Movie Review: Bigger

Bigger (2018) 

Directed by George Gallo

Written by George Gallo 

Starring Tyler Hoechlin, Kevin Durand, Julianne Hough, Tom Arnold, Colton Haynes, D.J Qualls, Victoria Justice

Release Date October 12th, 2018

Published October 10th, 2018

Bigger stars Tyler Hoechlin, former Teen Wolf star and current Supergirl co-star, as Joe Weider. If that name sounds familiar it’s because it is the name behind the greatest fitness empire history. Joe Weider is, perhaps, best known for having discovered Arnold Schwarzenegger but his life was far more than that as he revolutionized the fitness game by creating bodybuilding as we know it and changing the way the world viewed getting in shape. 

Bigger begins poorly by taking us back, unnecessarily to the early life of Joe Weider and his brother Ben (Aneurin Barnard). We learn that Joe’s mother wanted him to be a girl and never came around to having two sons. She mistreats the brothers throughout their life and while Weider would go on to say that what his mother withheld from him and Ben became the impetus for building his empire to fill that void, it rings hollow if you consider it as him crediting emotional abuse for being successful. 

The film begins to get watchable when Tyler Hoechlin finally takes the role as Joe and Ben leave Toronto behind and move on to college and empire-building. Unfortunately, this leads to another brief derailment in Joe’s first marriage. Former Nickelodeon star Victoria Justice plays Kathy Weider and the characterization here is pretty odd. Initially, the chemistry between Justice and Hoechlin isn’t bad but director George Gallo fumbles that very quickly. 

Needing to get Kathy out of the story to move on to the more interesting part of Joe Weider’s life, Gallo chooses to have Kathy pretend she has completely forgotten who she married. From their first meeting to their first date through their marriage, Joe is consistently only interested in bodybuilding, nutrition and health. It’s all this version of Joe Weider ever talks about. He shoots everything including his first kiss through the prism of health and fitness as a metaphor for life and love. 

So when Kathy returns home to find Joe and Ben working on their muscle and fitness magazine in their dining room Kathy, seemingly out of nowhere, takes umbrage. Kathy is shocked that the man who has talked almost nonstop about his plans to legitimize weightlifting as a sport and a lifestyle is suddenly spending his time building his dream. She turn angry and bitter and by the end of the scene an editing dissolve sends Kathy packing. 

Amid the tumult of Joe’s personal life, his professional life becomes a struggle as a more established bodybuilding publisher named Hauk keeps preventing the best bodybuilders in Canada from working with Joe. Hauk, played by character actor Kevin Durand, is a loutish, boorish, bully who tries to keep the Weider brothers from getting into his field of business. When Joe finally gains a foothold by proving his methods of training and nutrition are superior, Hauk finds other ways to try to derail his competition. 

Kevin Durand is by far the worst thing about Bigger. I get that he’s a villainous character whom we are supposed to dislike and distrust but Durand’s big, broad, oafish performance stretches credulity. Sure, Mr Hauk is not remembered to this day for a reason while the Weider’s went on to riches and fame and that does seem to indicate that much of what Bigger says about Hauk is based in some reality, Durand’s caricature of Hauk is far too silly and broad to be taken seriously. 

I have spent more time complaining about aspects of Bigger than praising the movie which is strange considering I am recommending the movie. So, let’s talk about the positives. I really liked Tyler Hoechlin’s performance as Joe Weider. I enjoyed how earnestly and honestly to the exclusion of all other things, Joe Weider was dedicated to his craft. The script is a tad broad but Hoechlin had me believing in Joe Weider’s obsessive personality that finds him looking at sex as something athletic and marketable. 

Hoechlin also sparks well with Julianne Hough as Joe’s second wife, legendary pinup Betty Weider. Betty was a model who Joe first spied on the cover of a magazine. Eventually, he would use his connections via his good friend Jack Lalanne (Colton Haynes) to arrange a meeting that he then uses to cast Betty for a photo shoot with one of his bodybuilders. The bodybuilder in question turns out to be Joe himself and the two begin falling madly in love. 

As I said, the chemistry between Hoechlin and Hough is terrific. Unfortunately, director George Gallo nearly ruins this relationship as well with his whipsawing female emotional developments. For no good reason, Betty nearly breaks up with Joe because he talked about fitness in the bedroom. Once again, it’s a case of marriage amnesia as Betty is forced to briefly forget the man she married and ask that he be an entirely different person who doesn’t speak exclusively via the language and metaphor of bodybuilding and fitness. 

I’m not kidding when I tell you that I found the single minded way that the script and Hoechlin play Joe Weider is charming. As a character, Joe Weider is fully formed, he is a bodybuilding obsessive who single mindedness drive can either making him irresistibly earnest and naive or can drive people to want to smack him in the face to see if they can find an actual human being beyond the tightly coiled musculature. 

Bigger is not groundbreaking, it’s barely even something I can recommend. Joe Weider doesn’t have a real arc in the traditional sense. Weider appears to move from success to success in his career without fail and even in lean times his single minded approach to getting what he wants sustains him. Tyler Hoechlin mines that to create a fully formed if quite odd character. Joe Weider was an oddball but Hoechlin makes him a really interesting oddball, even as the movie around him crumbles under any real scrutiny. 

Hoechlin is so winning that I can’t help but recommend Bigger. Oh and one more note: the bodybuilder turned actor who portrays the young Arnold Schwarzenegger, circa 1968, is outstanding. Calum Van Moger looks ludicrously like a young Schwarzenegger. It’s uncanny when he’s first revealed and when he’s posing in the first Mr Olympia, Von Moger unveils that classic Schwarzenegger grin as one final flawless touch on a very minor performance. 

Movie Review: The Sisters Brothers

The Sisters Brothers (2018) 

Directed by Jacques Audiard

Written by Thomas Bidegain, Jacques Audiard 

Starring John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Rutger Hauer, Riz Ahmed

Release Date September 21st, 2018

Published September 28th, 2018

The Sisters Brothers stars John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix as Eli and Charlie Sisters, bounty hunters for a man known as The Commodore (Rutger Hauer). Currently, they are on the trail of a chemist named Herman Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed) who is wanted by The Commodore because he claims to have a formula that makes panning for gold as easy as picking up rocks out of the stream.

Ahead of the brothers, also on Warm’s trail, is John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) a detective who works for The Commodore and acts as tracker for the brothers who do the hard part of kidnapping, torturing and often killing the people The Commodore sets them after. This chase however, is a little different. Morris is wavering over whether he wants to do his job and turn Kermit over or join up with him and runoff. 

As for the brothers, Eli is thinking of this run as his retirement. He’s fallen for a school marm and wants nothing more than to return home and open a store. Charlie, on the other hand, only concerns himself with the job and getting very, very drunk. Charlie likes killing people as a profession and hopes one day that he can become The Commodore so he can order other people around to kill on his behalf. 

Much of that plot description is inferred from scraps of dialogue in The Sisters Brothers. This an eloquent and brilliant movie for what is not said as much as what is said. The characters indicate things about themselves and we sort of fill in the blanks based off of their characters. Each character is so wonderfully colorful that you can’t help but want to fill in the blanks and get to know them more.

John C. Reilly is perhaps the standout as Eli, the practical, yet tougher of the two brothers. Charlie makes up for his slightness with risk taking while the quieter Eli is genuinely the kind of guy you can look at and know not to mess with him. Deep down he’s a man who wants to be a respectable gentleman but as we come to see as the movie plays out, he’s a skilled and menacing killer when he needs to be. 

Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance will divide audiences. Gyllenhaal chooses to play John Morris with a quirky vocal affectation that gives the impression of being pompous without being insufferable. Morris is a thoughtful character, a pragmatist and a dreamer in one. He never really wanted the life he has and appears to have a longing to be a writer rather than a detective, a skill he claims is honed and mastered, even as Warm figures him out with relative ease. 

As for Riz Ahmed, I enjoyed how little is made of his ethnicity. It speaks to the way people could get by in the west for a time before civil society brought the class system to the west and with it the inherent racism of such. I don’t believe the invention Warm has come up with for getting to the gold is real but it is used brilliantly in the film’s tremendous third act which travels unexpected places among the four lead characters. 

The Sisters Brothers was directed by Jacques Audiard, a French director who also co-wrote the screenplay with his frequent collaborator Thomas Bidegain. Audiard’s best known film is likely 2005’s A Prophet which was nominated for a foreign film Oscar that year. That film was a wrenching drama about Arab man desperately alone in a French prison and slowly drawn into servitude for a French criminal. Like The Sisters Brothers, the film is unpredictable and uncompromising. 

Audiard loves his characters and he especially likes following his characters to unpredictable places. You may think you know where his stories are headed but he’s ready for you in the end. The ending of The Sisters Brothers will undoubtedly divide audiences who may want something more conventional and western-like. Remember, this is a mood piece, it’s about tone and character and the violence in the story extends from circumstance as much as it does from these remarkable characters. 

The Sisters Brothers is one of my favorite westerns of recent memory. It’s a moody, atmospheric piece with strong violence but stronger characters. It’s a bloody western but also a witty one with smart characters and an unpredictable, perhaps a bit strange story. The story unfolds in a conventional fashion but nothing of these characters is typical or easily predicted. The film is funny and yet, when it needs to be brutal, it can be brutal. 

