I have scratched together a living, in one way or another, as a writer for more than 60 years now. I was a free-lance writer during the early stages of the Vietnam War. I was the Southwest Division Overnight News Editor for United Press International back when UPI was a legitimate news gathering organization. Following that, I went to the Dallas Morning News where I became the first person to write about rock 'n' roll on a daily basis for a Texas metropolitan newspaper. I later became the News' entertainment editor. Following some stints with a couple of prominent PR firms, I had the extraordinary good fortune to team with two communications legends, Ken Fairchild and Lisa LeMaster, as part of one kick-ass media consulting/crisis communications team. That was followed by stints as a department head with the City of Dallas (and its public information officer); the Dallas Northeast Chamber of Commerce where I had the good fortune to meet and work alongside some of this city's business and political titans; and editorial director for QuestCorp Media until that company went out of business. Now officially retired, concentrating on this blog.
How low can she go? That’s the question in the soft vanilla comedy Rough Night, about five women who blunder into disaster over the course of a carousing bachelorette weekend. If you’ve seen The Hangover and its sequels or various other movies of this familiar ilk, you have more or less seen Rough Night. There’s even a movie titled Bachelorette, another would-be laugh-in about friends who go crazy — snort, snort, snort, chug, chug — until they’re put back on the path toward happily ever after.
In Rough Night, Scarlett Johansson stars as Jess and is nearly eclipsed by Kate McKinnon, who plays one of her pals. A politician who’s about to get married, Jess is on the verge of losing a state senate race to an opponent who has pulled ahead with some Anthony Weiner-esque penis pictures. That a competent female politician can’t compete with literal penises suggests that the filmmakers have some ideas in store, something, say, that mines the comedy of our new Neanderthalism, an age partly defined by the reinvigorated war between the sexes and the triumphant rise and occasional fall of male members. No such luck. The director Lucia Aniello, who wrote the script with Paul W. Downs, soon abandons any pretense that she is going to deliver more than goofs. Instead, she trots out clichés, including a flashback that shows Jess and another bestie, Alice (Jillian Bell), holding their own at a frat blowout. Here, partying hard is meant as a stand-in for equality, which is mighty low stakes on which to build a gender-flipping comedy. Nonetheless, Aniello barrels ahead with limp penis jokes, yuks and a little upchuck, throwing in a starry guest appearance and the requisite slow-motion wolf-pack shot of the women strolling in a line, an image so stale it’s an entry on tvtropes.org. It’s all blithely formulaic and would be more irritating if the performers — who include Zoë Kravitz and Ilana Glazer — weren’t generally so appealing. (Glazer is a star of the Comedy Central show Broad City, which Aniello and Downs also both work on.) The actors are playing types, not people, but most bring enough natural presence and good will to fill in their characters’ sketchy profiles. It helps, too, that Johansson and Glazer are gifted physical performers who can sell weak jokes, though no one steals a show like McKinnon, a brilliantly versatile comic who reaches Madeline Kahn-levels of eyeball-rolling, eyeball-popping and all-knowing dementedness. Those eyes get a workout when the women’s weekend takes a detour that’s straight out of Very Bad Things, a 1998 comedy about a bachelor party that turns deadly when a reveler accidentally kills a female prostitute. In response, the men embrace their worst instincts, which in this case means they hide one death and, in the process, instigate another. Boys will be boys and sometimes killers — or so Very Bad Things cheerfully suggests. The Hangover basically packages such rotten male behavior for the mainstream, using a live hooker instead of a dead one and adding Mike Tyson, an errant tiger and a pileup of belabored high jinks. Women scarcely figure in its manly meltdown, which is the point. Rough Night switches the gender lineup from Very Bad Things but with less (shallow) philosophizing and heterosexual panic. Much like their Very Bad counterparts, the women quickly embrace self-interest, which leads to unfunny gags with an inconvenient corpse. That women can be as deadly or immoral as men isn’t new or interesting, and here it also isn’t all that entertaining. What is notable is that Rough Night makes room for the opposite sex (too many comedies are his or hers), specifically with some slow-building nonsense involving Jess’s fiancé (Downs), who crashes the party in adult diapers — which reads as a nice, sly wink at the comedy of male infantilism. American comedy has long depended on overgrown baby boys — Lou Costello, Will Ferrell — whose naïveté, entertaining misbehavior or outright stupidity suggests that men are finally as toothless as infants. It’s a convenient fantasy (don’t worry, ladies!), one that has grown less viable as women have gained power and autonomy offscreen. Rough Night wants its female characters to get down, dirty and dumb, too, and indulge in their ostensible vices as unapologetically as any Zach Galifianakis boob. That’s cool or might be if the jokes were a lot funnier and if this movie grasped that performing naughtiness is meaningless when men behaving badly is the rule of the land.
Snatched is the highest of high-concept comedies. Goldie Hawn and Amy Schumer star as a polar-opposite mother and daughter who get kidnapped while reluctantly vacationing together in Ecuador. It’s a mismatched-buddy comedy. It’s a fish-out-of-water comedy. It’s a raucous girl-power comedy.
