a family of five sat in a row near mine, the youngest child in daddy's lap throughout the flick, which is grisly and bloody and chock-full of peril. If you're going to traumatize your child, pick a better flick.

A Simple Favor

Actor / director Paul Feig is known for his frothy, sometimes filthy, comedies (Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy). His latest film, A Simple Favor, has delectable doses of crass humor wrapped around a chewy murder mystery that has some inspired surprises. Anna Kendrick stars as uber-Single Mom and vlogger Stephanie, who befriends and is seduced by another Mom, Emily (Blake Lively), whose big-city, psycho brio domestic goddess Emily finds intoxicating. Emily is married to the hunky Sean ("It Boy" Henry Golding), an English literature professor who can't seem to reignite his career. When Emily disappears, Stephanie tells her vlog subscribers (the posted comments from whom add a wonderful bit of cultural spice to the story) and takes off to discover what happened to her. Stephanie shifts into detective mode and uncovers hidden (at times hilarious) secrets on the back roads of Emily's past and realizes quickly enough that nothing is as it seems.

White Boy Rick

French Director Yann Demange's White Boy Rick tells the true story of a white Detroit teen in the '80s who joins a black drug-dealing organization, ingratiates himself to its members and leaders but ends up turning evidence against them in exchange for a lighter prison sentence, which is not delivered. Newcomer Richie Merritt is the eponymous youngster, Rick Wershe Jr., who lives with his desperate but enterprising gun-dealer father (Matthew McConaughey in his usual fine form) and druggie sister (a terrific Bel Powley). We're led to believe young Rick's circumstances account for most of the disaster his life becomes, but the case is not convincing because aside from the bombed out landscape we don't really come to feel present in Rick's world; his life remains cloudy and remote. The film also has a convoluted narrative (filmed mostly in Detroit, the seasons don't seem to line up from scene to scene) and the lack of substantive exchanges between the characters leaves their motivations blurry and indistinct. Too often important characters seem to occupy the same space but aren't actually in the same moment. The film also fails to recognize the elephant in the room: the whiteness that is referred to in the film's title and the book upon which it is based. How was 16-year-old Rick Wershe able to overcome racial distrust, if not animosity, as he clearly did? We're not offered more than just passing references to Rick's relationship with his closest friend, a low-level player in the organization. Why are they friends? What is their history? How was their friendship used to lend Rick gravitas? While the film has several powerful scenes (the rescue of Rick's sister from a crack den is gut-wrenching) the whole feels frustratingly incomplete.

Peppermint

In Pierre Morel's Peppermint, Jennifer Garner plays a stressed suburban L.A. mom turned vigilante machine after her husband and daughter are shot down by murderous drug-dealers on the child's birthday, a few days before Christmas. Yes, the pathos in the first 15 minutes is laid on pretty thick. Because the drug lord (Juan Pablo Raba) owns L.A. cops, lawyers and judges, his hitmen go free. Garner's character, Riley (homage to the Aliens series’ Ripley?), goes ballistic in the courtroom, is ordered into psychiatric custody but escapes and disappears for five years. During that time she's a ghost traveling the world, training in hand-to-hand combat, stockpiling military grade weaponry and, on the fifth anniversary of the killings, begins taking out the bad guys, all while living out of a van (more an arsenal on wheels) on Skid Row. Yes, it's utterly, brutally ridiculous and features the highest count of bullets to the face I've seen all year but Garner pours a great deal of heart into all of the havoc.

BlackkKlansman

Spike Lee's BlackkKlansman has a frustrating sloppiness to it that, while not unique to Lee's film, is especially disappointing because it undercuts the picture's noble intensions. Lee usually manages to walk the line between genius and jive pretty well, but in this film, which is based on a true account by black Colorado detective Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) who with a white co-worker (Adam Driver) infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, the mix of dogma and dogging is particularly unsettling. One would think that a director as astute as Lee would have discovered by now how to pull "racist white" from an actor without the result being cartoonish. There's too much dastardly on the screen and not enough ominous. Do the Right Thing, Lee's unquestionable masterpiece, is so good because the hate was presented in credible layers. Not so here. Lee has always seemed to me to believe that more is always better, so Klansman has set pieces that are longer than they need be, exchanges between characters that verge on tedious and speeches that are half-again preachier than necessary. BlackkKlansman is an exhausting and not entirely successful indictment of stark organized racism, which, if you think about it, is pretty low-hanging fruit for someone with Lee's talents.