One last note about The Sisters Brothers, it has one of the best musical scores of the year. Alexandre Desplat provided the score for the film and it is an elegant and sparse mood piece that fits brilliantly into the narrative of the movie. The deep strings and stark piano riffs are absolutely gorgeous, especially early on as the story is developing and the music reflects the sun drenched mountains and dry deserts of the film's stark visuals. It's completely engrossing and I was lucky to be listening to it as I wrote this review. 

Documentary Review Hal

Hal (2018) 

Directed by Amy Scott

Written by Documentary

Starring Hal Ashby, Bud Cort, Beau Bridges, Louis Gossett Jr. 

Release Date September 7th

Published December 12th, 2018 

One thing that arrogant film critics like myself hate to do is admit our blind spots, those places in film where we are less than educated. One of my significant blind spots is the work of director Hal Ashby. It’s not that I am not aware of him or his reputation as a genius and I have even seen two of his films, Shampoo, which I greatly disliked, and Being There, which I adored. I’ve seen portions of his final movie, 8 Million Ways to Die but as the new documentary, Hal, indicates, I don’t have much need to return to that troubled project as any kind of indication of Hal Ashby’s talent. 

Hal tells the life story of Hal Ashby as he went to Hollywood in the mid-1960’s and began life as an iconoclast and stayed that way. Ashby came to prominence as an editor and found fame when he worked with his closest friend, Norman Jewison on the Oscar winning In the Heat of the Night. Ashby’s editing of that AFI Top 100 movie won an Oscar and from there Ashby and Jewison’s friendship blossomed into a partnership that finally allowed Ashby the chance to be a director. 

His first feature film was a daring note on racial attitudes of the 1960’s and the burgeoning 1970’s, called The Landlord. The film stars Beau Bridges and Louis Gossett Jr and it featured a story about race and politics that many other filmmakers would not have had the nerve and boldness to approach. As attested to by Jewison, who produced the film, and Beau Bridges and Louis Gossett Jr, who starred in The Landlord and are interviewed in Hal, the film was in line with the left wing politics of the time and yet had a freshness that came specifically from Hal Ashby. 

The documentary movies chronologically through Ashby’s career picking up next with his indelible cult film Harold & Maude, a film I have found to be a particular challenge to my sensibilities. I suppose that is the point of that movie, to challenge preconceived notions but I have thus far found myself unable to watch the movie which has the premise of a depressed young man, played by Bud Cort, who falls in love with an 80 year old woman played by Ruth Gordon. 

Everyone I know who has seen Harold & Maude and I can’t intellectualize my issue with the movie beyond the simplistic prejudice that I am sure the film confronts. I can tell you that from the documentary, the film appears to be as daring and fascinating as any of Ashby’s work I have seen. Sadly, Bud Cort is not interviewed for the documentary but footage of him speaking at an event in Ashby’s honor following his death in 1986 gives insight into the strange relationship between the two that helps to shape the unending uniqueness of Harold & Maude. 

The Last Detail is next and again, the film lacks the big interview with Jack Nicholson, though an interview he conducted at the time he was filming is featured. What Nicholson’s relationship was to Hal Ashby is not mentioned but he was known for being beloved by his actors for his loose, improv style that used scripts mainly as an outline and not the gospel for how a film was to be crafted. Ashby shot reams and reams of footage for his films and culled from there a take that suited his sensibilities which in many cases conflicted with the original intent of the writers. 

Ashby himself appears in the film via recordings he made in the midst of making his movies. Especially near the end of his career when wars with studio executives became a significant part of his life. Ashby was labeled as difficult and his copious use of marijuana was portrayed by Hollywood power players as an addiction that affected his filmmaking. I don’t buy that but we can never tell by Ashby’s 1980’s output which consists mostly of films he made and then were taken from him by studio executives. 

Hal is a fascinating and immersive documentary with a film historian's eye for detail. I loved the use of scenes from Ashby’s movies and scraps of interviews at the time the films were being made and I was particularly struck by the repeated use of an old school editing machine and a very old film camera as interstitial devices. These capture the time of Hal Ashby and recall his love of the editing room and the hours he would spend pulling together his vision from reams of film that he’s portrayed as knowing backwards and forwards. 

Hal was directed by Amy Scott who is in a strong position to make a movie about Hal Ashby. Scott also began her career as an editor and made her feature directing debut here. She also edited the documentary and it's a tremendous piece of work. Especially insightful are interviews with directors who were deeply influenced by Hal Ashby including Judd Apatow, David O. Russell and Alexander Payne whose works carry in them the kind of warmth and insight and oddity that Ashby was well known for. 

Hotel Transylvania 3 Summer Vacation

Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (2018) 

Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky

Written by Michael McCullers, Genndy Tartakovsky

Starring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Andy Samberg, David Spade, Selena Gomez

Release Date July 13th, 2018

Published July 14th, 2018

Hotel Transylvania Summer Vacation is the third and least offensive of this trilogy of Adam Sandler starring animated comedies. I wasn’t a fan of the first two Hotel Transylvania movies which felt, to me, too scatological, like a sanitized version of what Sandler does in his live action work. This time, however, with the franchise leaving the titular hotel there is something of a different feel to everything and for the first time, I laughed out loud more than once watching a Hotel Transylvania movie. 

Hotel Transylvania Summer Vacation finds our hero Drac (Sandler) lonely. Sure, he has a loving family and great friends but he wants a companion and at the same time feels guilty for wanting one for the first time since the death of his wife. Drac’s daughter Mavis meanwhile, mistakes his loneliness for stress and comes up with a solution, a dream cruise to the Bermuda Triangle. The whole family is going including Frank (Kevin James), Griffin the Invisible Man (David Spade), Murray the Mummy (Keegan Michael Key) and Wayne the Wolf and his wife Wanda and ALL of their kids. 

While Drac appreciates his daughter’s effort a cruise for a hotel owner feels rather redundant but things pick up when he Drac meets the Captain of the Cruise ship, Ericka (Kathryn Hahn). Drac is immediately smitten and I must say, the scenes with Drac overcome with feelings on meeting Ericka is very cute and it made me smile. The follow up scene in which an over-confident Drac struts around the ship to Bruno Mars’ “24 Karat Magic” is delightful with a funny if not all that original payoff. 

So, we have a love story on our hands and that means we need obstacles and this movie has a pretty good one. Ericka has a secret, the cruise is a sham and she has set it up so she can get revenge on Drac. You see, Ericka is Ericka Van Helsing, of the vampire-killing Van Helsings. She’s trained her whole life to kill Drac. Her great-grandfather Van Helsing (Jim Gaffigan) has stayed alive long past a normal lifespan, just to see his granddaughter vanquish Drac as he had failed to. 

That’s a pretty clever conflict, I gotta admit, I really liked that. The first film played a similar conflict with Andy Samberg’s human falling for Selena Gomez’ vampire but that was somehow far less fun than this. This film seems to delight a little more in the conflict as Drac is the one who is unaware of the danger he’s in. I really enjoyed the romantic sequence of Drac repeatedly saving Ericka while she’s attempting to recover a weapon she intends to kill him with. She begins to fall for him and yet she’s torn. It’s just clever enough to be amusing. 

My favorite gag in Hotel Transylvania could not be more simple. It’s a flashback to Van Helsing attempting to capture Drac and his friends on a train. We see Van Helsing enter, we know the monsters are hidden at the front of the car. We see Van Helsing pull out a box of matches, the tension builds because we know what’s coming, we know from the other movies how Frank reacts to fire. When Van Helsing lights the match, Frank freaks out and the scene and the movie are off and running. There’s nothing special here, but the simplicity made me laugh. 

Hotel Transylvania 3 Summer Vacation is nothing special, it’s certainly not a Pixar quality work. This isn’t art but for a shallow kiddie flick, it’s pretty good. It made me laugh at these monster characters for the first time in the entire franchise so that’s something. Having low expectations certainly helped matters. But there is something more genuine and winning about this outing in the Hotel Transylvania franchise. Something slightly more clever and less lowest common denominator. Whatever the reason, I enjoyed it enough to say this one is worth seeing. 

Movie Review: A.X.L

A.X.L (2018) 

Directed by Oliver Daly

Written by Oliver Daly 

Starring Alex Neustaedter, Becky G, Dominic Rains, Thomas Jane

Release Date August 24th, 2018 

Published August 29th, 2018

That A.X.L even exists is rather baffling. Just who thought this was a good idea: A dirt bike racing teen befriends a robot dog and attempts to save him from the evil corporation that created him. It’s a concept that might have worked in a 1970’s Disney movie but in 2018 it comes off like an idea we’d poke fun at for being like a 1970’s Disney movie. A.X.L is a deeply, painfully, earnest story without wit or consciousness.

 A.X.L stars Alex Neustadter, a star of such magnitude that he is listed third in the credits on IMDB despite being the star of the movie, aside from the CGI. Miles, as the character is named, is a dirt bike racer without a sponsor who is befriended by Sam (AlexMacNicoll), a big time racing star from the same hometown in California. Through Sam, Miles meets and falls for Sara (YouTube sensation and pop star Becky G, top-billed on IMDB) whose mother works for Sam’s family.

