Jesse Hassenger | The Verge

Jumanji: The Next Level is a body-swapping delight

2019-12-13T12:10:12-05:00

When Sony first rebooted Jumanji two years ago with the decades-later, new-cast follow-up Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, it was a pleasant surprise even in the long shadow of Star Wars. It was pretty good for a movie nobody was clamoring for.

For a movie based on a book about a board game, Welcome to the Jungle found a good premise: four teenagers of varying social positions would be forced to inhabit the bodies of avatars that looked suspiciously like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Karen Gillan. The stars, then, would also be forced to inhabit the teenagers: Dwayne Johnson would improbably play an insecure nerd, Kevin Hart a strapping athlete frustrated by his newly diminutive frame, Jack Black a popular queen bee type aghast to find herself as a middle-aged man, and Karen Gillan an awkward girl shocked by her newfound action-heroine coordination. It was a perfectly timed gambit, coinciding with the downfall of the broadly popular Hollywood comedy. Welcome to the Jungle may have looked like a high-concept action-adventure, but it was really offering star-driven laughs.

The new follow-up Jumanji: The Next Level isn’t as conceptually inspired — few sequels are — but it definitely understands that the new Jumanji movies are, at their heart, body-swap comedies. The teenage characters, back in their normal forms, have been separated for their first semester at college and are reuniting for holiday break. Spencer (Alex Wolff), pining for his time in Dwayne Johnson’s super-body avatar, impulsively heeds the call of the broken video game console and gets sucked back into the world of Jumanji. Once his friends realize what’s happened, they set out to rescue him.

For pure laughs, ‘The Next Level’ might outdo its predecessor

But director and co-writer Jake Kasdan doesn’t stick them all back in the same bodies. Martha (Morgan Turner) once again takes the form of Karen Gillan’s Lara Croft-ish badass, but Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain) is now Jack Black’s tweedy map-reader, while Johnson and Hart are “played” by Spencer’s Grandpa Eddie (Danny DeVito) and his former best friend Milo (Danny Glover), respectively, who have also been sucked into the digital world. Johnson does a game (if not exactly spot-on) imitation of DeVito’s rasp, while Hart does a (quite spot-on) imitation of Danny Glover’s gentility. That’s just the setup; the movie goes further into body-swap territory and introduces Awkwafina as another gaming avatar, among other complications.

For pure laughs, The Next Level might outdo its predecessor. Hart milks a funny running gag about the leisurely pace of Milo’s speech, which would be maddening if not for its unflagging good nature, which somehow makes it funnier. It’s also a kick to see the artist formerly known as The Rock scrunch up his face and bark “HAH?” in confusion, suggesting that Grandpa Eddie has less of a hearing problem than a comprehension one. Body-swapping, or character-shifting comedy, has long been a stunt that allows some virtuosic comic actors to rise to the occasion; think of Steve Martin sharing his body with the ghost of Lily Tomlin in All of Me, Eddie Murphy double-cast in Bowfinger (and quintuple-cast in other movies), or Tom Hanks playing an overgrown 13-year-old in Big. It’s neat to see the Jumanji series sneak some of that old-fashioned performance value into a big-ticket Hollywood blockbuster.

Yet, even as the movie continues to invent new twists on its own formula — Gillan and Black share a flashy scene around the midpoint — there’s also something oddly dispiriting about watching this Jumanji. Because the “real” characters are so flat and uninspired, there’s a limit to how far their comic avatars can go. The personas twist, but they don’t really develop or escalate, settling instead for the kind of rote lesson-learning that turns adventure movies and comedies alike into self-improvement seminars. Eddie and Milo address a decades-long rift over a restaurant they used to co-own; the kids relearn some of the lessons from the first movie. A decade or so ago, Tropic Thunder stuck Jack Black in the jungle with Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., and more, and let its cast play off each other’s personas. The Next Level thinks the milk-bland personalities of its central teenagers and a couple of cranky old people count as a rooting interest to ground the hijinks. Black, Hart, and Awkwafina could be a comedy dream team; instead, they’re stuck hustling around a bunch of video game battles.

It’s a shame to see these actors thrown to the ostriches with such abandon

This would be less of a sticking point if the Jumanji movies really were cracking action adventures. But while Kasdan has made some fine comedies (and one all-timer, the terrific comic detective picture Zero Effect), his command of set pieces lacks the playfulness he brings to the funny bits. There’s a specific action sequence involving a herd of angry monkeys and a series of rickety, rotating bridges that a director like Gore Verbinski might have choreographed with pizazz; Kasdan’s version turns into a smeary CG-blur of some cool ideas and momentary thrills. Earlier in the movie, a chase involving a desert vehicle and a bunch of ostriches is downright dull.

Hordes of CG animals probably do count as part of the Jumanji brand, so it’s unlikely that they would disappear entirely. But it’s still a shame to see these actors thrown to the ostriches with such abandon. In the end, the performers’ high energy feels weirdly thankless; they shift their voices and their posture and their personalities, and they’re all still just subsumed into blockbuster noise. In other words, don’t count on anyone reaching into the Hollywood game and rescuing comedy anytime soon.

Zombieland: Double Tap is a shambling, half-revived mess of a sequel

2019-10-17T12:49:38-04:00

Putting aside the monstrous thirst for flesh, a zombie is essentially halfway between a living human and a rotting corpse, animated but staggering around without much grace, a desiccation disguised as a person. Zombieland: Double Tap occupies a similar space in the world of sequels. As a decade-later follow-up to 2009’s irreverent horror-comedy Zombieland, it isn’t an entry in an active franchise. It’s more like an 1980s-style cheapie retread, disguised as a more respectable legacy sequel.

Given the endless (and mostly basic) references to both pop culture and the original Zombieland, it wouldn’t be out of character for Zombieland: Double Tap to lay out this sequel-as-zombie parallel itself. The script (by Dave Callaham, Rhett Reese, and Paul Wernick) occasionally points out the film’s potential mustiness: Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) narrates a direct thank-you to the audience upfront, acknowledging that viewers have “many choices in zombie entertainment.” Later, Wichita (Emma Stone) chides Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) for reviving his old catchphrase (“Nut up or shut up,” for those with hazy memories of the original film). But for much of its running time, the movie is uncomfortably satisfied with recreating the dynamics of the funny, sometimes affecting, first film.

Zombieland: Double Tap downgrades the formula to sometimes funny, and not especially affecting. It takes place 10 years after the original, which feels like a grudging necessity to account for Wichita’s sister Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) aging from childhood to adulthood. Beyond that inconvenience, and a half-baked idea of “evolving” zombies, the movie feels like it’s taking place about six months after Zombieland. Columbus, Wichita, Little Rock, and Tallahassee have maintained their makeshift, post-apocalyptic family unit, with Columbus and Wichita settling into a couple’s routine (or rut), and Tallahassee serving as an overbearing father figure to Little Rock.

At the beginning of the movie, the quartet holes up in the White House, rummaging through presidential mementos. In their quasi-familial tension, Double Tap comes across an interesting idea: because these characters must stick together in a world overrun by zombies, their social structures have been rearranged. Little Rock has no access to friends her own age. And for that matter, neither does Tallahassee, who instead treats his surrogate daughter as both a little girl and a faithful zombie-killing sidekick. (His gifts for her are guns, always guns.) Meanwhile, Wichita finds it hard to achieve domestic bliss with Columbus when they have to cling to domesticity in order to survive.

Instead of developing these ideas into comic situations, or thinking them through in creatively dramatic ways, the writers use them to hastily hit the same story beats Zombieland covered. Little Rock and Wichita separate from the group, just like they did in Zombieland. Then Little Rock separates from Wichita, and everyone sets out on a road trip to find her. She may be headed for a zombie-free commune, akin to the zombie-free amusement park from the end of the first movie, except that the writers take a series of sour, mystifying jabs at the idea of young people gathering together in peace. Finally, a Hollywood movie with the guts to take on the scourge of pacifism!