Leave No Trace

Debra Granik's Leave No Trace is as principled as the movement that shares the film's title -- a worldwide community committed to minimal impact while enjoying the wilderness. 

In the first 15 minutes of this film, a father, Will, and daughter, Tom, (Ben Foster and Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, both splendid) are shown in their "home," a camp in a woodsy public park in Portland, Oregon, where they forage off the grid, undetected and undisturbed. 

Dad, a war veteran who appears plagued by PTSD, runs his daughter through drills that are to help the girl elude those wanting to disturb the peace. He's decent and loving; she is unspoiled and obedient. They are hurting no one. 

Of course, the peace is disrupted; father and daughter are discovered, detained and relocated to a tree farm where the owner (Jeff Kober) lets them live in exchange for Dad's labor. It's not long before the two are off again; Dad's anxieties will not let him be. Granik's film is loaded with dread but blessedly free of belligerence. 

Yes, the distress in it is heartbreaking but it's so elegantly written and finely tuned that the viewer's anguish is triggered not by rage but by a simple line spoken by a young girl, bone tired of running and hoping that finally her father's demons might be quieted: "I like it here."

Sorry To Bother You

Boots Riley's commitment to worker liberation has suffused the music he's written with his uber-Marxist rap collective The Coup and with former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello. Riley's first feature film as writer and director, the fascinatingly bizarre Sorry To Bother You, is beatifically political, anti-capitalistic and pro-labor at a time when the world seems to be colluding against the Average Joe and Joanna. Riley's protagonist, a chronically underemployed black man named Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfied of Get Out and Atlanta), is hired by an Oakland telemarketing company that sells nothing in particular. His ability to close a deal using his "white voice" gets him promoted upstairs where Cash's kind of moxie would be useful to the murky corporation, which practices a unique form of mind-control and labor enslavement. Cash's girlfriend Detroit (the tireless Tessa Thompson) and his best friend Salvador (Jermaine Fowler) are talking about revolution and urging Cash to infiltrate the ranks of the oppressor and bring down The Man (represented here by a oddly cross-dressing Armie Hammer) from the inside. Of course, little goes as planned and the big reveal three-quarters through the picture might send some folks bolting out the door but that would be regrettable because the messages within this American nightmare are layered and profound. This radical and phenomenal film raises the bar substantially for black cinema.

Ant-Man and the Wasp

 Nothing speaks more to the easy likeability and sad inconsequentiality of Peyton Reed's Ant-Man and the Wasp as the Partridge Family's 1970s earworm theme "Come On Get Happy," which is featured in this, the latest installment of the eternal Marvel Comic Universe film series. Paul Rudd is again the eponymous Ant-Man and comely Evangeline Lilly the equally eponymous but more badass Wasp, both of whom can change their size with the help of "magic" space suits designed by Wasp's dad. Since the first film (2015), Rudd's Scott Lang has been under house arrest for reasons that, frankly, I have little memory of, when he's kidnapped by Lilly's Hope and her father, former Avenger and S.H.I.EL.D. genius Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), to help retrieve Pym's wife / Hope's mother, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, from the quantum realm, which means getting really, really small. To do so, they have been building, with the help of giant ant minions, a shrinking machine -- which looks quite a lot like a huge printing press -- using parts purchased from a lowlife tech dealer (played with gratuitous Southern smarminess by Walter Goggins). Because all of this hoodoo science is easy-peasy, the only things standing between the terrific trio and their rescue mission are the FBI, Laurence Fishburne's rival scientist genius and a mysterious costumed figure who can walk through walls (snarling British beauty Hannah John-Kamen). Ant-Man is decidedly third-string on the MCU bench but, for my money, Michael Pena's turn as Lang's motor-mouthed sidekick Luis is MVP and he owns all of the best parts of this picture.