The three form a love triangle that will be tested when Sam and Miles are pitted against each other on the dirt bike track. Or, at least, that was the plot to one of the movies that someone cobbled together into A.X.L. The other movie is about a robot dog created by an evil corporate operative played by Dominic Rains and his lackey played by Lou Taylor Pucci. Thomas Jane and Ted McGinley round out the cast as ineffectual parents or actors just picking up a paycheck.

A.X.L is one of the most misguided movies I have seen come along in some time. The plot is utter nonsense, Short Circuit meets The Dirt Bike Kid perhaps, and the performances are irredeemably bland. Poor Alex Neustadter looks like he’d rather be anywhere else than pretending to be acting in front of a robot dog and Thomas Jane appears to be on hand to have a beer and get paid for the privilege.

None of the cast appear to be all that interested in the movie with everyone seeming to adopt the same wide-eyed, gape-mouthed expression to communicate every emotion of every scene. No joke, try watching this movie and not noticing the number of blank-eyed stares. It’s rather humorous but I wouldn’t recommend it as a drinking game. Then again, I don’t recommend anything about A.X.L.

One last note, A.X.L has the dubious distinction of having brought down its studio. Global Road Entertainment, according to industry magazine Variety, is trying to off-load the last of its movies after falling into the hands of lenders. It wasn’t all of A.X.L’s fault, the studio also released the pricey bombs Midnight Sun, Hotel Artemis and Show Dogs, but A.X.L with its CGI robot puppy, could not have helped matters, especially after opening to less than 3 million dollars opening weekend at the box office. Woof!

Movie Review: Alpha

Alpha (2018) 

Directed by Albert Hughes

Written by Daniele Sebastian Wiedenhaupt

Starring Kodi Smit McPhee, Johannes Haukur Johannesson 

Release Date August 17th, 2018

Published August 18th, 2018 

Alpha is the kind of action movie drama that stacks the odds far too high against the main character creating cartoonish levels of odds to overcome. Albert Hughes, the director of Alpha, sets his scenes in such a way that even Elmer Fudd might shake his head at the lack of believability, and he was repeatedly shot in the face by his own gun. The odds stacked against the lead character in Alpha on top of some silly looking at times special effects make Alpha a right laugh.

Keda (Kodi Smit McPhee) is undersized and gawky and also the son of a chief and therefore a future leader of his tribe. He’s about to go on his very first Bison hunt and his mother is concerned that he’s far too sensitive to be a hunter. His father, a barrel of a man, played by Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, believes that the hunt is exactly what his son needs to develop as a man and as a future leader. 

A bison hunt is a strange event, especially as filmed by Mr Hughes in Alpha. The chief tracks the bison by their… droppings and immediately the scene is followed by the tribe smearing themselves in something that looks exactly like the dung. It is apparently mud but the cut from the almost tasting of the bison leavings to the smearing of mud on his son’s face is clumsy and I am left to wonder if this was a failed attempt at a visual joke.

From there, the hunters sneak to within a football field distance from their prey and then drop the stealth entirely so as to begin running toward the bison and screaming. Why did they need the mud bath if this was the plan all along? The goal then becomes using spears to sort of shepherd the bison off the side of a cliff where they can be easily harvested at the bottom of the cliff. This goes wrong when Keda fails to find the ability to move either left or right when a charging bison is running straight at him. Our hero ladies and gentlemen.

Keda has the poor fortune of having one of his garments snagged on the horn of a bison that is running toward the cliff’s edge only to stop right at the edge and throw Keta over the side. Thinking his son has been killed, the father leaves to mourn but the boy isn’t dead and thus a journey of survival and discovery is set in motion, one filled with ever-increasing implausibility and survival and some supposedly heart-warming nonsense about a wolf, quickly domesticated.

Alpha isn’t as bad as I am making it out. Kodi Smit-McPhee is a nice young actor, though his perfectly shampooed hair will likely drive those in search of verisimilitude up a wall. He has a sympathetic quality that is undeniable and a steeliness that could be believable in a less cartoonish context. His mastery of whatever language he’s speaking is impressive, even if at times it comes off sounding like Leeloo from The Fifth Element, whom he oddly resembles in some scenes.

I respect the movie enough to not want to spoil anything by going too far into the implausible scenarios that Keda survives. Let’s just say that Leo in The Revenant was not as lucky as Kodi’s character in Alpha. The Revenant, at the very least, had some recorded history behind it whereas Alpha is based on a theoretical history of how early man interacted with nature. There is some theory that states humans were tougher then but tough enough to survive the trials of this movie? I found it too hard to believe.

I was going to mock the notion of Alphas and the Alpha Male construct but the movie actually does one thing right in how it eventually plays out that outmoded notion. For those who don’t know, the scientist who came up with the concept of the Alpha Male in the early 1970’s now decries it and points to new science that indicates that such things as battles for dominance among wolves are more like familial squabbles over thinning rations and not some battle over leadership or control. The Alpha is not the toughest, he’s the father and provider and his pack are more often than not, his children.

Even then, it’s not always a male wolf that was the provider. In some cases, female wolves acted as the provider for the pack. So, really all of those silly people who consider themselves Alphas and operate on the notion that being the most ruthless making them a leader are operating on their own shoddy intellectual construct and not the actual science of the wolf pack. The science states that a good leader is a good provider for the pack and thus is followed by the pack, not out of fear but necessity. 

That’s a bit of a tangent but only, again, because the ending of Alpha actually acts to deconstruct that notion as well by being much closer to the scientific truth of wolves than I was expecting. That is, unfortunately, the most impressive thing about the movie. The action is stilted, the stacked odds are cartoonish and the special effects are rather weak. Alpha isn’t terrible but it is much closer to terrible than being good.

Movie Review: Crazy Rich Asians

Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

Directed by John M. Chu

Written by Adele Lim, Peter Chiarelli 

Starring Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh, Awkwafina

Release Date August 15th, 2018

Published August 15th, 2018 

Crazy Rich Asians stars Constance Wu, star of the hit series Fresh Off the Boat, as Rachel Chu, an Economics Professor who is in love with Nick Young (Henry Golding). What she doesn’t yet know is that Nick’s family is crazy rich. The Young family has made billions of dollars and are a big deal in their home country. So big a deal in fact, that when Nick’s best friend is getting married much of the speculation and attention surrounding the ceremony centers on Nick and his family.

Rachel is about to get a crash course in Asian high society when she agrees to go as Nick’s date to his best friend’s, Colin (Chris Pang) and Araminta (Sonoya Mizuno), wedding. They will travel around to the other side of the globe, be immersed in the kind of glamour only the super rich understand and Rachel will have to deal with Nick’s disapproving mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh, glamorous as ever), while navigating the choppy water of being the girlfriend of the most wanted man in Asian high society. 

On the bright side, Rachel’s pal from college, Peik (Awkwafina) is on hand to help, as is the one member of Nick’s family that Rachel has met, fashion icon Astrid (Gemma Chan). Rachel will need all the support she can get, especially when she’s thrown to the wolves at a bachelorette party where it appears that only women who’ve failed at dating Nick in the past are on the guest list and each has their eye on taking down Rachel the outsider. 

Crazy Rich Asians is a relatively basic romantic comedy when you take away the social politics at play in having a mainstream romance with an all Asian cast. What director John Chu gets right however, is not relying on the tired romantic comedy plot requirements. The best modern rom-coms are aware that we know everything about their plot mechanics, what we want are great characters who stand apart and above stock stories. 

Constance Wu’s Rachel is just the kind of character we need to get passed all of the overly familiar elements of Crazy Rich Asians. Wu is a wonderful comic actress with smart instincts and a terrific face, brilliant eyes that communicate as much as any dialogue might. She’s a wonderful comic player and yet down to earth enough to ground the story of Crazy Rich Asians in something we can relate to and invest in. 

Henry Golding is terrific as well, if a little more eye-candy than his co-star. Golding’s shirtless scenes are plentiful in Crazy Rich Asians and the the beefcake is rarely necessary. Thankfully, he’s also given a few normal scenes where we get a sense of how much he loves Rachel and the sacrifices he’s willing to make to show her how much he loves her. He is an active part of the plot rather than a function of Rachel’s half of the plot, opposite Michelle Yeoh’s scheming Eleanor. 

Another thing I must commend Crazy Rich Asians for is creating realistic stakes surrounding Rachel and Nick’s relationship and the class warfare at play. A lazier movie might ask us to simply accept that class is a reason why two people who love each other would be pushed apart, but Crazy Rich Asians digs into the emotions at play and makes them part of the game of chicken that Rachel is forced to play with Eleanor. 

It’s not a revolutionary plot but it’s done well enough and with enough laughs that I really enjoyed Crazy Rich Asians. That the film has an all Asian cast is the most notable thing about the movie but the creators didn’t rest on history or novelty, they hired a brilliant cast and gave them rich characters and emotions to play within a familiar plot circumstance. We’ve seen much of this before but not with this racial twist and not with these wonderful characters. 

John M. Chu is greatly improving as a director. His previous feature outing was Now You See Me 2 and while many critics didn’t care for it, I found it to be a heck of a lot of fun, the work of a playful director. With Crazy Rich Asians that playfulness is on display once again and again, I found it charming. Chu has a great eye for set design when he has a good budget and he takes full advantage of his significant budget here, showing us all of the glamour and excitement having money can bring. 

The lavish setting serves to help further put us in the mind of Rachel who is completely overwhelmed by the surroundings and is reeling emotionally from the aspects of Nick’s life that he was hiding from her and the family that is not accepting of her as an outsider. It’s a whirlwind of emotions and Constance Wu is incredibly sympathetic but also feisty and intelligent, able to cut through the nonsense and stay true to herself. 

Again, all of that is pretty standard culture clash, fish out of water, romantic comedy stuff. It’s just greatly elevated  by one of the best comic actresses to come along in some time. Wu is a real winner and because of her and the fun direction by John M. Chu, I’m eager to recommend Crazy Rich Asians. 

Movie Review: Dog Days

Dog Days (2018)

Directed by Ken Marino

Writen by Elissa Matsueda, Erica Oyama

Starring Tone Bell, Vanessa Hudgens, Nina Dobrev, Adam Pally, Rob Corddry, Eva Longoria

Release Date August 8th, 2018 

Published August 10th, 2018 

Dog Days is an ensemble, family comedy, part-time romance, about people and the dogs who love them. It’s cheesy as the day is long but there is a particular charm to the direction Ken Marino brings to the film. That charm emanates from his terrific cast of comedy veterans toning down their act for the family set. People such as Tig Notaro, Lauren Lapkus, and Jessica St. Clair, make cameo appearances in Dog Days, and not just cameos, they have killer jokes to go with those cameos.

The plot centers on a universe of people beginning with Elizabeth (Nina Dobrev), the host of a popular daytime TV show. Elizabeth is so close to her dog that she leaves her TV on while she’s not home so her pup can laze around and watch mom on TV. Sadly, the dog is there when Elizabeth catches her boyfriend cheating on her and is apparently so broken up about the break up that he has to go to doggy therapy.

Elizabeth would like to be alone but that’s not going to happen as she is then given a new co-host for her talk show, Jimmy played by Tone Bell. Jimmy is a former football player and fellow dog lover who credits his pooch with saving his life after his football career ended abruptly. His style of winging it on the job flies in the face of Elizabeth’s buttoned up, very prepared style. Naturally, this means they are meant to be together.

There are four parallel plots in all in Dog Days. The next biggest involves Vanessa Hudgens as a coffee shop worker who begins volunteering at a dog shelter. Initially, she’s trying to impress a handsome but vacuous veterinarian but soon she begins to find purpose in working with the animals. This leads to a friendship and budding flirtation with the shelter owner, Garrett, played by the always awkward John Bass, last seen embarrassing himself deeply in Baywatch the movie.

Next up are Rob Corddry and Eva Longoria as a married couple who have adopted a young girl named Amelia. The child is sullen and distant despite the attempts of the couple to soften her up but things change when they find a lost pug. The pug becomes Amelia’s best friend and she begins to warm up to the new parents who’ve given her the dog. Unfortunately, we know where the dog came from, plot strand number 4.

Plot number 4 involves Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard as a pizza delivery boy with a bad attitude. When he delivers a pizza to an elderly man, played by Ron Cephus Jones, the elderly man’s dog gets out of the house only to be rescued by Amelia and her new family. The old man is kind and the dog belonged to his late wife. The emotional pull of this part of the story is surprisingly strong, even as it is quite admittedly pulling hard on the heartstrings.

Did I say there are four plots in Dog Days? I meant 5, there are 5 plots in Dog Days. Adam Pally plays a shiftless wannabe rocker who is tasked with dog-sitting for his pregnant sister, played by the brilliant Jessica St. Clair and her husband played by Thomas Lennon. Not allowed to have pets in his apartment, Pally is saddled with a running gag about hiding his dog inside an music equipment box and people thinking he’s transporting a body or a kidnapped person.

It’s not a particularly good gag, it earns mostly groans, though the payoff physical gag isn’t bad. Pally is terrific at playing a slothful layabout, a moocher with charm to spare. His part here is mostly as filler to the other plots but Pally is likable enough and his big puppy is cute enough that the plot doesn’t get in the way of anything and kind enhances the charm of Dog Days thanks to Pally’s inherent appeal.

There is a whole lot of plot here but it works for the most part. Many have, rather unfairly compared Dog Days to the work of the late hack Garry Marshall with his sprawling cast and nebulous plotting but that’s a rather significant insult to this movie. Marshall’s cloying, manipulative, holiday-based dreck were sloppy and earned a consistent series of ever-deepening groans before sloughed off the screen in a heap at their laugh-free conclusion. Dog Days is tighter, smarter and has actual laughs, something the Garry Marshall films only dreamed of having.

I did not expect much of Dog Days and it’s that low bar that likely has us here right now with me recommending the movie. That said, rather backhandedly, I do recommend this movie. The cast is charming and funny, the dogs are cute and it has legitimately big laughs in more than one scene. Given the landscape of modern comedy, Dog Days is a minor miracle as it provides a modern PG comedy with real laughs that don’t all require the sacrifice of one’s dignity via pratfall or bodily function humor. I personally want to give Ken Marino an award of some sort for this modest achievement but I am in the minority of positive opinions of Dog Days.

Movie Review: The Spy Who Dumped Me

The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018) 

Directed by Susannah Fogel

Written by David Iserson, Susannah Fogel

Starring Mila Kunis, Kate McKinnon, Sam Heughan, Hasan Minaj, Justin Theroux

Release Date August 3rd, 2018

Published August 3rd, 2018

The Spy Who Dumped Me stars Mila Kunis as Audrey, an underachiever working a menial job and celebrating her 30th birthday. Audrey is sad about the state of her life, not just the job but also her now ex-boyfriend, Drew (Justin Theroux), who dumped her via text message. Things aren’t all bad however as Audrey has a best friend, Morgan (Kate McKinnon) who is a constant source of support and great entertainment.

Audrey’s meaningless existence is changed forever when Audrey is thrown into the back of a truck with a pair of secret agents, Duffer (Hasan Minaj) and Sebastian (Sam Heughan), who inform her that Drew is a C.I,A Agent and he’s gone missing. When he pops up at her apartment he tells her that he has a mission she must help him with; she must travel to Vienna and deliver a package to another spy named Vern in order to save the world.

When Drew is left unconscious, Audrey and Morgan decide to actually go to Vienna and try to carry out his mission with the CIA hot on their tale. Once in Vienna, the two end up in gun battles, getting tortured, and facing off against some of the world’s greatest spies. The film travels to Prague and eventually to Paris as the globetrotting and gun toting get going the film gets really, quite funny.

Director Susanna Fogel does a great job of taking good advantage of her talented stars. The story of The Spy Who Dumped Me is a tad thin, so much of the film relies on the clever riffing of Kunis and McKinnon. Fogel smartly gives them room to roam within this goofball adventure to search for as many funny, and often quite dirty jokes. A lesser cast, actors without the ability to riff would unquestionably expose how thin this silly plot truly is.

Mila Kunis continues to grow into a reliable leading lady. Where it once seemed like she was destined to be outshined by funnier supporting players, like Kathryn Hahn in Bad Moms, here Kunis is able to hang in and be as funny as her co-star. Perhaps it’s her improv background, but Kate McKinnon comes off as quite a generous scene partner. It’s clear that McKinnon is capable of dominating a scene, and she certainly takes over a few scenes, but for the most part she is matched riff for riff by Kunis.

That said, McKinnon does star in my favorite sequence of The Spy Who Dumped Me. The scene is late in the movie and involves a Cirque Du Soleil style routine on a trapeze, McKinnon in a wacky costume and a icy contract killer played by Ivanna Sakhno. The scene is high level goofy and McKinnon earns big laughs throughout with some terrific physical comedy. Sakhno is pretty great to having to play completely straight opposite McKinnon’s clowning.

The Spy Who Dumped Me is terrifically funny if a tad uneven. The movie is mostly riffing rather than story but when the riffing is this good it’s hard not to appreciate it. Kunis and McKinnon have remarkable chemistry and the fun they’re having is infectious. I could complain about predictability and the stop start nature of the pacing of the film but The Spy Who Dumped Me is far too fun for such complaints.

The Spy Who Dumped Me opens nationwide on August 3rd.

Movie Review Teen Titans Go to the Movies

Teen Titans Go to the Movies (2018) 

Directed by Peter Rida Mitchell, Aaron Horvath

Wirtten by Michael Jelenic, Aaron Horvath

Starring Scott Menville, Khary Payton, Greg Cipes, Hynden Walch, Kristen Bell, Nicolas Cage 

Release Date July 27th, 2018

Published July 28th, 2018

I am only vaguely aware of the Teen Titans cartoon series. I know that I have flashed past it on cable television, alway pausing for a moment when I would see a recognizable superhero, like a Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman, before moving on with my life. I’m aware that it has a reputation of being irreverent and quite funny for the age group it is aimed at, and even some older audiences who appreciate its satiric, deconstructionist take on comic book characters, or so I’m told.