None of this prevents Double Tap from scoring some laughs, though it has to work harder for fewer of them. What felt like a fresh combination of characters 10 years ago — Eisenberg’s fussy nerdiness, Harrelson’s sensitivity-masking bravado, Stone’s no-nonsense sarcasm — now comes across as repetitive shtick. The best the movie can do is add new shtick to the mix, courtesy of Madison (Zoey Deutch), a young woman Columbus and Tallahassee meet at a mall.

Everything about Madison is a broad caricature of a ditzy blonde: she dresses primarily in pink, she runs her mispronounced words together with a semi-lockjawed form of vocal fry, and she’s easily delighted. But the clichés get elevated as Deutch plays dumb with a zest that recalls Anna Faris’ fearless daffiness. Deutch’s performance turns Madison into a natural, possibly accidental optimist who’s more endearing than the leads.

As before, a trip through Zombieland entails lots of set piece detours. One of Double Tap’s best sustained sequences starts with an insultingly blatant rip-off of a memorable throwaway gag from Shaun of the Dead. Director Ruben Fleischer and the writers elaborate on this theft, then play it straight into an impressively choreographed single-take (or, more likely, simulated single-take) slapstick zombie fight, with Eisenberg, Stone, Harrelson, and newcomer Rosario Dawson shooting and dodging through multiple rooms of a garishly decorated Elvis-themed motel.

In this scene and several others, Zombieland: Double Tap works as an agreeable time-waster, trading on the no longer novel, but still reliably amusing sight and sound of Jesse Eisenberg thrown into combat with the undead. But apart from the unsinkable Deutch, the movie’s women don’t fare as well. Wichita and especially Little Rock make nonsensical, sequel-driven decisions throughout, mostly serving the male characters’ stories, which aren’t especially strong either. When the group reaches that silly commune, the filmmakers again trip over a promising development: maybe these four people are too neurotic, sarcastic, and disagreeable to live in harmony with peaceful hippies.

Or, the movie then counter-suggests, maybe they should just show up to crack some cheap jokes and fight another horde of super-zombies. At times, Double Tap does recapture the original film’s tossed-off delights. It’s been revived with so many of the original actors and filmmakers for that express purpose. But this particular sequel suggests that in another 10 years, there won’t be much left to reanimate.

Gemini Man is a cinematic throwback, but it may be the future of blockbusters, too

2019-10-16T15:01:31-04:00

Around halfway through the new Ang Lee science fiction / action thriller Gemini Man, super-assassin Henry Brogan (Will Smith) learns some details about Junior, his equally skilled super-assassin clone (also Smith, in digitally de-aged form). Junior was born around 1995, meaning he preceded Dolly the cloned sheep by a year or so. This is the perfect time period to pinpoint as the birth of Will Smith (or at least a Will Smith) because it corresponds almost exactly with Smith’s ascent into movie stardom: Bad Boys came out in 1995, followed by Independence Day in 1996. This is also the approximate time period that actually birthed Gemini Man, a script that’s been kicking around Hollywood for well over 20 years, at one point as a possible vehicle for late director Tony Scott.

It’s no surprise, then, that plenty of Gemini Man feels like a slightly musty cable-replay staple, with that 1990s Jerry Bruckheimer military jocularity and a loving reverence for its lead actor’s movie-star face. But it’s also directed by Ang Lee, still trying out the 120-frames-per-second cinematography that gives 3D extra clarity. Lee played with 3D in the Oscar-winning Life of Pi, then added a high frame rate for the interesting but decidedly not-Oscar-winning Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. In Gemini Man, he tries to balance one more technological breakthrough with the digital de-aging process that lets Smith play opposite his younger self. Applying this cutting-edge tech and some of Lee’s earnest sensitivity to a junky popcorn film yields simultaneously futuristic and deeply, strangely retro results.

Gemini Man’s time-warped weirdness is appropriate to Will Smith’s blockbuster career; he makes a lot of high-tech science fiction movies, but he always seems to keep one foot in the past. Independence Day is as much a 1970s disaster-movie throwback as an alien invasion picture. I, Robot turned a seminal science fiction text into a generic cop action thriller. Even the snappy Men in Black is largely a streamlined Ghostbusters riff. On top of all that, Smith famously turned down the forward-thinking futurist classic The Matrix and wound up doing a different, vastly less iconic 1999 science fiction / action picture instead: Wild Wild West.

Twenty years ago, Wild Wild West was considered Smith’s first major financial and critical misfire. Though these days, a movie star getting his critically reviled project over $100 million single-handedly would seem pretty impressive. Gemini Man is a better movie in many ways, but it still has an odd kinship with Smith’s most notorious (though far from worst) big-budget endeavor. Wild Wild West certainly wasn’t an equivalent technological marvel in its day. Even in 1999, its green-screen effects were dodgy, and its massive computer-animated mechanical spider was unconvincing. From its clunky special effects to its steampunk-Western aesthetic to its TV source material to its employment of Kenneth Branagh as a legless Confederate general, almost nothing about Wild Wild West could be called influential. On the contrary, it felt like a sign that the 1990s’ favorite formulas — big movie stars and formerly popular brand names — were no longer luring in audiences. Compared to scrappier 1999 hits like The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project, or American Pie, even the quirkier aspects of Wild Wild West felt bloated and outmoded.

Will Smith and Kevin Kline in Wild Wild West. | Photo: Warner Bros." data-portal-copyright="Photo: Warner Bros." />

Yet Wild Wild West’s magical thinking about the power of intellectual property is basically gospel in contemporary Hollywood. It’s part of what makes a movie like Gemini Man feel like more of an outlier in 2019. Even Smith, who for years logged non-franchise hits, has acquiesced to this reality. His biggest recent movies plug him into gigantic IP like DC Comics and Disney animation. Suicide Squad and Aladdin share a mishmash-y quality (and disreputable entertainment value) with Wild Wild West, which turned out to be prescient about the quantity-over-quality approach to simulated mirth.

Gemini Man isn’t a mishmash — tonally, it’s more Enemy of the State than Wild Wild West — but it shares a different kinship with Wild Wild West, enough to raise the question of whether it will also leave its own accidental mark on Smith’s career. Both Gemini Man and Wild Wild West are star vehicles made weirder by their deviation from Smith’s usual levels of assembly line polish. While Wild Wild West lacked the snazzy Men in Black sheen, the high frame rate in Gemini Man is like an overabundance of polish: the movie gleams with an uncanny, sometimes discomfiting vividness that recalls a live broadcast blown up to impossible sizes.

Ultra-high frame rates are a fascinating way to capture a big star, displaying so much facial detail that close-ups become unusually detailed and piercing. Lee understands this, and pays a lot of attention to his faces, both real and digital, often holding his close-ups a beat or two longer than standard cinematic language would dictate. The movie’s many settings often appear curiously de-populated, exacerbating Henry’s sense of loneliness, and emphasizing the way Smith’s faces become the vividly rendered suns the rest of the film orbits around.

Yet as prominent as Smith’s faces are, the film doesn’t play as a commentary on Smith’s classic persona. It would be easy enough to have Henry’s clone wisecrack his way through the action to signify carefree youth, but the clone, raised to be a super-soldier, has the social inexperience of a kid (his room is filled with model kits) and the creeping soul-sickness of a practiced killer. This is a compellingly odd use of digital de-aging technology, reproducing a younger Smith without many of his star-making trademarks.