Hearts Beat Loud

Something at the core of Brett Haley's Hearts Beat Loud draws viewers in but also keeps the picture from really taking off. The film, which stars Nick Offerman and Kiersey Clemons as a father and daughter in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn during the summer before she leaves for UCLA, carries a message about the universality and restorative powers of music, how it unifies and rejuvenates, but the picture doesn't offer enough connective tissue to give the story any weight. Offerman's Frank barely runs a record shop, which exists, sadly, more as a narrative device than another character, which would have been sooo much better. Frank has virtually no interactions with customers, in fact, no one darkens the door of store through 90 percent of the film. Most of Frank's contact is with his pretty and brainy daughter, Sam; his friend, local barkeep and weed head Dave (Ted Danson) and his landlady / friend(?) Leslie (the ever-engaging Toni Collette). But their interactions are a bit plodding and reveal little about any of them. The most interesting aspect of the film, for me, is the treatment of the creative process, as Frank, who had a brief and undistinguished music career when he was young, and Sam write a song together that becomes an indie darling on Spotify (which along with Apple probably bankrolled this picture). This reawakens Frank's dormant longing to be heard and, perhaps, to bring back to life Sam's mother, who was the victim of a motorway accident while riding a bicycle years before. It is in all of these potentially resonant elements that the movie ultimately disappoints. Though it features three nifty emoesque ballads, the picture doesn't allow the characters to explore their pain, loneliness or disappointments or why they are doing any of the things they are doing. Too often Haley resorts to trite aphorisms that are folded into songs and so become anthemic. Offerman and Clemons are both fine in their roles but there is no warmth between them and, truly regrettably, Sam's relationship with a lovely but one-dimensional artist (Sasha Lane) feels tacked on and insubstantial.

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Morgan Neville's loving documentary on Fred Rogers and his groundbreaking public television program, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, is so loaded with heart and tenderness that many will find it tough to sit through it dry eyed. Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister, turned children's television into a consuming mission to help young people grow into adults who took care of one another. Neville's film shows Rogers, a lifelong Republican who died in 2003, using puppetry, storytelling and music to comment on world events and work through his own lingering childhood unhappiness and insecurities while delighting children nationwide. This is a beautifully endearing portrait about a man whose life was the embodiment of a much-needed message -- we need each other to survive.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

• Spanish director J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is over modulated and overwritten — loud and long — with heroes that are lacking in screen appeal, a predictably ridiculous and confoundingly open-ended script and special effects that are costly but only serviceable. Yes, the bad guys are, again, dinosaur Kibbles but even the visceral satisfaction of seeing them devoured feels stale.

Hotel Artemis

 Drew Pearce's Hotel Artemis is fueled by the premise that even criminals deserve quality health care -- but that's not the entirety of this grisly and sporadically entertaining picture. It also attempts -- unsuccessfully as it turns out -- to juxtapose tenderness with bloody brutality. Several unsavory characters check into a futuristic L.A. hotel / hospital during an urban riot sparked, we're told, by the privitization of drinking water. That water element is purely background as it is never explored and nothing ever becomes of it. The acting is fine (Jodie Foster, Sterling K. Brown, Jeff Goldblum) but the writing is epigrammatic when it's not mawkish, that is, characters are either talking like mobsters or blubbering like mopes. This could lend a sense of balance but instead it just feels contrived.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Ron Howard's Solo: A Star Wars Story is as precise and competent as a film can be but it lacks essential warmth and surprise. The leads (Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover) are attractive but frustratingly inert. Circumstances toss them into the same cockpit but despite their close proximity they generate no heat. The script, written by A-list Hollywood writers Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan, is safe and familiar and leaves plenty of room for the interminable battles these films inevitably devolve into. Because of the construction of this long-in-the-tooth series, and the placement of this episode in the ongoing Star Wars saga, the film is nearly devoid of real tension.The last 30 minutes are spectacular but deliver little WOW in the end. Disappointing.