Teen Titans Go to the Movies attempts to bring the magic of the small screen satire to the big screen and it works, for the most part. Teen Titans Go to the Movies is a funny and strange concoction that finds a group of super teenagers fighting for the respect that people their age don’t often get from adults. That’s a story that any teenager or former teenager should easily be able to relate to.

The Teen Titans are Robin (Scott Menville) aka Batman’s sidekick, Beast Boy (Greg Cipes) who can turn into any animal, Cyborg (Khary Payton) a half-human half transformer robot, Raven (Tara Strong) a misanthropic witch, and Starfire (Hynden Walch) a sweetheart alien Princess. Together they fight crime when they aren’t bickering or coming up with coordinated song and dance routines to tout how great they are.

The rest of the superhero world view the Titans as a joke and the opening sequence illustrates why. While they goof around rapping about their powers in front of a giant balloon monster wrecking havoc over a city, Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern show up and do the actual fighting of the big bad before explaining to the Titans and to us that the Titans are a bunch of goofs who should stay out of the way of the real heroes.

The Titans brush off the lambasting and decide to follow the heroes to the premiere of Batman’s new movie, even though technically, they weren’t invited. After sneaking into the premiere they meet Jade Wilson (Kristen Bell) who explains to them why they will never have a movie of their own, they don’t have a good nemesis, a bad guy foil who could raise their profile, an arch-nemesis if you will.

When the call goes out for a crime in progress the Titans leap into action and, as luck would have it, they stumble into a crime being committed by the evil mastermind Slade (Will Arnett). Though Slade laughs off the Titans offer to be their arch-nemesis, he does beat the team up and leave with his criminal booty. Robin meanwhile, is determined to make Slade their arch-nemesis and ride that rivalry to his own movie.

Eventually, Slade does take the Teen Titans seriously which leads him to try to destroy the team using Robin’s desire to be a movie star to drive a wedge into the group. His very obvious accomplice is a rather clever and funny running gag in a movie that has plenty of clever and funny gags. And yet, the comedy doesn’t mean that co-directors Aaron Horvath and Peter Rida Michall and their team of 8 credited writers, don’t ground this in some minor melodrama.

Teen Titans Go to the Movies takes somewhat seriously the relationship between the team and that grounding makes the jokes funnier and the plot more familiar, easy to follow even if you’re not a Titans regular. The group dynamic is goofy but with a bloated self-seriousness on the part of Robin that is the funniest thing about the group. Robin can be a goof just like the rest of the group but it’s his pompous belief in himself as a hero that is repeatedly punctured to strong comic effect.

The rest of the characters are less well rounded with Cyborg and Raven barely making an impression while Beast Boy and Starfire get a few solid punchlines though not much depth. The character that arguably has the most well-rounded arc is Will Arnett’s Slade who may not change much from his arrogant, growling bad guy-ness but does slowly come to respect and fear the Titans as they slowly come to prove themselves as heroes, goofball heroes, but heroes nonetheless.

If you like obscure reference humor you will love the fact that Nicholas Cage is in Teen Titans Go to the Movies. The joke is that Cage once was set to play Superman in a Tim Burton directed Superman movie that went as far as having a script and a new super suit and a long-haired Superman. Footage of Cage testing out this new look Superman went online a few years ago and Cage has maintained he would still like to play Superman and it’s nice to hear him get the chance here.

Teen Titans Go to the Movie is not a memorable movie, it’s not a lasting animated classic. It’s a well-made and quite funny television adaptation that likely won’t spawn a film franchise. But, for what it is, with it’s mild ambition and big laughs it’s not bad. Given the state of the D.C movie universe at the moment, it’s arguably among the best of the D.C comics adaptations, but that’s not saying much when you consider Man of Steel and Suicide Squad are part of that universe.

Movie Review: Blindspotting

Blindspotting (2018) 

Directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada

Written by Daveed Diggs

Starring Daveed Diggs, Rafael Cassal, Janina Gavankar, Ethan Embry

Blindspotting is a stunningly modern, of the moment movie. Directed by first time feature director Carlos Lopez Estrada and written by and starring Daveed Diggs, Blindspotting attacks our moment in time with a powerful story of race, crime. Fear and getting by. Set in Oakland, the film makes the changing city a character as well as Silicon Valley spills outward, gentrification feels like a threat, not exactly the worst threat these characters face. 

In Blindspotting Daveed Diggs stars as Collin, an Oakland twenty-something with just three days left on his probation. Collin spent several months in jail and has spent the past year in a halfway house but in three days he’s free. All he has to do is stay out of trouble. This is harder than it seems as Collin’s best friend, Miles (Rafael Casal) appears determined to locate trouble. One of the first scenes in the movie finds Miles, with Collin unwittingly in tow, buying a gun. 

Miles says it is to protect his family but Collin doesn’t care, he just wants to never see it and hope that he doesn’t get in trouble for being near it. The two men have been friends since childhood and it was Miles who came to see Collin in jail every week and gave him money and generally looked after him. Miles makes this very clear in conversations about Collin’s ex-girlfriend and current boss at a moving company, Val (Janina Gavankar). 

But that isn’t the story. One night after dropping off Miles and returning the moving truck to the company, Collin sees a young black man run past his truck, followed by a white police officer (Ethan Embry). The officer shoots the man in the back as the young man yells ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!.’ Collin and the cop lock eyes for a moment before other cops arrive and Collin is told to leave the scene. 

You think you know where Blindspotting might be headed after that but you will be surprised. The film is rarely about the shooting. The full breadth of this story is about the shooting but it’s about it in a much wider context of racism in general. The shooting is endemic of the larger problem at the heart of American race relations. It’s about how we see each other, the assumptions we make and how we fail to question those assumptions. 

Blindspotting features one of the best scenes of 2018. I won’t spoil it for you, it’s the ending of the movie. Daveed Diggs is known for his stage performance as Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton and he takes some of that Hamilton stage skill and bring it to this powerful scene in which he raps about all that we’ve seen before in the film and in the life experience of the character. It’s stagy, yes, but I could not rip myself away from it. 

The scene is incredibly powerful and director Carlos Lopez Estrada deserves a lot of credit for the staging of the scene. He creates a suspenseful ticking clock using a security system that keeps the scene incredibly tense throughout on top of Daveed Diggs’ incredible monologue. Rafael Casal’s Miles is only a witness in the scene but even how he’s used plays into the deep emotions of the scene, his face is indelible in the moment. 

The use of close-ups in Blindspotting is also quite powerful. A scene where Collin is walking down an empty street with a gun in his pocket and a cop pulls u-turn is punctuated by a close-up of Diggs’ face in the bright light of a police spotlight and then darkness. It’s a minor scene but it is filled with a remarkable level of emotion and that close-up is stunning. There are other powerful close-ups as well in the shooting scene and in that powerhouse ending that I talked about. 

Blindspotting is a testament to the powerful words of Daveed Diggs who wrote the screenplay and stars and to director Carlos Lopez Estrada who found a terrific way to introduce himself to feature filmmaking. This is an arresting, fascinating, suspenseful and emotional movie. Diggs and Casal use their friendly dynamic to make the movie less oppressive and more watchable than my description, the film does loosen its grip to let you breath and even laugh but, for the most part this is a tightly wound and engrossingly modern drama. 

Movie Review: Eighth Grade

Eighth Grade (2018) 

Directed by Bo Burnham

Written by Bo Burnham

Starring Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Emily Robinson

Release Date July 13th, 2018

Published August 15th, 2018

Eighth Grade is a movie of this moment; vital and real. Eighth Grade appears uniquely in tune to the teenage mind in a way that we’ve rarely seen in a feature film. Not since perhaps Catherine Hardwicke’s breakthrough 2003 feature, Thirteen, have I seen a movie that feels so uniquely on the wavelength of the modern teenager. Sweet, sensitive, smart and funny, Eighth Grade is one of the best movies of 2018 thus far.

Elsie Fisher stars in Eighth Grade as Kayla, a shy young woman at the end of her middle school years. Is Kayla really shy? Yes and no, she does have her own YouTube channel which is indicative of a desire to communicate with people. However, at school, Kayla has no friends and is given the award as the ‘Most Quiet’ girl at school. Kayla is awkward and angst-ridden around the other kids and it is a constant struggle between that angst and her desire to connect.

That struggle tends to manifest itself quite negatively in Kayla’s relationship with her single dad, Mark (Josh Hamilton), a doofy, dad joke spouting, good sport who is struggling with his own loneliness and insecurity about being a good father. The relationship with father and daughter is quietly the center of the plot of Eighth Grade which is otherwise plotless. Writer-Director Bo Burnham isn’t interested in plot but in atmosphere and especially in observing character.

In Elsie Fisher’s Kayla, Burnham has a character very much worth observing. Fisher’s remarkably innate likability and acute sensitivity make Kayla such a wonderful character. Unique and independent, Kayla may struggle with meeting friends but she does not struggle in evoking our heartfelt sympathy and care. I cared about Kayla the first moment she came on screen with her painfully earnest YouTube advice show as a window into her young soul.

Bo Burnham uses the device of Kayla’s ‘show’ to great effect as we learn things about the character in a way that feels fresh and organic and doesn’t resort to voice-over or other well-worn gimmicks of information exchange. Kayla isn’t an over the top personality, her YouTube show comes from a place of comfort where the only judgment she faces are from the likes, dislikes and page views, what few views she gets.