Meanwhile, the older Smith subdues his charm without erasing it. Henry says he’s starting to have trouble looking at himself in the mirror, but Smith wears that self-doubt lightly, as if he’s wary of bothering anyone with his “ghosts,” as he calls them. He’s good in the film, in both roles, though the best moments are the action sequences. They merge Lee’s patient, painterly sensibilities with his technology’s hyper-real intensity. And projected at 120 fps, they look like nothing else at the movies right now.

The fact that the 120 fps project is only available in select cities is a sign that this technology, beloved by Ang Lee, Peter Jackson, and seemingly not many others, may not catch on. And the fact that de-aging technology is also used this fall in an awards-caliber movie like The Irishman indicates that Gemini Man won’t be remembered as a creative breakthrough on that front, either.

But the movie may have a life as a star study or even a blueprint for the ways that star power can be adjusted like a special effect. For de-aging effects to make sense at all, they must involve the deeply familiar faces of stars; otherwise, there’s no reason not to simply cast a younger actor. (As much as some of us may love, say, Scoot McNairy, it would not be particularly thrilling to see him realistically portray a 22-year-old.) Gemini Man has an old-school respect for Smith’s star power but a futuristic sense of how it might be modulated with cutting-edge technology. So much of the movie depends on quiet reminders of Smith’s charisma, rather than a full-on charm offensive.

The “young” Will Smith has an uncanny effect, but it would arguably be weirder to see a computer-generated version of his old shtick, performed by the actor in middle age. This kind of virtual agility, providing something familiar (young Will Smith) and something new (playing an uncharacteristically somber role) may become a necessity for stars hoping to stay in the blockbuster game, especially if they want to manage their own brands without submitting to superheroics or Disney remakes.

Whether Gemini Man’s most interesting aspects ultimately give it a better reputation than Wild Wild West, this is clearly not Will Smith’s second shot at The Matrix. But as celebrated as that movie still is (with a legacy sequel in the works), the sleek, mind-bending stylishness of The Matrix feels less like a dominant blockbuster aesthetic than the sweaty, overspending, intermittent charm of Wild Wild West. (For that matter, the latter beats that Smith-less fourth Men in Black movie any day.) Gemini Man may appear misbegotten and outmoded now. Just don’t be surprised if once the technology that went into it has had time to settle, it beats the odds and winds up looking like the future.

The evil-smartphone movie Jexi doesn’t understand why people like technology

2019-10-11T11:27:50-04:00

The new evil smartphone comedy Jexi is a desperate mock-up of recognizable human behavior, but one key element rings truer than most Hollywood productions: characters are constantly looking at their phones. It’s not just aspiring journalist Phil (Adam Devine), the film’s awkwardly isolated, phone-obsessed hero. Jexi briefly pathologizes Phil’s particular fixation through a couple of flashback scenes where, as a child, he’s repeatedly handed a phone to stave off boredom or strife.

But it quickly broadens to show nearly every background extra in the movie’s San Francisco setting with their heads tilted down toward their smartphone screens. When Phil literally bumps into local bike shop owner Cate (Alexandra Shipp) because he’s staring at his phone, the fact that she’s wholly uninterested in a glowing screen and has seeming no social media presence is the movie’s idea of a major personality trait. The ubiquity of devices is supposed to be at least a little bit satirical, but most of the time, it registers as realistic.

The rest of Jexi is less realistic. Categorizing it as science fiction would be an act of generosity to its screenplay, which is an object lesson in the distinction between world-building and just making up random stuff. The movie is basically Spike Jonze’s movie Her, about a sapient AI companion and the man who falls in love with her, retooled as a comedy of mild life lessons. When Phil’s beloved phone breaks, he seeks a new one with a fervor that a phone-store employee (Wanda Sykes) likens to addiction, though she notes at least “a crackhead gets his steps in” and socializes with other crackheads. Phil, on the other hand, is eager to return to his routine of ordering food delivery and watching Netflix from his couch. But the new phone’s glitchy, suspiciously emotional operating system / voice assistant, Jexi (voiced by Rose Byrne), quickly announces that she has other ideas.

That concept sounds more like a years-too-late comedy sketch than a feature film, and that’s how it plays, complete with rapid escalation. Jexi starts sassing Phil about 30 seconds into their relationship, and soon, she’s criticizing his eating choices, loudly offering him a change-up in his pornography routine, and goading him into clumsy interactions with Cate. Phil makes a cursory attempt to replace his haywire AI, but for reasons that are hand-waved away by blaming “the cloud,” Jexi follows him to another new phone, and he’s forced to accept her into his life. She’s hard to resist because while she favors a bluntly profane coaching style, she isn’t entirely wrong in her diagnoses of Phil’s various social ills.

Jexi is in the unenviable position of being a movie that criticizes technology, which the internet at large often receives with hostility, even when the criticism is this light and benign. Writer-directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore are basically advocating for more human interaction, and lightly satirizing our collective dependence on technology by imagining a situation where phones are as needy and grasping about their owners as vice versa. A little of this is clever; it’s fun to hear Byrne affecting a Siri-like stiffness to talk trash about other technology. (She has no kind words for Siri, Alexa, or anything else on the voice-assistant beat.) But much of the movie’s humor amounts to making a robotic voice swear, just as the Lucas / Moore series of Bad Moms films rely on the spectacle of mothers saying “vagina” and euphemisms for “vagina.”

Just as they do in Bad Moms, Lucas and Moore derive a lot of their Jexi ideas from real life, which they filter through some kind of screenwriting life lessons program. Through this process, genuinely relatable moments become vaguely phony, the kind of yuks that are invisibly and unconvincingly hashtagged “#relatable.” The gags are exactly the kind of empty observations that the movie tries to criticize when Cate confesses to a past life of Instagrammed vacuousness.

It would be easier to buy Jexi’s more intentional absurdities if its reality wasn’t so elastic, stretching to accommodate poorly staged large-scale slapstick. (Lucas and Moore rarely go for a clean single-shot execution of a gag when they can stretch it out with pointless extra cuts.) Even the movie’s quietest moments, like when Phil actually gets an actual shot at taking Cate out to dinner, are dotted with canned studio comedy exchanges; there are lots of “Really?” / “No.” non-jokes and pointless, underlining asides like Phil saying something blundering, then adding, “Why did I say that?”

The Phil / Cate relationship requires a fair amount of buy-in up front, not least because Devine is nearly a decade older than Shipp, though the movie seems to be pretending otherwise. So it’s especially bizarre when the movie contrives an arbitrary conflict and an equally arbitrary resolution. The good news is that with all of the wan, watered-down rom-com material between Phil and Cate, Jexi only has a short section where Byrne’s operating system turns to ladies-be-crazy jealousy. Though there are some cheap crazy ex-girlfriend riffs, Jexi’s vengeance more often feels like rage against her potential obsolescence, and the movie is relatively magnanimous about her transgressions. Maybe we are just a few OS updates away from a phone that truly misses us when we turn it off or leave it at home.

That idea goes underdeveloped in Jexi, as does any inkling that Phil might be a genuine introvert who doesn’t necessarily need to be nudged into making friends with his co-workers at a BuzzFeed-like publisher. (They work on viral lists, while Phil yearns to move into the serious journalism vertical.) Granted, Devine is such a demonstrative, outsized performer that even when he’s trying to play relatively subdued here, he still doesn’t especially read as introverted.

But the movie still shows disappointingly little interest in how he might use technology to forge different kinds of interactions and friendships, as real people do. Instead, social media is just a crutch that people like Phil use to pretend they’re happy and surrounded by friends. That isn’t an unfair or unlikely view of the world, but it’s a simplified one that ignores more significant issues, like virtual harassment and online vitriol. The smartphone epidemic is certainly fair game for satire, but while Jexi pokes fun at Phil, it ultimately isn’t satirizing anything in particular because Phil is not much of anything in particular. He’s a blur of a character, by turns lecherous, sensitive, funny (or “funny”), impulsive, or terrified. Even at her least dimensional and most outlandish, Jexi has a personality. In the end, the movie doesn’t seem to understand how badly Phil needs an operating system of his own.

