Corner Office (3/5 Stars)

Certain styles and moods are pleasures within themselves. For instance, the plot in a Raymond Chandler novel doesn’t really need to make sense in order to enjoy the writing. As long as Raymond marks his word in his inimitable style, I’m all for the reading. The man can describe a room. This is why certain authors can find themselves writing about the same types of characters doing the same things over and over again. It doesn’t quite matter what the characters do, but how they do it.

“Corner Office”, a drama directed by Joachim Back and written by Tedd Kupper is based on a short story by Jonas Karlsson. I expect the short story read like a Chandler novel and that this movie is a fine adaptation of it. It wouldn’t have been an easy thing to accomplish. Like a Chandler novel, I expect the best parts of the source material was introspective, descriptive, and contemplative. To keep the interesting parts would likely require plenty of voiceover and a deliberate pace.

This the movie accomplishes through the fine choreography of events by Back and Kupper. The movie stars Jon Hamm as Orson, a serious office worker, who spends most of his day (and movie) in voiceover describing himself and his office to the viewer. His office is weird and Orson is weirder. It is unclear what product and/or service the office provides. Nothing beyond the gray office park is ever shown in the movie. The weather is winter and workers toil under fluorescent lights. The pleasure in this movie is hearing Orson describe it, which is at turns insightful and disturbing.

Most of what Jon Hamm is physically doing is nonverbal. He performs actions and looks at things while his voiceover presents the narrative. One has to remind oneself that the performance is split up between days on set in costume and days out of costume in the voiceover booth because Jon Hamm’s performance and Back’s editing of it is so seamless and effective.

Jon Hamm is at once incorrectly cast and a perfect choice. In the drab office scenes, he never quite hides his generally handsome figure, glasses, mustache, and bulky winter clothes notwithstanding. The lighting is bad but not bad enough to hide Don Draper. In the Corner Office, where Orson is well lit and is transformed into a confident persona, Jon Hamm is as good as he has ever been in a room.

What is the Corner Office? It is described in one scene by Jon Hamm to a company psychiatrist in phrases that fall like poetry (if I could find the quote online, I would put it here). The problem is that no one else at the office thinks it exists. The movie does a good job of putting off the decision as to whether it exists or not till the very end of the film. Even then, it may have been better to keep it ambiguous. Ultimately, I didn’t care about who was crazy. Like Orson, I just really liked spending time in the space. Like a good cup of tea and a Chandler novel on a rainy day, it was relaxing.

Looking up “Corner Office” online, one finds that it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2022, but was released theatrically only in August of 2023. That sounds like not that many people liked it but because it had a recognizable star, it had to eventually get released. I know of no theaters that actually showed it and I live in New York City. At the same moment “Corner Office” was released theatrically, it also became available on demand. I saw it on a plane, which I can confirm, is one of the worst places to watch a movie. I guess I should be happy I got to see it at all. Back in the day, one could read Roger Ebert’s column, which reviewed six or seven movies a week, and be fairly confident that you were aware of every movie you needed to be aware of (just aware, not actually see) to have general knowledge of movie culture. Now the amount of movies has ballooned and the ubiquitous Roger Ebert is gone and won’t be replaced. Even Netflix’s DVD library, which could be counted on for giving the viewer a comprehensive idea of what movies were out there, is gone. Movie libraries are being divvied up between different streaming platforms, which by their nature, can’t support as large a selection as a physical library of DVDs can. So smaller, older movies will inevitably be left out. Where they can be found once the initial on demand period has ended, I don’t know. “Corner Office” won’t be coming out on DVD.

A movie like “Corner Office” is not for everyone and shouldn’t be seen by everyone. It is a small movie for a small audience. The problem lies in how difficult it is for the people who want to see it to find it. And this problem appears to be getting much worse for movie culture in general.

Oppenheimer (5/5 Stars)

 

Seemingly every week we are treated to spectacles: ordinary people with superpowers, vehicles with impossible functions, events that can never happen. Oppenheimer may be the only movie confined to historical fact that gets close to all the extraordinary nonsense continually thrown at us. In 1945 a group of American scientists split the smallest thing known to man, an atom, and created the largest explosion the strength of 25 kilotons of TNT. Human beings had unlocked an unseen but potent energy in the universe and had harnessed for themselves the primal powers of the sun, nuclear fission. A month later, those same humans, specifically Americans, dropped two of these bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in a bid to end the largest war human beings had ever conducted against each other. It worked. The war was over, but an unease settled upon those responsible. After all, this wasn’t magic, it was science. Anyone could do it. And someday they would. And they could build an even bigger bomb using nuclear fusion. Then instead of killing 70,000 people in an instant like the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, millions could die with one hydrogen bomb over New York or Moscow. The Project Head, Robert J. Oppenheimer would later describe his reaction upon seeing his experiment work that very early morning of July 16, 1945. He thought of an ancient sacred Indian text in which the deity Vishnu reveals himself in his sacred multi-armed form and states, “Now I am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

‘Oppenheimer”, Writer/Director Christopher Nolan’s latest movie is a story of two rooms and a flashback. The first room takes place in 1954 where Oppenheimer is appealing a decision of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to not renew his security clearance. The second room takes place in 1959 where Lewis Strauss is seeking to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. In both rooms, the subject of testimony and cross-examination is the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), which is shown in the flashback from his school days through the The Manhattan Project, which culminated in the Trinity Test, the first successful testing of an atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Having a cursory knowledge of American history I knew about The Manhattan Project and the Trinity Test. I did not know that Oppenheimer was denied a renewal of his security clearance less than a decade later because of suspected ties with communism. As for Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr.), I had never heard of him before and you probably haven’t heard of him either. Though his senate confirmation hearing pales in importance to everything else in the movie, it is itself a remarkable and curious moment in American history. A president’s appointments to his own cabinet are almost never contested, let alone denied. Before Strauss was rejected it had only happened once in the past 100 years.

This movie is based on the book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. As with all material based on real life, the challenge is not in the creation but in the editing. (My favorite metaphor is that fiction is like painting, documentary is sculpture). Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of this book and the editing of the movie is a marvel in organization. The movie is long but moves quickly. The cast is enormous, but characters are efficiently and memorably introduced. The movie switches between time periods and locations, but the viewer is never confused as to when and where they are. Nolan affects this by shooting the 1954 room and the Oppenheimer flashback in color, whereas the 1959 room and Strauss flashback are in black and white. Nolan even organized enough room for a twist in the plot, not an easy thing to do in a biopic.

Then there is the IMAX. I saw this movie in June in a normal movie theater and was compelled to see it at the Lincoln Center IMAX in September. It will be a good movie no matter how you see it, but you really should see it on the largest screen possible. Nolan uses the IMAX expertly, saving it for close ups of the quantum world, very large explosions, and expansive landscapes. It would not be incorrect to categorize Oppenheimer as a tentpole summer blockbuster. It is a BIG movie with lots of Stars. (This would be an indispensable movie for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon games. In just one example of many, Gary Oldman shows up as President Truman in a great “the buck stops here” scene). It also happens to be very good in the classic sense. The subject matter is compelling and morally complicated. It is rare that you see these two things together. Rare movies like Apocalypse Now and Citizen Kane come to mind.

Christopher Nolan has been a very good director for more than two decades. He is old enough to be a stubborn proponent of obsolete technology preferring shooting his movies with film cameras as opposed to digital cameras. He is also British and makes movies about billionaires, space, and World War II. He then could be characterized as a conservative filmmaker. But, this has never been the case, and continues not to be true. There are several instances of radical choices, for instance, In the first room, Oppenheimer is cross-examined as to adultery. One not only marvels at the presence of nudity in that particular setting but also how well it works. Nolan continues to be an expert on how to use time in his storytelling. The idea of splitting the movie into two rooms in the 1950s and a flashback that generally moves forward from Oppenheimer’s school days to the present and into the future past the two rooms (there are a few scenes in the 1960s) may not seem all that impressive until one considers how the movie would work if it was entirely linear. If the storytelling was linear, the movie would be ten hours long and irretrievably boring after the third hour when the bomb goes off.

About halfway through the movie, Nolan drops the two rooms and tells the story of the Trinity Test for an uninterrupted 30-40 minutes. Here are the most fascinating scenes in the movie. In particular, it is of continual concern to the scientists that the project is justified, after all, as one scientist points out, a bomb falls on both the just and unjust. The only reason why they feel compelled to build a bomb in the first place is because they do not want the Nazis to get there first. Then right before the bomb is built, Hitler kills himself in his bunker and Germany surrenders. There is a scene in which the scientists argue as to whether they should continue. Oppenheimer argues that the science will always be there, that people won’t understand it until they use it, and once they’ve used it, the horror of that understanding will usher in world peace since war will become unthinkable. (I will speculate that there is a much simpler reason why they continued. The scientists wanted to see if it would work.) Then once the bomb is built, Oppenheimer attends a meeting of the U.S. Military brass and they discuss whether and how they will drop the bomb on the Japanese. In one of those “you can’t make this up” moments from history, one of the potential target cities, Kyoto, is struck from the list because of its cultural significance and also because the general in charge of the list honeymooned there.

I am compelled here to note that science, capitalism, and democracy, those things that are the foundation of America as an idea, do not provide strength because they are right. Not all scientific experiments are successful. Capitalism doesn't always provide correct values. Not all democratically elected leaders are good at their jobs. The strength in these three things is that they are processes, not end results. And what they do is that they can be used to point out something that is wrong. The experiment fails, the stock market crashes, the politician is marred by scandal. And just as importantly, once this something that is wrong becomes apparent, the participants have the opportunity to self-correct. You can change the experiment or change your theory, you can create regulations (or remove barriers) to improve market conditions, you can vote out politicians that have proven themselves incompetent.

Before, during, and after the bombs were created and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the participants questioned whether what they were doing the right thing. This movie shows those arguments. It isn’t sure whether the bombs should have been created. It isn't sure whether the bombs should have been dropped. Moving forward, Oppenheimer acts to dissuade the U.S. Government from building the larger more destructive hydrogen bomb. Does that make Oppenheimer a hypocrite? No, it makes him a scientist. The enemies of the Open Society will look at this movie and see only weakness. They believe that history is a story told by the winners and that there is no truth but what power dictates. America won World War II. It won it unconditionally. Does this movie feel like a story told by winners? No, it doesn’t, and that is because we aren’t Nazis or Communists. We are allowed to second guess ourselves. To see the benefit of this openness, just imagine if it was the other way around and Hitler had gotten there first. Then this movie would be a propaganda reel with nothing but admiration of the creators and demonization of the victims. It was a good thing for humanity that America got to the bomb first.

Showing Up (2/5 Stars)

“I’m enjoying my retirement. I get up. I do a little of this. I do a little of that and then it’s time to watch TV again,” says a character played by Judd Hirsch in Kelly Reichardt’s new movie “Showing Up.” And if that sounds exciting, then this is the movie for you. Like all of Ms. Reichardt’s movies, “Showing Up” is understated and slow moving, but holds itself with a strong sense of self-assuredness.

That assuredness borders on the farcical here given the almost entire lack of conflict and/or plot. Our main character, Lizzy, played by Michelle Williams, is a sculptor that has a show opening in a week. It doesn’t appear like it will be that big of a deal. She lives and works in an artistic community and seemingly everyone has some type of show opening at some point. One character named Eric, (inexplicably but capably played by Andre 3000 of Outkast fame) is the sort of person that finds a way to love something about anything. As an example, he mans the kiln at the school and when he burns one of Lizzy’s sculptures, declares that he thinks the burn makes it look even better.

Much of the movie is spent concerning itself with Lizzy’s efforts to get her family to show up at her show and/or bother her landlord Jo (another artist played by Hong Chau) to fix her apartment’s hot water boiler. About twenty minutes into the movie, there was what I thought was a throw away scene when Lizzy finds a pigeon has broken into her house and hurt its wing. This pigeon and Lizzy’s attempts to care for it provide the majority of the drama for the rest of the movie. The remainder of the drama occurs when her family members actually do show up at her show and it becomes readily apparent why the parents are divorced and her brother (played by John Magaro) probably shouldn’t be in public at all. But then the scene deescalates without a big fuss and the movie ends shortly thereafter. It all turns out okay and everyone goes on with their lives.

Did I like this movie? Well, let me just say that it is not on the level of “First Cow.” The sculptures, and other art created in the movie certainly could have been better. Will I see Kelly Reichardt’t next movie? Yeah, I expect I’ll be showing up.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

 

For those counting, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is the first part of the seventh Mission: Impossible movie. They stopped numbering them after Mission: Impossible III in 2006. The franchise is notable in that it has been around for almost thirty years, but has only picked up speed recently, the last four movies being released since 2011. Not that the first movie wasn’t successful, or that Tom Cruise was not a bankable action star. The opposite actually. No, it was just that in the 1990s when the first two movies came out, Tom Cruise had other things to do than action sequences. He was far more of a dramatic actor. He routinely starred in movies that won or were nominated for Oscars (Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire) or had an element of romance in them. In the late 1990s/early 2000s, he starred in some straight up avant garde movies (Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, Vanilla Sky). Unfortunately, the days of Tom Cruise taking risks in roles are over. Now all the risks are purely physical. Since 2011, he has done nothing but action blockbusters. 

The explanation for this lies entirely with Tom Cruise. He gets to pick the movies that he is in. I’m going to hazard any entirely speculative guess though. I bet it has something to do with Scientology. I read a book about this once, and it basically concluded that Tom Cruise was near the top, if not at the top of this “religion” (religion is in quotes mainly because Scientologists believe that it is only a religion for tax purposes. The actual tenets consider the beliefs to be scientific fact, hence the name). Tom Cruise was and is the most famous of Scientology's disciples and its most potent poster child. After all, Scientologists believe that once a person attains a certain level in their process, that, in turn, prevents them from getting sick or aging. The ageless Tom Cruise is in this ideology, almost a deity. That sort of deified status is bound to have effects on a man’s character. In Tom Cruise, it would appear to manifest itself in a sort of manic seriousness. I have a feeling that Tom Cruise is doing all of these action blockbusters, one after another, for the money. I think Scientology has lost a lot of goodwill in the past two decades, probably has a much harder time of winning new recruits than ever before, and Tom Cruise is essentially bankrolling the place. And the best way for Tom Cruise to make a lot of money is to strip away everything about himself that could be controversial and present himself as the ideal mass market product: action-oriented, moral, enough of a sense of humor, and sex appeal (but no actual sex). In other words, a well-produced Mission: Impossible movie, like this one.

Christopher McQuarrie returns as Tom Cruise’s ideal action movie partner. McQuarrie has directed the last three Mission: Impossible movies. He has also written seven of Tom Cruise’s last ten movies, all action blockbusters. The two make a consistent and productive team. I am going to bypass talking about the plot for the moment. What you want to know is if the stunts are still very good. Yes, they are. There isn't a set piece as great as the Burg Khalifa sequence in Ghost Protocal or a fistfight that packs as mean a punch as the bathroom brawl in Fallout, but it all still pretty good. The main set piece is a well-publicized stunt of Tom Cruise racing a motorcycle off a mountain and spending many seconds in a freefall (while speaking dialogue). We know that this is the real thing, but how does it show up in the movie? Well, there is a shot in which Tom Cruise pulls the ripcord for his parachute and is dramatically sucked out of frame. I don’t believe the computers can do that yet. Another very good sequence is a comic car chase with Tom Cruise driving a tiny Fiat with one hand through the streets of Rome. Tom Cruise is becoming known for his chase sequences that have camera angles and backgrounds that so very clearly show that this is the actor driving this vehicle going that fast in this place (see Top Gun: Maverick). 

The plot is yet another world endangering conspiracy. I cannot say I quite grasped it except to understand that the bad guy is not a person at all, but some sentient artificial intelligence. I’m not sure if I should have picked up on what this sentient artificial intelligence wants. Perhaps that will be explained in the sequel. Having said that, it is very dangerous. It is particularly adept at pretending to be human and thereby tricking the other humans so that they think they are interacting with other humans. At the bottom of everything though, it appears that the corrupt national security apparatus of the United States Government may be behind it. A corrupt national security apparatus (dare I say, a deep state) seems to be what Ethan Hunt has been fighting this entire franchise. He starts off on some mission given to him by the United States government only to find out that the U.S. Government is the actual bad guy and that he has been set up. As I've mentioned before, this a trope found in a lot of movies. I wonder if it helps sell tickets overseas. After all, if you vilified a foreign government, those people might be offended. Here, in America, we all take turns vilifying the government with every transition of political power.

The core gang is back together. There is Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell and Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn. Gone are Jeremy Renner and all other previous love interests. Tom Cruise’s agelessness is exceptional, true, but it can be noted that Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg are aging like normal people. They are all actually pretty old now. Ving Rhamses is 65. Tom Cruise is 61. Simon Pegg is already 53. (You would think he would be much younger than Tom Cruise because his stardom came of age twenty years after Cruise was an established star). The new girl, Hayley Atwell is invited to join the club. Although she is not young at the age of 41, she is still in an entirely different generation. I wonder what the movie would feel like if Tom Cruise, while still remaining in shape and doing all the same stunts, stopped dying his hair and let his face naturally age. Would it be hilarious? Maybe. My favorite new addition is Pom Klementieff, who plays a femme fatale. I had to look her up in order to realize I had seen her a bunch of times in Marvel movies. She plays Mantis, a member of the Guardians of the Galaxy. This is a more interesting/intense role for her and she has, hands down, the best makeup of everyone. Vanessa Kirby and Rebecca Ferguson round out the other female action stars. All the women are between twenty to thirty years younger than our main star, but perhaps this can't be helped. After all, what actress in their 60s do you think could physically keep up. I am blanking here.

Asteroid City (3/5 Stars)

Wes Anderson’s movies have always had several layers to them. A good example is “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, which starts off with a young girl reading a book of the same name, turns into an interview with the aged author (Tom Wilkinson) of said book, which turns into the young author (Jude Law) interviewing the aged subject of that book (F. Murray Abraham), which, finally, turns into the subject of the movie itself, a story about the young subject of that book (Tony Revolori) and his apprenticeship at the Grand Budapest Hotel under the supervision of the esteemed M. Gustave (Joseph Fiennes). Except by now, after several tellings over decades of time, the style of the resulting movie has undergone several distinctive transitions in style (like a visual game of telephone) each more fantastical than the last. The final form of the Grand Hotel, exceptionally pink and ornate, is too fantastical for real life. But since we, the audience, know that what we are witnessing is a superimposed artifice on something that happened to real people, (It is not explicitly stated in “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, but the story takes place somewhere in Eastern Europe (maybe Budapest, Hungary) and the bad guys in the background are clearly the Nazis and then the Soviets of the 20th Century), Wes Anderson deftly gets to have it both ways. He can indulge his artistic vision without distracting from the underlying humanity of the characters. 

This is a technique We Anderson used again in “The French Dispatch”, masterfully I would say. It is a technique that is employed again in “Asteroid City”, which presents itself as a Radio Drama (shot in black and white and hosted by Bryan Cranston) which is about the creation and production of a play (Edward Norton is the playwright), called “Asteroid City”. By the time we get to “Asteroid City”, we are in a very Wes Anderson and Co. tableau. It is a desert on the border of Oregon and California, sparse and clear, but not looking particularly hot. It is the 1950s and there are roadside diners, cadillacs, and atom bomb tests. The colors are mainly sky blue, tennis green, and sand. But for the same reason this technique was successful in “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The French Dispatch”, it fails here. In those previous movies, the artifice was superimposed on what was a real story about real people. Here, the audience is told that there isn’t ultimately a real story about real people. We are told “Asteroid City” is a fictional play written by a playwright that isn’t based on anything that actually happened. As a result, it isn’t just the art direction that is artifice in this movie. All of the characters and story in “Asteroid City” are artifice too.

The play “Asteroid City” concerns an annual science camp for budding teenage astronomers that takes place in a sparsely populated village centered around an asteroid impact crater and the government research facility that studies it. The families of the teenage astronomers visit to have a science fair, with scholarship for the winner, and watch an astronomical event (something about ellipses). During this astronomical event, an alien spacecraft shows up, an alien gets out of the spacecraft, takes the asteroid, and leaves without a word. Now this happening could mean several things to all sorts of different people. Even if the people who witnessed the event didn’t know what it meant, that still would have meaning. However, if the event never happened and the playwright who made it up doesn’t know what it means, well, then it truly is meaningless.

This is the problem that “Asteroid City” has. In its backstory, the Radio Drama about the making of the play undercuts the play storyline itself by presenting it as something that didn’t happen, or could have happened a completely different way based on the whims of its creators. And if you are like me, and don’t find the travails of Writer’s Block or Actor’s Motivation all that original and/or interesting (like at all), you may find yourself wondering if the movie would be better off if every single black and white scene of the Radio Drama were cut from the movie. I don’t think it adds anything. I think it arguably distracts and trivializes the main story. At the very least, cutting those scenes would make the movie 15-20 minutes shorter. While I’m changing things, how about making Scarlett Johannson something other than a movie actress? Why are we watching an actress playing an actress practicing lines for a movie different from this movie which is a radio drama about the making of a play? The previous sentence isn’t even a joke. It should be. 

Not that “Asteroid City” isn’t enjoyable in parts. I especially liked the speech of General Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) and the Cowboy/Alien song. I think there should have been much more of young Ricky Cho’s anti-authoritarian storyline. I enjoyed seeing Jake Ryan with another ten years on him (I first saw him in Moonrise Kingdom and Inside Llewyn Davis in 2013-2014 respectively) and Jason Schwartzman in a starring role, his first in a Wes Anderson film since Rushmore. It’s just mediocre.

Hey, they can’t all be winners. Wes Anderson and Co. produced four great movies in a row over the past decade (Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch). It would be greedy to expect a fifth. All things must pass. 

Beau is Afraid (5/5 Stars)

 

Something that I have gleaned from watching a lot of movies is that human beings have nostalgia for the culture of their youth. It is an entirely normal thing to be convinced that the movies that came out, the music that was around, and the games that were played were some of the best. It has dawned on me that I am an exception to this rule. Indeed, looking back at American culture over a long period of time, I’m pretty sure my teenage years 1996-2006 were the nadir of American culture. It was a time of turnover in the culture, when the last taboos of obscenity and language were being violated in ever increasing numbers, when alternative music devolved into emo/grunge/nu metal, when pop music corporatized itself into boy bands. When my parents were teenagers, they had The Beatles. I had Eminem. (I suppose I could have felt different if I had HBO back then, but I didn’t). The worst part though is what happened to the horror genre in movies. The breakdown of standards concerning violence in movies (thx Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Tarantino’s Kill Bill) led to a free for all that culminated in what was being called “torture porn.” It seemed like all the creativity in the genre was focused on finding new and excruciating ways to mutilate, dismember, and (hopefully) kill characters.

Enough time has passed that we can perhaps look back at that time as a time of puberty, when you drank way too much just so you could know what it was like, but now that you are older, and have already done it, you don’t need to do it again. The horror genre in the last decade has revitalized itself. Since all the taboos as to violence have been broken many times over, creators of good horror films have needed to become creative once again as to how to scare us. And step up they have, none more so than the writer/director Ari Aster. His previous movies include Hereditary and Midsommar. And now here is Beau is Afraid. It is a three hour long odyssey and I spent a majority of its time traumatized.

There is a fundamental difference between the films of Ari Aster and the awful horror movies of my youth. I am convinced that the only way one can watch Saw or its many sequels is to detach themselves from the movie and consider it without any empathy or sympathy, much like someone would watch a geek show at the circus (a thing where a homeless man would bite the heads off of chickens, or so I’m told). In contrast, although Ari Aster’s films have strong horror elements (there is some type of witch’s coven in Hereditary and a forest cult in Midsommar), it is impossible to not be drawn into the story and the characters. Watching Hereditary, the most memorable scene takes place at the dinner table and involves Toni Collete yelling at her son. Toni Collette isn’t possessed in this scene. It’s all raw earned emotion. In Midsommar, there is a scene that may well be placed in the dictionary as the ultimate example of catharsis. A young woman discovers that her boyfriend is cheating on her. The other women in the community help her get it all out. The scene ends with them all screaming together in a barn.

The screening I attended of Beau if Afraid involved a question and answer session with Ari Aster. In this session, our writer/director described Beau is Afraid as a comedy. If it is a comedy, it is much like the “comedies” of Martin Scorsese. I'm thinking particularly of After Hours. Scorsese’s notion of humor was to fling as many terrible things as possible upon an entirely innocent man (it’s a great movie, I recommend it). Beau is Afraid is like that, but the things that happen to Beau are much worse.

Beau is played by Joaquin Phoenix. He lives in a nightmare city, on a block full of urban terror. The neighbors accuse him of playing loud music when he is not playing any music. Grotesque graffiti lines the walls. Crazy, half-deranged people, some of them presently being violent, inhabit his street. And they are not going away. They inhabit his street. When Beau ventures out of his home to the corner deli, this horde of deranged people take the opportunity to break into Beau’s apartment where they party all night long and destroy the place.

This is in the first twenty minutes of the movie. What is extraordinary about Beau is Afraid is that the preceding paragraph is not a dream. That is, at no point does Beau wake up and realize that some of the above did not happen. Nor does the above seem to be some sort of psychological condition within Beau, wherein the crazy people are the delusions of a schizophrenic or agoraphobic. There is no point in the story where someone shakes Beau and tells him that he’s imagining all of this crazy shit. It is happening. There really is a serial killer known as the naked stabber, a deranged man that runs around town naked stabbing people. He stabs Beau. He does. That is why Beau is walking around with bandages for the next two thirds of the movie. And the bathtub scene. Apparently that too is real.

Ari Aster brings a technical mastery to what is being shown. The movie is composed of long shots with incredible framing of background detail and extras. The sound design is doing funky things too. All of it combines into this phantasmagorical hellscape. The scary things aren’t vampires or zombies. They are things that are familiar to you: your mother, the police, drugs, sex, your therapist, teenage girls. In a flashback, Beau’s mother tells him that he inherited a particular thing from his father which is arguably the worst possible thing a mother could say to a son. Alfred Hitchcock would have loved this movie. Martin Scorsese wrote the forward for the Midsommar DVD box set. If nothing else can be said, Ari Aster is an excellent filmmaker.

It must take an extraordinary amount of confidence/resolve for a movie to show what it is showing and not blink. To not, at some point say, okay I’m drawing the line here, and that last part was just for fun. But as far as I can tell, this happens just once and it happens only to make things worse, not better, and that is in the last twenty minutes of the movie. If I had one qualm about the movie is that I would take away that one blink and see where the movie goes without it. This is a movie like Under the Silver Lake that I felt was within reach of being perfect if only it could have reworked some of its scenes.

At the screening I asked Ari Aster the following questions.

What did you mother think of this movie?

Did she think it was funny?

Once you see it, ask me how he responded.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (3/5 Stars)

 

"Oh, Boy, I have a really good feeling about Plan C." - Edgin, Bard

The traditional portrait of a participant in Dungeons & Dragons is a teenage boy, the type prone to non-contact sports and virginity. At least that was the popular portrayal on TV when I was growing up. I didn't really know anybody who played Dungeons & Dragons, and the very few times I came across someone who spoke of it, the stereotype would be confirmed: they would be bragging about being a level 20 dungeon master or something that seemed strange to be openly proud about. 

My first substantial exposure to the game came after school in my mid-twenties. Some of my roommates, all grown men, had a game with other locals. I wasn't involved and regarded my non-involvement with ambivalence. I was generally put off with the requirement to obtain a comprehensive knowledge about something entirely useless. Sure, I was a fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, had read the books and watched the movies, but I had never been a superfan. I tried but did not finish the Similarion once I realized that it wasn't so much a story as much as a history. I've never understood the point of a history, or any argument concerning canon, about a make-believe world. It is in fact possible to go to a bookstore and buy a history of real events. Some of them are quite good. There was something undeniable though about the game going on in the living room. It was a lot of fun. There would be laughter emanating from the room for hours on end.

That much garnered enough of my interest that I tried to become involved. Only then did I realize something rather ridiculous about Dungeons & Dragons. It turns out that this much ridiculed thing from our childhood is rather cliquish. It is almost impossible to join a campaign once it has started (indeed, usually someone in the game will have to leave first for anyone to join) and a campaign can go on for years. Then the campaign ends and this same group of people (say 4-6) will start a new campaign and so on and so forth until the same five people have been playing the game together for longer than you ever thought possible.

I had the pleasure of making it into a game of Dungeons & Dragons in 2019 as a player then turning that experience into starting my own groups as dungeon master with friends and family during the pandemic. I found out first hand what made it so fun. Sure, there was a lot of learned knowledge about useless things, but the role-playing portion of it worked a lot like improvisational comedy. As dungeon master, one of the more important tasks is to switch the game back and forth between story and strategy so that neither part of it becomes tiresome. Ultimately, the adventure books one buys and bases the game on are just guidelines. The experience is one created by the group, much like how jazz is created in a club.

I bring this up in this review of the movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, to point out what an uphill journey making a movie based on this game surely was. First, the expectations are enormous. The built-in audience doesn't have just have a experience reading a book (maybe 10-20 hours alone) or playing a video game (30-40 hours alone), they may have logged hundreds of hours in the company of others. These nerds will intuitively know whether what is being portrayed on the screen is "realistic" and will likely have qualms about whether or not certain things are possible or certain characters are acting the way they are "supposed to act." 

The expectations problem becomes even more apparent when one considers the improvisational nature of the game. Like hearing a recording of jazz or listening to someone rehash a scene of improvisational comedy, something is definitely lost when the spontaneity of the moment is past. If you have ever listened to a Dungeons and Dragons player gleefully recount the story of the last session, you will know what I mean.

So there it is, you have an audience of judgmental nerds who expect the movie to be a certain way, but the creators better not make it like an actual Dungeons and Dragons session because then it won't work at all. Having given themselves these impossible odds, I think this movie essentially pulls it off. The movie's story works as a movie, while placating the nerds by assuming an enormous amount of knowledge.

I bet a person lacking in any knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons would be entirely lost. The world and its history isn't explained. The players simply inhabit what is known as the Swordcoast. How magic works in this world isn't explained. There isn't a mention of the weave or any types of levels or spell slots. There is very little exposition on the different kinds of beings, classes, and monsters. It is assumed that the audience, or at least the audience that counts, already knows this. At one point, the characters venture into the Underdark. Again, there is little to no explanation as to what that is. They just do it. 

The plot is not improvisational. It actually relies on the most basic of movie tropes. It's a Heist Movie and before the Heist, we've got to Get the Band Back Together. This works quite well in a Dungeons and Dragons movie because we need a team and that team needs to go on a mission. The team will require the basic classes in Dungeons and Dragons: Bard, Barbarian, Sorcerer, Druid. The other classes not in the Team will be on the other side as enemies: Rogue, Wizard. Then there is the Paladin, who is on his own side (of justice and truth of course).

These characters act like these characters should act and the movie employs character actors that slot in quite well into the types. The dashing Chris Pine is our Bard. His best friend the Barbarian is played by Michelle Rodriguez. Hugh Grant plays the dastardly Rogue. Some young people I've never seen in movies before play the Sorcerer and Druid (Justice Smith and Sophia Lillis respectively). One of the writer/directors of this movie is John Francis Daley, one of the titular Geeks in the short lived TV Series Freaks and Geeks. 

The way the story is written and how the characters play off each other will remind you of spending time with old friends. Yes, the Bard and the Barbarian have a special relationship because they have very different skills that make their sum greater than their parts. Yes, the Sorcerer is prime for a good coming of age story arc since his power derives from his bloodline and develops during puberty. Yes, the Paladin will play a part, but only on his goody-two-shoes terms.

So, is this a good movie? Sure, but here is a better question: Is watching this movie more fun than playing Dungeons and Dragons? or an even better question: Is it worth watching this movie if you've never played Dungeons and Dragons? I think the first better question is a wash: If you've played Dungeons and Dragons, you will very likely find this movie entertaining, or more importantly, not annoying. Chris Pine and his weirdly symmetrical face continues to be a flattering avatar for nerds. The second better question is: only if you want to feel excluded. This may be a revelation to you but the nerds are not pining for your company. I recall watching the first episode of the first season of TV Series Stranger Things. The older sister of the main nerd wonders in disbelief: how do you spend all day, ten hours straight, playing a game and not finish it? For myself, it was easier to make friends on the football team. Once you've played Dungeons and Dragons, you will understand.

John Wick Chapter 4 (5/5 Stars)

Since I had the pleasure to see and review John Wick 3: Parabellum in theaters in 2019, I have had the opportunity to go back and rent the DVDs for John Wick and John Wick 2. And although one can never tell with these sorts of things, John Wick Chapter 4 might be the end of the franchise, or at least this particular iteration of it. So now we may have a complete view of the entirety. It is a rare thing to behold, a franchise which starts out in the realm of ordinary and then gets increasingly better with each installment. The fourth movie is arguably the best one.

This may seem like an odd comparison, but while I was watching John Wick Chapter 4, I was reminded of the evolution of Wes Anderson’s career. He started out as a simple independent filmmaker with a unique style and vision (think Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums). Over the years however, it would appear that his attention to detail and artistry has pulled into his orbit a multitude of exceptional artists until now a Wes Anderson movie is chock full of wonderful production design, costumes, makeup, etc. in all shapes and sizes in every scene. The evolution of the John Wick franchise feels like this progression. It started off with a normal movie but with some rare attention to detail in fight scenes. Famously (and although I haven’t actually done the counting, I do believe it), it is said that the bullets fired out of each gun in a John Wick movie are counted. When the guns run out of bullets, the stunt direction calls for John Wick to take the time to reload his gun in the middle of the fighting. This sort of detail is usually not picked up by most audience members and for that reason most movies don’t bother with it. But I expect it is the sort of detail that artists working in stunt direction notice, and that along with innumerable other details, has likely led to that evolution of the John Wick franchise, where not unlike a Wes Anderson movie, it appears that the cream of the crop in what this movie specialized in, stunt direction and production design, has gravitated towards the team the produces these films. John Wick Chapter 4 is stunning to look at. The team appears to have gotten access to Sacre Coure, the Arc De Triomphe, Versailles, and other gorgeous places in Paris, France. They continue to place Keanu Reeves in interesting and exceptional fights while adding one of the best in the genre to the cast: Donnie Yen (Ip Man).

There are a lot of movies out there in the subgenre of old man out for revenge. I haven’t seen most of them, although I did see the original Death Wish and Unforgiven. I have not seen any of the multitude of Liam Neeson’s “Taken” movies. John Wick lands squarely in this subgenre, but it contains a shrewd understanding of what actually matters when it comes to how these movies work. The important thing to take away here is the tongue-in-cheek game the movie plays with John Wick’s motivations. Usually in this type of movie, the old man is a solitary man who has had some close family member, almost always a young woman, die/raped in some gruesome fashion. This gives the old man the excuse of justifiably killing a lot of bad guys. In the John Wick series, the bad guys kill his dog in the first movie and steal his car in the second. This all goes to show that the movie understands that motivation doesn’t really matter. It’s just an excuse to get you to the action scenes. Frankly, the whole concept of character motivation comes close to being a running joke in the franchise. The movie employs serious character actors like Ian McShane, Lawrence Fishburne, and Hiroyuki Sanada who expound on the deeply traditional manner of the way things are and the consequences of stepping out of line with the powers that be. And then Keanu Reeves, with his unique brand of charm/bad acting goes “Yeah, but they killed my dog”. And then what proceeds are several hours of exceptional stunt direction. The movie doesn’t ask you to believe/feel that all these people need to die. It knows and you know that the plot is just a contrived artifice for stunt direction. As long as the stunt direction is strong enough to stand on its own, and here it is, that is all the audience needs to be entertained.

This is the type of movie that I would love to hear the director’s commentary about. Especially as to which stunts are analog and which are digital. There is so much that is impressive here that some very good stunts can be considered as throwaway. In the first great action platform, taking place in the Osaka Continental (yes, many samurai swords come out into play here), a stuntman takes a tumble head over heels down an escalator. I’m pretty sure that was an analog stunt (that is the stuntman really went down the escalator in that fashion). It is notable how quickly the movie moves away from that stunt and how ordinary it feels amongst all the others.

There are too many scenes that deserve mention here, but I will name a few. For Keanu Reeves, nunchuk fight scene. For Donnie Yen, nevermind a mention of any particular scene, his entire performance as a blind marital artist is notable. Then there is a minor character played by Rina Sawayama who participates in the Osaka Continental fight. I have been routinely unimpressed by how beautiful women who know kung fu are somehow able to beat up men twice their size in movies. But here, Rina takes on two sizably larger men and she does so in a choreographed fight that retains its plausibility. This is not easy stunt direction. Indeed it is as easy as a person being able to plausibly fight someone who is twice as large as they are in real life (Not Plausible!). But she does it, seemingly without noticeable cheating, and everyone involved should be commended. I also really liked the fight in the Berlin rave with the fat man (Scott Adkins in a fat suit). I know I just started watching 2023 movies but I would be gobsmacked if I don’t pick this movie for Best Stunt Direction in next year’s Oscar picks (also for Best Cultural Appropriation for Japanese/French production design as well as Hong Kong martial arts in general). Indeed, John Wick Chapter 4 will be one of the best movies of the year.