The aching, angsty,  earnestness of the millennial is captured here in a way that feels almost documentary-like. Burnham has a strong incite into this age group as it has been millennials who’ve helped to raise his profile and made his Netflix special a must see. He’s not pandering to them, he’s going out of his way to be understanding of them and careful in how he portrays them. While Burnham does resort to the kids always on their phone gag, the payoff that comes late when Kayla confronts a pair of phone-toting popular is worth the well-worn trope.

Elsie Fisher is a remarkable find, a young actress of the most natural instincts. Burnham has given her a wonderful character and range to play but Fisher is the one who makes Kayla sing. It’s a performance of layer and nuance and the empathy Fisher evokes for Kayla is the bond that drives the movie. We feel for her, worry for her, laugh with her and urge her forward as she pokes her head out into the world beyond her YouTube channel,

Equally excellent is veteran actor Josh Hamilton as Kayla’s lovingly befuddled father. Though he is the constant focus of his daughter’s unearned ire, we know he’s just as much of a lost soul as she is and loved how the movie never makes it easy for father and daughter to connect. Hamilton’s awkwardness reflects Fisher’s and bonds the two as parent and child. A scene between the two late in the film may be one of the best and most moving scenes in any movie in 2018 and much of the credit for the scene belongs to Hamilton.

Bo Burnham has made a lovely, insightful, warm, and funny movie that feels fresh and like nothing else in theaters today. It’s the first truly millennial movie, the first film to take on this generation and understand them and their unique sensibilities. He captures the earnest qualities that seem to be a very large part of the millennial experience and he does it all with great humor and without pandering. Eighth Grade is one exceptional film.

Documentary Review: Three Identical Strangers

Three Identical Strangers (2018) 

Directed by Tim Wardle

Written by Documentary 

Starring Edward Galland, David Kellman, Robert Shafran 

Release Date June 29th, 2018

Published August 25th, 2018

Nature or nurture is a question as old as when man began to question his very existence. This question speaks to the very soul of humanity: am I a product of how I was raised or is my existence a reaction to my environment. To me, the answer is rather simply, a mixture of both but that isn’t exactly a satisfying answer if you’re a social scientist. For years, the field of mental health would draw battle lines surrounding the nature vs nurture debate and it led to something rather monstrous in its coldly calculating science.

In 1961 a psychiatrist by the name of Peter Newbauer decided there was one way to settle nature vs nurture. With the help of a wealthy and well respected adoption agency, he would oversee the separation of sets of twins at birth, sending the siblings to different homes with different demographic make ups and track how they grow up via interviews mandated as part of the adoption agreement.

What? You’ve never heard of this monstrous experiment? There’s a reason for that, it was never published. The fact that this ever happened likely never would have came to light if Bobby Shafran hadn’t decided on attending community college, the same community college attended by Eddy Galland, his heretofore unknown twin brother. Even then, it seemed like a brief heartwarming accident, the kind of story that closes a local newscast. 

But then it was revealed that Bobby and Eddy had another brother, David, and were, in fact, adopted triplets. The story became a media sensation in 1980 and carried on for a few years with the triplets parlaying off of their minor fame. That to, could have been the end if the triplets story hadn’t intrigued an award winning journalist into looking into how something so strange could have taken place. What he found turned this heartwarming story, into a heart-rending scandal.

Three Identical Strangers is an incredibly compelling documentary. Director Tim Wardle is new to feature length documentary, he’s worked for several years in television but Three Identical Strangers feels like the work of a veteran. The story unfolds with remarkable clarity and vision with a strong hand at the narrative. Wardle sets us up brilliantly and then employs brilliant twists that are never forced or overly dramatic, but rather perfectly calibrated to documentary storytelling.

Wardle has a cinematic eye as well as a documentarians eye. Notice a scene in which he describes the adoptive parents meeting with the adoption agency after the triplets have found each other. There is a moment here that is dramatized and it is apart from the rest of the doc which is more traditional, face to camera interviews. The father of one of the boys witnesses the adoption agency people toasting over having seemed to dodge a bullet in their meeting with the parents. Your first thought is that this is a throwaway scene and this will now turn into a legal battle, but you’re wrong. I was wrong while watching it as well.

The scene is urgently important for setting up the rest of the documentary narrative. The whole film turns on this dramatized moment and it is an ingenious way to shift the structure of the narrative. The heartwarming and curious portion of the story is now over and the murky and darker side of this story is fully begun and what an incredible story we’re being told in Three Identical Strangers.

The film even begins the debate of nature vs nurture by seeming to take one side before switching and pleading the case of the other side. Again, I find this shift to be incredibly smart and in keeping with the clever way Wardle shifts from heartwarming curiosity to mysterious and murky morality play. The nature vs nurture debate will not be decided here or likely in any kind of text, filmic or otherwise, but Three Identical Strangers offers something unique and fascinating to that debate.

Three Identical Stranger is one of the best movies of 2018 and were it not for my deeply emotional connection to the Mr. Rogers documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, I might call it the best documentary of the year. It’s a wildly fascinating and exceptionally well told story. Tim Wardle is a terrific new voice in a feature documentary and I can’t wait to see what he does next after his remarkable triumph with Three Identical Strangers.

Movie Review The Catcher Was a Spy

The Catcher Was a Spy (2018) 

Directed by Ben Lewin 

Written by Robert Rodat 

Starring Paul Rudd, Sienna Miller, Mark Strong, Jeff Daniels, Tom Wilkinson

Release Date June 22nd, 2018

Published July 8th, 2018 

The Catcher Was a Spy stars Paul Rudd as Morris ‘Moe’ Berg, a former major league baseball catcher turned international spy. Berg played 15 years with the Boston Red Sox before retiring at the end of 1938. By 1941 Berg, known as Professor Berg among his teammates, a graduate of Princeton University, sought and received a position at the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.

Rudd plays Berg as a man of many secrets and discretion. An early scene finds Berg going to a bar, thought by many as a haven for gay men. When he’s followed there by a suspicious teammate, Berg turns to violence to try to cover his tracks. Later, on a baseball tour of Japan next to luminaries such as Babe Ruth, Berg took the initiative to dress in Japanese garb and covertly film footage of a Japanese naval yard. He then parlayed the footage into his position with the OSS.

Sienna Miller co-stars in The Catcher Was a Spy as Estelle, Berg’s girlfriend. The relationship is fraught by Berg’s unwillingness to commit to Estelle, his desire not to have children and Estelle’s seeming awareness of Berg’s proclivities. A side mistress is less aware leading to an argument that illustrates Berg’s commitment to being discrete, even if it means losing someone he appears to care about.

Once Berg moves toward becoming a spy we meet his new OSS boss, played by Jeff Daniels. Daniels’ blunt, blustering military man turned spy is impressed by Berg’s initiative and ambition though wary of the secrets he keeps from the secret keepers. Nevertheless, it’s the OSS chief who assigns Berg to go to Italy and eventually on to Sweden to investigate how close Germany may be to having an atomic bomb.

Along on the mission in Italy, where he faces down enemy fire from fleeing German soldiers, are an army Colonel played by Guy Pearce and a physicist played by Paul Giamatti. Their target is the well known German Physicist Werner Heisenberg, played by Mark Strong. Heisenberg was one of the few scientists who chose to stay in Germany after the Nazi take over and was appointed head of the German effort to make a bomb.

The question is, is he helping or hurting the German cause? The Catcher is a Spy is ingenious and exciting in laying out Moe Berg’s mission and what is at stake. Having been a major league baseball player turned spy, Moe has never had to kill a man and much tension and drama is built around whether he could, if called upon, kill Heisenberg to keep him from building the atomic bomb.

History tells us how that played out but if you, like me, aren’t fully aware how this turned out, it’s an exciting and exceptionally well told story. The Catcher Was a Spy was directed by Ben Lewin, a Polish director best known for his 2012 feature The Sessions starring Helen Hunt, a film that earned high praise for Hunt who was thought to be a possible Oscar contender. Hunt played a sex therapist working with a handicapped man played by John Hawkes in an equally lauded performance.

Similar acclaim could be coming for Paul Rudd who brilliantly plays Moe Berg. Rudd, known for his work as Ant-Man and as the comic foil of director Judd Apatow in several films, plays Berg very low key, almost unknowable. It’s a complex character to play, a man so insular, who kept his own council, with few broad strokes in his personality. Rudd finds smart beats to play, especially employing Berg’s talent for languages which Rudd and the story use late in the film as part of the spy play. Listen for his intentional lack of accent in an important scene, subtle but ingenious.

The Catcher Was a Spy will be a treat for anyone who loves an old school spy movie, one without the trappings of a James Bond or Jason Bourne. The film played as part of a new series of Independent Films at the Putnam Museum. The Putnam is partnering with the New York Film Critics Series to show 10 independent features unlikely to play at local multiplexes. The next feature for the month of July is yet to be announced.

You can keep an eye out for The Catcher is a Spy on on-demand services such as Amazon Prime over the next few months.