But it’s not much more than a concept. Hawn and Schumer are stuck playing barely-there characters stumbling from one wacky scenario to the next. A cadre of kooks helps them along the way. Both women supposedly shift away from their comfort zones and closer to each other in the process. The end. If you’re headed on your own vacation, Snatched would be a sporadically amusing way to pass the time on the plane, I suppose. As an exercise in afternoon cable-channel surfing while dozing in and out from cold medication, it’s harmless. But as an end-of-summer comic adventure, it’s a frustrating waste of everyone’s abilities. The iconic Hawn hasn’t graced the silver screen in 15 years — not since 2002’s The Banger Sisters. Here, she’s a cautious cat lady named Linda who inexplicably displays a preternatural, calm fortitude when the going gets tough. Hawn has elevated similarly throwaway material throughout her career (Foul Play, Overboard, Bird on a Wire), and it’s certainly lovely to see her again, but why come out of retirement for this? The expert timing remains, but she’s awkwardly hemmed-in, and you long to see her burst forth with her signature silliness. Schumer, meanwhile, plays yet another version of her well-honed persona, which she did far more effectively (and to a surprisingly emotional extent) in 2015’s Trainwreck. Emily is boozy and blowsy. She’s selfish and vapid, but she can be fun. And her underlying insecurity and talent for tossed-off, self-deprecating asides make her an unexpectedly endearing figure. Linda and Emily get tested repeatedly in Snatched, though the actresses playing them certainly don’t. But they have their moments together — especially in the film’s early going — which provide a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been with snappier direction and stronger material. It’s as if the mere idea of Hawn and Schumer playing a squabbling mother and daughter were enough. It’s not. Director Jonathan Levine has shown far greater skill in balancing a variety of genres and tones with his previous films, including the great comedy-drama 50/50 and the horror-comedy Warm Bodies. Here, his mixture of action and laughs never quite gels. There’s a lifelessness to the physicality and a shriekiness to the humor. Similarly, screenwriter Katie Dippold has shown a knack for creating strong and delightfully strange women with her work on The Heat and last summer’s all-female Ghostbusters reboot. But with Snatched, the characters never really deviate from their types until the very end, when they’re called upon to have a sudden and conciliatory change of heart. Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack show up from time to time as the overly prepared, platonic life partners who help Linda and Emily out of their various jams, but their dynamic feels half-baked, too. Snatched starts with promise, though. The delusional Emily gets fired from her nowhere retail job and dumped by her burgeoning rock-star boyfriend (a very funny Randall Park) in quick succession. There’s a sly, understated nature to the humor here — a rhythm that steadily sneaks up on you. The two had been planning a romantic getaway to Ecuador, and since the trip is non-refundable, she has to find someone else to join her. After all her girlfriends reject her offer, she coaxes the divorced Linda, who still lives in the family’s suburban home with Emily’s nerdy, agoraphobic brother (an amusingly odd Ike Barinholtz), to travel with her to paradise. But Emily’s flirtation at the hotel bar with a charming and hunky Brit (Tom Bateman) leads to peril for her and her mom, as the two find themselves the victims of a kidnapping plot by interchangeably menacing, brown-skinned bad guys. (Somewhere in here, Snatched might be trying to say something about the propensity of pampered Americans to travel abroad without ever daring to immerse themselves in the local culture, but it doesn’t do it in the most thoughtful or articulate way.) From here, mother and daughter bicker and bungle their way through an escape and subsequent hijinks. It’s all pretty obvious stuff, and not nearly as outlandish as it strains to be. But an escalating side bit involving phone calls between Emily’s freaked-out brother and an unmotivated State Department official (Bashir Salahuddin) provides some off-kilter laughs, and it hints at the kind of movie Snatched might have been with a little more daring. Similarly, an interlude with a self-serious, self-styled adventurer in the Amazon (Christopher Meloni) offers some welcome surprises. But if the journey is the destination, Snatched never really goes anywhere.
This movie begins with a few noncommittal scenic shots of rural England and a man saying in voiceover, "Did she? Didn’t she? Who’s to blame?" Hearing this, I thought, "Well, that’s no ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again.’" Not fair, maybe, but My Cousin Rachel is, like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier, master of the moody semi-Gothic romantic thriller.
