Movie reviews
If you're a distinguished older male actor in Hollywood, you're typically cast as Batman’s sidekick or a WWII veteran who escapes from assisted living (Michael Caine), God or a grieving father (Morgan Freeman), a brilliant psychotherapist or Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), an action hero (Tom Cruise), Sigmund Freud and a Roman emperor (Sir Anthony Hopkins), or a daring drug mule (Clint Eastwood). But distinguished older actresses get cast in simple-minded comedies about old friends having silly adventures that make the lightest-weight beach read seem like Remembrance of Things Past. “The Fabulous Four” follows in the unfortunate tradition of the “Book Club” movies, “Summer Camp,” and “80 for Brady,” with an EGOT-full of brilliant talents mired in antics that “The Golden Girls” would consider too ridiculous.
The quartet in this film is Susan Sarandon as Lou, an uptight, humorless cat lady and cardiac surgeon; Bette Midler as Marilyn, a wealthy recent widow who impulsively decided to get married again two months after the death of her husband of 48 years; Megan Mullally as Alice, a popular singer who is perpetually tipsy, high on drugs, or having sex with randos, sometimes all at once; and Sheryl Lee Ralph as Kitty, a kind-hearted weed grower and mother of an adult daughter who has suddenly become rigidly religious. You can glimpse Midler’s real-life daughter, Sophie von Haselberg, playing Marilyn’s daughter early in the film.
Marilyn is staying in a gorgeous mansion in Key West, where Ernest Hemingway lived when he wrote two of his books, which we are told so often they could be getting paid by the mention. She invites Kitty and Alice to her wedding but does not invite Lou because they have been estranged for years. So Kitty and Alice tell Lou the kind of preposterous lie that only works in painfully contrived screenplays: they don't mention Marilyn. They just say she has won a six-toed cat from the Hemingway House.
When Lou finds out she’s been tricked, she agrees to stay. However, she is clearly still in pain over the sense of betrayal by Marilyn, for reasons telegraphed so unmistakably from her arrival in Key West that the ultimate reveal carries no weight. Throughout the trip, she keeps running into a group of 20-somethings she met on the plane and accidentally becomes their badass ideal.
Marilyn is so excited about her over-the-top wedding plans she barely notices that her friends think she is over the top. For another one of those reasons that only works in painfully contrived screenplays, she does not introduce her fiancé to her friends until the night before the wedding so there can be a very predictable twist. But the four are too busy having wacky adventures. Lou uses a Kegel (pelvic floor) exercise ball Marilyn gave her as a slingshot to take out a bicycle thief! Lou accidentally unties the rope to the parasail because she is hallucinating! Yes, it is supposed to be a funny prank that Lou’s closest friends dose her with weed without telling her. Another intended-to-be hilarious scene takes place in a strip club, where a star performer connected to one of the women is recognized when she sees the birthmark on his bare butt while he is grinding on the bride-to-be.
The Internet Movie Database lists more than 40 producers for “The Fabulous Four,” most of them “executive producers,” which can mean anything. Three are Mullaly, Sarandon, and Ralph. These women know what they are capable of, and they know what a good script is. Was a silly comedy the only project they could get funded? Or did they just want an all-expenses-paid trip to Key West? It does look spectacularly beautiful, though there are too many shots of chickens.
The stars do their best to bring warmth and charisma with criminally under-written characters engaging in silly antics. There are lovely moments when they sing, including a duet with Michael Bolton(!). It just makes us wish it was a concert film. Or, as Gene Siskel used to say, we would be better off watching a film of the four actresses sitting around, talking about their lives. Instead, we get tired “jokes” about powerful weed gummies, an older person sharing every minute of her life with ridiculous TikToks, characters tearing each other’s clothes off in a fight and then somehow making up, and a character unexpectedly becoming a hero to some young people even though they have never heard of Joan Didion. Like these other actresses-of-a-certain-age movies, the entire story is grounded on some notion of a deep and sustaining friendship. But it's hard to believe these women have any genuine connection other than cashing a check for a film that is not fabulous but forgettable.
Sharks, while undeniably lethal, are also, studies have shown, kind of dumb. And “The Last Breath” is a cheesy new thriller that is even dumber than a real shark. Not that it features any real sharks — the predatory creatures here are CGI, and hilariously enough, they move through the water faster than the “rage virus” zombies of “28 Days Later” roam over land.
They don’t show up until about halfway through the Joachim Heder-directed movie, which begins during World War II, and the shelling of a ship that results in a wreck that’s apparently legendary in the present day. That’s according to old salt Levi (Julian Sands) whose rickety boat is playing host to a group of self-proclaimed “certified divers” who are also kind of pushy, to say the least. At least the males in the group are. There’s peroxided wannabe Alpha Brett (Alexander Arnold) and entitled stoner Logan (Arlo Carter), who wonders aloud at the dock whether a local ten-year-old would sell him weed. Rarely have two characters been presented so immediately as those whose deaths you will actively root for. But I’ll refrain from spoilers.