Here’s why this is the decade of superstar astronaut movie roles

2019-10-09T13:13:27-04:00

Brad Pitt in Ad Astra. | Photo by Francois Duhamel / 20th Century Fox

In the recent science fiction film Ad Astra, Brad Pitt plays an astronaut, and the only surprising thing about it is that he hasn’t played one before. His Ocean’s Eleven ringleader George Clooney already went to space on film in Gravity and Solaris, and their co-star Matt Damon did in The Martian. Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Sandra Bullock, Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattison, Juliette Binoche, and Ryan Gosling have all gone into some form of make-believe orbit, too. Now, a few weeks after Pitt charted a course for Neptune in Ad Astra, Natalie Portman is playing a more earthbound (but still active) NASA star in Lucy in the Sky.

That’s a lot of movie stars in the stars, and most of them have made the journey fairly recently. Hanks and Willis did their astronaut movies in the 1990s, but most of the others blasted off in the past five years or so. Though the Moon landing recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, movie astronauts were mostly featured in science fiction, horror, and / or shlock for much of the 1970s and 1980s, give or take the occasional Right Stuff. There were a few classic space-set movies and characters, but astronaut wasn’t a go-to role like cop, crook, or lawyer. (Most telling is the list of big-name actors from this period who never went to fictional space: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, Barbra Streisand, Sylvester Stallone, and so forth. Jack Nicholson only played one post-orbit, in Terms of Endearment, and Clint Eastwood waited until 2000 to suit up for Space Cowboys.)

Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in 2013’s Gravity. | Photo: Warner Bros." data-portal-copyright="Photo: Warner Bros." />

But in the 2010s, playing an astronaut has become a major actor’s showcase. Pitt hasn’t played a cop in ages, and neither he nor Portman have ever logged time as cinematic lawyers. Some of the space-movie boom is probably the usual Hollywood slow-motion trending; Gravity and The Martian were big hits, making it easier for other space movies to get greenlit. But few genre trends attract this many A-listers.

At least one other trend has, though: the ubiquitous superhero movie. Space pictures have emerged as an alternate route into big-budget studio territory for stars who don’t want to commit to time-consuming franchises or log time striking poses in spandex. A few of the recent A-list astronauts have appeared in Marvel or DC projects, but usually not in titular roles. (So far, Damon and Pitt have limited themselves to tiny cameos, in Thor: Ragnarok and Deadpool 2, respectively.) Plenty of actors have made nuanced, dimensional roles out of superheroes, but even the most sensitive renderings of Batman, Captain America, or Spider-Man don’t tend to offer the same level of introspection and dignity that actors get from floating in space, contemplating the cosmos.

Zazie Beetz and Natalie Portman in Lucy in the Sky. | Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures" />

Ryan Gosling has movie star charisma in plenty of films, but he’s at his most roiling and inward playing a quietly grieving Neil Armstrong in First Man. Brad Pitt is a picture of laconic cool of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but in Ad Astra, he gets to interrogate that same brand of laconic cool even further, playing a taciturn, work-obsessed spaceman who’s still processing (and apparently sometimes perpetuating) the ache of his abandonment by his astronaut father (Tommy Lee Jones).

Ad Astra isn’t an outlier, either. Almost all of these recent astronaut star vehicles are domestic dramas in disguise. By including expensive visual effects and putting famous people in spacesuits, they put a big-budget gloss on a type of movie that most studios are hesitant to make even on a shoestring. As much as newer space movies may claim to take inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, that movie’s human relationships, especially familial ones, are largely marginalized; the little girl who wants a bushbaby doll for her birthday is a memorable detail, not a full character.

Kubrick’s film is more about mankind’s collective relationship with the universe, something these newer movies don’t always foreground in their narratives. Ad Astra is a father-son drama to match Interstellar’s father-daughter dynamic. Lucy in the Sky centers on an extramarital affair and a disintegrating marriage. Gravity and First Man are about parents’ grief. Despite all of the on-screen technology, not to mention the behind-the-scenes technology needed to mount a convincing space mission, there’s something elemental about scenes where actors are allowed to think and react by themselves, often in close-quarters close-ups.

Robert Pattinson in High Life. | Photo: A24" data-portal-copyright="Photo: A24" />

But this fall’s entries to the space canon add another element that might attract movie stars to astronaut roles: they can be read as analogies for the isolation of movie stardom. That’s particularly true of Lucy in the Sky. Portman’s character returns to Earth feeling alienated from the normal, grounded people around her because few of them can fully understand what she’s experienced. Her husband, played by Dan Stevens, even works for NASA, but he’s in publicity, so far removed from her experience that he might as well be working for a paper company or at a grocery store. He understands the physical and temporal sacrifices her job requires, but not the mental toll. Their marriage more or less fits the description of a superstar marrying a regular guy, and the fleeting bond she shares with a fellow astronaut (Jon Hamm) brings to mind movie stars who realize they can only really share their lives with other famous people.

Ad Astra also addresses the disparity between an astronaut’s dedication to his job and his ability to connect with his loved ones, with its shots of Liv Tyler, as Pitt’s estranged wife, looking sad and eventually leaving him. Writer-director James Gray may not have cast Tyler specifically in her capacity as a moderately famous semi-star opposite a certified megastar, but their respective status levels help convey their relationship’s imbalance. Their brief scenes of domestic strife have empathy for Tyler’s character and sadness over Pitt’s closed-off masculinity, while Lucy in the Sky can’t help but portray the husband as kind of a dope. On the other hand, Astra also can’t be bothered to give Tyler an actual character to play, so both movies indulge some degree of unproductive solipsism about their protagonists’ loneliness.

Ad Astra and Lucy in the Sky are both perceptive about that loneliness, to a point. Both lead characters have difficulty communicating the enormity of their experiences in space, and in a weird meta touch (or maybe just an imitative fallacy), their movies have communication failures as well, especially in their scripting. Astra has some terribly on-the-nose narration that explains, laboriously, that sons often suffer for their fathers’ sins. Lucy has some terribly expositional dialogue that it delivers semi-regularly in place of actually developing its relationships. Both movies depend on their stars to do substantial work bridging the gap between what their movies are intended to say about our place in the universe and what the filmmakers are actually capable of saying.

Matt Damon in The Martian. | Photo: 20th Century Fox" data-portal-copyright="Photo: 20th Century Fox" />

That’s often a movie star’s job, unspoken or not, to communicate simply and directly and to be easily understood because of their on-screen history, natural charisma, or some combination of the two. Given that, it can be a little disconcerting to think of stars as de facto aliens struggling with basic human interactions, which is how Pitt and Portman sometimes come across in their new films. (The problem is only exacerbated by the way both movies have excellent supporting casts that drift through the stories without purchase or purpose.)

The thematic and creative struggles of Ad Astra and Lucy in the Sky suggest that the increase in astronaut roles has a sort of symbiosis with the box office dominance of superheroes, beyond stars’ reasonable desire to avoid playing them. As brand names square off with big names at the box office, maybe more superstars are trying to reassert their humanity — and grappling with what that experience means to them.

In Noah Hawley’s astronaut drama Lucy in the Sky, the aspect ratio is the real star

2019-10-03T13:46:03-04:00

TV creator and writer Noah Hawley made his name working on shows that try to stretch the medium’s boundaries. Even given the cinematic style of much buzzy 2010s television programming, his series Fargo and Legion both clearly have a foot in the film world, from their source materials (Coen Brothers movies for Fargo; X-Men lore adapted into blockbusters for Legion) to their movie-star casting and their widescreen / split-screen / big-screen style. Watching any given episode, it’s easy to wonder whether Hawley really just wants to be making movies.

