Category Archives: 2023

Past Lives

Past Lives            5 stars

Past Lives is another of the Sundance movies from this year that I did not see in Park City. Fortunately, it has hit the big screen and can be seen by all audiences. The movie brings out the concept of In-Yun, a Korean belief that people that are connected to one another and will reunite in other ways in other lives at different times, hence the name of the film. This movie Is a real emotional tear-jerker that is aided by some great performances from the main actors. The story takes place in three time periods. We first meet Na Young and Hae Sung as 12 year olds in South Korea where they are close friends, But Na Young’s family is about to immigrate to Canada so they must separate. Later the story jumps ahead twelve years and Na Young now goes by the name Nora (Greta Lee previously appearing only in supporting roles) and is trying to get established as a writer in New York. Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) stayed in Korea and is doing his mandatory military service, but has never forgotten his childhood friend, so he has done an online search for her and finally found her. The pair carry on an on-screen relationship where the pair relate well to each other and they are obviously close, but they must end things. Seeing one another in person is not practical. In the third act, an additional twelve years later, Nora has married Arthur, an American man, (John Magaro) another writer and received her Green Card. Hae Sung still has not forgotten his friend and arranges a trip to see her in New York. One may think this would create a very awkward situation but the writing of first time director, Celine Song is so honest and subdued that she makes the characters seem very real. There is still an obvious attraction between the two main characters, but the reality of their situations determines that they must remain friends. Hae Sung even says that it hurts to like Arthur, Nora’s husband so much. Greta Lee is impressive as an actress who can express feeling with a simple look and through long pauses that tell a great deal. By the end you are wondering what will be in store in their next lives. Some people have already said this is one of the best films of the year.

No Hard Feelings

No Hard Feelings              2 stars

After taking some time off to be a mom, actress Jennifer Lawrence of The Hunger Games and X-Men fame tries her acting chops in the R rated raunchy sex comedy No Hard Feelings, written and directed by Gene Stupnitsky. We know that Lawrence can hold her own in comedies. (Remember the David O. Russell movies Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle?) Here she takes on the role of an older woman trying to “date” an introverted nineteen-year names Percy who is about to go to Princeton. It seems that his rich parents, (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick) are worried about his lack of experience with women so they put an ad on Craig’s List offering a Buick to a woman who would try to bring Percy (Andre Barth Feldman) out of his shell. Maddie (Lawrence) is in trouble financially since all the rich people moving into town have been forcing her property taxes up, so she is willing to try out this offer. Lawrence can deliver on the comedy which includes a few amusing physical bits, but there is something lacking in the writing making it not feel very authentic. It doesn’t go as far as many raunchy comedies like The Sweetest Thing or Neighbors, but it’s also not quite a romantic comedy given the premise. It feels predictable too as Percy is not supposed to know of this arrangement, but it is inevitable that he will find out, which of course he does. There are also a number of appearances by supporting cast that seem to go nowhere, making me wonder why they were even there. (What was the point for Kyle Mooney to be here?) Unless you are a real Jennifer Lawrence fan you can pass this one up and not lose much. You should check out the movie Causeway from earlier this year that featured Lawrence with Brian Tyree Henry.

Asteroid City

Asteroid City      4 stars

Viewers of Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City will immediately recognize the picturesque style and rapid storytelling techniques of the acclaimed director. This is apparently the eleventh film of Anderson’s going back to Bottle Rocket in the nineties. This one may be the most imaginative one yet. Here we get a story within a story as the film starts with a TV host in a 1950’s Actors’ Studio show telling us about the writing efforts of a famed playwright working on his play, Asteroid City. This part of the movie is in black and white, but when we travel to the play, set in a 1950’s southwestern town in the desert the screen switches to bright pastel colors so typical of Anderson’s movies. The town is the location of the annual Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention because it is the site of a crater created by an asteroid many centuries before. There, we see a large collection of interesting characters portrayed by many well-known Hollywood actors, including some regulars that Wes Anderson works with. They include Jason Schwartzman as a war photographer traveling with his Brainiac son, Scarlet Johansson as a Hollywood film star and Tom Hanks as a rich grandfather. Some of the actors have double roles portraying their Asteroid City characters and the actors in the play when they interact with the play’s director (Adrien Brody). There are too many notable characters for me to list here. You will have to see the movie to get the full experience. Eventually, there is a life changing event in the small town that brings the attention of the US military. We do get a fascinating story told with rapid fire dialogue and narration that’s familiar as was done in movies of the forties and fifties. You may experience some confusion about what’s going on as expressed by Schwartzman’s Jones Hall does when talking to the director, Schubert Green (Brody). His advice: “Don’t worry about it, just keep telling the story.” Wes Anderson’s movies aren’t always cohesive. They are more about being something to experience and Asteroid City is all about the experience.