The good, or not as bad, zoomers on the boat trip include Noah (Jack Parr), grizzled Levi’s younger mate and also the ex of good doctor Sam (as in Samantha, and played by Kim Spearman), who’s stuck in the lout party taking the boat out. Is a rapprochement in store? Again, no spoilers. While Levi, having discovered the aforementioned shipwreck, has resolved to report it to the authorities despite it having been his personal passion — “forty years I’ve been looking for her” — finance bro Brett has other ideas, and his money does some persuasive talking. So off Levis and company go to drop the wannabe adventurers in the drink. Where they find skeletons, claustrophobic settings, and eventually a snapped guideline. Did a barracuda do that? No, of course, a barracuda didn’t do it.
The arrival of multiple huge speed-of-light sharks coincides with everyone’s oxygen tanks getting dangerously low. While Levi mostly stays on deck knitting — a “dexterity exercise” to soothe his dive-damaged nerve — his reference early on to his old red scuba suit and the nickname it bestowed on him back in the day stands out like Chekhov’s proverbial first-act gun.
His work as Levi represents the final film appearance of Julian Sands, who died in 2023 while hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains of California, and he’s reliably wry as he first resists heroics and then goes for broke.
The movie’s lifts from “Jaws” are so blatant that they might as well be read as affectionate, aspirational homages. As goofy and unconvincing as it often is, “The Last Breath” is difficult to get exasperated over. It may go down easier still if you opt to see it in a very well-air-conditioned setting.
The suburbs are hell. That's what the movies keep telling us. Perfect nuclear families living in their McMansions are often anything but perfect. It's not exactly new cinematic territory, but it's a well that gets tapped often because it's just a lot of fun to watch rich families implode, often of their own doing. In that vein, the new suburban-set thriller "The Girl in the Pool," from director Dakota Gorman and screenwriter Jackson Reid Williams, breaks no new ground. But with its many twists and turns, it is indeed a lot of fun.
One-time teen idol Freddie Prinze Jr. plays the family patriarch Tom, a businessman, who, while still handsome, feels past his prime (at one point, Prinze Jr. splashes his face with water and the back of his balding head reflects in the mirror, and it struck me how rare it is to see any stars actually allow signs of their aging to show on screen). Tom is celebrating his birthday and is soon meant to meet his wife Kristen (Monica Potter) for dinner at a fancy restaurant. He's left work early to get ready and is surprised by a visit from his much younger mistress Hannah (Gabrielle Haugh).
Their tryst in the family pool quickly becomes a murder scene and the audience is at first led to believe Tom is the culprit as he attempts to both clean up the mess and hide her corpse from the guests attending a surprise party organized by his wife and their adult kids Alex (Tyler Lawrence Gray) and Rose (Brielle Barbusca). Although we're firmly planted in Tom's psyche as he re-hashes their afternoon delight and its grisly aftermath, the choppy flashbacks are careful not to reveal exactly who did the deed and why the woman was murdered.
Pressure from the party mounts. Partygoers keep getting too close to where Tom has stashed away the body. He's harassed by his father-in-law William (Kevin Pollak, charmingly acerbic), who makes it clear that Tom and Kristen's marriage has been on the rocks for awhile. Another unexpected visitor pushes Tom to his limits. As Tom spirals into a frantic drug-induced paranoia state, the film adds twist after twist, until the entire family has blood on their hands.
Gorman playfully switches perspective in one scene, pulling back from a claustrophobic ultra-close-up of Tom to a wide shot of Alex, Rose, and her boyfriend watching Tom as he pitifully stumbles around the backyard. It's a refreshing reminder that not only are we watching a movie, but also Tom the character is so deep in his own world, that it's like he's in his own movie as well. It's a pity, then, that Gorman's direction isn't always this razor sharp as there is a current of mordant humor throughout Williams' script that could easily have made this whole affair a pitch-black comedy.
The same goes for the uneven characterization of the women. Haugh's Hannah seems to exist solely to look hot in a bikini and spout red herring-laden dialogue. The always solid Potter adds a steely gravitas to what mostly amounts to a stock character in Kristen. I kept waiting for her to get a great monologue moment like she does in the similarly lurid thriller "Along Came a Spider." Alas, it never comes. Rosie is similarly underwritten, reduced to a pastiche of Gen-Z stereotypes, although Barbusca does her best to overcome the trite material with some hilarious line readings.
By design the son Alex remains an aloof presence, looming largely in the periphery until a third act twist places him squarely in the center of the action. For his part Gray goes all in, delivering one feeble excuse after another for his rancid behavior with a perfect mixture of derangement and vulnerability. A cookie-cutter copy of his equally ordinary, yet completely self-obsessed father.
Not surprisingly, Prinze Jr., who served as an executive producer on the project, has the meatiest role, and he is truly fantastic as the desperate Tom. Unlike Burt Lancaster's crestfallen suburban patriarch in "The Swimmer," Tom is always presented as pathetic. In the opening sequence he asks his friend, "Am I a good man?" but it's clear from the jump that he is absolutely not. The film never once props him up as aspirational, just sweaty and sad. Flustered, he's always asking for five minutes so he can come up with a plan, but Tom’s the kind of zero who could be given a whole year and still wouldn’t come up with a good plan.