Ocean's 8

In Ocean's 8, writer / director Gary Ross (Free State of Jones) offers up a by-the-numbers heist flick that lets the ladies run the show but doesn't actually up the ante for the Ocean franchise. Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett head the crew of lady scoundrels and thieves in an audacious scheme to steal a $150 million necklace from its wearer (a never-better Anne Hathaway) during the exclusive Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala. Bullock is Debbie Ocean, sister of Danny Ocean, played so memorably by George Clooney in previous installments. Danny is now dead, and Debbie is just released from prison and aching to get back at the person who ratted her out (Richard Armitage). That factors heavily into her plans. As with previous Ocean films, the thrill is in watching the execution of an intricate operation but "8" lacks the previous films' edginess and close calls. All happens pretty much as it was story-boarded, which short changes the ladies, I feel. As it is, they all look FABULOUS from start to the flashy, photo finish. James Corden has several winning moments as a British insurance investigator who is called in by Cartier to find the missing jewels and who succeeded in catching both Debbie and Danny after previous capers.

Incredibles 2

Animated adventures have more action set pieces than live features because there is less conversational exposition, usually, and because animation lends itself to greater range of possibilities for battles and audiences expect it. Brad Bird’s Incredibles 2 is a terrific picture in those respects but also has levels of meaning — family, commitment, trust, duty, etc. — that adults will really dig. If this family is a metaphor for modern America’s most crucial social unit then it’s a brilliant one and represents crucial elements of contemporary life with good humor and intelligence. It is NOT just a movie about superheroes. Still, the most entertaining set piece in I2 was an “incredible” baby vs raccoon fight.

First Reformed

Paul Schrader's powerfully disconcerting morality film First Reformed will no doubt prompt audiences to question their most grounding beliefs -- and that is what make this puzzling picture so captivating and disturbing. With glacial pacing and a level of interiority that is not often seen in contemporary cinematic narratives, First Reformed stars Ethan Hawke in a part that will garner him nominations and maybe statuary come awards season. Hawke is the addled and alcoholic minister of a "museum church" in Albany, where he maintains an ascetic existence and appears to be slowly succumbing to lung disease. His ministry, such as it is, brings him in contact with a congregant (Amanda Seyfried) and her environmental activist husband (Phillip Ettinger) and a crisis that spins them and Hawke's character out of their orbits and into conflict with a church leader (a refreshingly measured Cedric "the Entertainer" Kyles) and a powerful local businessman (Michael Gaston). My favorite Schrader films (American Gigolo, Hardcore, Affliction) all involved characters beset by extraordinary circumstances and their own natures. Hawke's Reverend Toller struggles with faith in his God and fellow man, and we find ourselves pulling for him despite our own natures and better judgments.

Superfly

Music video auteur Director X's Superfly re-hash is all about excess -- too much money, too much sex, too much cocaine, too much blood, too much trust, too much hate, just too much -- and it all adds up to a surprisingly satisfying ride. The wonderfully charismatic young actor Trevor Jackson (Grown-ish) stars as the elegantly "processed" Youngblood Priest, a major player in the Atlanta drug trade who is off everyone's grid until he dodges a bullet that ends up in the gut of a bystander. Then, as they say, shit gets real. Helping Priest move weight and avoid drug rival Snow Patrol's loose guns are his BFF Eddie (an outstanding Jason Mitchell best known to me from Mudbound and Straight Outta Compton) and his winsome muse Georgia (Lex Scott Davis) and her gangsta bitch girlfriend Cynthia (Andrea Londo). Director X and screenwriter Alex Tse have crafted a crackling film that pops with snappy wit and artfully choreographed throwdowns that is a fitting, if not all together reverent, homage to Gordon Parks Jr.'s 1972 original.