Movie Review Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom

Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom (2018) 

Directed by J.A Bayona 

Written by Derek Connelly, Colin Trevorrow 

Starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jeff Goldblum, Rafe Spall, B.D Wong 

Release Date June 22nd, 2018 

Published June 21st, 2018 

Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom picks up the action of Jurassic World not long after the action of the first film in the reboot franchise. Here we find Bryce Dallas Howard as Claire now working as a dinosaur advocate. Claire is lobbying the government to mount a mission to Isla Nublar, former home of the Jurassic World theme park, to rescue the dinosaurs who are threatened with extinction due to an active volcano on the island.

When the government declines the effort, on the advice of none other than Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum’s character from the original Jurassic Park, Claire is forced to accept the help of secretive billionaire Benjamin Lockwood (Jame Cromwell) and his associate Eli Mills (Rafe Spall). Lockwood was a partner of the original park owner, Dr. Hammond (Sir Richard Attenborough from the original Jurassic Park), before he dropped out of the project following the death of his daughter.

Lockwood and Mills will bankroll a secret expedition to save as many dinosaurs as they can but only if Claire can convince her old flame Owen (Chris Pratt) to come with her. Owen is the only person on the planet who can likely convince Blue the Raptor to remain calm enough to be captured and taken off the island. Once he agrees, the expedition is all set but of course, there is a secret agenda at play and once the dinosaurs are secured, plans get underway to bring them to Lockwood’s estate and not the island sanctuary that Claire was promised.

Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom was directed by J.A Bayona who took the reins of the franchise from Colin Trevorrow. Trevorrow had left the project behind after he’d been hired to direct the final film in the Star Wars franchise, a film he was famously fired from. Trevorrow remains on this project however as one of the screenwriters alongside Kong Skull Island screenwriter Derek Connolly. Bayona brings a unique, childlike sensibility to Fallen Kingdom that makes the film scary yet still family friendly.

Bayona was the director of the wonderful 2016 family adventure A Monster Calls and that experience appears to have influenced the making of Jurassic Park Fallen Kingdom. The film features a subplot involving the granddaughter of Benjamin Lockwood, Maisey played by newcomer Isabella Sermon. This subplot brings a child’s perspective to the film similar to the perspective in the original which featured a pair of kids in peril.

There is a warmth to the production design of Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom that was lacking in the original. This is owed to the main setting of the film, an elaborate mansion filled with dinosaurs as the film progresses. Despite the chilling scenes of suspense and terror with characters running for their lives, the mansion is actually rather inviting, like a library or a museum but filled with real dinosaurs.

The strong production design of Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom extends to the special effects which are top notch. The dinosaurs remain an extraordinary sight and the ways in which the effects interact with the human characters are as remarkable today as they were in 1993 when Steven Speilberg made us believe that dinosaurs had roared back to life in Jurassic Park. The effects and design go a long way to make up for a tepid script and lacking characters.

I remain a fan of Chris Pratt but boy does he need to change up his style soon. His Owen is barely a step away from his Star Lord character from Guardians of the Galaxy. Owen is perhaps a tad more muscled up and slightly more mature but the wisecracks and tough guy posturing remain Pratt’s prominent acting tricks. Howard meanwhile, has moments when she breaks out of damsel in distress mode but it’s a mostly one note performance undermined by a script that doesn’t seem to know what to do with her.

The human villains are the weakest part of Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom. Rafe Spall’s weasley assistant and Toby Jones rat-like underground arms dealer the ostensible villains but they never prove necessary beyond providing a reason to get the dinosaurs to the mansion. They lack personality and their ambitions appear silly. The notion that gangsters and arms dealers are paying millions to buy dinosaurs never registers as realistic and the supposed buyers are mere caricatures of villains from other movies.

The best villain in the film is the one that doesn’t have an agenda or a scheme. The Indo-Raptor is a remarkable creation, combining the DNA of a T-Rex and a Raptor. The bad guys were hoping to create a hunting, killing dinosaur that could be controlled and used as a weapon. But, when the Indo-Raptor gets loose, there is no controlling it and its rampage provides the best parts of Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom.

I don’t love Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom but by the lowered standard of brainless summer blockbuster, it’s not bad. Turn off your brain and enjoy the remarkable dinosaur CGI and you will have fun with this movie. It may not be great art but it’s fun enough for me to say take the kids and have a good time. Keep in mind, Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom is rated PG-13 and the violence can be scary for young kids, especially the Indo-Raptor is a potential figure for children’s nightmares but as long as you prepare them and hold their hands, kids 8 and up should have a good time here.

Movie Review Tag

Tag (2018) 

Directed by Jeff Tomsic

Written by Rob McKittrick

Starring Jeremy Renner, Ed Helms, Jon Hamm, Jake Johnson, Hannibal Burress

Release Date June 15th, 2018

Published June 16th, 2018

Is Tag juvenile? Of course, the comedy featuring an all star cast playing an extreme version of the schoolyard classic game will inspire a number of think pieces about growth stunted man-boys and their unwillingness to grow up. This however, misses the genuine and very sweet, and very funny point of Tag. Based on a true story, Tag is an ode to friendship and how the friends we make as children remain special whether we stay in touch or not.

Tag stars Ed Helms as Hoagie, a veterinarian with a thriving practice, a loving and supportive wife, played by Isla Fisher and even kids that we don't meet in the movie. However, for one month of each year, all of Hoagie's grown up responsibilities go out the window. In the month of May, Hoagie plays an unending game of Tag with his group of childhood friends including Callahan (Jon Hamm), Chili (Jake Johnson), Sable (Hannibal Burress) and the best of the best Tag champion, Jerry (Jeremy Renner).

In the nearly 30 years that these friends have played Tag, Jerry has never been tagged and now, he's decided to retire, un-tagged. This sends Hoagie and the rest of the gang on a desperate quest to get Jerry before the end of the month and his retirement. How far is Jerry willing to go to keep his streak alive and make things interesting? He's scheduled his wedding on May 31st and specifically did not invite his four closest friends.

Naturally, Hoagie finds out about the wedding and notes it as the perfect time to tag Jerry. However, these guys are actually Jerry's friend and don't want to ruin the big day, thus allowing for rules to be in place specifically to cater to the feelings of Jerry's new bride, Susan (Leslie Bibb), who may or may not be in on Jerry's scheme to remain un-tagged. Along for the ride is a Wall Street Journal reporter, Rebecca (Annabelle Wallis) who drops her story on Callahan as the CEO of a major company in favor of this story about this epic game.

Tag is the first feature film for director Jeff Tomsic. Previously, Tomsic has made his career in television, directing comedy specials for people like T.J Miller and sitcoms such as TBS's underrated The Detour and Comedy Central's much loved Broad City. Tomsic doesn't yet have much visual invention in his work but it's solid and professional. The stand out moments are the big comic set pieces such as a forest chase where Jerry has an elaborate escape and a church set scene that once again finds Jerry out thinking about his buddies.

As I was saying in the opening however, as juvenile as Tag unquestionably is, there is a good heart to it. The goal of these guys, characters who are based on a real group of friends in Oregon, is to remain friends and remain in touch, quite literally. Many of the set pieces in Tag are based on bizarre things these real guys have actually done including dressing in costumes and chasing one another on golf carts.

The point is that the childlike joy inspired by the game Tag keeps these lifelong friends from growing complacent. That's the thing about friendships from childhood, complacency and distance creeps in and while modern technology allows many ways for us to stay in touch, there is nothing better than a milestone moment of being in the same place at the same time to really remind you how important having friends is. Life can so easily get in the way, a game of Tag now and then, or your friendship equivalent, may be just the thing an adult needs to get by.

Documentary Review: Won't You Be My Neighbor

Won't You Be My Neighbor (2018)

Directed by Morgan Neville

Written by Documentary

Starring Mr. Rogers 

Release Date June 8th, 2018

Published June 8th, 2018

What is missing from the world in this day and age? Kindness. Kindness appears to be missing in this day and age. While everyone is yelling at each other and becoming tribal via social media, kindness is becoming more and more rare. Kindness exemplifies the work of Fred Rogers, the remarkable host of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. The life and work of Fred Rogers is now being celebrated in a new documentary called “Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?).”

In the 1951, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Fred Rogers was on his way to become a Presbytarian Minister when he first saw a television. The remarkable invention inspired him with its seemingly endless possibilities. Mr. Rogers would become a Minister eventually as well as a music scholar with a degree in music composition from Rollins College in Florida before settling into the world of television at WQED in Pittsburgh.

Rogers determination from the beginning was to work in children’s television and by 1963, the seeds of what would become Mr. Rogers Neighborhood were sewn. You likely know about Mr. Rogers and his sweaters and his songs and puppets but did you know he studied child development with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh alongside? That’s just one of the fascinating notes that make Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?) so unique and interesting.

"Won’t You be My Neighbor(?)" was directed by Morgan Neville, a documentarian who specializes in music documentaries. His “20 Feet from Stardom” won the Academy Award for Best Documentary feature at the 2013 Academy Awards. Neville is a smart, thoughtful and curious director who comes at the material of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?)” with an eye toward a conventional documentary narrative, a linear, life story, approach.

However, the unusual part of the “Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?)” is in the weight Neville gives not just to telling Mr. Rogers’ life story but explaining the impact he had on the lives of his viewers. Rogers was a quiet revolutionary, a Republican who fought for the funding of PBS in front of Congress and won. In 1968, in the wake of the death of Robert F. Kennedy, Rogers engaged his child audience in a conversation about death.