Tom's eventual journey towards something resembling redemption is played a little too straight. One final bad decision to cap off a film full of bad decisions should be laced with dramatic irony, especially since it is a damning indictment of how white men's rage, at any age, is often coddled and protected by those with the most power. It's a stinger that would have been better served on a more preposterously pulpy platter. Instead, the film ends with a limp whimper. What could have been a deliciously dark satire, instead remains in the liminal space known as aggressively average.
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I return to a film to discover my initial gut reaction might have been a bit too harsh. When I first watched Sean Wang’s emotionally brutal coming of age film “Didi” at Sundance—where it won the festival’s audience award—I thought his follow-up to his Oscar-nominated animated short ("Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó") was, at best, a carbon copy of the kind of tropey, saccharine mining of memories that’s become Sundance’s forte. I could see passing references to “Eighth Grade,” “Skate Kitchen,” "Mid90s,” “Minari,” and “Minding the Gap”—better films that seemed to capture their intended spirit with greater urgency and originality. But upon a recent second watch, I have found that “Didi,” his feature directorial debut, is far stronger and far more affecting than I initially gave it credit for.
There are the universal qualities in Wang’s story that just so happens to occur in many of these films: Chris Wang (Isaac Wang)—affectionately called Didi by his mom, but derisively called Wang Wang by everyone else—is on the precipice of high school, soon to encounter all of the growing pains that happen when you pass from adolescence to teendom. He is an outcast in his mostly white Fremont, California enclave. It’s why, tellingly, he surrounds himself with other people of color like Farad (Raul Diad) and Jimmy/Soup (Aaron Chang). But even they’re assimilating into a kind of toxic, white broness that becomes common at that age. Their slow drift away from him, alienates Chris even further.
Chris can’t seem to find love or affection, anywhere, really. He has a crush on a girl named Madi (Mahaela Park), who he befriends at a party and talks with on AOL Instant Messenger. Despite his friends goading him to push his sexual boundaries, Chris, who is still very young, is far too nervous to make the leap. Even in the timid expressions of his inchoate feelings, much is revealed. “You’re pretty cute, for an Asian boy,” Madi, who might have issues with her own identity, backhandedly says. There are many racial slippages in “Didi,” such as Chris telling people he’s only half Asian, or him accusing his doting mom of being too Asian, or the way a group of boys add the word “Asian” to “Chris” when they chant his name. Chris wants to assume the role of boisterous hypermasculine cool kid, but it’s just not in him. And when he tries, he comes off as mean, vicious, and just plain hurt.
He blames many people for his perceived shortcomings: His older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), who is an adversary until she realizes his deep loneliness; his clinging mother, Chungsing (Joan Chen), an aspiring artist who takes flak from her demanding mother-in-law and rebellious kids while her absent husband works in Taiwan; along with his classmates, who simply find him weird. Chris searches for acceptance from a group of older skaters and from his supposed friends at school, but each only reveal inadequacies he perceives in himself.
His personal journey is often rendered through on-the-nose choices, such as the way he uses AOL Instant Messenger, through a bot, to type out the deep, dark insecurities he is too afraid to say aloud. His Nai Nai (Chang Li Hua), a comedic figure representing an older generation’s perception of success and gender roles, is a loose thread that sorta falls away in the film’s second half. While cinematographer Sam A. Davis does well to capture the year 2008—from recreating a camcorder aesthetic to composing luminous compositions that seem to capture the brightness of the California sun—he is sometimes heavy-handed on his use of shadows, to the point of obscuring a touching farewell scene between Chris and Vivian.
“Didi” is at its best when it shakes up this genre’s common visual language. Absurd animation of talking dead fish, a re-animated squirrel and a fever dream where figurines from a mini-golf course haunt Chris, are some of the major whimsical departures that give this film its own spin. Those wonderful swings further connect the film with its late-aughts vibe, which recreates everything from early-Facebook to late-era Myspace, and the kind of off-kilter videos that once proliferated the height of Youtube. Throw in some winking references to "The Notebook" and "A Walk to Remember," along with some flip phones, and even the era, one spurred by the misplaced hope of change, has an unlikely air of nostalgia.
“Didi” also finds further vigor whenever the camera settles on Chen. As Chris’ mother, the actress delivers the slightest twinge of hurt and pang of anger without ever overreaching. It takes a powerful actress to recite a speech you’ve heard in a million other films, such as her major heart-to-heart with Chris, without it ever feeling overly familiar, or, even worse, trite. Chen pulls off that incredible, tender trick with astonishing effortlessness—making for a powerful foil with her younger, but no less impressive co-star Wang. As the final grace notes of “Didi” began to strike, I remembered that I’ve seen this kind of story many, many times before. And yet, I found myself glad to press rewind.
“Deadpool & Wolverine” exists because Hugh Jackman, who has played Wolverine nine times and had supposedly retired the character after 2017’s “Logan,” loved the Deadpool series and was friends with star Ryan Reynolds. He wanted the mutant with the adamantium claws to team up with the Merc with the Mouth, preferably in a buddy movie modeled partly on R-rated 1980s action flicks like “48 Hrs.” The end product is true to the spirit of the franchise while pushing its self-aware humor and fourth wall-breaks until it all seems like the result of a dare: how big can we make the air quotes around “sincerity” while still tugging on heartstrings?
SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW
About half an hour into the movie, Wade gets sent on a multiverse-spanning mission that ends up teaming him with Wolverine (never mind the reasons; you’ll learn them anyway when you see the movie, which will make a billion dollars no matter what somebody like me has to say about it) and the duo ends up traversing a prison-like “Void” ruled by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corwin), a bald, skeletally slender twin sister of Charles Xavier. The place is filled with debris and monuments, all seemingly drawn from films released by Disney and 20th Century Fox (which was swallowed by Disney in 2019).
I’m sure there’ll be a comprehensive bullet-pointed list of cameos on the film’s Wikipedia page by the time you read this, but among other things I believe I spotted a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, the spires of the Williamsburg bridge (site of an important Spider-Man battle) and the top of the Statue of Liberty’s torch (the original 1968 “Planet of the Apes” was a Fox production), all buried in the ground like the “two vast and legless trunks of stone” in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.” This zone is referred to as a “metaphorical junkyard.” The phrase can be read two ways. I suspect Deadpool’s arched-eyebrow playfulness inclines it toward the second reading: a dumping ground for pop culture metaphors, especially the kind you encounter in comic books and movies based on them. The metaphors in this junkyard include comic book characters who, in addition to being themselves, are walking representations of aspects of society, psychology, or a political or social condition.
They are also products. Not for nothing does the first Deadpool-Wolverine fight happen around a giant stone-carved version of the 20th Century Fox logo that used to appear in front of Fox movies: a studio had to be sacrificed for this film to exist. Cinema history obsessives who can tolerate Ryan Reynolds’ mugging and pratfalling and verbal footnoting will appreciate that, among other things, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is a superhero version of a memorial service for a studio and the various franchises and undeveloped projects that were discarded or decommissioned when it was bought. Lazarus-styled IP tributes are handled with more wit and humor (not to mention basic decency) here than the AI whirlwind of rubber-faced DC characters trotted out in Warner Bros. “The Flash.” The movie’s wry awareness of the profit motive takes a bit of the sting out as well. “Fox killed him,” Wade says of Logan, “Disney brought him back. They’re gonna make him do this till he’s ninety.”
Also, not for nothing: the movie’s main story is about literal as well as figurative resurrections. When we meet Wade for the first time in six years, he’s been kicked to the curb by his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) and rejected by the Avengers and has resigned himself to being a “loser” and is now selling used cars and wearing a bad hairpiece. He gets roped into service by Mr. Paradox (Matthew MacFayden), an agent for the Time Variance Authority (TVA) who has developed a “Time Ripper” that can mercy-kill timelines that have lost their “anchor being.” Again, there’s no point getting deep in the plot weeds in a review of a film like this, so let’s say that to head off apocalyptic problems in Wade’s own timeline, he has to capture a Wolverine from one of the other timelines and replace him in the one where he was a tragically deceased “anchor being” holding that strand together.
In service of all the tomfoolery and shenanigans that ensue, the movie turns subtext into text and bold-faces it. Wade revels in declaring himself a timeline Jesus. In one timeline-jumping mission we see Logan crucified on a giant X. The movie incrementally becomes the nine-figure-budgeted superhero action movie equivalent of a Chuck Jones-directed Looney Tunes touchstone like “Duck Amuck.” “Keep going,” Wade says when a character starts monologuing, “audiences are accustomed to long run times.” Wade narrates the entire thing, as he always does, and at one point seizes the camera and drags it into another part of the set to tell us something confidential.
The script is upfront about what Disney wouldn’t allow Reynolds and company to show. Cocaine is prominently mentioned but nobody does any; butt stuff is described but not depicted; there’s homoerotic horseplay and wordplay, but no actual sexual person-play. That being said, the writers get more latitude than I assumed they’d get when it comes to criticisms of Disney running the MCU into the ground and off in multiple, incompatible directions post “Endgame.” “Welcome to the MCU, by the way,” Wade tells Logan. “You’re joining at a low point.”
At the same time, the film maintains the loose-verging-on-chaotic, sketch comedy-derived sensibility that links it to slapstick from the early sound era of motion pictures. Wolverine and Logan are nigh-invulnerable cousins of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby riffing their way through the long-running “Road” series, which regularly paused to bond with the audience over watching a movie. They’re also Moe and Curly in super-suits. Their eye-pokes go through the sockets and into the brain.
Somehow, despite the silly mayhem and hyper-meta goofing, I kinda did care about the characters, especially in the finale, which unspools a pathos firehose and blasts us with it. Jackman is moving as Wolverine – and always has been; arguably more so the older he gets. Here he plays, not the straight man, but the exasperated, cranky man. He yells not just because he’s had enough of this red-suited clown but also because he’s furious at himself for failing and now has a target at which to direct his accumulated negative energy. Reynolds, for all his blabber-mouthed, abrasive relentlessness, is touching as well, probably because in this version of the characters’ stories, they’re both broken, abandoned men: “losers,” Wade calls them. Their loser-ness connects to the idea of the Fox-Marvel characters ending up collateral damage in a long running corporate rivalry that concluded with one combatant annexing and pillaging the other.