Elemental

Elemental            3 ½ stars

The new Disney/Pixar animated movie Elemental takes on racism and the treatment of immigrants as well as the question of whether fire and water can coexist. In the much anticipated movie released in June, a couple from the foreign land of Firetown comes to Element City, a metropolis where the citizens are made up of the four elements: Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. They set up a shop in a rundown part of town and soon have a daughter named Ember, who grows up to be a young woman with a very fiery personality. It’s pretty clear that there are racist treatments toward the Fire citizens and that the Water inhabitants are the more privileged class in this modern land. Ember is destined to eventually run the shop, taking it over from Dad when he retires, but she has difficulty controlling a temper that can wreak havoc on the shop and the customers. When she causes a water leak in the basement, a Water city inspector named Wade appears who is overly sentimental and prone to crying spells. Wade threatens to report the shop over code violations, creating the necessary situation where Ember and Wade must work together to find the source of a water leak that endangers much of Element City. There is no bad guy here. It is just a case of decaying infrastructure, but it provides a way to show how the Fire citizens are treated and the excuse to get Ember and Wade together and find out if Fire and Water can exist together. There are some moments of great tension involving a sports arena and enthusiasm for a Wind athlete and one of his greatest fans, and then there are the inevitable meet the parents scenes. There are the usual comedic moments where we find a cute character. This time it is a young Earth kid named Clod who is destined to be a pest when he grows up. It is clear that the writers drew on some of their own experience as immigrants in developing the story, especially with the traditions from the old country and with the Fire people being excluded from certain events. The animation is first rate as expected with Pixar, but the story is a little thin in this one.

Sound of Freedom

Sound of Freedom          no review

I have not seen the Jim Caviezel movie Sound of Freedom, nor will I ever see it. The ads for it have been appearing regularly on television. The movie has had some very high box office numbers and has created a stir in the right-wing world so I felt compelled to make a public service announcement and warn people about it. The thriller action movie appears to be part of a crusade against child trafficking and features Caviezel as a sort of one man super hero out to rescue the victims of the sex trade. (Caviezel is best known for his portrayal of Jesus Christ in the Mel Gibson movie The Passion of the Christ.) In reality, it is a propaganda piece put out by the people who adhere to QAnon fantasy conspiracy theories such as the traffickers are harvesting children’s organs and extracting adrenochrome before killing them. The movie appears to be appealing to a mostly older white audience who are there to reinforce their views of what is wrong with the government and the country. Based on what I have read of the movie it is full of implausibilities and condemnations of the government. The movie was reportedly made in 2018 and it took this long to find someone to distribute it as it was considered to be a money loser. I have a suspicion that certain churches and right-wing groups have been buying out theater tickets in order to inflate the numbers. This has been a practice for other such propaganda movies. If you have not seen the movie you are warned to stay away from it. If you have seen it then you have my sympathy for enduring the pain.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One  4 ½ stars

Returning to the screen in true summer blockbuster form is the seventh Mission Impossible installment in Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One. The awkward sounding name teams up Tom Cruise in his iconic role of Ethan Hunt, leader of the IMF team with director Christopher McQuarrie, who directed earlier MI films and last year’s big hit Top Gun: Maverick. The action thriller features no less than a car chase through a European city (featuring a miniature Fiat), a desert gun battle, a thrilling cat and mouse hunt through an airport with a possible explosive, daring hand to hand combat amid the canals of Venice, all capped off with a thrilling confrontation on the orient Express through the Austrian Alps. As usual, these action scenes feature Cruise doing most of his own stunts which includes jumping off a mountain peak on a motorcycle with a parachute. This time around Hunt has accepted a mission with his IMF team to stop The Entity, a digital sentient AI being that threatens to control the world. I hope this is very far-fetched. The key to stopping it is a literal key, the possessor of which could control the entity if they can get the key to the right place. This is all that is needed to set up the usual action sequences vital to a successful Mission Impossible film. Despite the name of the film, it really does stand on its own as a complete film. We are promised a Part Two coming next year which is rumored to be Cruise’s final entry of the franchise. Returning as part of Hunt’s IMF team are Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg) and Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) who Hunt considers as family and perhaps his weakness. Villainous figures from the past appear including Gabriel (Esai Morales) and the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) who vie for control of the Entity. One new character deserving attention is a pickpocket appearing at a very inopportune time in the form of Grace (Hayley Atwell) who is “persuaded” to join the IMF team when there is no other choice. The CIA suits who would like to control Hunt are portrayed by Henry Czerny as Kittridge, head of the CIA and Shea Whigham as Briggs, a government agent who seems to follow Hunt’s every movie. Rounding out the villains is Paris (Pom Klementieff) who is mostly silent but very well versed in car chases and hand to hand combat. (You may have seen her as Mantis in the Marvel movies.) The movie strikes the right balance between action sequences and cooled down scenes allowing the audience to catch its breath so that you don’t notice the two-and-three-quarter hour running time of the film. The AI themed plot of the movie is appropriate to our current times and one hopes it isn’t predictive of what is to become. Now I will be looking with anticipation to 2024’s release of Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part Two!

Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer   4 ½ stars

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” These are the words that J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy says early in the Christopher Nolan new epic film Oppenheimer about the life of the theoretical physicist who was chosen to head the Manhattan Project during World War II. We don’t know if Oppenheimer really said this but it demonstrates just how troubled he became as he would come to terms with the incredible destructive power unleashed with the atomic bomb. The film gives us the story of Oppenheimer’s life and how he led the project located in the desert at Los Alamos, New Mexico, including the scandal of an affair and the drama of two court hearings. The movie packs a heck of a lot in the three hour running time. It is about the creation of the bomb, but is just as much a tense political thriller. It follows multiple time lines and a myriad of characters from academics and the military using both color and black and white footage sometimes interspersed with images of explosions and rotting corpses and faces. Nolan often uses short scenes with only a few longer ones all of which are packed with dialogue jumping from one time to another. It would be nice to see the years the scenes occur in, but there are many clues given as the time lines stretch from the nineteen twenties to the nineteen fifties. Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) main enemy in the film is Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission after the war who first recruits Oppenheimer then seeks to destroy his career. One may be surprised to see that the achievement of completing the first atomic explosion happens about two-thirds of the way through the film with the hearings taking up the remainder of the movie. In the first, occurring around 1954, Oppenheimer is accused of being an agent for the Soviets with communist leanings when it is brought out that his views toward the weapon changed with the development of the H-bomb and that his wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt) may have been a member of the Communist party many years before (the worst accusation in the America of the 1950’s). In the second, a Senate hearing is held for the confirmation of Strauss as the Commerce Secretary for President Eisenhower in 1959. We seem to go through endless testimony from individuals who played a role in the Manhattan Project, some on Oppenheimer’s side and some who are not. Throughout the entire movie, it is Murphy’s performance that makes it a success more than anything letting us see Oppenheimer’s talent as a visionary who is also deeply troubled by the threat brought to humankind by this creation. There are a great many actors with supporting roles in this complicated story that will be familiar to audiences. To mention a few there are Matt Damon, Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Casey Affleck, Florence Pugh and Jason Clarke without going into the individual roles. (Gary Oldman is great as Harry Truman being a real jerk.) To really understand what is going on, one would have to see the movie more than once. I can guarantee that it will keep your attention throughout, thanks to Nolan’s writing and an excellent score by Ludwig Goransson. I would say though that the sex scene in a hallucination that Oppenheimer has could have been left out and nothing would be lost. It is safe to say that this is one of two must see movies of the summer. We will be looking for many Academy Award nominations for Oppenheimer next year, I am sure.

Haunted Mansion

Haunted Mansion            2 stars

A number of years back Disney came up with the idea of making a movie based on a Disney ride and voila, Pirates of the Caribbean appeared on movie screens and became an instant success. Then just a couple of years ago Jungle Cruise came to the theaters and delighted many movie goers. Now we have the latest Disney release based on a Disney ride but this time you would be better off going to the park than to the theater. Haunted Mansion features a young woman named Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her nine-year-old son, Travis, who have taken possession of an old mansion that is over two hundred years old only to discover that it is inhabited by ghosts. She goes looking for help and finds a priest named Father Kent (Owen Wilson), a quantum physicist (LaKeith Stanfield) who has lost his wife, a medium (Tiffany Haddish) and a past his prime college professor (Danny Devito). None of the team can turn down the job because they all discover that once they enter the house, a ghost travels with them wherever they go, so they have to take on the challenge of removing the ghosts from the mansion. After many missteps involving spooky portraits and endless hallways with trap openings they eventually discover there is one ghost present who was a terrible man named Crump, (Jared Leto) who is collecting hundreds of souls in the house, tormenting them for eternity. With the help of a spirit trapped in a crystal ball (Jamie Lee Curtis) and a quest to find an artifact belonging to the horrible Crump some of the group leave on a venture to complete the challenge and rid the world of Crump. It’s quite a gathering of funny talented people that should make it an entertaining movie. The trouble is that it feels like a collection of poor CGI effects that make constant reference to the Disney ride and other past Disney movies. There are the obvious portraits with moving pictures, the descending floor, the guy playing the organ and the dancing spirits. There are even chairs that pick up characters and try to eject them from the property. It all feels like the movie makers are trying to inject everything they can find to mimic the ride. I had grown tired of the silly action by the time it was over. What a waste of comedic talent. I did find Hadish to be funny in her role as the medium and enjoyed seeing Jamie Lee Curtis if only briefly. Nice try Disney. Maybe you should make the movie first and then make the ride based on the movie. Another ghost movie called Ghostbusters comes to mind that I would gladly see again for more laughs.

A Good Person

A Good Person                  3 stars

A Good Person, written and directed by Scrubs star Zach Braff and starring Academy Award nominee Florence Pugh (of Midsommar, Little Women and Oppenheimer and Princess Irulan in Dune 2!) brings us into the all too familiar world of drug addiction and PTSD. In this movie it is Pugh who plays the drug addict, Allison, a young woman who had everything going for her including a loving fiancé and an active social life until a tragic accident resulted in her being addicted to OxyContin. Allison has a falling out with her mother (Molly Shannon), is afraid to work and is not above blackmailing former friends in order to score more drugs. Things are bad for Allison but also in pain are her fiancé, Nathan (Chinaza Uche), Nathan’s father, Daniel (the legendary Morgan Freeman) and Daniel’s granddaughter, Ryan (Celeste O’Connor of Selah and the Spades). You see, Daniel’s daughter and mother to Ryan were killed in the tragic accident. Long after the incident these people are trying to get on with their lives, some better than others. Daniel is now responsible for Ryan who has been acting out in high school. Having been an alcoholic before, Daniel is in a position to try to help Allison out of her addiction but it is a painful situation given the loss everyone has suffered. While Florence Pugh puts in a good performance as Allison the film feels rather formulaic on this all too familiar subject. Better movies come to mind like Requiem for a Dream, Rachel Getting Married and Clean and Sober (which features a young Morgan Freeman). There was also Sound of Metal in 2019. (Outstanding!) It’s a tough assignment to measure up to some of these excellent movies. Braff gave it a try, but it was also reported that he specifically wrote the movie for Pugh since the two were at one time involved in a relationship. It’s certainly not great. I will be watching closely for the release of Dune: Part Two which includes Florence Pugh playing the part of Princess Irulan.

Bottoms

Bottoms               4 ½ stars

The newly released Bottoms brings the raunchy high-school sex comedy into the 2020’s. The movie’s writers, Emma Seligman (who also directs) and Rachel Sennott (starring as P.J.) have described it as this generation’s Heathers, (that teen comedy from 1988 starring Winona Ryder). In this fast paced and foul-mouthed story, BFF’s P.J. (Sennott) and Josey (Eyo Edebiri) are gay high school girls starting their senior year, who regard themselves as ugly and are very horny for girls on the cheerleader squad. It’s a tough time for them as all the attention is on the school football team, the Vikings who are about to face their chief rival in the upcoming game. The quarterback, Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine doing some over the top acting) is the boyfriend of cheerleader Isabella, who Josey is hot for. Clearly this forlorn pair need a plan. Under pressure P.J. comes up with the idea of forming a girls fight club hoping to attract some hot girls to join, with Josey in agreement. Their pretext is that girls are in need of self-defense training and it is a way to promote feminist empowerment. Unfortunately, the founders know nothing about fighting so simply punch each other in the face to start things off. (They also invent a story about being in juvie where they supposedly acquired these skills that they don’t really have.) Eventually, their love interests do actually join the club where the girls beat each other up even with their teacher sponsor present (former NFL player, Marshawn Lynch). How long can P.J. and Josie keep this up before their true motives are discovered? You will have to see the movie to find out but in the meantime you can enjoy some of the funniest writing I have seen this year. No topic is too sacred for Seligman and Sennott to poke fun at. While being rather raunchy the movie has a smart feel to it like Booksmart and has a high level of energy like Bring It On, (also a cheerleader movie). You might say it is similar to American Pie, but with queer female characters. Rachel Sennott and Eyo Edebiri previously have done web shorts together on Comedy Central. Sennott previously appeared in last year’s Bodies Bodies Bodies and Edebiri was in this year’s Theater Camp. (One of the cheerleaders in Bottoms is played by Kaia Gerber, daughter of Cindy Crawford, important for my generation.) I think we can count on seeing plenty more work featuring these talents as well as from director Emma Seligman.