Upgrade

Aussie director Leigh Whannell's Upgrade borrows narrative elements from a half-dozen films -- primarily Blade Runner, RoboCop, 2001 and Death Wish. Derivative is not always bad, and in this case similarities can be overlooked because Whannell's execution is sure. This is an interesting, though loopy, sci-fi body count flick that stars Charleston (S.C.) native Logan Marshall-Green as Grey Trace, an underemployed mechanic and restorer of vintage muscle cars. Left a quadriplegic in a thugland attack that killed his wife (Melanie Vellajo), Trace finds his way to boy genius scientist Eron (Harrison Gilbertson), who offers him a makeover -- a sentient chip named Stem (voiced by Simon Maiden) that will make him better than new. With his restored mobility and Stem's timely guidance and occasional intervention, Trace hunts the shooters, but obstructions are plentiful and threats are bloody. A tenacious detective (Betty Gabriel of Get Out) suspects Trace has gone vigilante and that he is dispatching with gruesome efficiency some really dirty, enhanced bad guys but she's early on not aware of Trace's Upgrade, and when she does learn of it, Trace and Stem may be too far gone for her to stop.

Hereditary

Ari Aster's Hereditary works so wonderfully because Aster's story inhabits a tilted, wall-eyed world populated by folks who are a tad too earnest or detached, too intense or unconcerned, who say things that are both meaningful and meaningless, who seem to be loving and indifferent. When the horrors begin we're not immediately sure this is creepy enough to be frightening -- maybe it's just strange. And it is that uncertainty -- and Toni Collette's amazing performance as a frightful mother, wife and daughter in a household haunted either by her Hecuba of a dead mother or by madness -- that holds us tightly through a film that is so deliberately pace it might tax the patience of patrons wanting more solid scares with the abundant grotesquerie.

RBG

I find it hard to imagine anyone making a more loving portrait of an iconic figure than Julie Cohen and Betsy West have in their documentary of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG).  In many ways the film is quite conventional -- mapping a bit of Ginsburg's childhood, her college years at Cornell, then Harvard and Columbia, and finally her career as a litigator on behalf of women faced with discriminatory treatment in both private and public arenas and ultimately her years on the Supreme Court. Though all of that is noteworthy and duly inspiring, I was moved more by the tender love story between the tirelessly studious and exacting RBG and her gregarious and devoted husband, Marty.  Each of RBG's professional milestones is framed in conventional newsreel style but also through the lens of her husband's devotion and boundless respect for his wife and her work. It's touching and utterly charming.

The Rider

Chinese filmmaker Chloe Zhao's The Rider is the beautifully crafted story of a young rodeo cowboy (Bradley Jandreau) who is recovering after being thrown and stomped by a bronco. Bradley has a metal plate in his head and a spastic hand that doesn't always do what his brain tells it, a developmental disabled younger sister (Lily Jandreau) who he dotes on and a father (Tim Jandreau) who is so full of bitterness and regret that he's of little use to his motherless children. Yes, the lead characters are just about playing themselves as are many of the other residents of the dismal South Dakota reservation where the story is set. Though he's as battered as a war veteran, Bradley, under-educated and lacking real options, exudes an optimism (perhaps foolishly) about his life, his dream that he will ride again because, dammit, that's what cowboys do. Zhao's scenes of the restless Bradley, ill-advisedly, training horses and mounting them to gallop through the scrubby Dakota plains are riveting and will surely earn cinematographer Joshua James Richards accolades. Zhao, who also wrote the screenplay, devotes most of the picture to showing how broken bodies and broken spirits heal -- or don't. Bradley's best friend, Lane (Lane Scott) was himself severely injured while riding a rodeo bull. Footage of the strikingly handsome Lane, full of swagger and fire, makes the time the audience spends with his wrecked and palsied body, looking at his nearly unresponsive face, all the more painful, and Bradley's commitment to him both inspiring and heartbreaking. The Rider is emotionally draining and deeply, deeply moving.