→ November 21, 2022
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Amsterdam (movie).

Amsterdam takes an incredible cast and some fantastic costume work and turns it into … not much. I can’t even call it nothing, because it’s more than that, but this latest film from David O. Russell, his first since 2015’s Joy, is just indescribably bland. (You can rent it now on amazon and elsewhere.)

The script is the real problem here, as it’s convoluted, undecided about what kind of story it should be, and totally humorless. It’s part mystery, part political thriller, part historical fiction, and mixes in a tepid romance, but fails at virtually all of these things, lacking the tension for the first two or the humor to make it more of a wink and a nod at all of these disparate genres. It’s based on a real episode from U.S. history known as the Business Plot, and creates three protagonists – two wounded vets from World War I in the doctor Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and lawyer Harold Woodsman (John David Washington) plus nurse Valerie (Margot Robbie) – who get pulled into the intrigue, 39 Steps style, when someone they knew in the War shows up dead. That leads to the introduction of a Tolstoy-esque list of characters, adding to some of the confusion of the film and depriving some of the better players here of screen time, before we find out what the conspiracy is and get to the big resolution.

I’m in the target audience for Amsterdam. I like political thrillers, especially of that era, whether we’re talking about the Hitchock oeuvre or novels like The Dark Frontier or Le Carré’s best. I like murder mysteries. I love almost anything set in the 1920s or early 1930s. And I do often fall for movies that are stylish – if the dialogue matches. But Amsterdam doesn’t have a great story, neither in the murder part nor in the political conspiracy part, and the dialogue is drab.

Bale’s character is supposed to be a wiseass, but he’s neither clever nor funny enough to do it, yet he’s too smart to be comic relief. There’s something endearing about his loyalty to his fellow soldiers from their unit – which is itself rooted in kindness, although again, it’s a convoluted back story – but that’s not enough to fully define a three-dimensional character. Robbie can’t help but be endearing, but her character is weird for absolutely no reason at all, making art out of the shrapnel she removes from soldiers’ wounds, something that’s explained at length and then dropped for the rest of the film. Of the big three, Washington’s character is the best defined, and the most interesting, and his understated style works well here. But there are far more actors in this film who are nondescript or actively bad, none more so than Anya Taylor-Joy, who is playing an even more shrill version of her character from Peaky Blinders. She’s supposed to be suspicious, but instead, she’s obvious – and annoying as hell when doing it. Her husband is played by Rami Malek, whose skin condition from No Time to Die has resolved itself but who’s almost simpering here. Robert de Niro deserves credit for a very by-the-book turn as the General whose help the trio needs to secure, as the moment he appeared, I thought we were in for an overacting clinic. He’s quite credible in the part and holds it even when his character has to make a pivotal, emotional speech at the climax.

And that climax is … nothing. This is based on a real story; although the veracity of the accusations of a plot to overthrow the U.S. government remains in dispute, Amsterdam treats it as real, which should make the ending far more exciting. The script here has it end in a meeting and a whimper, although there’s a tussle over a gun that feels forced, like Russell was trying to insert some action into the film but couldn’t figure out how.

I was just never engaged in the story of Amsterdam, and that’s the biggest indictment I can offer. I am an easy mark for everything this script was trying to do, but it’s so busy trying to do so many things that it succeeds at none. The film actually opens with a long flashback sequence to World War I that explains how the dead body connects to Burt and Harold, and how they connect to each other (along with Chris Rock’s character, another member of the same unit), but it comes after a ten-minute or so opening scene that sets up the murder. The flashback itself is padded with too much detail anyway, so by the time we get back to the actual story – which features Taylor Swift as the deceased’s daughter, and she’s also not very good – any momentum that there might have been at that point is long gone. And the one thing that might have salvaged Amsterdam, wry humor, is mostly absent. There are a few attempts at some Marx Brothers-style wisecracking, but those fall flat. No single character is funny, and the script is too self-serious for something this stylized or slick. It’s not actually a bad movie – it’s a movie, and a colorless one at that.