As it happens, du Maurier’s novel My Cousin Rachel has an entirely different and hookier opening line: "They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days." One feature of this movie, written and directed by Roger Michell, is — I’m assuming here — a new conception of its protagonist, the novel’s unreliable narrator. His name is Philip, and after wondering who’s to blame, he gives a brief accounting of his life. Orphaned, brought up by an adult cousin named Ambrose, sent to school. Philip cops to not having liked books. He cops to not liking much of anything, besides hanging out with Ambrose in a dusty manse whose interior looks like the gatefold sleeve picture of a mid-70s Jethro Tull album. Ambrose runs some kind of land-based business — he has a lot of workers walking around wielding scythes. It’s all very pre-Victorian man-cave like, and Philip insists that’s what he likes, but then, oh no, cousin Ambrose falls ill and gets sent to Italy, because that’s what you did when you were sick and lived in England. From there Ambrose writes letters detailing his recovery, and the TLC he receives from yet another cousin, a young woman named Rachel. But then comes news of Ambrose’s death. Philip is both heartbroken and indignant, and blames this Rachel person. To his godfather and estate lawyer, and his daughter Louise, who clearly pines for the young now-master-of-Ambrose’s-estate, Philip vows revenge. Then Rachel shows up. And she’s played by Rachel Weisz, so, you know. Nevertheless, the speed with which Philip transforms from would-be avenger to slack jawed google-eyed "let me give you all my mother’s jewelry" dope is kind of astonishing. First he insists that she stay in the mansion, which he and Louise have managed to clean up so it’s more Jane Austen than Jethro Tull. Then he gives her access to his accounts. Eventually, he decides to turn over all his worldly goods to her on his 25th birthday. In return, he wants … well, he’s not quite so indelicate as to articulate it. This is an arguably juicy narrative, especially when intercepted letters and other items start to cast suspicions on the seemingly pure-and-true Rachel, and after Philip contracts a nasty virus that could in fact be related to the herbal "tisanes" that Rachel concocts and practically force-feeds the fellow. But My Cousin Rachel is an impossibly turgid film. From the moment it opens, it’s constantly indicating menace and heightened emotion, but never doing anything to genuinely evoke it. Rael Jones’ music is the main culprit here, but the film’s most blatant disaster is Sam Claflin’s performance as Philip. From the first minute Claflin presents the character as a kind of period bro, albeit one whose default mode of dealing with his environment is a sneering entitled truculence. The character’s ingenuousness is meant as a kind of virtue, at least I think it is, but Claflin’s sneering, furniture-smashing, and banality make Philip impossible to care about. As for Weisz, she’s not given much to do besides be tender and/or affronted; the plot, such as it’s been adapted for this film, hinges on her character being kind of unknowable, so we’re left with a good-looking cipher, through no actual fault of Weisz’s. And Michell’s direction is both overstated and incoherent. Plot threads are inexplicably left to hang, only to be picked up at a later point when the viewer has pretty much been obliged to move past them. Focus tricks in individual shots, and unwarranted camera movements meant to create a sense of unease merely elicit the response "what’s THAT about?" Michell has made watchable films in the past — you may like Notting Hill; I was more partial to Venus — but this literally looks like a picture made by someone who’s forgotten how to direct. Incidentally, the du Maurier novel was made into a picture years ago, with Olivia de Havilland in the title role and a young Richard Burton as Philip. Big shoes to fill, but I honestly don’t even think that was an issue (the movie is not well-remembered today except by devoted fans of its stars) in the creation of this movie. One of the problems with this My Cousin Rachel is that it’s hard to come up with any issue or reason relative to its creation, I’m afraid.
Just call it "Grumpy Old Crooks." This quasi-remake of a 1979 caper film (which starred George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg) makes wholesale changes to the structure of its forebear — unfortunately few of them are for the better. An inconsequential but engaging piece of fluff has been turned into a misfire that somehow manages to misuse the talents of its three Oscar winning stars, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Arkin. Although Going in Style’s heist represents a high point and gets props for being suitably clever, it’s swamped by bad melodrama and lame comedy.
The filmmakers aren’t really selling this movie for its story, however — they’re banking on the reputations and charisma of the three stars to pull in at-home viewers who don’t often venture out to multiplexes. As such, Going in Style may likely be a bigger draw on home video. The decision to cast an 83-year old (Caine), an 82-year old (Arkin), and a 79-year old (Freeman) is not playing to the typical theater-going demographic. Throw in Christopher Lloyd (age 78) and Ann-Margret (age 76) and it’s clear director Zach Braff isn’t going for the teenage crowd despite the soft PG-13 rating (the content is borderline PG). One of the problems with Going in Style is that it takes forever to get going, and when it does, there’s not much style in evidence. The setup is interminable. Half the movie is devoted to introducing the characters, establishing their relationships, and making sure the audience is aware that these are good guys not criminals. They have been screwed over by the system, robbed of their pensions by greedy banks and corrupt corporations, and forgotten by a system that’s supposed to protect them. In the original Going in Style, the main characters were a bunch of aging retirees who just decided to pull a caper. Here, with the weight of so much social wrongdoing and desperation weighing things down, it’s not nearly as much fun. And God forbid the characters (or the script) have even the slightest edge. Theodore Melfi’s screenplay works overtime to make sure that no one could view the three criminals as anything other than burnished heroes. Another big