Based on the 1955 C. S. Forester novel The Good Shepherd, Greyhound stars Tom Hanks as Commander Ernest Krause, a steely World War II Navy captain leading up an Allied convoy through the treacherous “Black Pit” of the Atlantic Ocean. Surrounded on all sides by Nazi U-boats, Krause and the men aboard the USS Keeling are threatened day and night by enemy ships outside of their line of sight. We see the Battle of the Atlantic through the eyes of the intrepid US soldiers as they fend off the German fleets and courageously make their way to the ports of Liverpool.

This is hardly Hanks’ first involvement in a WWII project. As the lead in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and executive producer for HBO miniseries Band of Brothers and The Pacific, he’s been behind some of the best depictions of the War on both the big and small screen. It’s strange, then, that he would come to the well once more for a film that’s so under the pedigree of his previous work. Hanks not only stars in the film but also translated Forester’s book into a screenplay that reads more like an instruction manual for how to steer a boat rather than a script for a feature film.

Ultimately, it’s Greyhound‘s strict adherence to accurate wartime jargon and seaman’s parlance that sinks it. Certainly realism and authenticity are qualities worth aspiring to but not at the expense of fleshed-out characters and compelling dialogue. Often times, it feels like Hanks threw naval buzzwords like “bearing”, “rudder” and “starboard” into a bingo cage, spun it around and penned the selections. Attempts at character development, like a miscalculated flashback to Krause’s love interest played by Elisabeth Shue, fall well short of what we need to emotionally invest in the largely nameless members of the crew. While the film’s impressive action sequences are all well-shot and tightly edited, they could just as easily appear in any other seabound war picture.

The direction by Aaron Schneider is so workmanlike, it makes Ron Howard seem quirky by comparison. Take away the opening and closing credit sequences and the film barely crosses the 80 minute mark. Each extended siege is solemnly bookended with fadeouts to title cards with the times and locations of the major portions of the mission. Even though Schneider has the ability to show us at least some of the enemy’s perspective, he locks his focus on the members of the Greyhound as the supposedly tense scenes of conflict boil down to Krause barking out commands and underlings scribbling down coordinates. Composer Blake Neely tries to juice things up with a predictably bombastic score but the film works best in the quieter moments, especially when one of the Nazi U-boat captains known as Grey Wolf taunts the Greyhound crew with antagonistic rhetoric via radio.

It’s not difficult to see what would draw Hanks to this role, as it’s squarely within his well-defined wheelhouse of All-American heroes like Captain Phillips and Captain Sully. While arguably no one does it better than he does, I’d like to see Hanks step a bit outside of his comfort zone more often at this stage in his career. Perhaps someone could take a crack at writing a believable antagonist role for arguably the most likable actor in Hollywood history. Even with a sturdy performance at the helm, Hanks’ star power alone isn’t enough to keep Greyhound afloat.

Score – 2/5

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

As anyone who’s gone through months of quarantine (basically all of us, at this point) will tell you, it has a way of distorting one’s perception of time. With the removal of structured tasks like work and social outings, the “Blursday” phenomenon can make us feel that we’re living the same day over and over again with no end in sight. Given that so many of us can now relate to this purgatorial condition, it perhaps couldn’t be a better time for a time loop comedy like Palm Springs to come along and help us make sense of and maybe even make light of our “quarantine blues”. When Neon and Hulu struck a $17.5 million deal for the film at Sundance earlier this year, there’s no way they could have realized how apropos it would ultimately be upon its release.

Andy Samberg stars as Nyles, a seemingly carefree slacker whose loud Hawaiian shirt shouts “I don’t care” but disaffected disposition points to something a bit darker. “Today, yesterday, tomorrow — it’s all the same,” he murmurs blithely from a pizza-shaped pool float the morning of a Palm Springs wedding. It turns out, his words are more literal than it sounds, as Nyles has actually relived this exact day more times than he can remember. The twist on the Groundhog Day conceit comes in the form of maid of honor Sarah (Cristin Milioti), who becomes stuck in the perpetual time loop with Nyles after an unforeseen incident binds their fates. With nothing but time on their hands, the two work together to absolve themselves from their temporal dilemma.

Director Max Barbakow and screenwriter Andy Siara know they’re in familiar territory here but one of the many joys of watching Palm Springs is seeing how fresh a perspective the pair can graft onto this formula. By making a couple go through the broken record routine as opposed to one person alone, the film investigates the prospects of a romantic relationship in a time warp that continually resets. The story serves as a multi-faceted metaphor for monogamy, making literal the sentiment that two people can live forever in their own shared reality apart from the rest of the clueless world. In this way, the film reminded me often of all-time great Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in the way it explores how time interacts with romance in unexpectedly complicated ways.