Now he has: Lucy in the Sky is a psychological drama that employs plenty of his favorite visual tricks, especially with the size of the frame. Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman) is an astronaut finishing her first trip into space, which is depicted in widescreen glory. “Just a few more minutes,” she pleads, when told it’s time to head back into her ship and return home. When she gets back to Earth, Hawley mostly switches the aspect ratio to the square-ish 4:3, the shape of most movies made before 1952, as well as old CRT television sets. From scene to scene, and sometimes within scenes, the frame expands and contracts, sometimes so wide that it defies standard numerical descriptions, until Hawley slices it back down to size, forming tiny windows into Lucy’s soul. Or something. It isn’t always easy to tell.

It’s isn’t easy to tell what Lucy is thinking, either, though it’s clear she’s distressed on Earth, and wants to hide it from her family and co-workers. She yearns to venture back into the abyss, and she throws herself into the competition for another shuttle spot. She also throws herself at fellow astronaut Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm), as her dorky-go-lucky husband Drew (Dan Stevens), a NASA PR guy, tries to cover up his bewilderment over his distracted, troubled wife. The story is more of a potential powder keg for those familiar with the actual events that inspired the film: Lucy in the Sky is loosely based on the story of Lisa Nowak, who ended her own affair with a fellow astronaut by allegedly throwing on an adult diaper and driving hundreds of miles to confront a romantic rival, possibly with lethal intent. It’s exactly the kind of crazy real-life anecdote that Hawley might retell in some kind of faux-folksy Fargo monologue.

Maybe it’s that anecdotal nature that makes Lucy in the Sky feel digressive rather than urgent, even knowing that Lucy must eventually confront Mark and another, younger astronaut (Zazie Beetz, immediately reprising her Joker role of “woman”). The movie’s unhurried pacing, also a hallmark of Hawley’s TV shows, masks his impatience as a filmmaker. He’s seemingly unwilling to let his scenes play out and breathe, and the aspect-ratio fussing is a perfect example of how he overthinks the movie into a stupor.

Hawley starts with a seemingly simple conceit: he uses an expansive frame to depict the vast but technically confining world outside the Earth’s atmosphere, then uses a cramped frame to depict the wide-open Texas spaces that nonetheless close in on Lucy. But switching between two aspect ratios isn’t enough to make a story come alive, and Hawley keeps tinkering with his borders until the people inside them feel incidental, even arbitrary. A subtler use of the switch might create a sustained mood; Hawley seems more interested in sustained attention to his directing. He’s a talented image-maker who seems to distract himself from offering many arresting images.

Despite the visual trickery, the most consistently memorable aspect of Lucy in the Sky is Natalie Portman, who gives a terrific performance as she’s floating out there on her own. Biting into a Texas accent, Portman isn’t too far from the twitchy overachievers she played in Black Swan or Vox Lux, though the context is vastly different. After beginning her career as a precocious kid, she’s come to specialize in playing characters whose desperation roils beneath a surface of professional excellence. Here, she gives Lucy a scrappy moxie that’s endearing and frightening; at one point, Lucy calmly risks drowning just to prove she can finish an underwater training exercise that goes wrong.

Hawley and screenwriters Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi blessedly avoid the go-to astronaut-drama move of giving Lucy a child to neglect or mourn. Instead, they provide an uneasy ally for Lucy in the form of her niece, Blue Iris (Pearl Amanda Dickson), who’s temporarily living with Lucy and Drew due to her own family dramas. Blue Iris seems distant at first, but eventually, she becomes Lucy’s sidekick of sorts, caught up in her aunt’s can-do paranoia. This would be a fascinating relationship if it actually developed on-screen. It doesn’t, and Portman’s natural charisma is forced to fill in a lot of gaps.

It’s hard not to like Lucy in the Sky, not because it’s especially likable or even skillful, but because Portman is so committed that she sometimes seems capable of making the movie worthwhile by sheer force of will. But the moments that come alive, like that underwater training sequence, or a climactic moment of stalking at an airport, only make the rest of the film look more wandering and indistinct. The movie focuses so intently on technical craft that it sometimes zones right out. Hawley is still stretching boundaries, often literally, while disregarding the human experiences they’re supposed to contain.

In The Irishman, Martin Scorsese finally takes the glamour out of gangsters

2019-09-27T20:01:00-04:00

At the press conference following the New York Film Festival press screening of the Netflix-produced feature The Irishman, director Martin Scorsese discussed the project’s long gestation, noting that he and star Robert De Niro had wanted to work together again “since Casino.” It sounded odd to hear it put that way, because before Casino, De Niro and Scorsese had one of the most prolific collaborations in American movies — to the point where during Casino’s 1995 release, critics largely received it as an old-hat retread of Goodfellas. Now it’s 2019, Casino has a better reputation, and De Niro and Scorsese haven’t made a feature together in decades.

That kind of time-passing blink is at the heart of The Irishman, even if its three-and-a-half-hour runtime suggests otherwise. Scorsese’s return to organized crime and its adjacencies takes place over roughly 50 years in the life of Frank Sheeran (De Niro), a real-life hitman whose exploits powered Charles Brandt’s non-fiction book I Heard You Paint Houses. (The title flashes pointedly onscreen toward the beginning of Scorsese’s film.) To allow the 76-year-old De Niro and other cast members to play younger versions of their characters, the film uses cutting-edge computer effects to de-age its major players for large chunks of its story. It’s Netflix’s most lavish production yet. (The film is receiving a limited theatrical release in November, and will be streaming to Netflix subscribers on Thanksgiving.)

For the most part, the effects are impressively seamless. Beyond a few sequences where the movie’s “young” De Niro simply doesn’t fit with what actual young De Niro looked like, the most noticeable change is the change of his eye color from brown to blue. The tweaks are a little eerie, but that dynamic works for the movie, where Frank’s sometimes-murderous job is treated with dispassionate, workaday remove. He doesn’t refer to himself as a hitman. He identifies vaguely as a union man.

The Irishman first introduces Frank as a delivery-truck driver who engages in strategic meat theft and gets away with it. (“I work hard for them when I ain’t stealing,” he explains.) He soon falls in with the Bufalino crime family, becoming close with Russell (Joe Pesci, dipping back in from his retirement) and later influential union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino, making a belated Scorsese-picture debut). Frank shoots plenty of people in the head, but he spends just as much time smoothing over little beefs, parsing the hidden meanings of a mobster confiding that he’s “a little concerned” about another mobster’s failure to fall in line.

De Niro delivers the customary Scorsese-gangster narration explaining the ins and outs of his business, but the film isn’t packed with procedural details or multiple colorful points of view, like Casino or Goodfellas. Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker still make asides with snappy cutaways and move the action along propulsively, but they’re imparting middle-management tidbits. On-screen text fills in some gaps with what becomes a running gag: as the text introduces minor characters, it also notes the particulars of their violent demise, years later. The de-aging effects are effective in part because they’re subtle; Frank Sheeran never looks especially youthful. For most of the movie, he feels comfortably settled into middle age. It’s implied that his service in World War II may have robbed him of any youthful idealism, or even general lustiness.

The retro clunkiness of these characters, well past their physical primes, is key to what makes The Irishman often surprisingly hilarious. The tough guys — especially Pacino’s volatile Hoffa — bicker over punctuality, offer each other cereal, drink ginger ale. De Niro and Pacino share a hotel room wearing grandpa pajamas. In a framing device within a framing device, De Niro and Pesci go on a slow, smoke-break-filled road trip with their wives. Scorsese’s gangster movies usually have streaks of mordant humor, but here it’s more quotidian, as when the ultra-powerful Hoffa tries to enjoy an ice cream sundae without an associate nagging him about the federal laws that affect their pensions differently.