I wish the movie were more coherent and consistent. The visual effects are of variable quality. Some of the closeups are luminous and the colors radiant, particularly in night scenes, while other shots (particularly daylight panoramas in the limbo sequence) are so flat-looking and washed out and devoid of detail that they wouldn’t pass as a screensaver. Director Shawn Levy– a regular Reynolds collaborator who’s comfortable with CGI-driven, big-budget projects – handles the action competently but without jaw-on-the-floor inventiveness (though he does have a comedy storyteller’s knack for timing the verbal and visual gags, and there’s a nifty “Oldboy” tribute). This is the second "Deadpool" in a row where Wade is driven mainly by a desire to do right by Vanessa even though she's barely in it. (His narration does, however, confess to getting a stiffie while watching "Gossip Girl," which starred Reynolds' wife Blake Lively.) The movie is tight by superhero standards (127 minutes) but still runs out of gas. Wade admits it, though, promising to wrap things up when you start to fidget.
There are compensations, particularly in the casting. MacFayden serves tasty ham in the Shakespeare-trained Brit tradition. Corrin, who played Princess Diana in Netflix’s “The Crown,” makes a frightening villain, with her predatory stare, bird-boned arms and legs, and long, elegant fingers. The movie pushes some of Cassandra’s torturous or murderous acts to the point where they seem like spiritual as well as physical violations. When this woman gets in your head, it’s not a metaphor. (Between the profanity, the gore, and the sadomasochistic bent, this entry is as not-for-kids as the others.)
In its sketch comedy-adjacent way (there are five credited writers) “Deadpool & Wolverine” articulates something honest and true about the essence of comic book movies, more so than most “grimdark” adaptations: it’s all a riff anyway. Multiverse storytelling — like the comic book, soap opera, and pro-wrestling tropes it evolved from — is infinitely malleable. No important character is irrevocably dead, nor are they locked into being exclusively a good or bad guy. That’s why big-name characters can be introduced with fanfare, then killed suddenly for a laugh, or flipped from irredeemably evil to evil but redeemable. We go in knowing our suspension of disbelief will be flicked off and on like a light switch. This is part of the pact. And the dare.
Set at a conference for “thought leaders,” “The Way We Speak” is an ambitious drama that puts its cameras on a handful of characters wading into an arena of intellectual combat while dealing with personal challenges that threaten to unravel them. The performances are uniformly excellent. That all the key players (save for the lead) are not yet in-demand names is even more impressive. They carry themselves like stars (or known-quantity character actors) even if we don’t know them.
Faith versus Reason is the main attraction: a middle-aged writer named Simon Harrington (Patrick Fabian of “Better Call Saul”) who is finally starting to have a breakthrough is brought in to have a series of debates over three days with another rationalist, his longtime best friend and colleague George Rossi (Ricco DiStefano). When Rossi bows out due to health problems, Simon ends up squaring off against a last-minute replacement, Sarah Clawson (Kailey Rhodes), a young Christian essayist whose latest book has sold over a million copies.
Offstage, Simon has an unsteady and sometimes heated relationship with his wife Claire (Diana Coconubo, possibly the cast’s MVP, at least in terms of the role’s degree of difficulty). She’s a famed medical researcher who has been in cancer treatment for years and is a rock for Simon even though her body is betraying her and she’s worried about survival. Simon, already a prickly sort and a drinker as well, begins to crack while worrying about his sick friend and sick wife and his own career ambitions. He increasingly views Sarah not just as his opponent but his enemy, creating a ripple effect of ill-will that impacts other characters and makes the conference tense.
Written and directed by Ian Ebright in his feature debut, “The Way We Speak” has already been compared to the work of Aaron Sorkin. The comparison fits not just because nearly every single person in the story is fantastically, at times theatrically, eloquent, but because the structure, look, and tone channel the underappreciated “Steve Jobs,” a Sorkin-penned, Danny Boyle-directed movie set around three product launches. As it turns out, this movie has a lot of the virtues of a Sorkin joint, in particular a gift for snappy patter and keen insight into the dynamics of relationships between smart, accomplished, ambitious people. However, it also has some of the flaws, chiefly an overconfidence in its ability to articulate the big ideas and timeless themes that are believed to be hallmarks of Important Drama.
The content of Simon and Sarah’s onstage clashes is so basic as to seem beneath an institute lauded in the screenplay as a gathering place for the world’s brightest minds. The debates don’t go much deeper than an intro class. “How can you justify a righteous deity that allows so much suffering to play out without direct intervention?” is one of the questions posed by Simon, in a self-satisfied tone (like so much of what he offers) that suggests he believes this will be a knockout blow. When it comes to cinematically representing the substance of the faith and reason dialectic, Ingmar Bergman or Terrence Malick this film ain’t.
