Greyhound

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Greyhound

There’s something not quite right with the new World War II action film Greyhound. There are numerous thrilling moments contained in its taught, 91-minute runtime, to be sure. I lost count of the number of times an image, or a sound, or a stunning sequence of battleships in action gave me chills. The problem is, all those individual moments never add up to a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

I felt what star/screenwriter Tom Hanks – this is the third feature-film screenplay from America’s Dad, after That Thing You Do and Larry Crowne – and director Aaron Schneider were trying to give me: a tense, non-stop thrill ride of a war film that’s lean on plot and packed with heart-stopping adventure. But it’s a little too flimsy on plot – one inexplicable scene actually highlights this fact – and the action, while quite rousing in brief moments, is too mired in CGI and rain-soaked scenery. The exciting effect is fleeting at best.

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Blessed Child

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Blessed Child

Journalist and short-film producer Cara Jones chose as her first feature-length film to explore intensely personal subject matter in the documentary Blessed Child. Jones serves as the director, co-writer, and central subject in a film that documents her long process of walking away from her religion – what she now regards as a cult – while struggling to not do the same thing to her family. The film is a good first effort and is told in such a personal way that it couldn’t have been made by anyone else. The director’s unique perspective on the life she abandoned is the movie’s greatest strength.

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Palm Springs

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Palm Springs

“It’s one of those infinite time loop situations you might have heard about.”

Yes, I just spoiled the biggest plot surprise of Palm Springs, the new romcom starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti. Luckily – both for me and the film’s marketing push (the trailer also spills the big secret) – this charming and wacky movie has plenty more going for it.

Palm Springs is a delightful reworking of the central conceit of the Bill Murray/Andie MacDowell movie Groundhog Day, in which Murray’s character is doomed to relive the exact same day over and over and over until fate/karma/the universe decides he has grown enough as a human being to be let out of his hellish purgatory. What sets Palm Springs apart is that this time, two characters – really three, but I’ll get there – go through the experience together, and it leans into the raw nihilism with which Groundhog Day only briefly flirted.

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The Assistant

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The Assistant

The most striking thing about The Assistant is its utter lack of sensationalism. Director Kitty Green’s fiction-film debut – the Aussie filmmaker has focused on documentaries until now – is a #MeToo movement/post-Weinstein reckoning that focuses not on monstrous acts of depravity, but mundane workday events. It also details the insidious protection of power that allows for abuse to happen.

The film can work as a sort of litmus test. This is a movie that is far removed from the sort of sickening specifics of Harvey Weinstein’s predations as detailed in dozens of news stories. For a viewer who isn’t paying close attention, for one who doesn’t understand how a toxic work culture operates, one could think nothing that happens in the movie is all that disturbing. That’s the real horror of Green’s picture and what makes it so effective. It’s the quiet things, the knowing jokes and the looking-the-other-way, that keeps real accountability from happening.

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The Vast of Night

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The Vast of Night

With his debut feature, The Vast of Night, first-time director Andrew Patterson made me feel the way I felt the first time I saw Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Patterson’s movie isn’t as polished as Close Encounters. It’s much smaller in scale and resources. Patterson, who self-funded Vast of Night with money from his television commercial production company, made the movie on a micro-budget of $700,000 over four weeks. Still, there is a sense of awe and wonder to the picture that put me in mind of Close Encounters. It’s a stunning first effort.

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100 Essential Films: 9. Gone with the Wind

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100 Essential Films: 9. Gone with the Wind

Film number nine in my 100 Essential Films Series (if you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here) has been staring me in the face for awhile now. The four-hour run time alone was a little daunting. But, with the current political, social, and cultural climate, I decided it was time to tackle Gone with the Wind. It’s the last movie in a trio of them from 1939, one of the greatest years in movie history. This was a first viewing for me, aside from feeling like I knew almost everything about it via cultural osmosis. I watched it through the streaming service Vudu, and the digital transfer looked gorgeous. Too bad the film’s actual content doesn’t match the visuals.

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Da 5 Bloods

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Da 5 Bloods

“Green is more important than black.” So says one of the villains of Da 5 Bloods in an exchange that leads to the movie’s action-spectacle climax. The green that the character is referring to is money – in the form of hundreds of gold bars. Da 5 Bloods is a Spike Lee joint, so it’s easy to guess what the character means when he says black. Black skin, black pride, black power, black anger. Like almost all of his work, Lee’s film is brimming with unique observations and perspectives about the black experience. This time he’s focusing on the Vietnam War, the conflict in which a disproportionate number of black men were sent to fight and die even as the struggle for black civil rights was raging at home.