Pacino is delightful in his role, reconciling his preening showboating (appropriate for a puffed-up, sometimes self-appointed leader of men) with his ability to go quiet and seething. Pesci, meanwhile, inverts his violent-hothead characters from Goodfellas and Casino. He’s the even-keeled higher-up who evaluates the situation and issues his orders, still calling De Niro “kid” after decades together. It’s an impressive, imposing bit of restraint.

The De Niro performance, especially with its digital tweaks, will probably strike some Scorsese habitués as boilerplate, given how it relies on his familiar downturned mouth, crinkled eyes, and hemming and hawing. But as The Irishman goes on and on, wonderfully entertaining but not concise, his work gathers power. The movie barely covers the growth of Frank’s family (another way he’s made to seem perma-middle-aged); it barely even distinguishes between his wife and his mistress.

But early on, Scorsese establishes that at home, Frank operates under the watchful eye of his daughter Peggy (Lucy Gallina as a kid; Anna Paquin as an adult). As a child, she says very little, and her parents describe her as shy and sensitive. Then suddenly she’s grown, and her silence isn’t so easily dismissed. It’s a shame to see Paquin in a Scorsese movie without anything more to do than issue reproachful looks, but at least that neglect is thematically appropriate. It’s no accident that Frank’s closest relationships are with fellow gangsters/workers. He may not revel in violence, but he’s at home in that world, moreso than in the domestic sphere.

All of Scorsese’s violent movies reckon with the consequences of their violence, but The Irishman is particularly interesting in the way it follows Frank as he ages. It’s clear from the opening shot, which tracks through a nursing home, that this isn’t a guy who gets whacked, blown up by a car bomb, or even confined to witness protection. He lives with what he does, yet seems fully unequipped to grapple with it. The movie is chilling not because De Niro plays Frank as an icy, remorseless killer, but because he’s an affable company man, proud of his union appreciation dinner, and he also happens to kill without remorse.

Scorsese has often regarded his gangster characters with a mixture of fascination and repulsion, and they’ve never looked less glamorous than they do here, particularly in the movie’s devastating final stretch. The major players of The Irishman weave in and out of ’60s and ’70s American history. Yet most of them, particularly Frank, seem to be living for their pointless, petty work, fighting a losing battle against the clock. That theme renders the movie’s technological fight against real-life aging more poignant, as the digital fountain of youth gives way to decrepitude. In many ways, this is an Old Man movie — a slower late-period work by a filmmaker ruminating on his advancing age, and on the beloved classics he made as a younger guy. But it’s Scorsese’s version: pulsing with more life than most younger filmmakers, before giving way to stark, chilling regret.

Quentin Tarantino’s historical revisionism makes his movies better suited for the future

2019-08-01T11:38:09-04:00

Warning: Significant spoilers ahead for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

More and more often these days, press screenings for movies are preceded by warnings to critics, asking them not to spoil the movie in their reviews. It’s an attempt to preserve a movie’s sense of surprise in an era where outlets race to jump-start the online discourse about new releases, as if a starter pistol went off at the beginning of every movie.

Generally, the anti-spoiler requests are reasonable. But the entreaties around Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood felt particularly odd. “Please don’t spoil this movie about the 1969 Manson Family murders” sounds as counterintuitive as the warnings issued over the Lion King remake. Doesn’t everyone already know how these stories turn out? Isn’t this information readily available to anyone with an internet connection?

But given Tarantino’s involvement, the spoiler warnings make more sense. Starting 10 years ago with his World War II epic Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has made a hobby of histories so revisionist that they turn historical fiction into pulp. The audacity of this approach is clearest and most thrilling in Basterds, with its much-discussed alternate ending to the war. But Tarantino applied a similar history-as-wish-fulfillment technique to the Westerns he made next, too. Django Unchained has a freed slave wreaking vengeance on a Southern plantation. The Hateful Eight is less of a fantasy, but it still reimagines American history as a locked-room mystery inspired in part by old TV shows.

Classic (and not-so-classic) television also figures into Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino’s latest fake history project. Grouping it with his other historical rewrites isn’t a spoiler on its own because long before the film gets to the August night when a group of Charles Manson’s followers murdered actress Sharon Tate and four other people, the movie has established a series of playful fabrications around its historical re-creations. Though the story includes plenty of real people — including Tate (Margot Robbie), her husband Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), members of their Hollywood social circle, and members of the Manson “family” — the movie’s two biggest characters are not available in historical accounts. Tarantino’s leads were inspired by a number of real-life sources, but Tate and Polanski did not actually live next door to a fading-star TV actor named Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) whose longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) has become an all-purpose handyman and valet as Rick’s career has downshifted.

Though Rick — and, by extension, the more laid-back Cliff — are stuck wondering whether there’s a place for their TV Western skill set in a changing Hollywood, Tarantino clearly feels right at home noodling around in 1969 Los Angeles. Despite his interest in toying with broader historical issues, the writer-director is still seen largely as a preserver, appreciator, and remixer of cinematic history, an image Once Upon a Time in Hollywood does not dispel. But it does further blur the lines between our reality and Tarantino’s fictions with a cheekiness that connects it to his alternate narratives about WWII and slavery.

In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino makes plenty of pop-culture references, sometimes to real shows (Green Acres and Kung Fu) and sometimes to fake entries in real genres. (Even in the world of the movie, the Charlie’s Angels ripoff Fox Force Five never got past the pilot stage.) Hollywood’s version of this involves more visual trickery, with actual scenes from Bounty Law, the fictional TV show that made Rick Dalton a semi-star, and digitally fudged scenes from real shows like FBI, where Rick books a guest-star gig a few years after Bounty Law is canceled. There are even snippets where Rick imagines himself into a scene in the real Steve McQueen movie The Great Escape, in a role he supposedly just missed out on.

Tarantino uses subtler visual tricks to rewrite history, too. At one point during an up-and-down day in the life of Rick, Cliff, and their neighbor Sharon, Rick is shooting a guest spot on a different TV Western (the real-life show Lancer, with actual actor James Stacy being played by neo-cowboy Timothy Olyphant). Tarantino shows the audience a substantial chunk of the episode as Rick shoots his scenes, but filming continues for an unnaturally long time, and Tarantino keeps the actual filmmaking apparatus — the cameras, crew, and director — off-screen as much as possible.

He’s not just showing the episode as it would look on the air, as he does elsewhere in the film. He plays the scene out as a continuous story, shot more or less the way Tarantino would shoot one of his movie Westerns, complete with gorgeous Robert Richardson cinematography and striking, deliberate camera angles that wouldn’t be a part of a typical ’60s television production. Eventually, though, Rick blows a line and the reality of his job intrudes.

Some of this trickery is doubtless for Tarantino’s amusement. (Supposedly, he’s written a small batch of full Bounty Law episodes and would love to shoot them with DiCaprio, though he concedes this is unlikely.) But it also forms a powerful thematic backbone in a movie that often ambles along delightfully. In one of its loveliest scenes, Robbie’s Tate impulsively decides to watch one of her own movies at a real theater. Robbie’s reactions, as she takes private satisfaction when her on-screen antics get laughs from the crowd, are beautifully acted. They’re also paired with images from The Wrecking Crew that don’t appear to be doctored to feature Robbie in place of her real-life character. Robbie’s Tate watches the real Sharon Tate on-screen, and the effect is strangely transporting.

Rick is less confident about his place in Hollywood. It’s a source of explicit anxiety. He mentions to Cliff early on that he bought his house early in his career to establish himself as a real Los Angeles resident, not someone who’s just visiting and renting. That unease informs his actions throughout the film, and it makes Sharon Tate’s unselfconscious lack of it feel like a relief. She’s still in the stage of career (or the state of mind) where she can look up at the screen and simply enjoy seeing herself in a movie. Tarantino isn’t just playing with his audience’s perception of reality; to varying degrees, he’s making that part of his characters’ experiences and psychology, too.