Maybe we’re not supposed to think that the verbal combatants standing at those lecterns are as profound as they think they are? That’s a more charitable reading. Another is that the main event onstage is a pretext to externalize what happens internally when accomplished, ego-driven people get stuck under a spotlight while coping with intensely demanding personal matters and start to crack. (Sarah’s got her own issues, somewhat related to what Simon’s going through.)
This is where the film most impresses. Ebright is ruthless, in the best way, when it comes to showing how people can be selfish and thoughtless in personal and romantic relationships, even when they think they’re behaving in an exemplary or at least decent manner.
Simon is already right on the edge of assholery when we first meet him. Fabian’s demeanor and vocal style in the part are reminiscent of Michael Douglas in some of his classic ‘80s and ‘90s charismatic heel roles. But he digs deeper into self-sabotaging unpleasantness and weakness than Douglas ever did, and as the film goes along, the character becomes increasingly hard to defend because he’s losing control and has no sense of the damage he’s inflicting on himself and those around him (including the hosts of the conference).
Sarah doesn’t emerge from the story pristine either, but one can at least make the case that extended exposure to Simon brought out bad elements in her personality (or perhaps suppressed anxiety/misery related to her own marriage) that might not have manifested until she showed up at the conference.
The most sympathetic character is Claire, who’s married to a mass of resentment in the form of a man. Simon, we learn, has been in her shadow for a long time (supporting her, at least in his mind; emotionally but not financially). He has resentments that he should know better than to admit, mainly about his wife’s cancer getting in the way of his long-deferred dream of being a famous writer. The movie is most compelling and observant when it’s deflating Simon. When he gets drunk at dinner, Claire leaves early and drafts a waiter to watch over him until he’s ready to leave. Simon asks his minder, “Are you familiar with futurism? Because I’m kinda famous for it.” “Oh,” the waiter says politely. “Right on!”
Before we get too deep into the story of Lou Pearlman, a pop music kingmaker who built his empire on a Ponzi Scheme, something needs to be addressed about Netflix’s three-part docuseries “Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam.” As technology advances, there are going to be deeper and deeper questions about what’s allowed in non-fiction filmmaking, and the creators of this series wade into what I would call some professionally murky waters. Pearlman himself died in 2016, but he published an autobiography titled Band, Brands, & Billions and the series uses passages from that book but puts them into the form of an A.I.-generated Pearlman, as if he’s being interviewed or giving a sort of presentation about his life. While no one is here to defend Pearlman, the decision feels a bit wrong to me. Written words in a book are not the same as an interview. How do we know a word or two aren’t missed in the translation? How do we know the emphasis on a certain word or idea is the right one? It feels like an incredibly slippery slope to turn books into something that looks like an interview.
Of course, morally gray areas are appropriate for the story of Lou Pearlman, a man who made pop stars in the ‘90s and ‘00s in a way that really changed music forever. The great revelation of “Dirty Pop” is that the whole thing was a scam as Pearlman was basically getting people to invest in these bands with little to no intent of ever getting them a return on their investments. Pearlman started his career selling blimps he didn’t own to companies, transitioning to actual plane rentals through Trans Continental Airlines before he noticed the success of New Kids on the Block, and set about to recreate it on a massive scale. He basically created the best-selling boy band of all time in The Backstreet Boys, but that is just the tip of the pretty boy iceberg as Pearlman went on to manage and shape NSYNC, O-Town, LFO, Take 5, Natural, and many more.
It was all a scam, and “Dirty Pop” does a decent job of recounting the facts. The Backstreet Boys were the first to notice that they weren’t really getting paid, filing a lawsuit against Pearlman. NSYNC followed suit, and the house of cards fell. As Pearlman scrambled to find the money he had mostly spent on other artists, people suffered. How much the people around Pearlman knew about his illegal and immoral wheelings and dealings is a bit of a gray area in “Dirty Pop.” The series is surprisingly defensive at times of Pearlman and his legacy, perhaps indicative of how much people want to defend something they love like the music he helped create. If you’re a Backstreet Boys or NSYNC fan, it can be hard to morally reconcile how something that brought you so much joy could have been so corrupt.
And yet “Dirty Pop” seems hesitant to dig into this complexity. The interviews with former boy banders are the highlight, but several of the big names are missing (including Justin Timberlake), giving the already-thin project a further sense that it’s incomplete. By the time Pearlman was caught, his crimes were labeled the longest-running Ponzi scheme in history. He used companies that only existed on paper to get investments that he basically spent on himself or further projects to keep the scheme going. The intersection of business, greed, and pop culture is a fascinating place, but it’s also perhaps too ethically complex for a flashy Netflix docuseries. How can something so beloved also be so painful to so many? Pearlman isn’t here to really answer that question, and the series can’t quite get there, even with their version of his own words.
Whole series screened for review. On Netflix on July 24th.