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Shirley

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Shirley

In the opening scenes of Shirley, central character and audience surrogate Rose Nemser meets the writer Shirley Jackson at a house party. Rose and her husband, Fred, will be houseguests of Jackson and her husband, literary critic and Bennington College English professor Stanley Edgar Hyman, while the newlywed Nemsers look for their own place. Fred has just accepted a job in the English department at Bennington, and Stanley is to be Fred’s mentor.

Upon their meeting at the party, Rose compliments Shirley’s recently published short story, The Lottery. She tells Shirley that reading it “made me feel thrillingly horrible.” There is no more apt description for my own emotional state while watching Shirley. It is a thrillingly horrible experience, perhaps the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. Any fan of Shirley Jackson’s work should be entranced by it.

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Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics

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Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics

There’s a section of the new(ish, I’ll get to that soon) Netflix documentary, Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, that discusses the all-important set and setting concept. It has to do with the state of mind a person is in before they embark on an experience with hallucinogenic drugs. Focusing on a positive mindset (set) and putting oneself in a comfortable setting with people one trusts makes it much more likely that one will have a good experience on the drug. The same basic idea is true of watching the documentary, too. To use the parlance of someone you might score psychedelic mushrooms from at a Grateful Dead tribute band concert: Don’t let any negative vibes near your aura while you watch it, man, or you’ll, like, be in for a real bad time.

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Spaceship Earth

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Spaceship Earth

Just about every person who participated in the Biosphere 2 experiment -- and subsequently the new documentary about it, called Spaceship Earth -- talks about the scientific goals of their undertaking. As noble as these scientific aspirations were for the project, it’s pretty clear that they were secondary to more emotional and psychological interests. One of the eight members who volunteered to live inside an airlock-sealed facility for two years -- they called themselves biospherians -- recalls her first thoughts just after the door to the outside world was shut and locked on day one. She describes turning on the rain in the vegetation section of the biosphere and gaining a sense of peacefulness. She wanted to wash the air, to wash out the impurities of the world she left behind and "begin anew." She soon discovers, as do we, that it's not easy to begin anew when messy interpersonal human dynamics are involved.

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What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael

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What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael

The main issue I have with Rob Garver’s documentary about Pauline Kael, arguably the most influential film critic ever to write about movies, is that it’s too reverential of its subject. In Garver’s film, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, we do get the warts, but they’ve been airbrushed, even if only slightly. The film also tries to pack an entire lifetime into its 100 minutes, which often gives the feeling of rushing through the major events of Kael’s life.

Those few reservations aside, What She Said is a consistently entertaining and enlightening look at Kael. Every person – this writer most certainly included – wrestling with their movie obsession, as well as the movies themselves, owes her a great debt.

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Capital in the Twenty-First Century

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Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“The problem is concentration of ownership…” The entirety of French economist Thomas Piketty’s argument about what’s wrong with our society and how to fix it can be boiled down to those six words. Obviously, that’s an oversimplification, and Piketty’s nearly 700-page examination of wealth and income inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, goes into exhaustive detail on the subject. It was published in the original French in 2013, and the English translation released in 2014 reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list a month after publication. New Zealander filmmaker Justin Pemberton has turned the tome into an eye-opening, and at times a rather eye-popping, new documentary.

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Color Out of Space

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Color Out of Space

I came for Nicolas Cage, I stayed for Richard Stanley. In the newest adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft tale, Color Out of Space proves itself to be a delightful throwback to horror movies in the vein of Event Horizon and the original The Evil Dead. It’s a well-paced, atmospheric shocker that entertains as it horrifies.

Set on a rural farm on the east coast, Color Out of Space centers on the Gardner family. Husband and wife Nathan and Theresa have moved their three kids, teenagers Lavinia and Benny and younger son Jack, to Nathan’s father’s old farm. It’s a classic getting-out-of-the-rat-race setup, with the characters all making adjustments to their new lives.

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Life After Flash

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Life After Flash

“Flash! AH-AH!” Like millions of other movie fans my age, I grew up watching (and watching, and watching, courtesy of my parents’ HBO subscription) the 1980 cheese-fest Flash Gordon. The movie was a cash-grab attempt by producer Dino De Laurentiis to capitalize on the success of a little movie called Star Wars. Ironically, George Lucas’s original idea was to make a Flash Gordon film, but when De Laurentiis wouldn’t sell him the rights, Lucas went off and created the Star Wars universe instead.

The star of the De Laurentiis produced and Mike Hodges directed Flash Gordon was Sam J. Jones, a relative unknown in Hollywood. The sci-fi spectacle about a New York Jets quarterback who travels to another planet in order to save Earth from a sadistic despot was only the actor’s second credit after the Blake Edwards comedy 10. The documentary Life After Flash covers the production, release, and legacy of Flash Gordan as well as Jones’s ups and downs in life following his big break portraying the comic strip hero.

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Never Rarely Sometimes Always

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Never Rarely Sometimes Always

Never Rarely Sometimes Always (NRSA) is the kind of stripped down, deeply personal filmmaking that is a worthy successor to the independent cinema of someone like John Cassavetes. That director’s work on films like A Woman Under the Influence, Faces, and Shadows emphasized naturalistic performances and a gritty realism born of their limited budgets. In Never Rarely Sometimes Always, director Eliza Hittman focuses on a young girl with few options and little support while dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. The film is filled with grace and compassion; it’s a luminous example of humanism in art.

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Selah and the Spades

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Selah and the Spades

There is one scene in Selah and the Spades that gets to the root of writer/director Tayarisha Poe’s tale of control and the damage caused by an insatiable thirst for power. It comes late in the film, and it’s between the titular high school senior Selah and her young protégé, Paloma. It’s a test of loyalty. Selah’s unrivaled power as the head of the Spades is in question. The Spades is the most powerful of the five factions – think the five families in The Godfather – serving up every vice you could think of to the students of a well-to-do Pennsylvania boarding school.

Selah asks Paloma to prove her fealty. The scene perfectly captures – in no small part thanks to the performance of Lovie Simone, who plays Selah – just how drunk our hero is on her own power. We see Paloma in the next scene, walking in a daze with bloody knuckles. She has done what Selah asked. She has, in this moment, anyway, passed the test.

If only the rest of Selah and the Spades was as focused and compelling as that one scene.

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Atlantics (Atlantique)

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Atlantics (Atlantique)

Atlantics is a ghost story that weaves themes like economic inequality and crushing poverty into its romantic drama plot. That may seem overwhelming, but it never is in the hands of writer and director Mati Diop. This is Diop’s feature film directorial debut, and the incredible atmospheric tone of her picture, mixed with the rich subject matter, make Atlantics an indelible storytelling experience. Diop now holds the distinction as the first black woman ever to direct a film included in competition at the Cannes film festival. That’s no doubt a consequence of the festival’s past organizers overlooking many other deserving filmmakers, but Diop is a hell of an artist. Her movie is a great achievement; one that earned this bit of filmmaking history.

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Human Nature (2020)

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Human Nature (2020)

You can take the title of the documentary Human Nature as a reference to a few different ideas the film raises. Probably the most apparent – especially after you’ve seen the movie – is the way a recent and revolutionary scientific discovery brings with it the ability for the human species to alter our very nature, what makes us human. I took it as a nod to our one unique trait, the thing that has caused all of our triumphs and pain. Our human nature is defined by our complex brains and our endless quest for discovery and knowledge about how the universe works. That knowledge, as one man puts it in archival footage of a scientific conference that opens the film, can be used either “for deliverance, or equally for disaster.”

Human Nature is a thought-provoking film that is by turns wondrous and terrifying.

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Swallow

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Swallow

There are perhaps three scenes in the film Swallow that actually achieve an emotional truth that resonated with me. They all feature the main character, Hunter, and her interactions with people trying to help her. Two of those scenes are between Hunter and her therapist. One takes place under a bed. Hunter has crawled under it to escape the world. Richie, Hunter’s husband, along with his parents, have hired Luay, a caretaker from Damascus, to look after Hunter. Luay crawls under the bed with her to make sure she’s alright and to keep her company. These scenes made me believe the connections between the characters within them.

The rest of the movie is filled with interactions I didn’t believe for a second.

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100 Essential Films: 8. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

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100 Essential Films: 8. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

The theater closures and new release postponements caused by the coronavirus pandemic have affected my review release schedule. Because the local release of the movie I was going to write about this week has been indefinitely pushed back, I’ve been asked to hold onto my review of it until it opens here in Dallas. So, I’ve decided to take a look at the next film in my ongoing 100 Essential Films series. If you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here.

Film number eight is the second in a trio of films from 1939, a banner year for movies. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the second entry in the series from director Frank Capra (the first was It Happened One Night).

This one was a first viewing for me. While I didn’t respond to it quite as positively as I would have guessed based on its reputation, I did admire the cast, Capra’s direction, and some of the plot elements. Like every other film in the series so far, I borrowed a Blu-ray through intra-library loan (thankfully I got it before our library shut down due to a city ordinance to combat coronavirus).

I suspect this might be the first movie to showcase the proverbial “smoke-filled back room,” where political deals are hashed out among power brokers. I’m not sure, though. I haven’t had much time to do research, as I’m focusing on my social distancing. Stay safe out there!

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