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→ November 15, 2022
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See How They Run.

The success of Knives Out in 2019 didn’t just spawn a highly-awaited sequel, Glass Onion, which hits theaters later this month – it has spawned attempts to capitalize on its success, with two similar movies coming out this fall, See How They Run and Amsterdam. These movies are like catnip to me, as I love mysteries and detective stories in general, and Agatha Christie stories in particular, having read 50 of her novels and four of her short story collections. See How They Run doubles down on this, as it’s a period piece mystery that involves Christie’s famous play The Mousetrap and eventually features an appearance by the Queen of Murder herself as a character. So while I recognize this film’s limitations, I also loved just about every minute of it. (It’s streaming free now on HBO Max, or rentable everywhere, including Amazon.)

See How They Run is a bit more than a perfunctory murder mystery, though, as the script engages in some legerdemain, even starting out in one direction before the murder takes place and the whole thing shifts. After that point, we get our intrepid investigators, the overeager young Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), who is one of the first women in that position in the London police; and Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell), the drunken detective of stereotype. Someone has been murdered after the 100th performance of The Mousetrap, and, of course, everyone’s a suspect, from the actors to the playwright to the stage director. Constable Stalker is new to the homicide beat, so she starts jumping to conclusions, assuming every suspect is guilty, giving the film the biggest of its running gags, although Ronan’s performance makes it work. There is, of course, another murder, and the script plays around with the tropes of the British murder mystery, many of which Christie invented, before getting to the identity of the murder.

The script is about 80% formula, 20% clever, but this is a formula I happen to love, and there is at least a playfulness in the script that nods to the inherent predictability of it all. The core mystery is both well hidden and well written, credible with enough clues dropped along the way that at least in hindsight you can see how you might have figured it out. (I did not.) There is also some humor in here, not as much as Knives Out offered, but a number of laugh-out-loud moments for me from the bantering and a few sight gags. Your mileage may vary, of course.

What really makes this movie, though, is Ronan’s performance. We’ve seen Ronan be funny, including her Oscar-nominated turn in Lady Bird, but we’ve never seen her be this silly, and she seems to throw herself completely into it. Her comic timing is great, but she manages to make Stalker a comic character without making her seem totally un-serious. Stalker’s overzealousness actually leads to a significant blunder, although even that scene is also kind of funny, but she’s never an object of pity or derision, and Ronan’s portrayal is the main reason. Stalker is earnest but green, and her errors, even when played for laughs, are borne of inexperience rather than incompetence.

Rockwell, on the other hand, is a replacement-level detective here, with a generic British accent and nondescript mannerisms beyond a slight limp that itself becomes fodder for the script’s mockery of the formula. I’m not sure why Rockwell was chosen for a role when there are plenty of English actors available, but he doesn’t have a real direction here – he doesn’t lean into the role and ham it up, but he also doesn’t give the character any urgency or gravitas. The conventions of the genre almost require one or the other, and instead Rockwell gives a fine but ultimately forgettable performance. The remainder of the cast is mostly big names or great actors in bit parts. The one major exception is David Oyelowo, who plays the closeted writer Mervyn Cocker-Norris and is clearly having a blast, while also getting a good amount of screen to chew. Adrien Brody is very good but doesn’t log enough minutes, and Ruth Wilson, who was stunning as Jane Eyre in the 2006 BBC mini-series of that name, is barely in the film at all.

The script does offer a bunch of Easter eggs for hardcore Christie fans, some of which appear in this EW story, although I won’t mention them here beyond the one in the title – the original name of The Mousetrap was Three Blind Mice. I caught a couple, but clearly missed the majority, although I admire the cleverness in slipping so many tiny nods to Christie, her works, and her adherents into the script. That may have ultimately worked against the finished film, however, as there’s so much Christie-ness or those that there’s probably less plot and less humor than there could have been. It doesn’t fare that well in comparison to Knives Out for that very reason. If you liked that film and also just like this genre, you’ll probably enjoy See How They Run as I did. If you aren’t a fan of witty murder mysteries, though, this isn’t going to have the same broader appeal that Rian Johnson’s hit film did.

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→ October 20, 2022
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Athena.

Athena is the newest feature from Romain Gavras, son of Oscar-winning writer and director Costa-Gavras, who has a great eye for action sequences and can put you right on the edge of your seat, starting out this film with a literal and figurative bang. The script has Shakespearean aspirations, but the story doesn’t work well enough to achieve its goals or to match the quality of the action sequences.

Athena is the name of a housing complex in an unnamed French city that is home to a large population of Algerian-French citizens, and as the film opens, we see one of them, a police officer named Abdel (Dali Benssalah, who was in No Time to Die), asking for peace in the wake of the death of his 13-year-old brother Idir. A video has gone viral showing Idir’s beating death at the hands of several men in police uniforms, which serves as the spark in the powder keg of Athena; Abdel has barely finished speaking when the camera spans to the crowd, where we see a young man, Karim (Sami Slimane), lighting a Molotov cocktail that he’ll throw into the police station. This leads to a daylong standoff between Athena residents, led by Karim, who is Idir’s and Abdel’s brother, demanding the police deliver Idir’s killers to them, and the French police, with Abdel caught in the middle, distrusting his superiors and trying to avoid any further harm to his family.

The action sequences in Athena are fantastic, starting with that Molotov cocktail and Karim’s followers invading the police station to try to loot it of weapons. It ends in one of several memorable shots, this one with Karim and company standing or sitting at the edge of one of the roofs in the complex, all steely-eyed and determined and also too young to be doing this. His side will end up taking a police officer hostage, something telegraphed from the very beginning of the film, further ratcheting up the tension amid the uncertainty whether he’s going to survive, or whether any of the brothers – there’s a third, a drug dealer with anger management problems named Moktar – are going to either. It’s a grim view of modern French society and the relationship between the police and the people, although it may be a realistic one.

The script seems more concerned with keeping the tension cranked up to 11 than with advancing the plot in a meaningful way, or saying anything beyond, hey, there’s a lot of anger out there, you know? The film isn’t making an actual statement on police violence, as the police in the film respond to Abdel by saying they believe Idir’s killers were in fact far-right agitators wearing police uniforms to try to light the match and usher in some kind of race war; the uncertainty around that is enough to muddle the narrative even as it also casts Abdel’s choices in a different light.

The brothers are all Muslims, as are most of the residents of Athena, but the film does next to nothing with this information. This feels like a huge omission – the rights of Muslims in France remains a contentious issue, on top of decades of discrimination against Algerians, and Athena just ignores it. The police shown in the film are at least somewhat diverse, with Black and white officers, and of course Abdel as a Muslim officer, which could be fodder for multiple subthemes, but the movie can barely handle Abdel’s dual role as a cop and an Algerian resident of the Athena complex, with no energy left for anything else.

Even as an action movie, with plenty to recommend it on that score, Athena feels a bit like empty calories because it can’t stick the landing at all, choosing a slam-bang finish over a meaningful or even a sensible one. It’s just my inference, but I certainly thought the way the film ends indicated pretensions towards Shakespearean tragedy, but in this case, the tragic deaths are just not earned, not one of them. It just ends up aggravating you because you can’t help but feel like all that buildup was for nothing. It’s 80 minutes of a sugar rush and 20 minutes of insulin shock. For a film that starts with a ton of promise, and features some incredible cinematography and memorable shots, it ends in a disappointing fizzle.

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→ August 25, 2022
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Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a madcap adventure, a martial-arts action film, a dark comedy, a sci-fi romp, bursting at every seam with ideas and dad jokes. It’s a brilliant work of screenwriting, carried by a career performance from the always wonderful Michelle Yeoh – who nearly wasn’t even in the film. (You can rent it on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, etc.)

The film, written and directed by the Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert, who also directed the bawdy video for Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What”), follows Evelyn (Yeoh), a harried, unhappy laundromat owner, married to the hapless Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). They have a daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and Evelyn’s estranged father, Gong Gong (James Hong, who turned 91 during filming), who is just arriving from Hong Kong. Evelyn is preparing a welcome party for her father while also staring down piles of receipts for an upcoming IRS audit (with Jamie Lee Curtis playing the tax authority’s agent). It’s clear that Evelyn is unhappy across the board in her life, but while the two are in the elevator at the IRS offices, Waymond suddenly changes and begins telling Evelyn that theirs is just one universe among many in the multiverse, and in his (the Alphaverse), people can verse-jump, gaining special skills from their parallel selves – but one person, Jobu Tupaki, has used this to accumulate immense power and is threatening to destroy all universes at once. It’s up to Evelyn, our universe’s Evelyn specifically, to save them all.

Part of the genius of this script is its combination of highbrow philosophical questions with lowbrow humor. The difference between existentialism and nihilism, with the former holding that the only meaning in life is created by the individual while the latter views life as meaningless, full-stop, is at the core of the movie; Jobu Tupaki sees and experiences all universes simultaneously, and thus believes that there is no meaning anywhere, only pain. (I don’t think there’s a Major League reference here, but I also wouldn’t say it’s impossible given some of the other allusions here, including one to a 1990s alternative song that is so perfectly integrated into the dialogue I had to pause the movie just to admire it.) Jobu is the film’s Bazarov, accumulating followers in a sort of nihilist cult, even as she seems to be speeding towards her own destruction.

The Daniels originally envisioned Jackie Chan in the main role, but rewrote the script to make the lead character a woman, with Yeoh their first choice, and the decision to re-center the film around not just a woman but a mother and an immigrant changes one of the film’s core messages. Evelyn is asked to run the family business and manage the family, to handle the finances and the relationships and organize this ridiculous party for a father who disowned her decades earlier when she chose Waymond and his dubious financial prospects against her parents’ wishes. Of course she has to save the universe: She’s a mother. If this wasn’t written as a commentary on the modern working American mother, who is expected to do it all and 20% more, it sure as hell plays like one – and Yeoh never lets us forget it, with an undercurrent of stress on her face throughout almost the entire movie. It’s a tour de force of a performance, one that lets her show tremendous range, and I’m going to hazard the opinion that it’s the best thing she’s ever done, even though I know I haven’t seen most of her performances because she’s been extensively pigeonholed since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Look at her filmography – it’s a sad commentary on the industry’s narrow view of Asian-American actors, and I haven’t even mentioned that this is Quan’s first film role in 20 years after he retired due to the lack of interesting parts offered to him.

The movie is also highly, consistently funny, from the allusions to wordplay to some gross-out jokes to some of the bizarre parallel universes we see, like the one where people have hot dogs for fingers, or the one where there are no people, just rocks. The sheer audacity of much of the humor, often right in the middle of a huge action sequence or a big emotional scene, helps some of the goofier jokes land, and even makes what is probably the grossest gag in the film much more acceptable. It feels like a film written by two people who never said no to the other’s wackiest ideas, and in this milieu, where we’re suspending disbelief to allow for its premise of travel between parallel universes, that sort of humor is almost a requirement. I do think the Daniels missed an opportunity by not having Eels or at least Mark Oliver Everett on the soundtrack, though.

I thought the story here ended exactly where it should, and the script gets to that point in a reasonable and not too predictable fashion, although it does involve a big downshift from the intensity of the first ¾ of the film. There’s yet one more theme that comes up in the back half of the film that further informs the ending, although discussing that would involve a significant spoiler; I’ll go as far as saying that I thought that was handled perfectly and hope those of you who’ve seen it know what I’m addressing. I doubt I’m going to find ten films this year that I liked more than this, or five performances by actresses I like more than Yeoh’s. It’s just a fantastic film in almost every way.

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→ June 28, 2022
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Cha Cha Real Smooth.

Cha Cha Real Smooth subverts many of the conventions of the rom-com, throwing two people together in a situation that might lead to love and/or sex in most movies, but thanks to some smart, subtle twists to the formula, ends up a coming-of-age movie about being in your 20s.

It’s the second film from writer-director Cooper Raiff, whose 2020 debut Shithouse received very positive reviews, but this time he’s working with a bigger budget and much bigger names in the credits, including Dakota Johnson, who plays Domino, the single mom who lives near Raiff’s recent Tulane graduate Andrew. Domino is about ten years older than Andrew is, and has a daughter, Lola, who is autistic. (She’s played by autistic actress Vanessa Burghardt, making her first appearance in film or TV.) They all meet at a bat mitzvah, where Andrew, who works at a fast-food place in the mall called Meat Sticks, shows a knack for getting kids out on the dance floor, leading Domino to bet him a grand that he can’t get Lola to dance. He does, which leads some of the moms at the party to ask him to be the DJ and party starter for their kids’ b’nei mitzvah, a job that might overstate his readiness for prime time but also keeps him and Domino in each other’s orbits. She has a fiancé who’s often working out of town, while Andrew has a girlfriend studying in Barcelona. Andrew, meanwhile, still lives with his mom (Leslie Mann), stepdad Greg (Brad Garrett), and younger brother David (Evan Assante), the last of whom is trying to land his first kiss with his girlfriend, for which Andrew gives him a substantial amount of often-dubious advice.

Raiff has created some fantastic characters here, and while the dialogue can be a bit clunky, he seems to have a knack for seeing how different characters might react to and interact with each other. The Andrew-Domino dynamic is the beating heart of the film, especially in the way that Andrew tries to use his charisma on Domino and charm her the way he might have charmed women in college – to which she’s a little susceptible, but not in the way that he hopes. The same trick doesn’t work as well on everyone else, though, which is a part of Andrew’s challenge in the film: He thinks he’s a fully formed adult, and knows the ways of the world, but of course he doesn’t and is going to stub his toe or worse as he learns those lessons.

There’s a lot going on in Cha Cha Real Smooth, and it doesn’t always land. Andrew’s mom is bipolar, and had a manic episode at some point in the recent past, but that detail is dropped halfway through the film and never really returns, unless you want to count that as the reason she married Greg – but I don’t think that adds up. You can see where the Barcelona girlfriend thing is going pretty quickly, and the story would have worked just as well without it. It’s also really unclear why Andrew continues to get DJ/Party Starter gigs after his first fiasco, other than plot convenience, although it does lead to a very satisfying scene at what I presume is his final fiasco while also setting up a great denouement with the closest thing Andrew has to an antagonist. I also wish Mann and Garrett, who are both great in small roles, had a bit more to do, although the way the Andrew/Greg conflict (Andrew is just a dick to his stepdad for no apparent reason other than that he exists) resolves is also satisfying. I’ll add my wife’s criticism here, with which I agree, that this movie deserved better music; there are some good names in the soundtrack that indicate an attempt to get the right kind of indie artists into the film, but the songs are not that memorable.

Lola is a critical part of the story and the evolution of Andrew and Domino’s relationship, but to Raiff’s credit, she’s more than just a prop, and develops a relationship with Andrew that shows the audience more about each of them. Burghardt plays her like a whole person – she’s described it as portraying things she’s learned not to do as an autistic person. It’s the best kind of representation: A character with a disability is an integral part of the story, has normal interactions with other characters, building a real relationship with one of them, and deals with some of the problems that they might face in the real world – in this case, bullying by other kids. Lola is part of the fabric of the film, and her autism is not a plot point, but simply a characteristic.

If Raiff didn’t stick the landing here, Cha Cha Real Smooth would not have worked – it could have become too precious, or just unrealistic, with even small changes in how the Andrew/Domino relationship ends or where those two characters are in the coda that takes place six months later. But Raiff does get that part right, which helps mitigate some of the things that didn’t work in the middle of the film. It’s also frequently very funny, and Raiff has very good comedic timing that will probably carry him a long way. I don’t know that I need to see more of him playing this sort of character, but I enjoyed the two hours I spent with him. Your mileage may vary.

Cha Cha Real Smooth is streaming on Apple TV+.

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