Reaction Shots

This is a silly, silly movie. There’s so much goodwill surrounding Ke Huy Quan and the whole wast is so game, that it’s relatively easy to forgive how silly it is. How silly is it? It wants to be an action-packed rom-com centered on a realtor who has a sordid, violent past, and is populated with hit men who write poetry and try to guide their partners through navigating break-ups. It’s a start and stop proposition, as well. When it leans into its Looney Toons set-ups and pacing, the film fires on all cylinders, but as fine as Ariana DeBose and Ke Huy Quan are, there’s a halting element when they get together. The voiceovers don’t help, either. Also, Marvin’s gangster brought Alvin (Daniel Wu) is so cookie-cutter, that there is no sense of threat; the stakes are undercut by the fun of the mayhem and the comedic high notes, of which there are several. A set-piece where Marshawn Lynch (once again showing off killer comic chops) and André Erikson show up to pressure Marvin into revealing R...

….but it does start out like one. Here’s spoiler-free description but I promise some spoilers are coming later. I’ll use a big space and hash-tags and fair warning when we get there. Josh and Iris are two twenty-somethings going away for a weekend with Josh’s friends at a lakeside “cabin”, so Josh’s friend Sergey calls it; call it what it is, a big house. We’ve seen in flashback Josh and Iris’s meet-cute, we know that Iris is insecure around his friends and is convinced that his pal, Sergey’s girlfriend Kat, hates her. In addition to Sergey and Kat, there’s also Eli and Patrick and while everyone is decent to Iris, Kat does make her antipathy known. Will Iris win Kat over? Will hijinks among the couples ensue? Will there be a major conflict, break-up, and get back together series with Josh and Iris? Well, of course, silly!!! Iris has a secret, though, and so for that matter, does everyone! It’s a fun romp chockfull of laughter, romance, and sexy time!  And lots of bodies and blood ...

A film shot mostly in secrecy, the filmmaker under arrest and sentenced to 8 years and flogging, a film shining a light on suppression of women’s rights. freedom of expression, and theocratic oppression, seen through the filter of compromised values, working for a state that claims to represent the will of God, and the toll this can take on a family. The family might be fictional, but it would surprise me not at all to find examples close enough to reality that could be substituted for the work at hand. In modern day Tehran, a functionary is promoted to an investigative judge. He’s served loyally and well and conscientiously for twenty years, and now seems positioned to be on easy street. The government housing for officials promises more space and each of his daughters a room of their own. What e didn’t count on is that he didn’t gain the promotion through his own merit; the guy before him got canned for not filling out the paperwork for a death sentence without due process. Iman is r...

There’s much about Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, his first feature in English, to commend it. There’s also a lot of elements that don’t cohere and that ring strangely off. The best of all this is seeing Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton share the screen. Moore’s Ingrid gets slightly short shrift as it is, after all, Martha’s death (and life) that takes center stage. Swinton, once again, turns in a quietly strong performance and Moore supports her expertly.  Before whinging on about what I feel are the film’s shortcomings, I want to stress a few things right away. Almodóvar is bringing death and the right to one’s own “good death”, as Martha says, front and center. The scenes between the two women where both are confronting Martha’s immanent demise are reminiscent of some of Ingmar Bergman’s work between Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman in   Autumns Sonata . There is strength and sensitivity that is rarely seen on view here, and if the dialog feels somewhat stilted or stylized (which...

Not terrifying  Falling somewhere between his more experimental mode and pop genre approach, Presence feels very much like Soderbergh’s take on “elevated horror”. It shares much of the genre’s watermarks, mostly where themes tend to overwhelm plot or mitigate the frights that are the parvenue of horror. To be clear, I don’t necessarily find this a fault of the genre or various examples of it. Also, I’m a tough sell. The times I’ve actually been taken by a horror film are very few; maybe someday, I’ll cover them. I also can’t take critics seriously who complain that a movie isn’t scary, scary enough, or for that matter, scary. I can’t. It’s make-believe, and in order for to work, there has to be suspension of disbelief and acceptance of the film’s narrative as reality.  A significant amount of horror and suspense relies on structure. Plot can even fall by the wayside if the central conceits and characters are strong enough. When all three come together, then watch out.  T...

David Lynch by Martin Schoeller/Art + Commerce You reach a certain time of life and you recognize that we don’t go on forever. People we love and admire don’t live forever. That said, I hoped I’d never have to write the words “David Lynch has died” because, as with David Bowie, it just doesn’t seem possible that they   could   die. However, that kind of sentiment - if I genuinely believed it - would show a profound lack of understanding of the artists and their work. Both were clear-eyed visionaries who saw through the genteel fabric of lies of the constructed realities most people inhabit. Lynch, in particular, saw and felt the underbelly of the American Experience with its Howdy-Doody surfaces covering up a roiling morass of darkness. However, I don’t think Lynch necessarily saw evil as personal; I think he grasped that, if anything, the darker forces the we try to tamp down beneath the surface instead of working them out, are as impersonal as the thunder or lightning on a p...