Monthly Archives: June 2023

Reel Views, Review

Asteroid City

Wes Anderson is the type of director whose work is so firmly situated in the cultural consciousness that even those who have only seen one or two of his films can immediately recognize his style. Over the years, parodies of Anderson doing X-Men or a horror movie have popped up on YouTube and SNL and more recently, AI has been used to create fake trailers for Star Wars and Lord of the Rings in Anderson’s emblematic style. The question around Asteroid City, the latest from the oft-caricatured auteur, is whether Anderson would drastically change things up to keep audiences guessing or continue with the muted and mannered methodology to which viewers have become accustomed. For the most part, Anderson plays to his strengths in terms of aesthetic and tone but the difference here is in the richness of emotions from the film’s panoply of characters.

Set within a play of the same name, Asteroid City takes place in a fictional desert settlement named after a meteorite that landed thousands of years ago and created a crater where a science fair is now held annually. Rolling into town for the 1955 Junior Stargazer Convention are five teenaged honorees, there to show off their impressive retrofuturistic inventions, along with their respective families. Fittingly, one of the teenagers, Woodrow Steenbeck (Jake Ryan), is nicknamed “Brainiac” and brings with him his photographer father Augie (Jason Schwartzman) and three sisters. He strikes up a fast friendship with fellow Stargazer Dinah Campbell (Grace Edwards), whose actress mother Midge (Scarlett Johansson) similarly begins a relationship with the recently-widowed Augie.

Being a Wes Anderson movie, Asteroid City additionally boasts dozens of other eccentric players and ornate vignettes to detail this world-within-a-world. He’s assembled impressive casts before but this may be Anderson’s most stacked ensemble to date; when superstars like Tom Hanks and Steve Carell pop up only for a few scenes each, seemingly because the film is already bursting at the seams with talent, it becomes even more apparent the embarrassment of riches this project has become. The sheer amount of familiar faces, which also includes Anderson stalwarts like Jeffrey Wright and Tilda Swinton, may connote that these characters are disposable or replaceable but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Some of their stories are funny and some of them are sad but they’re all interesting and would be worth diving into on their own terms.

The writing in Anderson’s work is often droll and direct, ripe for satire but also whip smart and difficult to emulate authentically. Asteroid City has several trademark pithy exchanges, the first conversation over phone between Augie and his father-in-law being a clear example, but over time, the dialogue becomes more reflective and introspective. The play can be seen both as a Cold War parable and a pandemic allegory, where isolation and fear underscore human’s desperate need for connection. Augie and Midge’s tryst is fueled by conversations between open windows in adjacent motel rooms, their framing resembling the video chat confines of computer screens. When juxtaposed with an alley-set chat between the actor playing Augie and the actress that was to portray Augie’s wife, Anderson’s comment seems to be that people will cross any barriers to carry out meaningful conversation.

If things in Asteroid City weren’t metatextual enough, there is another layer of artifice by way of a TV show narrated with Rod Serling-like candor by Bryan Cranston about how the play was performed. Though these scenes are in black-and-white and in a markedly different aspect ratio than the Panavision widescreen used for the play itself, it can be tricky keeping track of what world we’re in when. Cranston’s character even pops up briefly in one of the full-color scenes by accident, only to slyly slink away back to his own universe. Despite these veneers of unreality, Anderson is careful never to lose the thread of why each of these characters matter and why we should care about them. That’s a breakthrough worth celebrating for a filmmaker who has, from time to time in his stellar career, favored cerebral flourish over genuine sentiment.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, an action-adventure sequel starring Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge which concludes the 5-film arc of the titular archaeologist as he teams up with his goddaughter to retrieve a legendary artifact that can change the course of history.
Also coming to the multiplex is Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, an animated fantasy comedy starring Lana Condor and Toni Collette about a shy teenager who learns that she comes from a fabled royal family of legendary sea krakens and that her destiny lies in the depths of the waters.
Streaming on Netflix is Run Rabbit Run, a psychological horror film starring Sarah Snook and Lily LaTorre following a fertility doctor who must challenge her own values and confront a ghost from her past after noticing the strange behavior of her young daughter.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