When many of us think of vacationing on the Mediterranean, the first things that come to mind might be the gorgeous blue-green crystalline waters, the picturesque villages anchored on the shoreline, and the many variations of seafood fare available within walking distance. Perhaps that’s part of what inspired rockstar John Allman (Harry Connick Jr.) to escape the pressures of the music business to catch a little rest and relaxation on the scenic island of Cyprus. Unfortunately, he’s confronted with a more serious problem when the house on a cliff he purchased turns out to be a destination for people looking to end their life. As he tries to connect with other locals about what he can do to stop the practice, he meets an aspiring singer named Melina (Ali Fumiko Whitney) and her mother, Sia (Agni Scott), an accomplished doctor on the island who once had a relationship with John many years before – and who now has another chance at love.
Writer-director Stelana Kliris follows the well-worn beats of a romantic comedy with her follow-up to her 2014 feature debut, “Committed.” In “Find Me Falling,” she gives the audience a few surprises and instead follows a predictable story of a long-delayed romantic reconnection featuring two handsome leads. However, the subplot about suicide just outside John’s doorstep feels strangely glib, dampening the mood of this escapist rom com from the jump: the movie is called “Find Me Falling” afterall. In some scenes, this plot detail is played for laughs, like when an exasperated John scolds a man looking downcast and heading to the cliff, “Now is not a good day to die!” Embarrassed, the man turns back, and John continues his emotional conversation with Sia. Other moments are much more sympathetic, like when John coaxes a scared young woman off the edge and promises to help her, but it’s a tonal whiplash from nights spent at a music-filled taverna, getting sunburnt on the beach, or reigniting a long-lost romantic flame.
As a tired rockstar looking to get away from it all, Harry Connick Jr. looks a little too polished but acts appropriately tired by all the small town mishegoss he finds on arrival. He seems embarrassed that people recognize him and is maybe one of the most unpretentious rock stars ever written for a movie. As Sia, Agni Scott plays the part of the accomplished woman who soldiered on with her career and single motherhood well, and she struts through the film with a stylish sense of nonchalance. It’s a performance that’s almost too cool and aloof, because as their characters may verbally pine for each other, the physical chemistry feels less evident, and their moments of passion look less exciting than some of their arguments.
However, Kliris’s script doesn’t just center on the film’s two lovebirds. She builds out Sia’s relationship with her daughter, Melina; her concerned sister Koula (Lea Maleni), who is weary of this dashing stranger who’s returned to Cyprus for what may be more than a change of scenery; and the family’s matriarch Marikou (Aggeliki Filippidou), who is always on hand to lend an ear, share her wisdom with her family, and cool tempers between family members. There’s a loving familial dynamic that develops alongside the romance that also grounds the story in the culture and place, not just using it as a narrative backdrop. Even Captain Manoli (Tony Demetriou) plays a vital role in giving John a tour of the town, introducing him to the taverna where John sees Sia for the first time in years, and has his own issues that John then helps him and his family in return.
By the end, “Find Me Falling” lands on uneven ground. It’s as if this lighthearted romantic comedy has its frothy bubbles burst by the sudden encroachment of dramatic interruptions and uninspired pop music and lyrics (John’s big hit is called “Girl on the Beach” and the song does not sound better than the title). It’s an odd choice that may affect some viewer’s expectations for a frivolous getaway romance, like using lime for a Greek dish that calls for lemon. It changes the profile of the movie, leaving an aftertaste that feels slightly off an otherwise decent meal.
Jane Giles and Ali Catterall's documentary "Scala!!!" is about a legendary, notorious, hugely influential and long-gone London theater. But it'll appeal to anyone whose formative moviegoing years were defined by eccentric, usually urban or college-town cinemas that programmed whatever the folks who ran the place found interesting and switched lineups every day or two. There are increasingly few such venues left, alas, with real estate having become usuriously priced all over the world and "content" having largely replaced the notion of "entertainment," a thing one sought outside of the home. But this is a fun testimonial to a place that meant something. Witnesses to the Scala's history include patrons, management and staff, many of whom were or became notable filmmakers or programmers, including John Waters, Ben Wheatley, Ralph Brown, Mary Harron, Beeban Kidron, and Isaac Julien.
The thrill of transformation is a subtext. The Scala didn't just show films, it stimulated interest in cinema, challenged and offended viewers (on purpose), and pushed the limits of what was then considered acceptable to screen in England. It championed pro-union and LGBTQ-friendly films, early works by subsequently legendary directors (including David Lynch's "Eraserhead"), and underground movies that blurred arthouse and grind-house categories. One of the more fascinating tales is about the durable appeal of 1975's "Thundercrack," American filmmaker Curt McDowell's fusion of an "old dark house" movie, a surrealist art flick, and a hardcore porno. "It was screened at the Scala constantly, probably from the day the cinema opened right to the time it closed," says Alan Jones, co-presenter of London's Shock Around The Clock horror festival at the Scala. "Legend was that there was only ever one print of 'Thundercrack' here at the Scala, and it was run until eventually it fell apart."