change from the 1979 film is that certain bittersweet elements have been elided, ensuring that the narrative is as bland and vanilla as imaginable. Director Zach Braff believes that the audience doesn’t want anything even a little challenging. So he makes sure the comedy is tasteful and restrained, the drama is tasteful and restrained, and the characters are tasteful and restrained. It would be a stretch (although not much of one) to call Going in Style "wholesome" but it’s dull and badly in need of an injection of energy. Joe (Caine), Willie (Freeman), and Albert (Arkin) are three former co-workers and friends. Now retired, they live off modest pensions and spend their free time hanging out. Joe lives with his daughter and granddaughter and Willie and Albert share a house across the street. Things start going bad when Joe learns that the adjustable rate on his mortgage has adjusted and he can no longer pay the monthly bills. The bank is unsympathetic. Then the three men’s previous employer is bought and their pensions are eliminated. Faced with mounting bills and no way to pay them, they decide on an unconventional solution: rob a bank. Once the crime arrives (nearly an hour into the 96-minute running length), things perk up. The segment in which Joe, Willie, and Albert construct their alibis represents a small bit of cleverness in an otherwise unremarkable wasteland. The intricate choreography of their day, which doesn’t become apparent until after the fact, is the kind of thing that viewers of caper films appreciate and, at least in this aspect, Going in Style doesn’t disappoint. In trying to connect this movie with Ocean’s 11 (the original not the remake), Braff and company stack the deck. During the robbery, the trio wears Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. masks. It’s a cliché to say that Caine, Freeman, and Arkin are on hand to pick up paychecks but it’s true. These roles could have been filled by no-name mediocre actors except then it wouldn’t have gotten financing or distribution. It’s a boondoggle for the actors — a chance to hang out and do something that requires little exertion. Learn the lines, have fun with each other, and go home at the end of the shoot with a nice little bump to the bank account. Going in Style is just as much a demographic-oriented product as any superhero or robot sci-fi movie. It’s all about marketing with little concern for whether the core film is any good. This is at best made-for-TV quality with stars too big to allow it to go directly where it belongs.
47 Meters Down ** Directed by Johannes Roberts. Two sisters on a Mexican vacation are trapped in a shark observation cage at the bottom of the ocean. With oxygen running low and great whites circling nearby, they have less than an hour of air left to figure out how to get to the surface. In the lulls between bouts of yammering, Roberts concentrates on building a solid atmosphere of desperation.
The Devil’s Candy **½ Written and firected by Sean Byrne. A struggling painter is possessed by satanic forces after he and his young family move into their dream home in rural Texas. To enjoy this, one must tolerate slapdash writing and profoundly irritating adult behavior. Yet Byrne somehow whips his ingredients into an improbably taut man-versus-Satan showdown. Queen of the Desert ½* Written and directed by Werner Herzog. Charts the life of Gertrude Bell, a British adventurer, archaeologist, spy and political attaché who played a key role in reshaping the Middle East after World War I. Ends up being an emotionally empty, thematically ill-defined and listless affair. It is never able to communicate the complexity of the woman at its center. Transformers: The Last Knight ½* Directed by Michael Bay. Optimus Prime confronts a dead planet and his lone hope of reviving it depends on an artifact that can only be found on Earth. From the very beginning, this is an incoherent mess.
Guy Ritchie is that fun friend whose texts you don’t always return because his energy level is always cranked up to 10, and even when you’re in the mood for him, he still wears you out. His best entertainments are 1990s lad mag confections, chock full of funny, well-dressed, hardboiled men (and a couple of women) who bust each other’s chops when they aren’t joining forces to steal something. They’re the kinds of films you forget exist until you stumble across them and end up watching the whole thing again because the tone is just right — edgy but lighthearted — and never for a moment does the movie pretend that watching it is going to make you a better person. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, his two Sherlock Holmes films, Snatch, the bizarre self-help action film Revolver and 2015’s better-than-expected The Man from U.N.C.L.E. are assortments of savory treats presented in the most stylish boxes Ritchie can devise.
But there are times when Ritchie makes his own style the star of the film, crowding out the actors and the story because neither is terribly interesting. The result is an oxymoron: a frenetic slog. That’s unfortunately what happens to King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, a knowingly anachronistic riff on the legend starring Charlie Hunnam. This version envisions Arthur as a working-class hero with entirely contemporary sensibilities. He was raised in a brothel after his father and mother were murdered by his uncle Vortigern (Jude Law). Vortigern is an unworthy King of England and a pampered sadist who owes a supernatural debt to the Lady of the Lake, envisioned here as a mass of CGI tentacles enfolding three women, one plump and the others slender and curvy. Ritchie and his cowriters, Lionel Wigram and Joby Harold, aren’t interested in historical fidelity because the historical Arthur was a mystery anyway and they’re mainly having fun here. They take Arthur’s childhood trauma seriously (he keeps re-experiencing it in nightmare form, like Bruce Wayne remembering his own parents’ murder by a mugger) but ultimately treat it mainly as the centerpiece for a standard-issue "hero’s journey," one that owes quite a bit to the Star Wars, The Matrix and Lord of the Rings films. When he pulls the sword from the stone, he, we and the baddies all know that he is truly The One; when he grips it with both hands and then swings, the earth trembles and the camera starts whirling in circles around and around CGI Charlie