No Hard Feelings

The predictable but reliably funny sex comedy No Hard Feelings stars Jennifer Lawrence as Maddie, a thirtysomething Uber driver who’s in a bit of a pickle after her car is repossessed. While working her second job, Maddie’s co-worker friend Sarah (Natalie Morales) finds an ad offering a used Buick to anyone who will date their 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). Desperate to dig her way out of bankruptcy, Maddie meets with Percy’s parents to accept the job and attempt to drag the awkward Percy out of his cocoon of video games and online interactions. Maddie’s early seductive passes at Percy evolve into dates that grow more meaningful and suggest that the two may have a genuine connection beyond the covert agreement between Maddie and Percy’s parents.

If the premise of No Hard Feelings feels refreshing, it speaks not to its inherent originality and more to how out of fashion raunchy romantic comedies have become in recent years. What makes this film slightly more progressive than past compeers like The Girl Next Door or She’s Out Of My League is that here, the female lead is the one calling the shots and it’s the male co-star who plays the ingenue. It’s also a tricky needle to thread to be crude but not offensive, shocking but not problematic. While the movie tends to be more on the safe side, save a few scenes that intended to provoke a reaction, director and co-writer Gene Stupnitsky finds a nice rhythm and balance between laughs and pathos. Like his similarly foul-mouthed Good Boys, the runtime here is also under 100 minutes, a brisk respite from the scourge of overstuffed outings.

After moving on from the Hunger Games and X-Men franchises, Lawrence took a short hiatus from the limelight but her return in last year’s Causeway and now No Hard Feelings remind us why she became so popular in the first place. Maddie is certainly rough around the edges and could be seen as objectionable for taking up the unsavory offer to “educate” a young man before he heads off to Princeton. But Lawrence hits the right notes with her licentious heroine, obviously able to pull off sexpot allure with aplomb but also unafraid to lean into the physical comedy, even when it gets ugly. The trailers have highlighted a moment where Maddie crawls on all fours crying after getting maced by a terrified Percy but a beach-set scene shortly after takes the cake in terms of no holds barred slapstick performance. You’ll know it when you see it.

Similar to his character, Feldman is more reserved earlier on in his performance and comes out of his shell as No Hard Feelings progresses. He pushes things a bit too far in the third act, in terms of how much his character changes, but the film’s mid-section allows for a burgeoning vulnerability to bring Percy to a sweet spot in terms of characterization. Feldman is also able to lend his musical theater bonafides to the role — he also played the title role in the hit musical Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway — during a restaurant scene that adds some nice dimension to his loner character. Feldman also has some well-handled scenes with his parents, played by Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick, with the presence of the latter inspiring an inevitable Ferris Bueller’s Day Off riff towards the film’s conclusion.

As is often the case for rom-coms, the weak spot for No Hard Feelings comes with its plotting and the necessary contrivances that keep the narrative moving but simply don’t reflect real life. If you’ve ever seen a movie like this before, where characters make a secret plan that keeps one of the central protagonists in the dark, then nearly nothing about the second half of this film will be surprising to you. For as many hard-earned laughs as Stupnitsky and co-writer John Phillips work into the screenplay, I wish they could have come up with something in terms of story that wasn’t so well-worn. This is a comedy that relies mainly on the timing and chemistry of its two stars and that’s where the majority of its successes lie. No Hard Feelings is hardly a revelatory raunch-com but in its attempt to revive a stagnant genre, it rises to the occasion.

Score – 3/5

More movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Asteroid City, a sci-fi dramedy starring Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johansson following a writer as he stages his world famous fictional play about a grieving father, while traveling with his tech-obsessed family to small rural city to compete in a stargazing event.
Also playing in theaters is God Is A Bullet, an action thriller starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Maika Monroe about a detective who takes matters into his own hands when he finds his ex-wife murdered and his daughter kidnapped by an insidious cult.
Streaming on Netflix is The Perfect Find, a romantic comedy starring Gabrielle Union and Keith Powers involving a career woman who transitions from the fashion industry to beauty journalism and subsequently falls for her boss’s son.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

The Flash

Arriving with not-so-lightning speed towards the end of the DC Extended Universe’s cinematic run, The Flash is a project that’s technically been in the works since the 1980s and is finally bolting into theaters. Based around the lauded Flashpoint comic book storyline, the movie’s narrative integrates time travel and multiverses in ways that should be inspired but ultimately end up just creating a confusing mess. Even if one goes into the film with knowledge of the myriad storylines from this Universe, along with general knowledge from other superhero lore, there’s a good chance audience members will have issues keeping up with the leaps in continuity and logic that this film makes. Despite some winning performances and some of the most consistent humor in a DCEU entry so far, The Flash is too little too late.

The Flash opens with Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), now a full-time member of the Justice League as The Flash, in the midst of handling a speedy clean-up for Batman (Ben Affleck) during a particularly messy car chase. After that bout of crime fighting, Barry works to clean up grocery store footage that will exonerate his father Henry (Ron Livingston) after the wrongful conviction of his wife’s murder. In frustration one night, The Flash discovers that he is able to run so fast that he can travel faster than the speed of light and, in doing so, effectively travel through time. Hurt over his mother’s murder years prior, he jets back in time with the intent of preventing her death but his actions create an alternate reality where Barry runs into his former self. Along with an altered version of Batman (Michael Keaton), the two Barrys work to set the timeline right.

Yes, The Flash sees the return of Keaton donning the cape and cowl for the first time in over 30 years and despite the time that’s passed, he settles back into the role very nicely. His Bruce Wayne was always the most eccentric and cerebral of the bunch, traits that Keaton has refined even further in his career since Batman Returns. While director Andy Muschietti can’t help but bolster the performance with CG-enhanced virility that has Keaton moving like an impossibly spry sexagenarian, the best Keaton moments in this film call back to the ingenuity of those earlier Burton Batmans. Staging an escape in an elevator shaft, he quickly calculates the collective weight of the escapees, along with a handy tape measure, and sets an explosive charge with proportional propulsion to shoot them up to the roof.

Though Muschietti and his screenwriter Christina Hodson do their best to hold our hand through the time travel paradoxes and multiverse snafus, it’s enough to say that the concept of the “butterfly effect” is used very liberally throughout The Flash. After Barry makes his first interjection within the past, the ramifications are predictably severe and the storyline gets messier than an Ashton Kutcher nose bleed. But if going back in time and zipping back to the future is enough to completely alter the appearance of someone (Bruce Wayne, for instance, since he’s played by two actors), shouldn’t nearly everything else be drastically changed too? The way that these universes unravel relies heavily either on plot contrivance or comedic effect, as with the running joke that Eric Stoltz starred in an alternate version of Back To The Future instead of Michael J. Fox.

I’m not someone who tends to pick on CGI in these superhero epics; there’s often so much money on the screen that the majority of these blockbusters are arranged at least competently enough for me to ignore some choppy rendering or unconvincing shading here and there. Having said that, this movie has scenes containing some of the most jaw-droppingly outdated effects I’ve seen in the modern superhero era. When The Flash is speeding through time, he generates a large orb of energy around him that projects flashes of events as they were and could have been. It’s not clear to me if these images are meant to look as if real actors were present in creating these vignettes but as presented, they would barely pass muster as cutscenes from a Playstation 2 game. The Flash has flashes of brilliance when it tackles themes of regret and acceptance but stumbles in delivering a coherent standalone feature.

Score – 2.5/5

More movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Elemental, a Pixar animated movie starring Leah Lewis and Mamoudou Athie set in a world inhabited by anthropomorphic elements of nature where a fire creature and water creature strike up a romantic relationship.
Also playing only in theaters is The Blackening, a horror comedy starring Grace Byers and Jermaine Fowler about a group of Black friends who go away for the weekend, only to find themselves trapped in a cabin with a killer who has a vendetta.
Streaming on Netflix is Extraction 2, an action thriller starring Chris Hemsworth and Idris Elba continuing the story of a black-ops mercenary whose new mission involves the rescue of a ruthless Georgian gangster’s family from the prison where they are being held.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse

Four and a half years after the landmark Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, a follow-up has finally arrived but it was worth the wait and then some. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse does all of the things that great sequels need to do: it follows the continuity and ethos of its predecessor, boldly expands on the world that it set up and leaves us wanting even more. At 140 minutes, it’s the longest animated film ever produced by an American studio but it never feels bloated or dragged down by its densely layered storytelling. Assembled by a trio of directors entirely different from the three that worked on Into the Spider-Verse, this follow-up is another testament to the power of collaboration among storytellers with divergent creative backgrounds.

The previous film ended with Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) communing with Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) through a portal in his bedroom ceiling, her final line of “got a minute?” setting up further adventures across dimensions. The beginning of Across the Spider-Verse catches us up on her backstory and what she’s been up to since the events of the first movie, most notably her admission into the Spider-Society. This is a team of other Spider-Man variants, led by Spider-Man 2099 (Oscar Isaac), who aim to keep peace in the multiverse by disposing of dimensional anomalies and preserving “canon events”, crucial moments of growth similar amongst the Spider-People. Rejoined by mentor Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) along with new Spider faces Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni) and Hobie Brown (Daniel Kaluuya), Miles and Gwen must stop a new villain wreaking havoc across the multiverse.

Across the Spider-Verse joins recent films like Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once and MCU entry Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness whose storylines go deep into parallel universes. There are essays and thinkpieces to be written about why audiences are seeming to respond so strongly to movies with this theme but it’s enough to say that the “what if?” aspect of the plot device remains effortlessly effective here. Where Into the Spider-Verse introduced us to a few twists on the Spider-Man character we typically know from movies and TV shows, this latest film gives us glimpses of dozens of new Spider people, creatures, and machines that exist in other dimensions. There are tangents and cameos of the LEGO and live-action variety that constantly remind us of the boundless creative energy that goes into making these movies.

Into the Spider-Verse introduced a bold new animation style that visualized the comic book experience like never before and Across the Spider-Verse goes even further with its artistic ambitions. While Miles’ timeline on Earth-1610 retains the Ben Day dots and chromatic distortion of the first movie, we spend more time in other dimensions like Gwen’s home on Earth-65. Her world is rendered with draw-dropping impressionist vigor, where every frame is a painting that emotes with the scene it’s canvassing. The film’s most moving moments are between Gwen and her police captain father, reeling with the news that his daughter is a vigilante crime fighter. The frame is awash with watercolor paint whose hues bleed into one another; watching paint dry has never been this exhilarating. This is a new cinematic language of animation being created before our eyes and it’s simply a wonder to behold.

Reuniting frequent screenwriting partners Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Across the Spider-Verse adds veteran scribe David Callaham for a script that is somehow just as clever as the screenplay for its predecessor. It keeps up with all of the manic mythology surrounding the Spider-Man character but packs in gobs of pathos and wit too. There’s a clever bit about redundant initialisms that is set up in a New York bodega and then called back during Pavitr’s introduction in Mumbattan, which I take to be a portmanteau of Mumbai and Manhattan. It’s no secret that the superhero genre is a packed clubhouse when it comes to modern movies but if you’re sleeping on these Spider-Verse chapters, you’re missing out on the finest films this pocket of cinema has ever produced.

Score – 4.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, an action sequel starring Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback which takes the franchise back to 1994, where the machine creatures Maximals, Predacons and Terrorcons aid Optimus Prime against the Unicrons.
Streaming on both Disney+ and Hulu is Flamin’ Hot, a biopic starring Jesse Garcia and Annie Gonzalez about a Frito Lay janitor who disrupted the food industry by channeling his Mexican heritage to turn Flamin’ Hot Cheetos from a snack into an iconic global pop culture phenomenon.
Premiering on Netflix is The Wonder Weeks, a comedy starring Sallie Harmsen and Soy Kroon which follows three modern couples as they juggle relationships and demanding careers while navigating the unpredictable terrain of new parenthood.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup