Inside Out 2 (4/5 Stars)

The original Inside Out, a brilliant Pixar product that explored the mental landscape of an eleven year old girl named Riley and populated it with a group of emotional characters including Joy, Fear, Disgust, Anger, and Sadness, ended with a promise for a sequel. On the control panel in Riley’s main consciousness was a big red light entitled “Puberty”. If Riley’s inner monologue had been the scene of drama/comedy before, wait until she became a teenager. It has been nine whole years since Riley was 11-years-old. But now that she is finally 13 and about to start high school, we have a sequel.

“Inside Out 2” stands as a prime example of the rewards and risks of sequels to beloved movies. It pales in comparison to the original, but how could it not when the original was a great film. It adds more facets to Riley’s mental landscape and more emotional characters, but in doing so crowds out the original plot devices and characters. It ventures into a territory, puberty, that is not for children before avoiding much of what makes being a teenager not for children. But even with all of these drawbacks, it is the highest grossing film of the year and biggest money maker in Pixar’s history (1.6 billion dollars by last count). So, how could Pixar not make this movie? How could Pixar not make a third?

“Inside Out 2” stands at a very efficient 96 minutes and contains almost as much, if not more, material as the original. But while “Inside Out” was a fully integrated, organized and intuitive tour of the mental landscape of a child, (even the throw-away jokes made sense in a vaguely scientific manner, for instance the earworm Triple Dent commercial that won’t be forgotten), the mental landscape of “Inside Out 2” is more of a haphazard and disjointed affair. Some ideas work better than others. The “Brainstorm”, a tornado replete with flying lightbulbs, is a clever representation of a real mental phenomenon. The “Sarchasm”, a valley in the mental landscape that opens up like an earthquake fissure when Riley utters a sarcastic remark, is just a pun.

And whereas the original’s core idea presented a fairly straightforward mental process, the formation and storage of memories and how emotions color them, here we have something more abstract and, probably, less scientifically accurate. The sequel deals mainly with Riley’s formation of beliefs about herself. This is presented by vertical strings that connect a pool in the subconscious with the conscious control panel. Each string presents an idea like “I’m a good person” or “I’m not good enough”, which, I believe, is meant to be a manifestation of Riley’s personality.

But is that a good example of what a personality is? I”m not so sure. And what is a personality anyway? One of the more important books I’ve ever read, “Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book” posited that we don’t really have personalities, but we think that we should, and worrying about this absence or overcompensating for the same is the cause of much anxiety.

(Because I’ve mentioned it. One of the better thought experiments in Lost in the Cosmos directs the reader to consider why people can misread various astrology descriptions (Virgo for Pisces and so forth) and still be moved by its accuracy. The answer is that a person is so multi–faceted in terms of personality, that potentially any of the signs could apply on any given day. This is the counterintuitive reason as to why astrology is pointless. It’s not because it is inaccurate. It is because you are so complicated that the differences between the signs are nominal, and therefore meaningless.)

Speaking of Anxiety, this emotion shows up as the main antagonist. Other emotions that are introduced to the team are Embarrassment, Envy, and Ennui. Missing once again is Desire. (Just add some Lust to Envy and you’ve got it, but then again, this is a children’s movie). Anxiety is mainly concerned with planning for the future, which has its benefits, but not when it bottles up the other emotions (literally) and performs a hostile takeover. The best thing about Inside Out 2 is its portrayal of an anxious sleepless night and a climatic panic attack.

Still, when compared with the average teenager’s puberty, Riley is doing just fine. The action takes place over one weekend at summer hockey camp where Riley worries mainly about whether or not she will make the high school team. One of the missed opportunities here has to do with Riley’s teenage counterparts. Like many movies about teenagers, the protagonist is given a complicated inner life while everyone else at school is portrayed as not-anxious automatons. Indeed, what is hardly ever explored in movies for teenagers, is probably the hardest thing about being a teenager, which is you inevitably spend your days in forced interactions with other teenagers. This truth is hard to grasp for minds just getting used to their own consciousness let alone trying to contemplate the mental inner-workings of those around them. It also fights against the movie industry’s happy willingness to placate the audience’s narcissism. It would be a rare movie indeed that had a character realize that everyone in high school wasn’t thinking about them, for good or ill, because they were all too busy dealing with their own shit. Inside Out 2 misses this valuable lesson because it doesn’t delve too deep into the murky waters of puberty in the first place. But hey, there is always the next sequel.

The Bikeriders (3/5 Stars)

“The Bikeriders” was adapted by writer/director Jeff Nicholas (Take Shelter, Loving) from a book of the same name by journalist Danny Lyon. This is not a book I’ve read or one which has piqued my interest from watching the movie. It would seem to me that as a journalist, he spent a lot of time interviewing the wrong people. This story is ostensibly about a motorcycle club named the Vandals from the Midwest, but his main interviewee is not a member of the club. Instead, she is the wife of one of the members and she admittedly doesn’t understand the appeal of the club or motorcycles in general and appears to be entirely ambivalent as to whether it exists at all. It doesn’t even seem to think her insights are really worth the recording and seems to be participating as a lark. Now, if you were interested in this material, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that she isn’t the best tour guide

Her name is Kathy (played by Jodie Comer) and the view of this motorcycle club is seen through her eyes mainly. Indeed, the movie’s narrative opens up not with the formation of the club, but her first random foray into it, going to bar the club frequents to meet up with a friend of hers. She immediately doesn’t like it since the place and all the people in it give off dangerous uncouth vibes. Still she sticks around after deciding to leave when she notices one club member that is much better looking then the others, Benny.

Benny has one and one only redeeming attribute: he looks like Austin Butler. Now, I’m not saying that Beeny is a bad person. No, I’m saying he is a boring person, but for the fact that he looks like Austin Butler. I don’t recall him doing a single interesting thing in this entire movie. We are told he is not good at riding motorcycles (he keeps crashing), doesn’t appear to have a job (do any of these guys have jobs?) and is not good for conversation. He mainly broods and like every other man in this movie binge drinks and chain smokes in every scene. Clearly, Kathy's attraction to him is built on lust. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t explore or even admit that this is what we are watching. When asked why she liked him, Kathy just says she doesn’t know, especially since Benny is kind of stupid and gets her into all kinds of trouble. Frankly, this woman isn’t a good tour guide for her own love life.

There might have been a character that would have made sense to build this story around, and that would be Johnny (played by Tom Hardy), the leader of the club. This may have answered, if there was such an answer, the big looming question: what is a motorcycle club, like what is it supposed to be doing with its time? Because it appears like they mainly ride their bikes, have picnics, and drink.. It is revealed that Johnny got the inspiration for the club from watching The Wild One, a motorcycle movie starring Marlon Brando. That character is described as a rebel. Someone asks him what he is rebelling against, and he replies “What do you got?”.

This nihilistic response can be an inspiring call to action for men who don’t really fit in anywhere else. But of course, you can’t just meet and do nothing all the time. If you can’t afford gas, you aren’t going anywhere. Like everything else in life, even don’t-give-a-shit rebels need money, and, if your organization has no purpose and is full of unemployable ne'er do wells who don’t want to work, well, is it any surprise your network is eventually taken over by a criminal element. The last half of the movie has a lot of former members complaining about how the organization went south.

I’m reminded of Banksy from Exit Through the Gift Shop commenting on how the anarchist rebellious movement of street art was capitalized upon by Thierry, a man devoid of any artistic instincts. “I don’t think Thierry played by the rules, in some ways, but then there aren’t supposed to be any rules. So I don’t know what the moral is.” 

But not only that, your wife is unimpressed.

Kinds of Kindness (3/5 Stars)

Director Darren Aronofosky once commented in an interview while on the press circuit for “Black Swan” that the type of acting Natalie Portman was doing in that movie was the kind of acting that actors like doing. (See it and you can see why he was being a little defensive.) Actors want to perform scenes of heightened. The movie crew's job is to facilitate the same. Scenes of heightened emotion may not be easy, but easy is not the point. Ambition requires that the task be hard. Christian Bale doesn’t need to transform his body to play any particular role. Makeup and fats suits do exist. Christian Bale wants to do it.

I can only imagine that this sort of ambition draws actors to the projects of Director Yorgos Lanthimos and Writer Efthimis Fillippou, a pair of auteurs that deal primarily with the bizarre recesses of human behavior. Emma Stone is a seasoned veteran now having starred in several movies. Willem Dafoe returns with her from the latest Lanthimos movie, Poor Things, which was about a recently deceased woman who has her brain removed and replaced with the brain of her unborn child by a mad scientist. Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, and Hong Chau are all rookies. Jesse Plemons, in particular, is an actor that specializes in being the square white guy in the room. He is flexing muscles here that he doesn’t usually get to flex. Like many Lanthimos projects, Kinds of Kindness is an exercise in stunt acting.

There is a fine line here when it comes to placing strange characters in bizarre situations and watching how they react. If the characters are too strange and the situations too bizarre, then the drama fails because there is no empathetic connection. There needs to be something that the audience can latch onto in order to feel what the characters are feeling.

“Kinds of Kindness” is a three-hour movie composed of three separate stories, one hour each. The actors are the same for all three movies, but they play different characters in each of them. Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone are the main characters. The titles of the stories refer to the only character that finds itself in all three movies, a man by the initials of R.M.F. And here you will have a good test of the movie reviewer. If the reviewer claims to understand why R.M.F. is important or what he can mean, then they might just be pretentious windbags. R.M.F., if he is anything, is an inside joke. The stories, for all intents and purposes, are in fact separate stories. They just employ the same actors.

The stories, like Lanthimos' career, are hit and miss. The first hews the closest to reality and thus works the best. The second works until its last fifteen minutes when it gets cold feet and breaks point of view. The third straight-up employs miracles, which have the strange effect of legitimizing what is otherwise utterly bizarre behavior. We will take them one at a time.

The first stars Jesse Plemons in an interesting turn. His character works for Willem Dafoe, but not in any worldly employment. Willem Dafoe orders him and Plemons complies in doing things so specific and disturbing that one would naturally suppose that Plemons is being blackmailed. But, apparently, Plemons isn't being blackmailed. Instead, he is just so needy and pathetic that he can't function without someone telling him what to do.  In fact, this neediness is so absolute that by the end of the story, you may start wondering whether it is Willem Dafoe that has the short end of the stick. And since the movie employs no magic, adheres to its internal logic, and is well acted by consummate professionals, it is inherently interesting to watch.

The second story is strong until it commits a perplexing error. It too stars Jesse Plemons as a police officer whose wife, Emma Stone, survived a plane crash and several weeks on a deserted island before being rescued and returned home. The thing is, for whatever reason, Jesse Plemons isn’t sure that the Emma Stone who returned is the same woman who left. He thinks that maybe she is an imposter, perhaps an alien. So, either he is insane or she is an imposter. Because this is a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, both could be a possibility and for most of this story, it is fun trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, about three quarters of the way through, the movie switches its point of view from Jesse Plemons to Emma Stone and gives away the game. Like a movie trick that is explained, it loses its luster. Its feels like Yorgos may have gotten cold feet.

The third story stars Emma Stone as a woman who has abandoned her family to work for a religious cult. The cult is obsessed with purity, but not in any scientific way. As an example, to cleanse their sinners, they subject to them to hours in a sauna. Then they lick their sweat to test, based on the taste I guess, whether the purification rite worked. The catch is that this cult is on the search for a great healer of a certain gender, height, and weight, who can cure people just by touching them. This person ends up existing. And if she exists, well maybe you can test whether someone is pure by licking their sweat. As far as I can tell, the cult's plan is to find, kidnap, and imprison this healer on a boat and then, (maybe), sell tickets to visiting sick people. This story does end in a rather satisfying way, whereupon Emma Stone does a cool dance and nothing that took place before matters. Then R.M.F eats a sandwich, which also doesn’t mean anything.