I'm a Virgo

Hip-hop artist Boots Riley's Marxist politics set him in pretty rarefied air even before he added surrealist filmmaker to his resume with 2018's celebrated film Sorry to Bother You.

Now that's he's created a "beyond heavy" small-screen TV series, I'm a Virgo, Riley, 52, is arguably on the verge of becoming the latest incarnation of iconic Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, an uncompromising and subversive visual artist battling fascism and bourgeois self-satisfaction.

I'm a Virgo tells the story of Cootie, a13-foot-tall Black Oakland teenager (played winningly by Jharrel Jerome), who has been sheltered from the world by his father and mother (a terrifically cast Mike Epps and Carmen Ejogo), who may be more than just anxious about his safety as the parents of an unusual young Black man.

Cootie eventually steps out of his cloistered world and makes friends with three local kids (Brett Grey, Kara Young and Allius Barnes), who challenge his television-mediated views, especially his admiration for the crime fighter The Hero (Walter Goggins), who is more jackboot than Captain America.

During a visit to the neighborhood franchise of Bing-Bang Burgers, Cootie meets and falls for Flora, played by Olivia Washington, who has her own special gifts. She adds more layers to Cootie's adventure.

In the background of this unconventional coming-of-ager are events involving tenant evictions, corporate greed, environmental racism and revolution. It's a lot to take in but Riley has always had a lot on his mind.

The music Riley makes with his group The Coup and what he's done with Tom Morello, guitarist with the rock/ rap group Rage Against the Machine, involve many of the same issues coursing through I'm a Virgo; anyone familiar with Riley's discography won't be surprised.

What is surprising is the deftness of his direction, even the wilder, more cartoonish elements of the story.

I don't think I'm a Virgo's didactic elements will lead to an uprising against capitalism -- but it's thoughtful, entertaining and more engaging than Das Kapital.

Talk to Me (2023)

 

Aussie twins Michael and Danny Philippou have written and directed a bitchin' adolescent horror flick that scares circles around the latest Insidious installment and doubles as a slam dunk of an anti-drug movie that is blessedly free of controlled substances.

Moody teens Mia (Sophie Wilde) and BFF Jade (Alexandra Jensen) don't need the hard stuff when their friends Hayley and Joss (Zoe Terakes and Chris Alosio, respectively) hold parties whose main feature is the preserved hand of a dead medium.

If touched and the title of the film is spoken, visions of the ghostly dead appear. That's the gateway. The hardcore stuff is inviting the spirit in for a ride.

When Mia spends a little too much time talking to the hand, perhaps while trying to impress her ex-squeeze, the chaste Daniel (Otis Dhanji), things start getting out of, er, hand. And when Jade's tween-sib Riley (Joe Bird) asks for a little taste of what the cool kids are doing, the whole trippy affair rises to new levels of grim gruesomeness. ("I turned my pesky little brother on and now look at him!")

With Talk to Me, the Philippou brothers, of the 2014 horror winner The Babadook, offer a fairly fresh take on the spirit possession flick, save for a few narrative misfires and peculiarities. The holes won't keep the picture from scoring big points with young fans of the genre and their parents who are more concerned about the evil effects of crank than the undead.

They Cloned Tyrone

 

Juel Taylor's They Cloned Tyrone is a satirical Woke Nation manifesto mystery (streaming on Netflix) that stars Teyonah Parris, Jamie Foxx and John Boyega as a mean streets prostitute, pimp and drug dealer, respectively, who discover an enormous conspiracy to control Black folks through fast-food chicken, hair-styling relaxer and communion wine. 

All of this is for the dubious purpose of restoring peace to a country tearing itself apart, according to arch conspirator / svengali played by Kiefer Sutherland. 

It's a fascinating and captivating moviee with that Jamie Foxx rapid-fire swagger that's worth millions. In

The Flash

 

Andy Muschietti's The Flash is, uh, flashy and frantic and overwrought with comic book urgency but fumbles essential human elements by investing too much in the central premise of averting a tragic death through time travel.

The film's controversial non-binary star Ezra Miller does a commendable job in portraying speedy Barry Allen, in two separate but merged universes, but the story itself is burdened by the movie studio's ambitions -- the revival and redirection of the D.C cinema franchise.

It is regrettable that Marvel has done so much with multiple universe narratives over the past few years because those films make The Flash feel more than a little like an also-ran.

Jaye Davidson

 

Oscar-nominated actor Jaye Davidson made two feature films back in the '90s and then retired from motion pictures, though he still works as a model and promoter.

Davidson's debut was as Dil, a transgender woman and agent provocateur in Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992). Jordan's script won the Oscar for best piece written directly for the screen. As rich as Jordan's story is -- and despite intriguing performances by Stephen Rea, Miranda Richardson and Forest Whitaker -- it was Davidson's full-frontal "reveal" that jettisoned the film into the realm of cinema legend.

Davidson, who is openly gay and married to Thomas Clarke, has said he retired from acting because the fame grew to be too much for him. Two years after The Crying Game, he appeared as the alien invader in Roland Emmerich's Stargate, a role for which he said he was paid $1 million. And that, for all intents and purposes, was it.

The son of a Black Ghanaian father and white English mother, Davidson was the first British person of color to be nominated for an Academy Award.

That's quite a footnote.

Chasing Amy

 

Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy (1997), his third feature film, is an entertaining look at that popular cinematic musing -- is platonic love ever possible between men and women?

Smith -- whose films are often dialogue-heavy, pop culture and profanity infused, self-referential tales set in New Jersey -- amps up the wattage in this film by having the couple in question, comic book creators, a straight man (Ben Affleck) and a lesbian (Joey Lauren Adams, whom Smith was dating at the time). Holden and Alyssa are introduced by a mutual friend, the Black gay writer / artist Hooper (Dwight Ewell), at a Comic Con and immediately begin friendly sparring. The comic book Affleck's Holden draws with BFF Banky (Jason Lee), Bluntman and Chronic, is hugely popular while Alyssa's radical feminist book is a boutique item. They find common ground and find themselves pulled into each other's orbit. Banky grows resentful as the unlikely romance takes flight, which eventually ends up with Holden being forced to choose.

Smith's films, Chasing Amy included, are semi-autobiographical stories directed at viewers who swing between cynicism and hope. To them, life is not about the destination, which is unknowable, but the journey.

Smith's characters often display emotional and sexual fluidity. This perspective carries Chasing Amy through some interesting territory as characters discover new ways to connect that go beyond society's rigid expectations and demands.

It's easy to see why it resonated with many LGBTQ+ audiences -- but may have been dismissed by others because of Alyssa's confliction.

The Amy in the title represents past relationships, which were often unhealthy, that we refuse to let go.

All reacti

The Harrad Experiment (1973)

 

Fifty years ago, veteran TV director Ted Post helmed the film version of Robert Rimmer's 1966 provocative novel The Harrad Experiment to a modicum of "outrage" but pretty decent box office sales. The film starred James Whitmore, Tippi Hedren and 24-year-old Don Johnson in one of his first feature films.

The story is set at fictional Harrad College where Philip and Margaret Tenhausen are conducting sexuality experiments with young male and female students, mismatched in dormitory rooms to see if "heat" will overwhelm their conflicting personalities. Johnson plays Stanley, a sexual libertine, who is assigned to a room with Sheila, the very model of sexual repression. It's all titillation and voyeurism and decidedly tame based on 2023 standards. (The DVD is available for purchase on Amazon.)

A 1970 issue of New York's Other Scenes newspaper included a guest column titled Group Marriage, which describes an alternative living experiment in Berkeley, California, (where else?) that invited those interested in sharing spouses, breeding and parenting to apply. It was called Harrad West.

The invitation read in part: "Since we are a growing community, we would welcome as new members those who share our aims. We are particularly interested in applicants in the thirtyish age bracket. Younger persons are often not emotionally ready for what we are doing, though of course there are always exceptions. The upper age limit is often a point at which the individual is no longer able to change his (sic) life style. Couples are especially welcome, as are single females. We already have a large number of inquiries from interested males."

Hmmm. I suppose there's no getting around human nature.

Sylvester

My Country 'Tis Of Thee - YouTube

Fifty years ago, a Black gay drag performer in San Francisco named Sylvester released an album of rock and blues cover songs with a group of straight white men that he dubbed The Hot Band.

The album, which featured a scented gardenia sticker on the cover, was titled "Scratch My Flower." It sold miserably at the time but, curiously, is still in-print, packaged along with the group's second venture for Blue Thumb records, Bazaar.