Hunnam and his adversaries, in the manner of a video game with 3-D graphics. This Arthur wears what looks like a brown leather bomber jacket, sports a 2016 movie star haircut, calls everybody "mate," and makes a big show of not wanting to get involved in politics, much less embrace his destiny. That is, until circumstances require him to round up a crew of hyper-competent misfit outsiders and depose the kind heist-movie style, treating every skirmish and siege as if it were another vault that the Snatch guys were hoping to empty. The future Knights of the Round Table are just as contemporary. They’re a multicultural crew: this film’s Sir George is nicknamed Kung Fu George, tutors Arthur in martial arts, and is played by Hong Kong-born actor Tom Wu; Sir Bedivere is a Moor played by Beninese movie star Djimon Hounsou. And the Anglo actors’ characters get a dusting of Dickensian chimney soot to enhance their rough-and-ready bona fides. The future Sir William (Aiden Gillen), master of the longbow, goes by Goosefat Bill Wilson. I love all this stuff in theory — it’s not far from what Martin Scorsese did in The Last Temptation of Christ," populating ancient Jerusalem with New Yorkers, Midwesterners and Brits who spoke in their native accents and used modern slang, slicing and dicing the action into music video beats, and scoring the whole thing with Peter Gabriel’s chants and synth beats. The Ritchie sense of style suits a revisionist approach. He’s as slick and easygoing as a rock and roller showman can be, and because the totality of the film is so knowingly absurd — in addition to the slow-motion, acrobatic swordfights, there are gigantic CGI snakes, rats, wolves, and Godzilla-sized Indian elephants — the whole thing feels like a lark even when the characters are being beaten, tortured and executed. There are even moments when Hunnam, not an actor exactly known for his scalawag charm, evokes Errol Flynn’s devil-may-care jerk incarnation of Robin Hood. Astrid Bergès-Frisbey’s version of Guinevere, a witch whose eyes go black when she summons dark forces, is a fresh variation on the character, though it would’ve been nice if Ritchie had allowed her to crack a few jokes like the boys. No, the real problem is that the movie is unmodulated from start to finish. It never lets up in the exact way that a cocaine addict who wants to tell you his life story before closing time never lets up. Michael Bay has often been accused of turning in feature length motion pictures so over-edited that they feel like trailers for themselves, but I don’t think Bay has ever made a movie as frantically, pointlessly, tediously busy as King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Not content to do that time-tested Guy Ritchie story-about-a-story thing in every other scene of the picture — you know, the bit where a character tells an audience, "And then I sez to him," and the movie cuts to the same character five days earlier saying, "Put down the money, mate!" — the film does it constantly for two hours, dicing dialogue, performances and story points into microscopic narrative particles that disintegrate in the mind. On one level, you have to admire the skill necessary to tell a story in this manner. You can’t just make a six-hour film and then cut it down to two. You have to think about how every piece, no matter how small or large, will fit with every other piece when the whole narrative is stitched together. But the downside of this strategy is that it doesn’t allow room for any single moment to truly live and breathe, and it’s in such moments that we really get to know a character and care about what happens to them. The emotional heavy lifting that might be done by acting, writing and careful direction is done here in shortcut form by whooshing, tilting, diving camerawork, ominous "whoosh" and "boom" noises on the soundtrack, and other signifiers of awesomeness. There’s so much narrative and visual motion, such fast cutting, such loud music, and so many rapid shifts of time and place that on those rare occasions when the movie slows down and lets two characters speak to each other, in relative quiet and at length, it feels as if something’s gone wrong with the projection. Ritchie keeps rushing us along for two hours, as if to make absolutely certain that we never have time to absorb any character or moment, much less revel in the glorious, cheeky ridiculousness of the whole thing. The entire movie is an information delivery device with top-dollar production values, forever mistaking getting to the point for the point itself. It’s the legend of King Arthur as told by an auctioneer. I’m not sold.
The Bad Batch ½* Written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour. In a desert wasteland in Texas, a muscled cannibal breaks the important rule of not playing with your food. The violence in this movie has neither artistic nor narrative prupose.
The Big Sick ***½ Directed by Michael Showalter. Pakistan-born comedian Kumail Nanjiani and grad student Emily Gardner fall in love but struggle as their cultures clash. When Emily contracts a mysterious illness, Kumail finds himself forced to face her feisty parents, his family's expectations, and his true feelings. This is a Judd Apatow production and Apatow has a knack for spotting up-and-coming talent and using his considerable influence to help foster it on the biggest stage and under the brightest lights. He’s done this with Lena Dunham (Girls) and Amy Schumer (Trainwreck), and he’s done it again with Nanjiani. Certain Women *** Directed by Kelly Reichardt. The lives of three women intersect in small-town America. The subtlety of this film is both an accomplishment and a limitation. It’s hard not to want more for these women, and to wish you could see more of them. The Hero ** Directed by Brett Haley. An ailing movie star comes to terms with his past and mortality. Sam Elliott is Sam Elliott as Sam Elliott in The Hero, a sentimental and sporadically effective celebration of the veteran character actor. Wonder Woman *** Directed by Patty Jenkins. When a pilot crashes and tells of conflict in the outside world, Diana, an Amazonian warrior in training, leaves home to fight a war. Jenkins and her collaborators have done what I thought was previously impossible: created a Wonder Woman film that is inspiring, blistering, and compassionate, in ways that honor what has made this character an icon.
I’m not feeling the love. Raw, the 2016 French/Belgian horror film, has received considerable praise across the international cinematic landscape for its contribution to the genre. However, what Raw offers isn’t so much original as it is a repackaging of select aspects of zombie/vampire lore. Although there’s nothing inherently wrong with that — even the best horror films typically beg, borrow, and steal — the movie’s qualifications are suspect. At times, it seems like a showcase for director Julia Ducournau, an opportunity for her to show off her considerable skills as a filmmaker. Raw is often visually arresting but it fails at a key aspect of basic horror: atmosphere. There’s nothing creepy or remotely scary about this movie. It relies on gross-out scenes to earn the right to be called "disturbing" and seems more interested in delivering schlocky shocks than suffocating the viewer with suspense or dread.
Raw feels unformed — a collage of partially realized ideas and moments that never gel. The movie relies on our inherent revulsion for the consumption of human flesh to keep us from seeing the thinness of the screenplay. When it comes to gore, Ducournau doesn’t skimp — we see scenes of severed fingers being nibbled like mini corn cobbs, brains being sampled, and love bites go beyond the norm. But the characters are incomplete, the scenario is absurd, and the story doesn’t really go anywhere. Raw feels like a premise in want of a film. The setup is simple enough: the young protagonist, wunderkind Justine (Garance Marillier), is dropped off at college by her parents. Her school, a prestigious educational establishment for veterinarians, is an ominous-looking place. On her first night, she is subjected to a hazing ritual that culminates in a rave. After enduring her ritual humiliation, Justine encounters her upper classman sister, Alexia (Ella Rumpf). The next day, as part of the ongoing initiation process, she is required to consume a raw rabbit kidney. As a lifelong vegetarian, she is understandably reluctant but, faced with possible ostracization, she succumbs. This turns out to be a bad move — the consumption of uncooked meat awakens a hunger in her that she can’t control and, when Alexia loses her finger in a freak accident, Justine discovers that family bonds are no barrier to what constitutes food. To the extent that the movie is about anything other than inappropriate food habits, it focuses on the odd relationship between sisters. As it turns out, that’s about the only aspect of Raw that works. This is partly because of the spot-on performances of Marillier and Rumpf and partly because Ducournau has a better sense of how to handle the human aspects of her characters’ interactions than the unsavory ones. This makes Raw a bizarre outlier — a horror film where the dramatic elements work better than the scary ones. The pace is slow and the tone is far too serious. There are instances of black humor but, for the most part, Ducournau keeps things somber. Visually, the movie has its share of showy moments. I especially liked the blue+yellow=green exploration of primary colors, and there are a few other arresting images. I never felt as if my stomach was going to rebel, which makes me skeptical about the reports of mass turn-outs (with viewers fleeing for the nearest sink). Yes, Raw peddles blood and gore but, c’mon, we’ve seen worse. If I was to guess, Raw might be headed for cult classic-dom. It has that sort of feel. As something to watch at home on a normal evening (rather than a midnight screening in the neighborhood theater in about 10 years), it’s a dubious proposition — not bad enough to be interesting and not good enough to be worth paying money for.
I’m not an engineer so I never really knew, until just recently, there are significant differences between alternating and direct currents (known as AC and DC). I thought they were always considered together as part of the overall fabric making up the blanket I call electricity. As their respective names imply, DC is current that flows in only one direction while AC is a flow of charge that changes direction periodically, which also changes the voltage level.
What I recently learned was that home and office electrical outlets are almost always AC, while most of the electronics plugged into those outlets or that use a USB cable run on DC.
Thomas Edison
What’s more, I didn’t know that the theories behind AC and DC sparked (pardon the pun) an all out battle in the late 19th Century between two American scientific/engineering titans, Thomas Alva Edison, who by 1887 had constructed 121 DC power stations in the United States, and George Westinghouse, who in the following year purchased from none other than Nikola Tesla the patents for AC motors and transmissions. The problem with Edison’s DC at this time was that it could not easily be converted to high voltages. As a result, Edison proposed a system of small, local power plants that would power individual neighborhoods or city sections. Even though the voltage drop across the power lines was accounted for, power plants needed to be located within a mile of the end user. This limitation made power distribution in rural areas extremely difficult, if not impossible.
George Westinghouse
With Tesla’s patents, Westinghouse worked to perfect the AC distribution system. Transformers provided an inexpensive method to step up the voltage of AC to several thousand volts and back down to usable levels. At higher voltages, the same power could be transmitted at a much lower current, which meant less power lost due to resistance in the wires. As a result, large power plants could be located many miles away and service a greater number of people and buildings. This led to a major battle between Edison and Westinghouse. Edison tried to prove AC was too dangerous for public consumption and he went so far as having his cohorts stage public executions of animals using AC and having two direct employees, Harold P. Brown and Arthur Kennelly, design the first electric chair for the state of New York using AC. Today, I’m not sure that many people care enough about this historical battle to shell out the bucks to see a movie on this subject, even one with such high-powered acting talent as Benedict Cumberbatch as Edison and Michael Shannon as Westinghouse, especially when you consider the educational level of today’s average moviegoer. The filmmakers have come up with a great title for their film, The Current War, in hopes. I’m guessing, to make it seem more relevant while not misleading the public as to the subject of the movie. I have a feeling this could be a very fine film that could very easily and very quickly be nothing more than a dim bulb.
When it comes to resurrecting defunct TV shows as big-screen events, Hollywood has a less than stellar track record. With only a few exceptions, the results are forgettable and, consequently, forgotten. Despite having a legitimate A-list actor at the top of the marquee, Baywatch isn’t about the change the trend. The waterlogged end product is an example of lazy writing and direction with the vague hope that perhaps the involvement of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson will attract viewers. Regardless of whether Baywatch generates sufficient interest to make it profitable, it represents 2017’s first genuinely awful high-profile box office challenger.
Perhaps the best indicator of what we’re getting with Baywatch could come from examining director Seth Gordon’s track record (at least once he moved past his charming documentary debut, The King of Kong). His one good movie, Horrible Bosses, came out six years ago. He is also responsible for the lackluster Four Christmases and the godawful Identity Thief. The latter has a close kinship with Baywatch, riddled with unfunny humor and pointless, tedious action. Those characteristics define this film and make it, if not unwatchable, a waste of time and money. It would be foolish to craft a "straight" adaptation of the TV series, which was viewed as cheesy even when it was popular. (Those who watched Baywatch did so for reasons — most of which either jiggled or rhymed with "trough" — other than the writing.) So Gordon and his screenwriters decided to go the 21 Jump Street route of making things openly comedic. However, instead of going for broke and attempting something daring, Baywatch treads water. It adds some raunchy humor that feels desperate and regurgitated, throws in some obvious self-referential gags ("Doesn’t she look like she’s running in slow motion?"), and pulls a lot of punches. Attempts at satire are weak and, although Baywatch frequently pokes fun at itself, the jabs aren’t forceful or vicious. One key flaw is common in would be action/comedies: too much plot. That wouldn’t be a bad thing if the material was compelling but it’s not. It’s a standard order story about a rich villain with megalomaniacal tendencies (the uber-sexy Victoria Leeds, played by Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra) trying to buy all the coastal land to create a private resort. To do that, she’s not above drug dealing, kidnapping, and murder. The Emerald Bay lifeguard corps, led by Mitch Buchannon (Dwayne Johnson), CJ Parker (Kelly Rohrbach), and Stephanie Holden (Ilfenesh Hadera), begin an investigation, because that’s what lifeguards do when there’s a dead body on their watch. And, while they’re uncovering Victoria’s dastardly scheme, they’re integrating three new recruits into the team. One is a rolly-polly, athletically challenged geek (Jon Bass), another is a competent, drop-dead gorgeous woman (Alexandra Daddario), and the third is a two-time gold medal winning asshole named Matt Brody (Zac Efron). In addition to spending an inordinate amount of time on the "investigation" (including by-the-numbers action scenes like a rescue at sea and a speedboat chase), Baywatch devotes far too much effort into humanizing Matt and giving him a redemption arc. If the filmmakers’ intention is to satirize this kind of overused plot device, they fail. The movie uses a lot of old pop songs, but misses the most appropriate one: We Are Family, because that’s what Matt, a product of the foster care system, is looking for. Gag. Baywatch has a problem with finding a stable tone. It doesn’t know what it wants to be and, as a result, it stinks like an undercooked stew of rancid, mismatched ingredients. There are some funny moments (mostly related to Mitch’s endless list of Boy Band nicknames for Matt) but there might be 20 minutes of attention span-killing tedium between the chuckles. Many of the laugh-inducing bits are in the trailer I have included above, removing any need to sit through the entire film. The movie acknowledges (how could it not?) that the primary appeal of Baywatch was the eye candy and it has a little fun with this. Daddario and Rohrbach spend most of the movie in bathing suits and a shirtless Efron shows off abs, pecs, biceps, and triceps to rival The Rock’s. The film’s star flashes his white teeth, flexes his muscles, and shows off his charisma, but none of this is enough. David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson have cameos in which they are treated reverentially. (Contrast this with Johnny Depp’s appearance in 21 Jump Street.) Despite being aware of its existence during the 1990s, I never saw an episode of Baywatch, so I am unable to hazard a guess as to how fans will react to this new incarnation. Viewed as no more than a high-profile late summer home viewing release, however, it disappoints in almost every way, not succeeding at anything it tries and boring viewers in the process. More than lifeguards in spandex are needed to resuscitate this beached whale.
Beatriz at Dinner *** Directed by Miguel Arteta. A holistic medicine practitioner attends a wealthy client's dinner party after her car breaks down. Selma Hayek turns Beatriz into her own breed of wonder woman, John Lithgow’s character is definitely a super villain of sorts and their head-to-head battle is clearly worth seeing even if, in real life, it has only begun.
Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie **½ Directed by David Soren. Two overly imaginative pranksters named George and Harold hypnotize their principal into thinking he's a ridiculously enthusiastic, incredibly dimwitted superhero named Captain Underpants. The best animated movies for children are sublime. This one generally settles for noisy, though it throws in a positive message at the end. Fun Mom Dinner * Directed by Alethea Jones. Four moms whose only common ground is their kids' preschool class, decide to get together for a harmless "fun mom dinner." It’s all about both fellatio jokes and falling on love all over again, but it’s so rushed and the characters are so underdeveloped that the film feels frustratingly slight. It Comes at Night ***½ Written and directed by Trey Edward Shults. Secure within a desolate home as an unnatural threat terrorizes the world, a man has established a tenuous domestic order with his wife and son. Then a desperate young family arrives seeking refuge. There are no zombies in the streets, boogeymen in the basement or witches in the woods — and yet this is one of the most terrifying films in years. The Mummy ½* Directed by Alex Kurtzman. An ancient princess is awakened from her crypt beneath the desert, bringing with her malevolence grown over millennia, and terrors that defy human comprehension. The Mummy reboot from 1999, directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Brendan Fraser, was kind of fun. Monster movies frequently are. This one, directed by Kurtzman and starring Tom Cruise, is an unholy mess.
Like the greatest screen goddesses, Scarlett Johansson rises above it all. In the thrill-free science-fiction thriller Ghost in the Shell, her character comes at you in pieces, emerging first during the opening credits in the form of a metallic skeleton. It’s a good look — it evokes the original Terminator — but soon the skeleton is being dipped like a chip in whitish goo. This technological soup gives the metallic frame a humanoid cladding, making it more reassuringly and pleasantly familiar, from bosomy top to round bottom. It looks like a giant dream Barbie, hairless pubis and all.
Enjoy these credits because they offer some of the more arresting, inventive images in this visually cluttered yet often disappointingly drab movie. A live-action version of a Japanese manga by Shirow Masamune, Ghost in the Shell is one of those future-shock stories that edges around the dystopian without going full-bore apocalyptic. To that end it is set in a possible future world that looks distant enough to seem exotic and familiar enough to seem plausible. The original manga takes place in what’s described as a "strange corporate conglomerate-state called ‘Japan,’" while this movie unwinds nowhere in particular, just a universal megalopolis filled with soaring gray towers. Anyone who has seen Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or that film’s innumerable 2.0 follow-ups (Strange Days, The Fifth Element) will recognize this Ghost cityscape, with its jumbled forms, neo-noir shadows, patina of art-directed decay and its conspicuous Asian-Hollywood fusion touches. Some of this tickles the eye, like the semi-translucent, pony-size koi fish that float through the air, seemingly just because they look cool. The koi don’t seem to be selling anything other than the movie’s production values and visual concept; elsewhere, enormous spectral human figures loom over buildings like embodied billboards, nicely evoking rampaging movie monsters of the past. The most important leviathan, of course, is Johansson, whose mysterioso cyborg, Major, effortlessly slides right into this scene, with her preternaturally still face — often as blank as a mask — and the ports in the back of her neck that she uses to jack into cables and other characters. These artificial orifices are pleasingly mysterious and highly suggestive, at once creating a sense of human vulnerability and raising the possibility of the posthuman. Major occasionally stuffs goo in her ports and also uses them to plug into others. About the only part of her that’s human is her soul, or "ghost" in the story’s poetic parlance. The rest of Major is a bendable, mendable shell, which makes her well suited for hard-core tactical work with a police outfit known as Section 9. As the title suggests, Ghost in the Shell is haunted, including by the original manga, its sequels and several excellent animated movies: the first, also titled Ghost in the Shell, and the entrancingly lovely Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, both directed by Mamoru Oshii. The new Ghost in the Shell was directed by Rupert Sanders, who has made commercials and one other feature, Snow White and the Huntsman. He likes a dark palette and is good with actors, but there’s little here that feels personal, and he mostly functions as a blockbuster traffic cop, managing all the busily moving, conspicuously pricey parts. That’s too bad, especially because the original Ghost in the Shell is such a delightful philosophical plaything, with pleasures that simultaneously bewitch the eye and enchant the mind. This version, by contrast, ditches the original’s big, human, all-too-human questions, but keeps all the firing guns and car chases, the action clichés and intentional genre stereotypes. Stripped of its deeper-dish musings, the story turns into a perfectly watchable, somewhat bland action movie, tricked out with sharp details, some fine actors and one slumming legend, the director-actor Takeshi Kitano, who plays Aramaki, Major’s boss. He only speaks in Japanese; Major and almost everyone else speak in English. The characters understand one another, presumably because they’re beyond mere language and, in any event, they sometimes communicate telepathically. At first, the fact that they can speak to one another comes across as an inventive flourish, but like so much in Ghost in the Shell — the toddling geishas, the Asian extras — it helps to reduce an entire culture to a decorative detail. The movie has been widely criticized for casting Johansson in a role that was, of course, originally Japanese, a decision that isn’t offset by an absurd narrative twist that seems to have been created to forestall criticism but will only provoke further ire. This isn’t just appropriation; it’s obliteration.
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