Of course, the characters aren’t aware of what happens to the real Sharon Tate and her friends on the evening of August 8th, 1969. When Once Upon a Time in Hollywood reaches that fateful night, it pulls an Inglourious Basterds, only more so. Basterds let its characters kill off Hitler a little early and end World War II. Hollywood has Rick unwittingly intercept the Manson flunkies, which changes their path. Instead of coming for Sharon Tate and company, they impulsively refocus on the pernicious influence of television and decide to kill the TV gunslinger instead.

At first, it seems like Tarantino is going to sacrifice Rick and Cliff so Sharon Tate can live. But while Tarantino is capable of mercilessness (see The Hateful Eight), he evidently cares too much about his characters here to sacrifice them. Rick and Cliff fight off their attackers, dispatching them with bursts of horror-movie gore. It’s a slasher movie in reverse, with the wannabe slashers subjected to gruesome “kills.” The fairy-tale title of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (imitating the prelude to Basterds, with its “once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France…”) turns out to be accurate: Tarantino, in the end, gives Cliff, Rick, and Sharon happy endings.

Cliff is physically wounded, but no one suffers emotionally. Even Rick, who is less of a fighting machine than his double, gets to live out his flamethrower-abetted Hollywood fantasies, emerging merely “shook up” and ready for a relaxing, possibly career-boosting drink with his neighbor Sharon and her friends. The movie ends with Rick and Sharon meeting, warmly, for the first time.

At first glance, this looks like grindhouse-seasoned wish-fulfillment, aiming for the same giddy liberation from textbook history that comes when Hitler is machine-gunned to death on-screen. (Although it’s also ickier to witness such brutal, gory justice meted out to impressionable young women, even bloodthirsty, fictionalized ones.) But as a culmination of the movie’s fantasy-reality blur, it’s more than a Basterds encore, just as Basterds itself was more than a violent revenge fantasy.

Even Tarantino’s most obviously pastiche-heavy films, like Kill Bill or Death Proof, tend to play fine on their own terms for his many fans who might not actually share any of his reference points. At the same time, even his most sincere moments are rarely too far from some kind of movie reference, whether subtle or explicit. But his historical revisions do feel like a reassertion that his movies have more to say than just regurgitating references. By and large, his messing with history is a successful story gambit, startling and satisfying.

And Tarantino’s other recent subjects now look eerily prescient. The Inglourious fight against fascism and Nazi-ism feels even more cathartic now than it did a decade ago. The uniquely American cocktail of racism, misogyny, and lies at the center of The Hateful Eight now plays like a lurid coming attraction for the presidential election that happened less than a year after its release.

Despite the climactic violence, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of Tarantino’s gentler efforts, and it’s less attuned than his other work to the way historical atrocities echo into our present and our future. He’s embedded in pop culture again, particularly the movies, looking at an event understood as a cultural turning point, and musing over whether that turning point could have been delayed or even avoided. By focusing on Hollywood, in particular, he avoids hoary “loss of innocence” narratives that risk sanitizing and romanticizing the past.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has its nostalgic elements, but what makes its low-key final moments oddly touching is the wistfulness over a sense of community. Rick wants the comfort and security Sharon has, things that were cruelly taken from her in real life. At first, this seems like he envies her youth or her promising career. But whether he fully realizes it or not, Rick is ultimately looking for a sense of belonging. Inglourious Basterds saw many of its heroic characters meet tragic ends, but it was also a tribute to the power of cinema, with its heroine’s head projected over the anti-Nazi violence like a vengeful ghost. Tarantino’s new movie believes in that power, too.

But even as he bends reality, his alterations to history don’t appear so supernatural this time. He recognizes that cinema’s power comes from people working together, helping and protecting each other. Hollywood is bloody and messy, but its aims are sweet, bordering on cornball. The fantasy it’s offering goes beyond the righting of a historical wrong. For a moment, Tarantino’s fairy-tale Hollywood looks like an unlikely American utopia.

The killer-alligator movie Crawl is a solid antidote for a disappointing movie summer

2019-07-13T14:30:00-04:00

As the line between film and television continues to blur, big-screen movies are still supposed to flaunt their scope. In a summer where plenty of would-be blockbusters are withering at the box office, and plenty of potential moviegoers seem to be staying home to watch Stranger Things, size and scale remain selling points for the theatrical experience. Avengers: Endgame hops around planets and time-streams. Men in Black: International zips between continents like a James Bond picture. Even your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man takes a whirlwind tour of Europe.

Some of these big-scope adventures do deliver the requisite cinematic thrills. But as plenty of blockbusters deflate into disappointment, a different sort of summer movie has been making headway. In the lackluster summer of 2016, The Shallows (in which a stranded Blake Lively matches wits with a shark) and Don’t Breathe (in which trapped young people match wits with a wily, murderous blind man) provided more efficient and consistent thrills than a lot of their super-sized, mega-budgeted counterparts. Call them limited-location thrillers. So far this summer, the limited-location thriller to beat is the underhyped Crawl, in which a hurricane-stranded Kaya Scodelario matches wits with a pack of alligators.

Crawl isn’t as well-crafted as either The Shallows or Don’t Breathe, though it shares a producer with the latter: Sam Raimi, whose first two Evil Dead movies are gonzo versions of the limited-location thriller. Hit-and-miss horror auteur Alexandre Aja knows how to deliver lean, mean horror action. Crawl is far less tongue-in-cheek than his Piranha remake, but it doesn’t build to a fever pitch or deliver dynamite setpieces.

It does, however, maintain its tension in a way that outshines many of this year’s summer thrill rides. The setup is an ingenious hybrid of disaster movie and creature feature: College student Haley (Scodelario) drives to her old family home in the midst of a hurricane to make sure her dad (Barry Pepper), who hasn’t been answering his phone, is safe. She finds him gator-bitten and unconscious, and as their house floods, she realizes the alligators are pouring in along with the rainwater. Father and daughter must avoid both drowning and massive alligator teeth; much of the movie’s 87 minutes takes place in the rapidly flooding house.

That limitation is a major asset. Crawl has plenty of computer effects, but unlike so many movies whose reach exceeds their effects budget (especially in disaster-movie circumstances that seemingly call for large-scale destruction), it doesn’t require its characters to spend the entire movie in front of obvious green screens in a desperate simulation of epic scope. The weather effects are obviously computerized, but the house itself is a real set, flooded with at least some real water. When Haley first ventures into the basement to find her dad, Aja plays up the muck, gunk, and early hints of gore for all they’re worth. Because the set dressing feels so tactile, the movie creates a genuine sense of atmosphere in a potentially generic setting.

Content to explore its small-scale setting, the movie never drifts off into location-hopping weightlessness as Haley swims, jumps, and, yes, crawls around various tight passages and makeshift waterways. When the alligator bites come, they feel especially toothsome thanks to practical gore effects, and the stuntwork creates a more believable athleticism for its character—much moreso than stars who must be replaced by a CGI wire-frame cartoon every time they do something superheroic. If Crawl doesn’t have a standout setpiece, it’s because the whole thing moves so quickly and efficiently.

This includes the obligatory emotional backstory, which is basically a feature-length version of the “gymnastics” foreshadowing involving Malcolm’s daughter in The Lost World. Haley is a competitive swimmer. (Guess what stroke she specializes in?) Her dad is her former coach who may have pushed her too hard. Of course a bizarrely coordinated alligator attack turns into a proving ground for her swim skills, and maybe even a catalyst for family healing. This is all about as corny as it sounds, but like The Shallows, Crawl treats its lead character’s boilerplate with dignity, anchored by Scodelario’s no-fuss lead performance. It’s silly, sure, but it also has a pleasing clarity — nothing in this movie feels like it was frantically and haphazardly rewritten in the editing room. Alligators chase a resourceful swimmer; what’s to rewrite?

Yet even the studios that make movies like Crawl don’t always seem to understand the relative blessings they have on their hands. In spite of Aja’s decent track record, his movie wasn’t widely screened for press. This seems especially strange in a week where extremely mixed reviews for the would-be spectacle and scope of The Lion King popped all across the internet. This summer in particular, no studio should be ashamed to release an unpretentious, well-paced bit of entertainment like Crawl — and audiences shouldn’t feel ashamed to leave the comfort of their homes to check it out.

The Art of Self-Defense functions like a 20-year anniversary remake of Fight Club

2019-07-10T13:10:05-04:00

In Riley Stearns’ new movie The Art of Self-Defense, a lonely, mild-mannered office drone has an experience that forces him to reevaluate his lowly place in a supposedly civilized society. He joins a group with a charismatic leader who encourages a reclamation of traditional masculinity built around boundary-breaking physical conflict. He meets a similarly minded woman and develops an unconventional, not-quite-romantic relationship with her. Eventually, he comes to suspect that the charismatic leader is using dangerous, extremist methods to further a megalomaniacal cause, leading to a final showdown. If this description sounds familiar without knowing anything more about this new film, you may have seen the movie Fight Club, which turns 20 this fall. At times, The Art of Self-Defense feels like an unofficial remake.

Stearns doesn’t explicitly position his new film as an answer to David Fincher’s cultishly beloved Chuck Palahniuk adaptation. For one thing, its gathering of desperate, lonely men is far more socially acceptable than the bare-knuckle brawling group in Fight Club. In Art of Self-Defense, the meek Casey (Jesse Eisenberg) simply joins a karate class at a local dojo, which is presided over by a quietly domineering sensei (Alessandro Nivola). Stearns also takes a more hushed, deadpan, small-scale approach to the material. He doesn’t ape Fincher’s wild stylizations, which include sardonic asides to the camera, dream-world hallucinations (like a detailed visualization of a plane crash), and heavy use of computer-animated procedural close-ups, like zooming into the guts of a stove to show the cause of an explosion.

But while he eschews flashy techniques, Stearns explores similar territory. He’s studying a man who has become frustrated by the fear and anxiety that accompanied his careful attempts to abide by society’s rules. Casey, like the unnamed narrator played by Edward Norton in Fight Club, lives sequestered from physical violence. Once it enters his world — through an assault on the street, rather than Norton’s what-the-hell initial dust-up with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) — he wants to participate. He’s eager to finally feel like a real man.

The two decades since Fight Club came out have somehow made Fincher’s film look both dated and prescient. 1999 was long enough ago — before the Bush, Obama, or Trump presidencies; before 9/11; before conversations about white fragility were so frequent or pointed — that it now seems downright quaint that so many movies of that era agonized so thoroughly over the dilemmas of straight, white, well-off men. (To viewers who don’t fit those categories — and empathetic viewers who do — “quaint” may not cover it; “eye-rollingly ridiculous” might.) Movies like Falling Down, Fight Club, and American Beauty have satirical dimensions and ultimately may not endorse their characters’ most selfish or entitled views. But they do share an implicit understanding that their protagonists’ feelings of alienation are well-founded.

In Art of Self-Defense, Kearns clearly understands that there’s something retrograde about that concern. Maybe that’s why he set it sometime close to Fight Club’s release. Just as Fincher’s film doesn’t name its primary setting, Self-Defense doesn’t offer a particular place or period. But judging by its computers (present, but not ubiquitous, and clunky), phones (answering machines are still around), and methods of congregation (in person; no Reddit forums or app-based group chats), it’s probably happening sometime in the back half of the ’90s. It’s a half-savvy, half-suspect way of making the sensei’s regressive views on gender and masculinity more believable, even as they’re issued with a cartoonish lack of subtlety.

The film’s deadpan style serves this purpose, too, foregrounding its absurdity. After the initial controversy about Fight Club’s violence and irreverence faded, it gained an appreciative following and became a case study in possible misinterpretation. The movie’s big twist about Tyler Durden’s identity works as a reversal in part because it coincides with the Narrator realizing how far “Tyler” has hardened his ethos into all-out fascism. For the first half of the movie, Tyler Durden can be read as a charismatic, funny badass. He’s constantly ready with a bromide about the glories of “hitting bottom” in a fearful, consumerist society — one he views as emasculating, rather than, say, inherently misogynistic. The revelation about him sharing a body and brain space with the Narrator is unnerving because, by that point in the film, he’s also more or less the bad guy.

Rewatching Fight Club in 2019, that reversal feels less revelatory, not least because Brad Pitt has become a stronger, quieter actor since then, throwing the intentional shallowness of his Tyler Durden into sharper relief. (It’s also possible that 20 years of life experience would make plenty of viewers less enamored of Durden’s proto-men’s rights stylings.) But given what we now know about incels, MRAs, and the increasing popularity of open fascism, it’s still easy to see how a certain audience will always be taken in by Palahniuk’s catchphrase-y, self-aggrandizing rhetoric.

This could be why The Art of Self-Defense lacks a Tyler Durden character. Nivola’s unnamed sensei has a certain intense charisma, but the movie observes it from a remove. Though Casey is a clear figure of audience identification and his seduction into the sensei’s world of steely masculinity and brute confidence is understandable, the sensei always looks a little silly from the outside. It’s hard to imagine anyone but the most deluded audience member ever mistaking him for a genuine iconoclast in the Tyler Durden vein. The character is slightly more dignified, and certainly more credibly sinister, than, say, Danny McBride’s character in the cringe comedy The Foot Fist Way. But he’s not far off.

Is this the future of satirizing toxic masculinity? Making sure that as many audience members as possible will understand that a toxic male character is meant to be foolish so they don’t ever get the wrong idea? (It is possible to get some kind of wrong idea about Nivola’s character, of course — Art of Self Defense has some sharp twists and turns — but Stearns never lets him read as particularly heroic.) Debate rages on over whether it’s better to explore the incel mentality in uncomfortable depth or stop giving aggrieved men so much attention. As recently as this spring, Under the Silver Lake was criticized both for glorifying its dirtbag male protagonist and for hammering home his toxicity too hard and too early.

But as similar as The Art of Self-Defense is to Fight Club in its aims and overall form, there’s no creative reason for it to do the same thing as its beloved predecessor, and it would be absurd to pretend nothing has changed in the 20 years since Fincher’s film. For that matter, Fight Club isn’t an unimpeachable work of satire. Though its narrator ultimately rejects Tyler’s reductive, destructive view of the world, his enhanced sense of empathy amounts to being less of a jerk to the one woman in his life at the last minute. The movie still springs from Tyler’s point of view, however roundabout a route it takes to get there. This makes the multiple-personality twist a rare instance of that trope being genuinely clever and thematically rich, even for those who see it coming.

Nothing in The Art of Self-Defense is so knotty, which makes it both a cleaner movie and a less interesting one. There’s less room for disastrous misinterpretation because it barely requires interpretation at all; superficially, the movie is disturbing, but its only real ambiguities are tangential mysteries over what it really thinks about gun culture. (The sensei, the movie’s scariest and most adamantly macho character, abhors them.) Stearns has made an exacting, funny, well-acted, and sometimes bruising film, but it’s also one that feels like a closed system, unlikely to warp anyone’s thinking or produce a checkered, hotly debated legacy. Fight Club’s moment may have passed, but the movie itself lingers like a scar. It may take another 20 years to figure out whether that’s better or worse.