Those first two albums have some strong musical moments but are weakened a bit by Sylvester's often muddy vocals, an under-enunciated piercing falsetto that would nonetheless send his solo disco recordings of the late '70s into orbit. Sylvester's 1978 dance club hit "You Make Me Feel [Mighty Real]" was admitted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2019.

The closing track on "Scratch My Flower" is a rave-up rendition of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." I've never settled on whether this was intended to be an ironic send-up or sincere patriotic expression, but it's one of the highlights on the record.

Sylvester, who was reared in the Pentacostal church but was turned away after coming out as gay, died in 1988 from AIDS-related complications. He was 41.

Barbie

 

Greta Gerwig's marvelous deconstruction of the 60-year-old Barbie doll phenomena is a MAGA Nation nightmare about female empowerment, gender non-conformity and corporate fecklessness and misogyny that dismantles the country's fevered androcentrism while delivering a hilarious, tuneful, culturally dense, cinematically dazzling and whip smart treatise on how to fix what's wrong with the world -- at least a big part of it.

The film's prologue, which is narrated by 14-karat badass Dame Helen Mirren, is a brilliant recasting of the monolith discovery opening to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey that capsulizes girl / doll relations. It's been quite a while since I've been so enchanted by something so clever.

Margot Robbie, whose filmography strongly suggests she's the "gamest" A-lister in Hollywood, leads a stellar, decidedly diverse cast of characters, most of whom are named Barbie, in Gerwig and co-screenwriter and life partner Noah Baumbach's fantasy tale of the venerable toy's colossal identity crisis.

Barbie's bright and sunny disposition as Stereotypical Barbie in Barbieland is overturned when thoughts of mortality begin to pop into her head, at first inexplicably but later revealed to be related to the identity crisis of a real-world Barbie fan (America Ferrera). To avert disaster, Barbie must travel to the real world and make right what is wrong.

Barbie is joined on her journey by Ken (an equally game Ryan Gosling), who is experiencing his own crisis as Barbie's under-developed and woefully under-contextualized "boyfriend." He discovers in the Real World his own brand of empowerment that leads to a huge paradigm shift in Barbieland. According to some reports, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling were both paid $12 million for their starring roles.

Gerwig, as brainy an actress/screenwriter/director as any, has created in this $100 million pink parade an irreverent and subversive spectacle that will, nevertheless, make BILLIONS for Mattel.

The Bear, redux

 

Twenty minutes into Episode 6 of Hulu's The Bear's second season, I paused it to catch my breath. That was last night, and I'm still panting from the show's distinctively claustrophobic chaos, which was pinging in the red zone nearly from the beginning. 

A flashback episode -- home for the holidays with Carmy (Jeremy Allen White). Too many people in too little space with too much said and unsaid, too many agendas, too many old hurts, too many schemes, demands, unknowns. 

To my mind, that's been the key to the show's phenomenal success: its intensity and brashness and mystery.

So much happens in thpat space where freedom and obligation clash, where it's noisy and bloody. 

Where many of us are our most vulnerable and most creative. 

Now that I've caught my breath I'm taking just one minute to reflect further on the wonder that is The Bear's mother / martyr Donna Berzatto.

Berzatto, as played by Hollywood royal and A-lister Jamie Lee Curtis, is a furious blur of kitchen wizardry, pouring self-pity into her bubbling pots with the wine she steadily guzzles. 

She's a tortured torturer whose narcissism has turned her children into fearful comforters and enablers, inheritors of her mental and emotional illnesses, walking lightly around her to try to avert the inevitable. 

Donna fears abandonment even though it is clear from her treatment that she has abandoned her family for her own fixation on performance. That anybody still shows up for Christmas dinner knowing what will happen is one of the great mysteries of this scenario. Maybe they fear the year they miss will be the day Donna blows her brains out and they won't be able to live with the guilt.

Talk about power and control.

Donna Berzatto is the patron saint of functioning dysfunction and the answer to so many of the lingering questions in The Bear: Why Carmy bailed. Why Sugar is guardedly defiant.  Why Michael is dead. 

To quote the great Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, "Attention must be paid."

Mission: Impossible ~ Dead Reckoning Part 1

 

The thing to know before seeing the latest Tom Cruise / Christopher McQuarrie collaboration -- Mission: Impossible ~ Dead Reckoning Part One -- is it will be very much like their previous outings -- the other M:I films and Jack Reacher. That is to say, it will be a tremendous crowd-pleaser with off-the-chart stunts and chases, numerous cliffhangers and ample wit.

McQuarrie is an Oscar-winning screenwriter (The Usual Suspects) who knows good film stories are not made "good" by the crashes and body count but by the connective tissue that holds set pieces together in a sensible narrative. When a story is set in the world of spies and deception, it might be foolish to accept anything on "face value," especially in the case of Mission: Impossible, which has used masking, fakery and sleight-of-hand since its beginnings on '60s television.

In this episode, Cruise's Ethan Hunt and his crew of off-the-grid agents (Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson) are trying to find the missing half to a key that would unlock a mystery involving artificial intelligence and existential threats to world governments' security and commerce. The key is so critical to maintaining the balance of power that many nations have dispatched parties (Esai Morales, Vanessa Kirby) to locate the key and answer the riddle of its purpose.

Typical of this series -- and most every other top-dollar actioner I can think of -- exotic locales factor into the story, if for no purpose other than to provide streets (or canals, in the case of Venice) through which Hunt and company (in this case, a highly skilled pickpocket named Grace played by Hayley Atwell) might race on foot or in vehicles.

Some of these pieces are more than a few beats too long -- the chase through Rome has some comedic moments but wears out its welcome after 10 minutes. I thought this was curious considering how sensitive McQuarrie seemed in the past to pacing and flow.

Still, Part One ends with a jaw-dropping train-crash escape that raises the bar on Cruise's famous stunting and audience demands for Part Two, to be released next year.

Joy Ride

 

The writer of 2018's Crazy Rich Asians, Adele Lim's, directorial debut, Joy Ride, is an outrageously bawdy road trip movie about four Asian-American female friends who travel to mainland China to close a business deal for one member of their party, but, as one might expect, the journey turns into much more than that. A lot of it having to do with sex.

The four young women at the heart of this buddy comedy --produced by the irrepressible Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (This is the End, Neighbors, The Interview, etc.) -- are Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Sabrina Wu and Stephanie Hsu.

Park's Audrey and Cola's Lolo have been friends since childhood; Wu's Dead Eye and Hsu's Kat are later but ardent additions. They have been invited along for the ride to help Park's accomplished but culturally clueless Audrey, who was adopted by a white American couple as a baby, with language translation.

Lolo, without her friend's permission, has located Audrey's birth mother in a town not far from Beijing by train and encouraged her friend to add a detour to the agenda. This turns into a near-fatal miscalculation that, in typical Rogen and Goldberg style, involves copious amounts of drugs.

The film has a writerly, high-speed, wise-cracking sensibility, which the four leads pull off effortlessly. They have amazing chemistry (no pun intended). Though for all intents and purposes this is Audrey's story, each of the equally winning principals gets an extended moment to shine -- and do they!

But beyond all of the ribaldry, the picture smartly and sensitively explores questions about racial identity, cultural authenticity and family. The picture is not just hilarious, it's also thoughtful.

I have every expectation that, as the ending suggests, we will see more of these delightfully refreshing women in future escapades (pun intended for those who have seen Joy Ride).

Sound of Freedom

 

Alejandro Monteverde's Sound of Freedom is a tightly wound independently produced thriller with an urgent message about child sex trafficking told through a Christian lens.

Jim Caviezel plays real-life Homeland Security agent Tim Ballard, who when we meet him is successfully tracking down and arresting pedophiles engaged in the sell of children for sex.

His latest arrest leads him to the rescue of a Honduran 8-year-old, who asks Ballard to find and rescue his older sister who was kidnapped from their town at the same time. With the help of a freelance rescuer named Vampiro (Bill Camp), Ballard follows leads into Colombia where he stages a major sting that results in the rescue of more than 50 enslaved children and into the jungle where he finds the girl and successfully rescues her from a rebel leader.

Though based on an actual case, journalists have questioned the accuracy of the events presented on-screen and even Ballard's own version of the role he played rescuing scores of children enslaved by sex traffickers in Latin America. Concerns about connections with Q-Anon conspiracy theories may have contributed to the decision to shelve the film until Angel Studios purchased distribution rights and raised enough funds to get the picture into theaters.

Questions about the accuracy of the film notwithstanding, Monteverde has made a passionate, difficult, troubling movie that expresses to powerful affect its central mantra -- God's children are not for sale.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

 

I was entertained by James Mangold's assured direction of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which felt a tad more like "fan service" than credible conclusion to a truly venerable franchise.

And, as much as I was enchanted by Phoebe Waller-Bridge's roguish Helena and Mads Mikkelsen's sneering Nazi, I was underwhelmed and occasionally wearied by the film's title character (played, of course, by Harrison Ford), who, despite a pretty energetic, age-altered opening sequence set at the end of World War II lent the movie a forlorn creakiness that was, well, sad.

In this send off, the archaeologist / adventurer (Ford) joins forces, reluctantly, with his god-daughter (Waller-Bridge), whom he has not seen since the death of her father and Jones' close university associate, Basil Shaw, played by Toby Jones. Shaw was driven nearly mad by his obsession with a mystical timepiece created by Archimedes in the 3rd century BCE, which he believed if it were whole would have time-traveling properties.

Equipped with Shaw's notes and a lead, Jones and Helena set off to find the dial's missing piece, and as is usual for this series, the quest takes them and Helena's youthful partner-in-crime Teddy (Ethann Isidore) across the globe, recruiting the help of some of Indy's old friends, as the trio stays two steps ahead of nefarious interested parties led by Mikkelsen's Dr. Voller.

The Indiana Jones's franchise, which has belonged to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas since 1981, has been a predictable and bankable commodity that has turned the chase -- foot, vehicular, ocean vessel, aircraft -- into high art unburdened by plausibility or narrative coherence -- all for the sake of "gee-whiz."

Dial of Destiny pulls out all the stops in this regard but so much so that the set pieces felt bloated and tedious, to me -- porterhouse when sirloin would have been fine.

Still, fans will likely devour every ounce of it.

No Hard Feelings

 

IIn Director Gene Stupnitsky's No Hard Feelings, Jennifer Lawrence plays Maddie, a 30-something bartender / Uber driver in Montauk, New York, who has gotten behind in paying her property taxes and stands to lose the only home she's ever known.

After her car is impounded, Maddie discovers a Craigslist ad placed by a couple (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benenti) who are offering an automobile as payment to a twenty-something woman who devirginizes their anxious 19-year-old son (Andrew Barth Feldman), who is heading for Princeton in the fall.

Despite not meeting the age-requirement, Maddie applies and is hired. What proceeds is an uneven -- but frequently quite funny -- tale of two broken people who come to better understand themselves by facing the scariest thing they know -- human connections.

The premise is ridiculously sticky but both Lawrence, who is one of the film's producers, and Feldman are so invested in capturing both the outrageousness of the story's action and the warmth that lies at its heart that despite narrative holes and continuity gaffes it delivers an affirming glow after the credits roll.

Lawrence gives an assured A-lister performance and young Mr. Feldman (a former member of the High School Musical series) has a nice moment at the piano as he serenades Maddie in a restaurant, turning Hall and Oates' Maneater into winning seduction.

The Blackening

 

Director Tim Story takes a funny and insightful screenplay by Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins and turns it into if not comedic gold then certainly sterling silver.

Nine Black college friends plan a reunion in a secluded cabin for a Juneteenth celebration, but the party is interrupted by masked murderers with crossbows who threaten to kill them all if they don't play a game -- The Blackening. The game is -- for all intents and purposes -- a test of knowledge of African American history and culture, despite the racist minstrel centerpiece on the board.

The movie is 80 percent social commentary and 20 percent slasher cinema and pits the nine (Antoinette Robertson, Dewayne Perkins, Sinqua Walls, Grace Byers, X Mayo, Melvin Gregg, Jermaine Fowler, Yvonne Orji and Jay Pharoah) alternately against their masked captors and themselves. Narrative gaps don't derail the proceedings, mainly because viewers are likely to quickly forget this is a thriller.

The internal warring offers the heartiest laughs and cultural chestnuts that, I suspect, will be most impactful among people familiar with racial stereotypes and cultural tropes that often don't make it to the big screen. Here, they are wall-to-wall.

They are used here as measures of "authenticity" with the central cast representing different sectors of Black life in the U.S. who more or less unite to battle existential threats.

The Blackening, which seems to be addressing larger issues than racial authenticity, is a knowing and entertaining picture.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

 

Marvel Studios' latest animated feature -- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse -- is a work of art on a level of sophistication and stylistic brilliance that will undoubtedly be added to the canon of outstanding animated work that has included, most prominently, the Disney catalogue, including the wonderful Pixar features of the past 20 years. I predict it will be studied for years.

Marvel is taking full advantage of the narrative complexity of the multiverse introduced in its film and streaming series. This concept proposes there are an infinite number of dimensions of existence, all of which have some version of the same folks, most importantly in the case of this franchise -- Spider-people. Disruptions of the fated events in any one dimension can threaten all of existence.

Shameik Moore (Dope) voices again the version of Spider-Man that is Miles Morales, a Black Hispanic teenager in Brooklyn who has been fighting crime in the same way as the live action heroes (played most recently by Tom Holland). Miles is coaxed by his female counterpart from a parallel universe (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) to follow her as she explore the infinite possibilities "across the Spider-Verse" with a band of other selected Spideys.

As they venture out, visual elements change, color palettes go from muted to bold and back, backgrounds move from flat to three-dimensional, the screen takes on comic book stylings and the rendering techniques of other animators. It's simply beyond clever and merges on genius.

A tight, smartly written story supports all of this spectacle, with enviable complexity for an animated film that runs nearly half-again as long as the tradition long-form cartoon. Dialogue is whip-smart and expositive.

Young children will be mesmerized by the eye-popping action, while their parents will likely be impressed by the treatment of thorny questions about duty and obligations, truth and trust.

As for me, I loved it.

The Little Mermaid (2023)

 

Disney's live action remake of its 1989 animated feature The Little Mermaid, which was also staged on Broadway in 2008, has opened to large audiences.

When Disney announced that Halle Bailey was being cast as the lead underwater damsel who longs to walk among the humans, fans got to work crafting posters.

To my eye, the fans' renderings of Ariel, which looked sort of like Bailey but not really, were much more provocative, featured more decolletage, than what Disney's artists had imagined.

Few had imagined that, as in the case of Bailey, that the winsome mermaid would have braided hair in the style of many Black women.

And Disney, who introduced the idea of the high-concept motion picture boondoggle with accompanying merchandise, has a number of Ariel dolls for sale. One has brown rotini hair.

Master Gardener

 

Paul Schrader is a formidable cinematic moralist whose movies almost always depict failed and failing men wrestling with demons.

His latest, Master Gardener, tells the story of a surprisingly erudite horticulturist named Narvel Roth, played by Joel Edgerton, who works for Norma Haverhill, a pleated and plain-spoken doyenne of the property classes (Sigourney Weaver) in an unnamed Southern town with streets lined with palmettos and festooned with moss.

Norma asks Narvel to take over the tutelage of her grand-niece, Maya (a radiant Quintessa Swindell), her deceased sister's granddaughter, who recently experienced the death of her mother.

Narvel is to apprentice the young woman and prepare her to maybe one day take over the maintenance of the estate.

Narvel, a crisp and immaculately barbered presence whose torso bears witness to his dark past, takes the assignment and quickly grows fond of the young woman, who is struggling with drug addiction. Her habit compromises not only her future but, possibly, the lives and safety of everyone around her.

Edgerton, Weaver and Swindell, especially, are all fine and their interactions are clean and on the money. They are hitting all of the marks dutifully in this story of secrets and lies, but it is not one of the celebrated screenwriter's best efforts. The script is layered but the dialogue often feels stagy and artificial.

Hypnotic

 

The poster for Robert Rodriguez's latest feature, Hypnotic, a mind-bender (some might prefer appending the f-bomb to "mind"), superimposes star Ben Affleck over an intricate domino run.

This image is (unintentionally) ironic because the movie itself is scattered and chaotic, nothing like the ordered toppling of domino tiles.

Affleck plays an Austin, Texas, detective who is just returning to street duty following the disappearance of his daughter three years before. This is the first clue that something in the narrative is amiss. When the film opens, Affleck's Danny Rourke is in his therapist's office, recounting the last time he had seen his daughter, on the day of her abduction from a city park, while he was just a few feet away.

The session appears inconclusive, but Rourke is cleared to return to duty. He and his partner, Nicks (J.D. Pardo), respond to a report of potentially criminal doings at a bank. During the course of their investigation, they discover a mysterious man with mind-control powers (William Fichtner) who might know where Rourke's missing daughter is. Pursuing him leads Rourke and Nicks to another psychic played by Alice Braga, and the story starts to bend in another direction.

Illusion and delusion is the name of the game in this picture, a fairly humorless pseudo-sci-fi trifle whose level of narrative confusion makes it really hard to punch through.

Still, despite his muted aging frat daddy vibe, Affleck gives a credible performance as a distraught and distracted father with a huge secret.

Silo

 

The last half of Episode 3 of Apple TV's marvelous steampunk mystery series Silo, starring the amazingly versatile Rebecca Ferguson, was the most intense 30 minutes I've spent with a television program in quite some time.

Created by Canadian writer/producer Graham Yost and based on the books by Hugh Howey, Silo is a post-apocalyptic tale of an underground city contained in an enormous vertical bunker built before the memory of anybody currently living. The city is powered by an enormous generator that is showing troublesome wear and tear.

Ace mechanic Juliette Nichols (Ferguson) convinces the powers-that-be that the generator must be repaired before it fails permanently, casting the thousands of residents into airless darkness. It must be shutdown for Juliette and her teammates to make the repair, but time is not a luxury as the steam that drives the turbines will quickly build and threaten the whole operation.

Episode director Morten Tyldum masterfully paces the crisis that emerges, set against a backdrop of a suspicious death and the Silo's bizarre expulsion ritual. Tyldum makes every dropped tool and slipped knot potentially earth-shattering -- literally.

Blackberry

 

Actor / writer/ director Matt Johnson's film Blackberry is a hefty mix of cautionary tale and historical document that chronicles how the once ubiquitous Canadian smartphone came to life and how it was killed by Apple's iPhone.

Johnson plays second-banana / puppet-master Doug Fregin to Jay Baruchel's Mike Lazaridis, Fregin's brilliant bestie and former fellow engineering student at University of Windsor. They founded Research in Motion in 1984, employing other computer geeks in Waterloo, Ontario, to create circuit boards and modems for larger companies -- and watch classic fanboy films on Movie Night.

When discovered by the ethically challenged Jim Balsillie (a terrifically unhinged Glenn Howerton), RIM is deeply in debt and being strung along by big firms intent on stealing their ideas. He buys into co-ownership of RIM and commits to making them all rich.

Though slimy and unprincipled, Balsillie is indeed a rainmaker for RIM, pushing Fregin and Lazaridis to move forward on a smartphone prototype that he will pitch to Verizon and that will eventually be called the Blackberry. (The source of the name is a tiny bit of understated genius.)

Balsillie drums up business with the kind of jet-setting hyperbole and corner-office profanity that makes the ears of decent people bleed. But he delivers and over-commits RIM time and time again. He's incorrigible and greedy and the best thing to happen to RIM -- until he isn't.

This entertaining picture's narrative of a David becoming a Goliath intercuts passages about the science of communication technology with sections about the unsavory aspects of this schizophrenic first-world sector, where socially challenged outcasts put the rest of the world in touch with one another in mere milliseconds.

Baruchel, under a stringy silver wig and behind face-framing plastic aviators, personifies this dichotomy, evolving over the course of the film from meek "idea man" to an icy mercenary. It's a fascinating, and chilling, metamorphosis.

Joyland

 

Columbia University film student Saim Sadiq's first full-length feature, Joyland, is set in his native Lehore, Paskistan, and tells the story of Haider, an unemployed young man (Ali Junejo) in an arranged marriage to Mumtaz, a dynamic beauty salon owner (Rasti Farooq).

Haider finds himself tending to his three growing nieces and his aging, fiercely paternalistic father (Salmaan Peerzada). Haider's brother, Saleem (Sameer Sohail), and sister-in-law, Nucchi (Sarwat Gilani) are pleasing to Abba (the father) because they are pregnant again and the doctor has predicted this time with a boy, a continuation of the family line. Haider and Mumtaz have yet to have children, which seems to be a mutual decision.