That same year, as controversy raged over civil rights and black people were being kicked out of public pools, Rogers enlisted his friend, Francois Clemmons as Officer Clemmons in the Neighborhood, to share a soak in his pool. The conversation had nothing to do with race or the raging controversies, it was just pleasant small talk about the weather but the visual of two people, black and white, sharing a kindly conversation, said what the conversation did not.

Clemmons is among the very emotional interviews that are featured in “Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?), alongside Rogers’ sons and his wife, Joanne. Naturally, everyone has lovely things to say about Rogers but the stories aren’t saccharine hagiography, but rather an earnest, emotional, fond remembrance. The film humanizes Rogers, especially near the end of the film when we get a glimpse of Rogers’ own insecurities, the kinds of things he helped children get passed.

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?)” is a remarkable documentary without being showy or over-dramatic. Like its subject, the documentary is quietly revolutionary, playing to our emotional attachment to Mr. Rogers while genuinely educating us about this remarkable man and his impact on the world. For me, his kindness is a model. Rogers’ kindness is a superpower better than most superhero powers. Kindness is at the heart of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?) and that kindness, remembering that kind of kindness, makes this the best documentary of 2018 thus far.

Movie Review I Feel Pretty

I Feel Pretty (2018) 

Directed by Abby Cohn, Marc Silverstein

Written by Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein

Starring Amy Schumer, Rory Scovell, Michelle Williams

Release Date April 20th, 2018

Published July 17th, 2018

I Feel Pretty stars Amy Schumer as Renee Bennett, an attractive and funny woman who doesn’t find herself attractive. Renee’s low self esteem has hindered both her personal and professional life where she works for a famed makeup company but works in the I.T department in a basement office, well away from the glamor and fashion that the company is known for. Though she longs to be in the big office, she lacks the confidence to go for what she wants.

Things change when Renee takes a spin class and proceeds to tumble off of her bike. Having hit her head hard, Renee’s concussion changes her life and personality. Suddenly, post head injury, Renee is super-confident and believes she is the best looking woman in any room she’s in. This causes a rift with her friends, Aidy Bryant and Busy Phillips, but it does help her climb the corporate ladder as she lands a gig working in the big building at the makeup company owned by Avery LeClaire (Michelle Williams) and her grandmother Lily (Lauren Hutton).

Renee’s personal life also takes a positive turn as her confidence attracts a boyfriend, Ethan (Rory Scovell) and the attention of Avery’s stunningly handsome, playboy brother Grant (Tom Hopper). Ethan is a perfectly down to earth guy while Grant is a dreamboat and when Renee finds herself the object of both of their affections, even her newfound confidence can’t contain her nervous excitement.

I Feel Pretty requires a bit of unpacking in your emotional response to it. For me, I’ve always found Amy Schumer attractive, dating back to before her popular Comedy Central series, Inside Amy Schumer, to her time as a stand-up comic on the rise. It was hard to accept the gags that intended to show Renee as being unattractive as I did find her attractive. The key however, is to remember that this is Renee’s perspective of herself and not an objective take.

Here, the inexperience of the writing and directing team of Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein shines through. A more experienced filmmaker would have found a way to let audiences in on the idea that we are seeing the movie not from our objective position but completely from Renee’s subjective perspective, how she sees the world and assumes the world sees her. From that perspective the story of I Feel Pretty makes more sense.

It’s not that the direction failed to communicate the perspective, it’s rather that it was clumsy in communicating that idea and thus it’s easy to misunderstand the story as an objective idea of how the world sees Renee. If taken the wrong way, it can seem as if Renee is the butt of all of the jokes, as if the movie is making fun of her for seeing herself as attractive. Once you look at it subjectively and recognize that the film is entirely Renee’s unreliable, biased perspective, it makes the film easier to understand and enjoy.

Rory Scovell, in his first leading man role is quite good at reacting to Schumer’s bawdy antics. A scene, well-featured in the film’s trailer, has the two of them visit a bar that happens to be hosting a wet t-shirt contest. Watching Scovell’s shocked reactions to Schumer first wanting to go on stage and then what happens when she actually is on stage is very funny, and the scene immediately after that has a nice romantic undercurrent that I wish the film had been better at presenting in other scenes.

It's odd to call Michelle Williams a scene-stealer as she is a well known, Academy Award nominated actress but indeed, scene-stealer is her role here. As Renee's boss and idol, Williams plays Avery As confident, assured and comically disconnected with the world beyond her bubble of rich excess. The baby voice that Williams affects in the movie is a terrific device to show how everyone has something they are insecure about no matter how rich or confident they appear. In another, lesser comedy with a lesser actress that voice would be the extent of the character. 

Amy Schumer is a terrific comedian with a great sense of timing and the jokes in the movie are terrific. Yes, some of the gags are a little forced and Schumer is put in the position of using broad physicality to sell some of the lesser material but there are plenty of well-timed and quite funny moments in I Feel Pretty. At the very least, there are enough good jokes for me to recommend the movie on Blu-Ray, DVD and On Demand on Tuesday, July 17th.

Movie Review: Borg-McEnroe

Borg vs. McEnroe (2018)

Directed by Janus Metz Pedersen

Written by Ronnie Sandahl

Starring Shia LaBeouf, Sverrir Gudnasson, Stellan Skarsgard

Release Date April April 13th, 2018

Published August 10th, 2018

Usually when a movie bombs in spectacular fashion there is a very good reason why. Whether it was production delays, a star who finds trouble in the media, or a general lack of quality, there is usually an obvious reason to point to why something failed. Thus far however, it’s hard to say exactly why Borg Vs McEnroe is one of 2018’s biggest losers. Despite an 83% positive rating from critics at RottenTomatoes and an audience score nearly as good, the film barely broke the surface in terms of attention and with a $65 million dollar budget, there is not excuse for the movie tanking so badly.

Borg vs McEnroe takes audiences behind the scenes of one of the most epic battles in tennis history, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe’s spectacular fight over the 1980 Wimbledon Championship. With Borg chasing his 5th straight Wimbledon and McEnroe the cocky upstart, making consistent headlines with his consistently bad on-court behavior, the match up was instantly iconic and more than lived up to its legendary expectations.

Bjorn Borg (Sverrir Gudnasson) wasn’t always a Swiss Cyborg with laser focus and no emotion on the court. As we learn from Borg vs McEnroe, Borg had more in common with the young John McEnroe than we ever imagined. Borg was cocky and filled with rage as a teenager and nearly found himself kicked out of tennis before he could ever become a champion. Borg nearly chose hockey as a more apt outlet for his rage filled tennis game.

Then, Borg met Swedish tennis legend Lennert Bergelin (Stellan Skarsgard). It was Bergelin who rescued Borg’s career when he was nearly kicked out of the game as rage fueled teen. It was Bergelin who taught Borg to slow down and take one point at a time and, most importantly, not to let his opponent see his emotions. Despite Borg’s cyborg behavior on the court we learn from the movie that he had perhaps a form of OCD, or at least a deeply held superstition, that drove him mad and could at times hamper his on court abilities.

John McEnroe is at once more and less complicated that Borg. As played by Shia LeBeouf, McEnroe is quick to rage on the court and stand-offish off the court. McEnroe was friendlier than Borg and actually made friends on the tennis tour, while Borg practiced in private and rarely left his highly appointed hotel room with his ritualistic layout of tennis gear and his fetishistic approach to sleep temperature.

There are more interesting details about Borg and McEnroe in Borg vs McEnroe but I won’t spoil them here. Director Janus Metz does terrific job of setting the stage for Borg and McEnroe’s epic match. We get a great sense of the character’s histories and how they form the men they are on the court and the more volatile behind the scenes moments have a riveting quality in the context of the final act of the movie, the Wimbledon final of 1980.

Sverrir Gudnason is a real life tennis pro, once Sweden’s number 1 player though not someone who broke out into worldwide fame. His credible impression of Borg on the court is a highlight even as the film appears to be hiding Lebeouf behind quick cuts. Lebeouf does well to look credible but it’s hard to imagine he would be good enough to recreate the actual style of Borg vs McEnroe as even the real life Borg and McEnroe struggled to find the magic in real life.

Borg vs McEnroe is a terrific sports movie. It’s conventional but still compelling. Gudnason is strong for a guy who plays professional tennis for a living. He’s genuinely compelling as Borg even if it never seems like we get a glimpse into what he’s really thinking. LeBeouf gets the showier part and it works as Lebeouf’s own youthful troubles seem to somewhat mirror McEnroe’s.

Why did Borg vs McEnroe fail so spectacularly? The film made only $7 million dollars worldwide on a budget of $65 million dollars. It’s hard to say why it happened but it wasn’t the fault of the movie. The film is solid, well made and well acted. The characters are compelling, the tennis is exciting. What happened to make fans reject the film so hard by not buying a ticket? It’s baffling but there it is. $65 million dollars down the drain all because audiences decided to skip on seeing a pretty good sports movie to the point that it didn’t even make it to nationwide release.

Borg vs McEnroe is available now on Blu-Ray, DVD and On-Demand Streaming.