Located in the King's Cross neighborhood of London before it became gentrified, the Scala started out as a traditional theater, closed and reopened, and then for 15 years was essentially a film club catering to buffs of one sort or another. During the later era, the film's focus, it was a "ground zero" location for the budding fan culture scene in the UK, popularizing John Waters "trash" trilogy of "Pink Flamingos," "Female Trouble" and "Desperate Living" and films by Russ Meyer, screening previously unseen and classic older work, and hosting the first Avengers convention, meetings of The Laurel and Hardy Appreciation Society, and The Shock Around the Clock festival (described by critic Kim Newman as "Kind of like Woodstock for the bizarro generation").
The Scala always struggled to keep its doors open but eventually succumbed to a variety of adversities, including rising costs and a siphoning away of repertory and art house viewers by the convenience (though inferior presentation) of VHS rentals. The killing blow was a lawsuit from Warner Bros, filed after the theater decided to screen Stanley Kubrick a “A Clockwork Orange” even though the director pulled it from UK distribution following what appeared to be copycat killings. After the Scala Film Club lost the case, the venue went into receivership, and while it reopened in 1999 and added two floors, the focus was live entertainment.
Non-obsessives may find a lot of the movie uninteresting and incomprehensible because so many of the titles and artists mentioned in it are more than 40 years old and the era described is pre-digital. There's a lot of comfortable shop-talk about the physical processes of making and exhibiting the object known as "a film," which had to be carted around in canisters and stored and handled properly so it didn't decay. "I have always maintained that the Scala was willing to screen any length of celluloid that had half a dozen intact sprocket holes," says Jones. "Because of that, the films tended to break." They also tore, stuck in the projector gate and caught on fire, an occurrence the movie describes with a fair amount of reverence, even cutting editorially to a moment from the Peter Fonda film "The Trip" where the actor exclaims, "It's like an orange cloud of light that just flows right out of us!"
Based on Giles' 2018 book Scala Cinema 1978-1993, this documentary remembrance is so enthusiastic that it becomes exhausting, like listening to a lovable but manic and inebriated friend go on about his favorite stuff until the sun comes up (which, to be fair, is surely a stylistic feature rather than a bug; the Scala was known for its all-night marathons). But at a time when upbeat enthusiasm for anything is derided as "cringe," it's a treat to see so much energy expended to recall a venue and a community that was unknown to most, but felt like the center of the universe to the merry few who were part of it.
“Istanbul is a place…where people come to disappear.” This is the sad conclusion arrived at by late in this moving film by one of its principal characters, Lia, a stern-faced older woman who has crossed over into the Turkish capital from the Black Sea’s Batumi, a desolate-looking spot in Georgia. A retired school teacher, she has left her home after making a promise to her now-dead sister. The promise was to find that woman’s child, who’s living in Turkey. All Lia has to go on is a name, and the fact that the now-adult child is transgender.
The movie, written and directed by Levan Akin, begins in the messy, tumultuous house where Achi, a young man who’s for all intents and purposes still a boy, lives miserably under the thumb of his older brother. Lia happens by the house, is recognized by one of its residents, and on the spot Achi concocts a tale, saying he knows the niece, Tekla, and has an address for her. He attaches himself to Lia, who accepts his company reluctantly, and soon they’re off, settling awkwardly in cheap lodgings and combing the poorer areas of Istanbul with not much to go on but hope.
The two actors who play Lia and Achi, Mzia Arabuli and Lucas Kankava, are marvels. Kankava has a wide-open face that registers Achi’s boundless naivete, which is always there no matter how cocky or obdurate he makes himself. Arabuli’s own expression as Lia is often pinched, but as time wears on her, and as she starts to let herself go in a “what the hell” sort of way — she likes to dip into a bottle of a fermented drink called “chacha,” a habit she initially tries to hide from Achi — a pained vulnerability makes itself felt. These are two lost souls who make an unlikely temporary fishbowl for themselves, far from homes they may never return to.
On one of their ferry rides, Akin’s camera makes a graceful camera move away from the anxious Lia and Achi and settles on the more content-in-the-moment face of a trans woman, whose story the movie then picks up. This is not, as is soon made clear, Tekla. The character’s name is Evrim, and she’s a woman who’s found a purpose. Near to completing a law degree, she works for a trans rights NGO that also looks into various cases in poorer neighborhoods; at one point we see her springing a young boy and his younger sister, who act on the peripheries of the movie’s central story threads, from jail. She’s confident and compassionate, enjoys a fairly robust sex life, but she’s subject to condescension — at best — from the various authority figures she’s obliged to deal with. Deniz Dumanli’s portrayal of the character is extraordinary, grounded, vanity-free.
Lia and Achi’s story will intersect with Evrim’s, but not right away. Akin is here working in a tradition established in Italian Neo-realism — and by the end of the film, he shows he can turn on the viewer’s tear ducts as deftly as De Sica did in his prime — but his narrative approach brings a vivid freshness to the proceedings. The camerawork he concocts with cinematographer Lisabi Fridell, often shooting through windows and doorways, often gives the viewer a “fly on the wall” feeling, but never becomes voyeuristic. It invites empathy, not titillation. And the movie’s portrait of Istanbul — roiling, unglamorous, and yes, packed with stray cats — makes the city a character in and of itself.