Sadiq presents all of this with wonderful economy and pathos; it is clear he has lived within those crowded walls and mulled over the traditions that appear to be stifling Haider and Mumtaz.

When Haider gets a lead from a neighbor friend, he follows it and discovers it is a job as a backup dancer in one of the exotic clubs, which features a transwoman performer, Biba (the transgender actress Alina Kahn).

Haider is not a dancer but is entranced by the mercurial Biba, which may or may not be a signal of his own sexual awakening. He works hard to learn the steps but lies to Mumtaz, who has stopped working to help run the household, and the others about the job, saying he is the theater manager and does not perform, as that would bring shame upon the family.

Shame and secrets are common themes in this fascinating film about religious tradition and human agency. Mumtaz's relationship with Nucchi is especially interesting, as they are two modern Pakistani women who still feel inhibited by society's expectations. Their only relief appears to be an occasional excursion to the amusement park, Joyland, where they work through their frustrations on carnival rides.

But the central relationship in the film is between the diffident Haider and Biba, whose fire lights a dormant spark in him that will either enliven or incinerate him.

The Diplomat

 

Netflix's absorbing political thriller series The Diplomat has that stimulating feeling of cultural and political urgency that made The West Wing so successful.

Created by Debora Cahn -- veteran television writer / producer long associated with Aaron Sorkin's White House machinations series and with Shonda Rhimes' medical drama Grey's Anatomy -- The Diplomat stars Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, career foreign service officer to the Middle East who is reassigned as ambassador to the Court of St. James's and stationed in London with her fellow State Department operative and husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell).

The reassignment follows the bombing of a British naval vessel off the coast of Iran that killed more than 40 sailors; early surveillance suggests Iran was behind it but the Wylers, who know the region and the players, receive intelligence that is not the case.

The early episodes involve Kate finding her footing. Though brilliant, she has neither the background nor the temperament for what has essentially been a plush posting for presidential patrons that involved little, if any, diplomacy. The attack changes the game substantially, and Cahn and crew explore not only the complexities of foreign service, international communications and exchange but the interpersonal dynamics of the large number of players involved in these matters.

Adding to this absorbing narrative is the fact that the Wylers may or may not be in a middle of a divorce; their lives seem to be at once in tandem and fiercely opposed. There is heat but Kate doesn't trust her mendacious husband, whose ego is enormous. The scenes between the two are rendered flawlessly by Russell and Sewell.

Also outstanding in the early going are Ato Essandoh as American embassy attaché Stuart Heyford, Nana Mensah as presidential Chief of Staff Billie Appiah and David Gyasi as British Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison, three Black actors with whose work I am not familiar but who deliver wonderfully layered and refreshingly atypical performances.

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3

 

Reviewing James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy films is a redundant enterprise.

Moviegoers on the Guardians team will go reflexively. Those who don't dig the franchise's jokiness and cockeyed views on good and evil, justice, duty, family, romance, and, well, most every big issue featured in the Marvel Cinematic Universe will take a hard pass.

Marvel will bank another several hundred million and keep rolling.

The just-released Volume 3 -- named that because of the prominent role the soundtrack has played in the pictures' narratives -- has been telegraphed as the last featuring the complete original lineup -- Chris Pratt as Peter Quill, Zoe Saldana as Gamora, David Bautista as Drax, Bradley Cooper as the voice of Rocket, Pom Klementieff as Mantis, Karen Gillan as Nebula and Vin Diesel as the voice of Groot. But the mid-credit tease suggests there might be more in store.

One thing we know about the MCU, turning off the faucet is not something they do quickly, especially if the fanbase still has an appetite for the fare, as evidenced by the third installment of the similarly irreverent Deadpool series, which stars Ryan Reynolds, set for release next year.

Still and yet, Volume 3 boasts impressive, eye-popping alien world set pieces and stellar insider humor that comes fast and furious (*wink*).

Some viewers have objected to the sentimental elements Gunn has written into the latest story -- and the scenes of animal experimentation are indeed disturbing -- but I feel the movie holds together well, much of the glue being provided by Chukwudi Iwuji's villainous High Evolutionary, a worthy candidate to join Marvel's pantheon of evil -- along with Cate Blanchett as Hela and Josh Brolin as Thanos.

And, of course, the playlist kicks ass.