While the performances in Palm Springs might not quite be up to the caliber of Carrey’s and Winslet’s in Spotless Mind, they’re not as far off as one may anticipate. Samberg starts off in familiar goofball territory but it doesn’t take long before he adds layers of anxiety and grief to really sell the experience of a man caught up in his distressing scenario. Milioti is even better as a sardonic match for Samberg’s wise-cracking Nyles as she slowly unpacks the stages of existential dread in the funniest way possible. Elsewhere, the always fantastic J.K. Simmons turns in another excellent supporting performance as a fellow wedding guest who adds even more wisdom and emotional intelligence to an uncommonly perceptive movie.

“Uncommonly perceptive” is not a descriptor I would have necessarily expected to apply to a product of The Lonely Island, the comedy trio Samberg created with two fellow SNL alums Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. The minds behind frivolous cult comedies like Hot Rod and MacGruber have seemingly matured enough to craft something this simultaneously thoughtful and hilarious. If you’re familiar with the trio’s brand of humor and come into the film with the understanding of how much pranking and mischief two people could get up to in this sci-fi synopsis, then you may have a picture of just how entertaining the film ultimately becomes. Palm Springs is a melancholy and mordantly funny meditation on what it means to grow together with someone in a world that seems doomed to repeat its past failures.

Score – 4.5/5

Also streaming this weekend:
Available on Apple+ is Greyhound, a war movie starring Tom Hanks and Stephen Graham about an inexperienced U.S. Navy captain whose Allied convoy is being pursued by a fleet of Nazi U-boats.
Available on demand is First Cow, an indie drama from writer/director Kelly Reichardt starring John Magaro and Toby Jones about a cook who travels with fur trappers to 19th century Oregon.
Available on Netflix is The Old Guard, a superhero film starring Charlize Theron and KiKi Layne about a group of centuries-old immortal mercenaries who are suddenly exposed and must fight to keep their identity a secret.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

When Jon Stewart closed out his 16-year run as the host of The Daily Show in 2015, his departure sparked many questions about what he would do next in his career. Outside of his admirable advocacy and activism on behalf of 9/11 first responders, Stewart has largely spent the past 5 years staying out of the limelight entirely, opting for the quieter life on his secluded New Jersey farm. Alas, the satirist extraordinaire finally emerges as the director and sole credited writer of Irresistible, a toothless and tired political comedy which lacks the deft hand and finger-on-the-pulse urgency that Stewart displayed on each episode of his 22 Emmy award-winning show.

Daily Show alum Steve Carell stars as Gary Zimmer, a political strategist for the DNC who is shell-shocked by the results of the 2016 presidential election. Desperately looking for a rebound for the Democratic party, he finds a town hall video of retired Marine colonel Jack Hastings (Chris Cooper) making an impassioned plea for the undocumented workers of his small town of Deerlaken, WI. Zimmer sees in Hastings an opportunity to restore the recently-decimated Blue Wall and upon meeting him, he convinces Hastings to run for mayor in a historically Republican-run city. Zimmer’s efforts to prop up a burgeoning Democrat in the Heartland catches the attention of RNC consultant Faith Brewster (Rose Byrne) and with the power of Super PACs and wealthy donors behind both candidates, the mayoral race soon becomes headline news.

The overall form of Irresistible is nothing we haven’t seen before: a fish out of water story about a city slicker (a DC insider, in this case) who is forced to mingle with “normal folk” and in doing so, finds out he’s more out of touch than he realized. Where Stewart looks to distinguish his tale is in its lambasting of our broken political system and while he does land a few zingers that cut to the core of the dysfunction, so much of the humor is either too dated or too broad to resonate. Stewart made a name for himself sharply deriding the news media for their bias towards conflict and sensationalism, so it’s a bit of a letdown when his most cutting criticism on the subject this time around involves 12 talking heads bickering at each other simultaneously.

When he does take aim at the folly of the modern electoral process from the tedium of focus groups to the influence of big data, Stewart simply doesn’t offer as much fresh insight as he thinks he does. But the biggest issues with Irresistible don’t reveal themselves until the miserably contrived third act, where the lynchpin argument for campaign finance reform is clumsily unpacked upon the already ridiculously far-fetched plot. Even more insulting are the unfunny tacked-on fake-out credits in the vein of 2018’s Vice and then a mid-credit interview in which Stewart literally grills former FEC chairman Trevor Potter about the plausibility of the events that he just laid out before his audience.

Despite the self-aggrandizement and sermonizing, it would be a lie to say that the film doesn’t score some laughs despite itself. In the arena of more broad humor, Carell and Byrne fare much better with their playfully profane banter as they gleefully cross party lines. Perhaps the funniest lines come at the end of the fake campaign ads, which are paid for by faux special interest groups like Powerful Progressives For Strength and Wisconsinites For Religiously Based Compassionate Empathy. Stewart is a fine satirist, an underrated interviewer and an effective activist but based on Irresistible, he has a way to go as a filmmaker.

Score – 2/5

Also new to streaming this weekend:
Available on Netflix is Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, a comedy starring Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams about a pair of Icelandic singers who compete on behalf of their country in the titular music competition.
Available on Amazon Prime is My Spy, an action comedy starring Dave Bautista and Chloe Coleman about a CIA agent who finds himself at the mercy of a precocious 9-year-old girl of a family that he and his tech support is surveilling undercover.
Available on demand is Run with the Hunted, a crime drama starring Sam Quartin and Ron Perlman about a woman who becomes determined to track down the boy who saved her life as a child and then disappeared.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Debuting at the Sundance Film Festival this past January, the piercing new biopic Shirley stars Elisabeth Moss in the titular role as iconoclast 1950s author Shirley Jackson. Holed up with her viciously judgmental and ostensibly supportive professor husband Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg), Jackson is plagued with anxiety and agoraphobia while attempting to complete her next piece of visionary horror fiction. Her tenuous creative process is interrupted when Stanley’s student Fred (Logan Lerman) and his new wife Rose (Odessa Young) enter their lives and their home to stay for the summer. Cohabitation tensions emerge between the middle-aged intellectuals and the young newlyweds as the couples verbally spar amid the backdrop of an oppressively sweltering summer heat.

Following up her audacious coming-of-age drama Madeline’s Madeline, director Josephine Decker tightens up her experimental approach a bit to fit this comparatively more straight-forward narrative. But just because she’s working within a well-worn genre doesn’t mean she isn’t able to find plenty of spots to intersperse her expressive style and unique vision. Along with cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, Decker creates a claustrophobic and clammy atmosphere where the walls and ceilings audibly hiss with decay both day and night. At times, Grøvlen’s woozy camera seems to amble from one room to the next in order to capture interactions ranging from terse conversations to drunken attempts at flirtation.

Given its focus on two intergenerational couples intermingling while under one roof, the bones of this prickly psychodrama closely resemble those of the classic play/film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Adapting the fictional novel Shirley by Susan Scarf Merrell, screenwriter Sarah Gubbins peppers her script with dyspeptic dialogue that may turn audiences off but nevertheless feels true to Jackson’s essence. While attending a drab party, Jackson sarcastically quips “what a lovely insouciant tone you have!” to a woman she suspects is having an affair with her husband. Recalling her work on the Alex Ross Perry collaborations Queen of Earth and last year’s Her Smell, Moss proves that no actress can inject verbal barbs with quite as much venom as she can.

However, Moss’ work here is much more than an assemblage of nasty exchanges. As Jackson, Moss gives a fierce and full-bodied performance that recalls Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning turn in the literary biopic Capote. She’s introduced to us at the center of a semi-circle of eager fans, with a cigarette in one hand and scotch in the other, and it’s made clear that Jackson’s work has a way of casting a dark spell on all who take it in — Rose even says Jackson’s The Lottery made her feel “thrillingly horrible.” Moss sells the writer’s insecurities and idiosyncrasies perfectly, right up to the transcendent final scene that beautifully summarizes the creative process.

Moss will likely get most of the accolades from an acting perspective but I was just as taken with Odessa Young’s work as a stifled wild spirit waiting to be unleashed. As the film progresses, Rose starts to take on Shirley’s cadence and persona and the performances of Moss and Young begin to mirror each other in fascinating ways. Young’s measured transition from straight-laced housewife to liberated freethinker is truly mesmerizing to watch and one of the film’s biggest delights. A biopic about a shut-in during a humid summer may not be ideal escapist entertainment given the current world circumstances but nevertheless, Shirley is a delightfully off-kilter portrait of a similarly anomalous author.

Score – 3.5/5

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup