Eddington

“Eddington” begins with a homeless person (Clifton Collins Jr.) wandering down a desolate road at night in New Mexico, shouting into the void. You know, the void, the place where all meaning seemed to go during the COVID-19 pandemic. And that’s the time in which writer/director Ari Aster’s film takes place, the COVID-19 pandemic, late May 2020 when masks and social distancing were foremost topics of concern, and so was defunding the police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis cop, all of which are injected into a sprawling two-hour plus movie that isn’t so much interested in examining the novel coronavirus, per se, as it in evoking it as a manifestation of the great American divide. If it might be described as a western/noir hybrid, I kept thinking of it more like a Twilight Zone episode written and directed by an edge lord. Do I recommend it? Well, what does that matter? Go see for yourself; do your own research.

When we first meet Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), he is admonished for not wearing a mask, not just immediately transporting us back in time but immediately seeking to instill in the viewer a sense of drawing a line in the sand: who’s side are you on? It’s obvious whose side Aster is on. The mask is presented as a symbol, one worn by Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) as much to signal dreaded virtue as a safety precaution, and one eschewed by Joe to signal individual freedom, betraying the filmmaker’s thumb on the scale from the get-go. The ensuing plot is not even so much a series of events as it is a series of buttons being pushed. If everything in the last 10 years of American life has become politics, then Aster runs with that idea, creating a gallery of characters that are virtually inextricable from their political ideology, whether they realize it or not. 

Joe is at loggerheads with Ted not just over a mask mandate but the possible construction of a data center on the outskirts of town. Eschewing his role to keep the peace, Joe becomes the match that lights the fuse when he all of a sudden decides to run for Mayor against Ted in the upcoming election. As he transforms the two-man police department into a campaign committee, his wife Louise (Emma Stone) disappears down the conspiracy rabbit hole, prodded by Joe’s own mother (Dierdre O’Connell), meeting with and becoming close to some right-wing cult leader, Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Peak does not turn out to be much of a character, mostly existing in opposition to Joe, but Butler’s performance is still a delight of malevolent unctuousness. When Peak invites himself to dinner, watching Phoenix as Joe is watching a man in real-time lose a loved one to unreality.  

Ted’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) becomes a BLM activist along with his best friend Brian (Cameron Mann) for no other reason than they both like Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), a social media influencer cosplaying as a social justice warrior, or so Aster would say. This is a deeply cynical view of the world. Just as the ostensible secret that Louise is harboring becomes campaign fuel for her husband, activism is merely the means to some selfish end. Sarah’s belief in racial justice is dismissed by Joe as something she learned in social studies class, an allegedly trenchant observation peddled by social media reactionaries the world over, equating public education with indoctrination, if not a waste of time altogether. Aster underlines his belief that the kids lack any real beliefs themselves with scenes of them ignoring the vagrant when he is right in their midst. Of course, Aster pays the homeless man as much attention as the kids do, demonstrating how his button-pushing tends to tie itself in knots.

Aster does not really cast about looking for who or what to blame for this state of rampant division and ignorance but rather makes it clear: it’s the phones. On its face, that’s a glib diagnosis, but Aster compellingly renders it, nevertheless. If modern movies often seem hesitant to over-include phones in their narratives, as if it might be cheating, “Eddington” shares no such equivocation. The cooling tower accompanying the potential data center on a hilltop outside town stands like an anti-monolith of “2001.” Characters faces are buried in their handheld screens throughout, a potent juxtaposition to the wide-open southwestern landscapes. It put me in mind of another New Mexico-set movie, “The Vast of Night” (2019), where the wonder was in looking up at the sky. In “Eddington,” on other hand, everyone is forever looking down.  

Joe is as addicted to his phone as anyone else, curling up with it in bed when Louise turns her back to him, though he is also oldfangled, imploring for community and fellowship. The way Phoenix has him say this, though, I don’t think he could explain what he means by community and fellowship if he tried, and subsequent events suggest Joe’s belief in these ideas might be dubious. The character sports a white hat, yet just as frequently doesn’t, revealing a severe case of hat-hair below, deploying nothing less than hair and makeup (Anji Bemben: hair department dead) to evoke the mess Joe eventually makes of just about everything. When he says COVID is not even present in Eddington, you know it will have arrived by movie’s end, and it does, triggering an over-the-top fever dream climax that comes across like a western-styled showdown between good and evil reconfigured as the fever dream of an aggrieved white man. And even if “Eddington” struggles figuring out how to conclude, the open ending also underlines America’s lack of reckoning with that time, so many sins lying unatoned. 

Mountainhead

“Mountainhead” begins with the world’s richest person, Venis (pronounced Venice, like the Doge, now that I think about it) Parish (Cory Michael Smith), in the back of an SUV as he announces the launch of his new artificial intelligence app via his ultra-successful social media platform. Alas, in making the announcement, he misspells everyone’s favorite four-letter word beginning with F by inadvertently adding an extra U. This causes him more chagrin than the fact that the AI app is ominously untested. Watching all this unfold is his assistant Berry (Ali Kinkade) in the seat next to him. In the few words she speaks, she’s a simple sycophant, but Kinkade’s eyes reveal something more. She seems to be side-eyeing Venis even when she’s looking right at him, alarmed by his actions but not surprised, and almost trying to subliminally will him to grasp the implications of what he’s typing. That she doesn’t speak up might spell trouble for viewers who require their characters to be virtuous citizens, but in a movie deliberately devoid of humanity, Kinkade’s facial expressions prove the lone exception. She’s a passenger in what may as well be a self-driving car headed for a cliff, helpless to stop it.

Venis is on his way to a summit of three tech billionaires and one mere millionaire. They deem themselves the Brewsters, a reference that writer/director Jesse Armstrong leaves unexplained, but I nevertheless chose to assume related to “Brewster’s Millions.” That’s the 1985 Richard Pryor comedy unloved by critics that I could see becoming a recurring favorite of four bros sharing a Silicon Valley live-work loft. The remote mountain retreat where they gather, named after the A*n R*nd novel, which is not subtle but, my God, who ever accused A*n R*nd of being subtle, is owned by Hugo Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman). He’s dubbed Soup Kitchen because he’s the millionaire striving for those mystical ten digits while Randall Garrett is the gang’s paternal figure, referred to as Papa Bear. He’s a little Steve Jobs-like but because he’s played by Steve Carrell, it is Steve Jobs filtered through Michael Scott, such a muddy line between diviner and dimwit. The fourth member of the group is Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef), his own AI company in opposition to Venis’s. So is his attitude. Venis is the kind of guy who sees a heart stopping tableau of nature and declares his desire to fornicate with it, determined to devour everything. Jeff evinces an air of effective altruism though Youssef is shrewd enough to innately unmask the limits of that ethos in his turn.

As they come together, the world outside is coming undone as Venis’s unchecked AI unleashes a flood of disinformation; banks go on runs, countries collapse, people die, though seen exclusively through their phones, it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s fake. And though the fact-checking capabilities of Jeff’s own AI might provide an answer, the professed “intellectual salon” instead debates utilizing the unrest for a technocratic coup. Of what, exactly? America? Argentina? The whole world? That’s beside the point, as is any of this being possible in the first place, as are the potential consequences. The outside world might as well be theoretical and the rest of humankind might as well be dots, as Orson Welles deemed pesky human beings in “The Third Man.” “If I offered you twenty thousand dollars for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money?” The Brewsters would probably just negotiate a higher fee.

They game out their coup via “Mountainhead’s” Armstrong’s evocative dialogue. This unique language is an out to lunch and wholly believable mishmash of technobabble, introductory philosophy masquerading as PHD-level, and wellness flim-flam wrapped up in a kind of party animal, frat house-ese delivered by all four actors with a pertinent screwball repartee. Randall might be seeking a “transhumanist” solution for the cancer eating away his body, but this dialogue already makes him and them feel that way – self-perceived gods squabbling for control of the world on a distant mountaintop. Unfortunately, Armstrong has more flair for screwball verbiage than he does for screwball filmmaking, and so the conclusion in which the Brewsters turn on one of their own, never satisfactorily puts the whole enterprise over the top. Or maybe that’s just reality intruding. Screwball comedy is all about exaggeration and how can you exaggerate what’s going on out there these days? 

Much has been made of “Mountainhead’s” accelerated filming and production schedule, more by design than necessity, evoking Armstrong’s desire that his movie be inextricable from the present moment. That’s a strength, freeing it from needing to impose a solution, just a mirror, a sort of moving satirical print, say, akin to one mocking King Geroge in the 1770s. But it’s also a weakness. By responding to the present moment and nothing beyond, Armstrong has no idea how to end the movie; it just sort of sputters out. What’s worse, the limits of his own satirical creations are exposed by the real people he’s satirizing. It was sheer coincidence, but I watched “Mountainhead” the day the beef between America’s two most preeminent vainglorious dolts spilled out into public. Discovering that feud right after finishing this movie sent me right through the looking glass, wondering which way was up, feeling helpless.

Holland

“The Paperboy,” “Trespass,” even “Bewitched,” all the way back to “Dead Calm” and up through last year’s “Babygirl,” any new Nicole Kidman joint deserves rigorous analysis. Her latest movie, “Holland,” set in the eponymous Michigan Dutch enclave and bringing the veneer of the perfect family to heel when a missing earring sends Kidman’s home economics teacher over the edge and into the teeth of a may-or-may-not-be murder mystery, deserves such rigorous analysis too. And yet, as I watched it, and as I kept considering it afterward, trying to carve a review into blog stone, all I could really think about was Cosmo Kramer’s quote-unquote boss at Brandt-Leland in S8E3 of “Seinfeld” unable to make heads or tails of the reports his faux employee has handed in. 

No Comment

Cinema Romantico continues to have no comment regarding “Joker: Folie à Deux.” The blog can confirm it has yet to see “Joker: Folie à Deux” and in all likelihood will not see it until a few months from now, on VOD. At that point, the blog will possibly do as it did for the first “Joker” and write a (probably negative) review to work out our thoughts, leave it in the drafts folder, and never publish it. But that cannot be confirmed at the present time.

In the meanwhile, please enjoy this video of Gaga singing “Orange Colored Sky.”

Challengers

Set in the world of tennis, “Challengers” begins with a match between Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), the former a successful but aging pro looking to regain his mojo, the latter talented but mercurial and clinging to the edge of the profession. The event is in New Rochelle, seventeen miles outside New York as an establishing shot shows, and presented as a kind of country club idyll, underlined in the chirping birds and Henry Purcell’s Sound the Trumpet as sung by the Toronto Children’s Chorus on the soundtrack. Then, the idyll is wrecked as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s pulsing electronica score kicks the baroque music to the curb and the camera zooms in past the judge’s chair and across the court to find Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) in the crowd. The way she watches Art and Patrick, and the way they turn to watch her watching them, clues us into their prickly codependent relationship even before we learn the considerable backstory. True, “Challengers” is short on emotional and intellectual depth, often as glossy as a commercial during a tennis match which the frequently blatant product placement evokes. But there is a primal ferocity that sticks, nevertheless, brought home in the capping shot, as if director Luca Guadagnino made his movie in the spirit of a Serena, or a Seles, or a Sharapova shriek. 

Art and Patrick’s match provides the framework for “Challengers” as we do not merely flash all the way back to the beginning and then move forward to this showdown but skip around in time, days, months, and years, to see what led them here. One-time doubles partners, Art and Patrick’s friendship begin to fray when they fell under the spell of Tashi, an extraordinary rising star. Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes has said he was inspired by the contentious 2018 US Open Final between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, but watching the sequence in which Art and Patrick watch Tashi on the court took me back further, to the fraught days of Anna Kournikova when sex appeal and on-court skill seemed to blur into something indistinguishable.

That sequence, in which Art and Patrick first watch Tashi obliterate an opponent, and then meet her afterwards at a party, and then invite her back to their motel room, are funnier, really, than sexy, framing Faist and O’Connor by frequently placing them in the same shot with his sort of overcome slack-jawed expression renders them as two fluffy-headed boys bobbing in her wake. Physically, these scenes are attuned to Art and Patrick specifically as that, boys, clueless and hapless horndogs, and Zendaya’s performance here is deft, demonstrating complete control over them without making it obvious to them that she’s in complete control. And when she summons to the two boys to bed, brings them in close to her and then presses their lips together, the way she leans back, satisfied, she is essentially pitting them against one another. It’s a competitive love triangle, in other words, and “Challengers” charts the progression of that semi-romantic back and forth.

It is a fantastic set-up, yet the resulting follow-through only manages to reproduce the scintillating nature of this sequence in fits and starts. It’s clear the structure intends to evoke the shifting nature of a tennis match, yet the rhythm of the match itself quite blatantly mimics where things stand in terms of the love triangle. It’s not so much that it counteracts the match’s own sense of tension as it denotes how the characters in “Challengers” have little agency. It’s just one more puzzle box narrative where rather than lives being lived on screen, pieces are being snapped into place, meaning the tension results more from how the movie will put this all together than what are these people going to do, all of which also underlines the one dimensionality of the trio. Patrick as a rich guy cosplaying at being poor, Art wanting a real life outside of tennis, these attributes are reduced to lines of dialogue rather than being baked into the movie. In one scene, Patrick meets a woman (Hailey Gates) for a date merely as a cruel means to get a place to stay for the night. In her arresting anxiety, though, Gates threatens to puncture the movie’s three-person bubble. And because she does, just as the scene truly starts, it ends. If the piece doesn’t fit, it gets tossed.

On the other hand, a limited viewpoint and one dimensionality feel part and parcel of the characters themselves. There is one incredible moment, not long after we have seen Tashi and Art’s daughter and their daughter’s older nanny, when referencing his rehabilitating an injury, she expresses a wish that her own recovery from injury had been as easy as his, that she would have stabbed someone, a child or an older lady, to have his recovery. Zendaya’s voice here, casual, unthinking, earnest, virtually sideswipes you; whether she consciously realizes it or not, she may as well be speaking about her own daughter, or her own daughter’s nanny. Her daughter is an afterthought, not to the movie but to her. When this trio talks about tennis, they’re talking about life, and when they’re talking about life, they’re talking about tennis, and so practically every conversation and encounter between these friends and lovers in “Challengers” is filmed and played with the ferocity of a single point in a tennis match. “Life is bigger than the court,” retired tennis legend Roger Federer said in his recent viral Dartmouth commencement speech; “Challengers” says the opposite. 

Maestro

“Maestro” begins with American conductor and composer extraordinaire Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) playing his home piano. For a second, you might think he is alone, until you notice the television cameraman hovering in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and as the shot gradually closes in on Bernstein, the more cameras and lights come into view. He is performing, in other words, an apt emblem for a movie that is all about performance, and as much about performance in terms of its filmmaker and star and his co-star as it is about Bernstein, making for a fascinating yet frustrating film. After this sequence, we flash back to the past, the day Bernstein takes a call in his bedroom to guest conduct the New York Philharmonic, setting him on his way to professional glory. When the call ends, the dark curtain that has been drawn over a large window, is suddenly thrust open, revealing an exultant Bernstein standing on a window ledge. It put me in mind of Seinfeld’s immortal Elaine Benes saying of Rava’s boyfriend, the flamboyant possible thief Ray, and his penchant for theatrical flourish and melodramatic monologues, “Shouldn’t you be out on a ledge somewhere?” Cooper spends all of “Maestro” on the ledge.

In directing and co-writing the screenplay with Josh Singer, Cooper has opted out of making a traditional biopic, eschewing Leonard’s childhood and even forgoing any real insight into what made him a musical savant and how that manifested itself. No, “Maestro” suggests an artier “Walk the Line” in so much as the latter, despite a cut and paste kinda non-quality, found its spine through the love story of Johnny Cash and June Carter in so much as “Maestro,” too, preeminently functions as a love story of Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Indeed, it proves her movie as much as his, foreshadowed in that same opening scene where in his on-camera interview, Leonard talks of sensing his deceased wife’s presence in their home, as if she’s still with him in death. In Cooper’s telling, Felicia was very much a moon pulled along in the orbit of Leonard’s massive planet, though one with the wherewithal to keep up. “You have a lot of energy,” he says to her the first time they meet, and the ring Cooper gives this line lets you know it’s a compliment. And though I can’t confess to knowing the real nature of their relationship, and though it is crucial to note “Maestro” was made with the blessing of Bernstein’s children, indicating a movie made in the image of their own feelings on the subject, despite all the wrenching complications that go hand-in-hand with Bernstein’s bisexuality, there is genuine electricity between Cooper and Mulligan that makes their love believable in spite of it all. 

If a thousand movies have contained a Supportive Spouse standing in the shadows, Cooper pulls Felicia into the spotlight, demonstrating her own artistic pursuits and honoring her point-of-view, literally even, slipping into a breathtaking shot from her perspective as she lies on her deathbed. And if he puts Felicia in the spotlight, he puts Mulligan there too, putting her name first in the closing credits and offering her smattering of smashing close-ups, ones in color that come across like moving Life Magazine covers, and a monochrome one on a sidewalk as she walks toward the camera as the camera moves toward her, as if illuminating its pull toward her, the wordless language of movie stardom laid out before us. In other shots, though, like the camera gradually pressing in on Felicia as she lays on her side on a blanket, telling a friend about her husband’s incompatible dimensions, Cooper is essentially allowing Mulligan’s acting to carry the image. That occurs later, too, for both of them during a Thanksgiving Day row, conveyed in one take and a long shot that turns their blocking into a reflection of the words. It works so well to leave each character spent and wrecked that the comic capper of a Macy’s Parade balloon floating past in the background falls flat.

For all the attention lavished on Mulligan, however, Cooper the director kind of hangs Cooper the actor out to dry. His controversial prosthetic nose and considerable old man makeup as Bernstein all would seem to symbolize how Cooper vanishes into the character, though in reality, the opposite is true, how despite so much virtual transformation, Cooper himself still shines through. This is never more acute than the climax in which Bernstein conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Resurrection. Recounted in a six-minute single take, Bernstein is left drenched in sweat, though because Cooper has done so little to demonstrate his character’s conducting genius, what makes him one, how he harnesses the power of the orchestra, this moment becomes nothing more than an exhibition of Cooper’s own technique. It isn’t Bernstein’s sweat we’re seeing; it’s Cooper’s.

Afire

Beware all ye who enter Christian Petzold’s cunning German drama “Afire” in search of a likable protagonist; Leon (Thomas Schubert) is anything but. He’s a novelist, for God’s sake, one trying to put the finishing touches on his second book, a book called “Ham Sandwich,” for God’s sake, and who has tagged along with his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) on a retreat to the country to do just that. As played by Schubert and costumed by Katharina Ost, Leon is a lumpy, grumpy square, walking, talking indigestion, truly bringing the word dyspeptic to life, his resemblance to James Corden turning that try-hard inside-out into a never-really-try-at-all, or something. Mostly, Leon masquerades like he’s working, and gets huffy with Felix when he asks Leon to go along to the beach because it will drag him away from the work he is pretending to do, and gets even huffier with their unexpected third house guest Nadja (Paula Beer) keeping them up all hours of the night because she’s having, shall we say, a bit too much fun in the next room. Rather than confront her, or engage with her, he spies on her, and he then he spies on Felix, too, and an acquaintance (Enno Trebs) with whom Felix makes fast friends, peeping on life, evoked in Petzold’s keen point-of-view shots and underlined in Schubert’s air and expressions of jealousy and petulance. 

It’s an arty and sometimes electric manifestation of the observation in Neil Simon’s “Biloxi Blues” about existing merely as a witness, standing around watching, refusing to get in the middle of it, and which becomes all the more dire by virtue of a raging forest fire that gradually encircles them; for all intents and purposes, Felix is standing around watching the world burn. Leon, however, almost proves too prickly, making it difficult to believe he and Felix would be friends in the first place, or that Nadja would take such interest in him, flaws that can be written off by the deliberately questionable POV only up to a point. And if the conclusion initially seems to traffic in the perpetual myth that fiction is best culled from real life, ultimately it suggests something closer to a writer writing his way into real life, and which might have resonated with greater depth of feeling had the surrounding characters left a mark. 

The Killer

“The Killer” opens with the nameless assassin (Michael Fassbender) of its title holed up in some Parisian apartment while waiting for the arrival of wealthy so & so he’s been contracted to terminate in the luxurious penthouse directly across from him, all while talking to himself as much as us in a detached voiceover that is part running diary and part motivational mantra. If it’s a familiar set-up, director David Fincher deploys that familiarity to great effect. If most movies have conditioned us to expect this prologue to last maybe five minutes before the assassin’s target shows, this one just keeps going. The nameless Killer goes outside and then back inside; he eats fast food; he does yoga; he sleeps; he keeps talking, always in the same low monotone. We are lulled into a rhythm. Like the monitor the assassin wears on his wrist seeking to keep his heartrate low, our heartrate gets lower and lower, too, so that when the target finally shows, we’re virtually as relaxed and low-key confident as the assassin, which is why when the hit goes haywire, it’s not shocking to our intellect, necessarily, but still mentally and physically unexpected. I laughed out loud! It’s a prolonged punchline! It’s a helluva curtain raiser, leading to a similarly detailed interlude of the assassin’s escape, eventually to a safe house in the Dominican Republic where he finds his girlfriend Magdala (Sophie Charlotte) having been tortured to within an inch of her life, the people for whom he’s failed to complete his contract coming to collect.

Even then, however, when settling into a rhythm of The Killer undertaking a traditional pageant of vengeance, you can sense the mischievous glimmer in Fincher’s eye, the way he narratively makes the movie go one way even as he emotionally, or maybe just sub textually, pulls you in another direction. Like many movies in this minimalist vein, “The Killer” owes a debt to the essential French New Wave text “Le Samouraï” (1967) in which director Jean-Pierre Melville equates the austerity of a hitman’s (Alain Delon) code with that of so many feudal Japan warriors. In the existential cool of Delon and Melville’s deadpan air, that code is rendered as honorable as it is absurd. In “The Killer,” it is just absurd. Rather than Delon’s neutral colors, The Killer dresses like a dweeb in a bucket hat, floral prints, and sandals. Rather than “Le Samouraï’s” virtual wordlessness, The Killer prattles on and on in those voiceovers, coming across like John Doe’s diary entries in “Se7en” melded with a Tony Robbins seminar and basketball coaching clinics (“adapt, don’t improvise”). You can practically hear Fincher snickering just off screen. The script for “Se7en” was written by Andrew Kevin Walker, as is this script (based on a graphic novel by Alexis “Matz” Nolent), which is fascinating, suggesting how one twist of the tonal dial makes all the difference. In “Se7en,” John Doe’s observations are creepily revealing; “The Killer’s” observations are dryly empty.

This is telling. Like Magdala isn’t really a character, nay, a person, just sort of theoretical, The Killer hardly exists either, cribbing his various aliases from pop culture. The one scene designed on the surface to inject a sense of humanity is so overtly philosophical in its intention that it ends up playing more like that scene in “The Matrix” when Joe Pantoliano eats the steak that isn’t real, like this is all merely projection. It causes a weird detachment, not just in the less action-oriented scenes but the action ones too, like infiltrating a Florida man’s semi-fortress, as rote as it is riveting. That, though, seems to be the intention. It is no coincidence that The Killer uses an abandoned WeWork space for the Parisian opening, shops at Amazon, uses a FedEx Delivery driver as a kind of cover when breaking into a building, etc. Indeed, The Killer is less a samurai, a la Alan Delon, than an assassin as a gig worker, as if we are all on our own bosses yet at the mercy of the omnipresent corporate structures that allow it, giving The Killer more than a whiff of “Fight Club’s” Tyler Durden years after the battle. Durden was a cult of personality, but The Killer is without a persona at all, subsumed, IKEA structure manifested as person.

Book Club: The Next Chapter

As the title suggested, the original “Book Club” of 2018 was about, like, you know, a book club in which four adult women reinvent their lives while reading “50 Shades of Grey.” In “The Next Chapter” follow-up, however, aside from an opening prologue, in which our four returning heroines – Vivian (Jane Fonda), Diane (Diane Keaton), Sharon (Candice Bergen), and Carol (Mary Steenburgen) – read some books over Zoom during the Pandemic and a few subsequent occasional nods to Paulo Coelho’s 1988 novel “The Alchemist,” director Bill Holderman’s sequel essentially eschews a book club for a road trip through Italy as Vivian, who never wanted to get married, is on the verge of marrying Arthur (Don Johnson). Let’s call this “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” cinema, less a movie than a movie as a breezy vacation, for us and for its stars, who do generally come across amused, especially in the moments when you can detect Bergen, not Sharon, trying to make her co-stars crack. Why it even has a song and semi-dance number, introducing one handsome interloper (Hugh Quarshie) so he can sing in “Gloria” in Italian, paving the way for Queen Steen to indulge her real-life accordion passion. [Insert scene where Mary Steenburgen plays accordion here.]

This easygoing air is reflected in a screenplay, co-written by Erin Simms and Holderman, where dramatic conflict hardly exists and the 101 basics like narrative connective tissue are sometimes renounced altogether. When the four friends trek by train from Rome to Venice, their luggage is stolen, though this mostly just manifests as a call for carpe diem. What’s more, when they are shown wearing new clothes, no explanation is given of where these clothes came from, not even providing a frivolous shopping montage. No, their stylish duds just magically appear, underlining how things happen, like a light-hearted night in the Tuscany clink where the cell comes complete with four cots, as if they were waiting specifically for our quartet.

They wind up in jail because Diane has illegally brought along her late husband’s ashes to scatter. This, along with Carol’s semi-dalliance with a chef (Vincent Riotta) from her previous life while husband Bruce (Craig T. Nelson) recovers from a heart attack back home, are intended as the script’s emotional complications but barely register, passing like a sun shower, while the ostensible screwball machinations of the climactic double wedding and a Police Chief (Giancarlo Giannini) who always appears at just the wrong moment never come to a froth; they barely come to a fizz. That ultimately marks “Book Club: The Next Chapter” as a movie that could only be enjoyed the way I watched it, on an airplane, on the way to Europe, and on the way to Europe for the first time since being stuck in Europe for 21 days. On occasion, every once in a damn while, despite the truism about life being difficult, for God’s sake, you just want things to be easy. 

Master Gardener

Marking the conclusion to Paul Schrader’s informal trilogy of lonely, haunted men, “Master Gardener” is at once, the strangest, least successful, and yet, on some level, purest Schrader of the bunch. Because this is not just the conclusion to an informal trilogy. Nearing 80, this feels like a true late period film of the meticulous screenwriter and transcendentalist director, a harnessing of all his usual devices and themes, a man journaling at a table, a figurative poking in the eyes of polite society, and an interrogation of his own Calvinist upbringing, but also a movie that feels weirdly, wonderfully, not altogether successfully more unadorned than the previous two. “Master Gardener” does not gather force like “First Reformed” (2017), nor does it elevate to the mystic a la the unexpectedly Buddhist “The Card Counter” (2021), but pulses with something electrically strange nonetheless, this ineffable, inaudible hum suggesting everything on the surface is just for show. That means aside from isolated moments, and a mesmerizing performance by Sigourney Weaver in which she plays malicious with a high handedness that is, honestly, hilarious, nothing in “Master Gardener” feels believable, per se. But Schrader, like it or not, and you might not, has moved past all that, living out the movie’s own pruning metaphor by reducing everything to pure gesture and symbol, almost as if at his age, he has decided there isn’t time for anything else.

Air

In “Air,” when Nike sits down to pitch Michael Jordan and his family about being their preeminent brand ambassador, they fire up a highlight video. This video, it is Marketing 101, slick, entertaining, and empty. Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), the shoe company’s foremost scout for basketball talent, the one who has convinced a reluctant Jordan to take this meeting in the first place, immediately senses Jordan’s family, especially his mother Deloris (Viola Davis), tuning out this video and stops it, much to the chagrin of CEO Phil Knight (Affleck). It’s ironic, given how Affleck doubles as director and yet never senses that his own movie ultimately comes across as slick, entertaining, and empty as that highlight video itself. You see it straight away in an efficient opening credit pop culture nostalgia trip, not even so much setting the scene, though it does, as function like an advertisement for 1984, even as it dazzlingly gives away the game, as if we are seeing the world through “They Live” sunglasses outfit with the wrong prescription. 

Oh, “Air” is a sheer pleasure to watch, don’t get me wrong here, just as the commercialist and jingoist 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics were a sheer pleasure to watch. The Olympics comparison is apt. Despite the geopolitics and Hollywood machinations, Affleck’s Oscar-winning “Argo” was structured very much like a sports movie, designed to elicit similar weepy uplift, and so it makes sense that Affleck would be so in his wheelhouse on “Air.” This is an underdog story with a sports shoe rather than a sports team, evoked in one two-faced image where a glowing neon Nike sign is framed to look an awful lot like the picture of the Hickory Huskers above the gymnasium door at the end of “Hoosiers.” Indeed, Nike might be named for the Greek goddess of victory but in 1984, it lagged far behind its competitors, an anomaly in Oregon fronted by a nouveau hippie like Knight, sans a cutthroat competitive edge which is what Sonny gives it, introduced as both a gambler and a student of game tape, who sees the young Jordan for the cutthroat competitor he is and is determined to risk it all on him, just as Jordan’s mother Deloris (Viola Davis) is determined to shift the business paradigm. 

This three-pronged narrative structure goes a long way toward giving “Air” so much juice, ensuring there is always a new angle to play and meaning the movie never lags, moving forward at a pace that is not quite frenetic but just fast enough, underlined in how major characters are often introduced with intertitles, keeping us firmly committed to the narrative treadmill. And though “Air” is sculpted almost exclusively out of conversations, writer Alex Convery renders inside baseball with wit and comedy, often solid throwaway jokes, like a James Worthy-level one about Kurt Rambis. During the more business-y dialogue, meanwhile, Affleck keeps his camera roaming and quivering and editor William Goldenberg crisply cuts them, refusing to let us get bored, while for more emotional and personal moments, the camera and the cutting calms down, letting us truly absorb it. Scene after scene, and transition after transition, meanwhile, are marked by pop hits of the era, so much so that the movie has the feel of a jukebox musical, one more tune to keep you engaged (“I know that song!”), even if the curation, like Run-D.M.C.’s “My Adidas” when the action briefly segues to Adidas headquarters sometimes skews bleatingly obvious.

In the manner of “Air” itself, Damon’s turn both does and does not work. He evinces a love for the game that helps evince a love for his work, resulting in a likable presence that helps carry us through, even though, well, there’s just enough dirt under those figurative fingernails. He has several phone scenes with Jordan’s agent David Falk (Chris Messina), so single-focused and unlikable that the character himself says he’s destined to end up alone. Sonny, however, is portrayed the exact same way, an irony neither Damon nor the movie itself ever grasps, an incredible oversight that inadvertently exposes an overall lack of dimension preventing “Air” from finding another gear. Affleck fares better as Knight, playing an eccentric, perhaps, but also a sort of unlikely and, in turn, stressed out CEO who never feels exactly like a business genius, more like an eccentric in over his head, who in some ways knows it, and in other ways doesn’t. And while Dolores Jordan has far less characterization, Davis’s turn fills out the role anyway, simultaneously caring and commanding, effusing parental protection and control, split right down the middle. 

All these conference table dramatics suggest “Moneyball,” and while there are distinct similarities, despite the fudging of some real-life details and hints of hagiography in its presentation of mastermind Billy Beane, there was also shading to Beane, in the way the character was written and not just in how Brad Pitt played him, anguish and regret. Even more, there was tension in the plot, between science and romance, between business and romance. Such tension is weirdly absent in “Air,” rendering the whole movie [frantically searching Thesaurus for synonym of airless] insubstantial. Part of this stems from Affleck’s own hagiographic insistence on essentially making Jordan invisible onscreen (occasionally seen more than played by Damian Young), preferring to let his admittedly massive place in the culture do the work for him. The impulse is understandable, but in doing so, it makes what we already know paramount, turning Sonny and Deloris into prophets, negating so much drama and depth. Even then, however, Affleck might have made it work with a more expressionistic sensibility. Alas, that isn’t Affleck’s forte, and just as the shoe itself is mostly kept offscreen, there is no sense of how the shoe became an expression of Jordan, or how Jordan expressed himself through the shoe. Even there, Affleck turns to the historical record, literally tagging his movie with the Be Like Gatorade ad, finally dropping the facade and literally just becoming a commercial.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The title “Everything Everywhere All at Once” sounds like the crucial ingredient to a New Year’s Resolution. “This year, I resolve not to try and be everything and everywhere all at once.” And that sounds like Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), heroine of directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s epic, a Chinese American immigrant mother and wife and daughter and laundry owner virtually buried in the cacophony of her life as a long shot in which she pores over tax receipts in the face of a looming IRS audit with laundry bags towering on a shelf behind and above her suggests. 

Kwan and Sheinert – collectively known as The Daniels – further effuse this sensation in the ensuing bravura sequence of brisk choreography as the action moves from Evelyn’s upstairs apartment, where she is cooking noodles for Lunar New Year, to the laundromat below where she negotiates busted washers with the same curt weariness as family problems: grumpy, wheelchair-bound father Gong Gong (James Hong), neglected husband Waymund (Ke Huy Quan), and daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), with an American girlfriend. When the camera suddenly tilts up to a water-stained ceiling and then right back down, it suggests the myriad leaks of a life that can’t possibly all be fixed. This sequence barrels ahead so relentlessly that it can feel as exhausting as entertaining, deliberately so, putting you on equal footing with Evelyn so that when she looks up at the Bollywood musical playing on the laundry’s TV, you feel the relief in this stolen moment. She doesn’t know it yet, but in this image, Evelyn is preparing for her close-up.

Indeed, all this alone would be enough for an entire film but The Daniels take their movie to the allegorical extreme by yoking Evelyn’s cumulative stress to something like her superhero origin story, ultimately revealed as humanity’s last best hope in the so-called multiverse, broadly explained as an infinite series of other universes existing simultaneously with the current one where Evelyn is a different person with different careers, sometimes not even a person at all, and called to draw upon the vast array of skills from these other universes to save the world. Waymund emerges as unexpected co-agent in this quest, as if Trinity and Neo had been reimagined in a martial arts screwball comedy, his fanny pack originally existing as emblem of his dorky desperation rechristened as unlikely weapon, while the emergent supervillain in this multitudinous conglomeration of universes takes the form of Joy, one of the film’s neatest tricks, as if the Yeoh and Constance Wu characters of “Crazy Rich Asians” existed as the Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi characters of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” in an alternate dimension.

This is a sensational set-up, not least because even as the world building expands to nigh ludicrous heights, it essentially keeps the story all in the family, intimate, in other words, despite the excess. For a good chunk of the movie, this works like gangbusters, but eventually “Everything Everywhere All at Once” tosses so many balls in the air that it doesn’t so much come undone as start running in place, crystallized in a mid-movie ersatz end credits sequence. You can cheekily call attention to your own plethora of false endings, but that does not necessarily mean the hamster wheel sensation of those false endings is alleviated. 

Rather than simply give in to its own dream logic, trusting us to feel our way through, The Daniels repeatedly stop for bouts of exposition. Now, exposition in and of itself doesn’t have to be a bad thing (Paul Giamatti, for one, rendered it gleefully entertaining in “San Andreas”), but if ferocious forward momentum is crucial to the movie’s success, it is unintentionally blunted by each bout of explication. The teeming multiverse, meanwhile, grows increasingly elaborate even as it grows increasingly vague, “Sliding Doors” at supersonic speed in so much as the joyous possibilities of these alternate lives and the wistfulness of them passing by are elided, an inadvertent manifestation of the film’s emergent everything bagel metaphor that nothing matters in the face of the infinite. 

The everything bagel might have been a funny send-up of pseudo-philosophical ponderousness, except that The Daniels take it seriously, and in the process, commit to so many overarching philosophical ideas, that none really stick, which is how we end up with Waymund imploring “to be kind,” a dorm room marker board sentiment that could hardly hold a multiverse together. No, if anything holds “Everything Everywhere All at Once” together, it’s Yeoh, playing a part that draws from her various and disparate roles over the decades to evince a mother trying to relinquish the desire to be everything everywhere all at once. If only the movie itself had done the same.

Posting a Blog in Lieu of Posting a Blog

Cinema Romantico is aware of The Hollywood Reporter’s exclusive story that Lady Gaga is in talks to appear as Harley Quinn in Todd Phillips’s “Joker” sequel. The blog is still in the process of gathering additional information and has no comment at this time.

The Little Things

“The Little Things” goes back to 1993 when Steven Spielberg was offered the script and passed. In finally bringing it to the big screen, John Lee Hancock might have wanted to maintain the 1990 setting (the opening B-52s cut is less about dissonance than sonic time stamping) simply to make a smartphoneless thriller, though what he achieves, in part, is also a throwback to a time when three Oscar winners might have taken these roles just to see what they could register on the Chewing Scenery Scale. Denzel Washington is a 7, if only because he acts a little too; Rami Malek is a 5; Jared Leto is a 9. In this way, I enjoyed “The Little Things”, though John Lee Hancock aims for something even more than a throwback in opting for a purposeful lack of resolution. I might have enjoyed that too if he had the moment of truth feels less like a culmination rather than willful misdirection in the name of empty shock. 

Washington is Joe “Deke” Deacon, Sheriff’s Deputy of Kern County. In these early scenes, between the costuming and framing and his deferential air in the presence of his superior, Washington virtually shrinks, feeling very much like a guy in Bakersfield just trying to get by. Deke, though, is sent to pick up evidence in Los Angeles and, upon arriving, inadvertently peeves Joe Baxter (Rami Malek), an L.A. County’s new head detective. Gradually Deke’s backstory trickles out, that he used to be an L.A. Sheriff’s detective too but left, plagued by an unsolved serial killer case. And so when he tags along with Baxter on a crime scene visit and recognizes similarities to his outstanding case, Deke forgoes returning to Bakersfield to assist Baxter and right the wrong from his past. Not long after he emerges from a thrift shop wearing a suit that might be second-hand but nevertheless finally strikes the air we’ve been waiting for; he walks into that thrift shop as Deke and walks out as Denzel. In the scene where he seizes on Suspect #1, clues might have led him there but the way Denzel plays it, suddenly cocking his head and looking back, a gleam in his eye and a big grin on his face, it’s more like he just picked up a scent.

Playing coy with Deke’s past allows Hancock to include two detective stories for the price of one, with Deke and Baxter tracking the serial killer but Baxter also trying to uncover why Deke is so obsessed with this case in the first place. Malek is best in these moments, his small, suspicious smile and stuck out jaw turning standard reverse shots into smug poetry, like he knows Deke is hiding something. Eventually, however, it becomes clear this facial expression is all Malek has, and at the movie’s pivotal point, when he is called upon to summon a countenance that will make us travel back through the whole movie in the space of a second to let the weight of everything drop, he fails and the moment falls flat. 

The closer Deke and Baxter get to unmasking the killer, the closer these two unlikely allies become as Baxter senses Deke is not so much hiding something as battling inner demons. Hancock literalizes these moments when Deke lays in bed and stares at past crime scene photos and converses with the dead. Despite such grandeur, Washington sells Deke’s turmoil better in small moments, like a scene with his character’s ex-wife where, upon her standard issue question of whether he has been good, Washington has him say “Yup” three or four times fast it feels like he is trying to keep something at bay.

Leto, on the other hand, playing Sparma, the primary serial killer suspect, goes all in on actorly transformation. Though his character works at an appliance repair shop, he looks more like a 24-hour fry cook, covered in grease, with zombie eyes and a limp. It’s like if Jake Gyllenhaal in “Nightcrawler” came from a 90s music video, or something. Sparma, we learn, might just be a put-on, someone obsessed with the evil deeds of serial killers but not one himself, and Leto leans so hard into this idea that the performance itself threatens to become a put-on, which unintentionally crosses the streams and become too much like an actor researching a role rather than some kook amusing himself. 

Though you can detect a difference between Bakersfield and Los Angeles, it is not a yawning gap, Hancock emitting an impressive sense of place by evoking this L.A. as one on the outskirts, far from the center of action, evoking an older Los Angeles, to quote Roger Ebert discussing “Chinatown”, “a small city in a large desert.” Indeed, the movie closes outside the city, off the freeway, in the middle of nowhere, in the desert. It’s a conclusion that evokes “Chinatown”, too, or tries to, with the hands of fate gradually ensnaring its characters. The problem is, though, unlike “Chinatown”, which allowed that sense of fate to gradually settle, Hancock springs it on us all at once, courtesy of those dovetailing storylines of suspense. That makes the end more like “Seven”, except in forgoing an answer, Hancock leaves us hanging, trying to find an answer by putting the pieces of the puzzle together in our heads rather than realizing the answer has already emotionally ensconced us. 

Soul

The title of the latest Pixar adventure, “Soul”, refers not to music, though jazz does play a semi-prominent role, but to the essential core of a person. Co-directors Pete Docter and Kemp Powers literalize and lampoon the notion of a human being’s soul, not unlike the way Docter’s “Inside Out” had fun with the human mind, while taking us to fantastical places, a la Pixar’s Coco conjuring up the Land of the Dead. “Soul”, however, in toggling between breezy comedy for the kids and more existential questions for the adults works against an emergent theme of life’s meaning being distilled down to an appreciation of the little things by succumbing to its myriad aesthetic complications, a strange, occasionally great, beautifully animated, frequently muddled stew.

As “Soul” opens, Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a music teacher, is molding young musical minds. It’s a curious opening, if not a harbinger, where the kids come across inspired by Joe even as “Soul” simultaneously portrays him as teaching with one head out the door, more consumed with a desire to play jazz for a living, a message as distracted as Joe himself seems to be. At least, though, that distraction informs his downfall. After nailing an audition to play piano for a local jazz singer (Angela Bassett), Joe fails to see an open manhole in his excitement walking home and falls through. If this scene begins as comic setpiece of near misses, the transition is jarring in its suddenness, forcing us to recognize Joe’s instant death at the same rate as the character, while also proffering a subtextual lesson that wanting something too much or just wanting too much in general renders one blind to life’s peril.

Then again, death does not exactly enlighten Joe. Rendered a bodiless blob, Joe finds himself aboard a conveyor belt, imagining the ostensible sweet hereafter as a bleary subterranean airport walkway tracking toward The Great Beyond, a massive bright white light with a strange buzzing sound, like a refrigerator on the fritz. If other blobs simply stand there, at once transfixed and terrified, Joe turns and runs, still clinging to the belief his life had turned around, spilling off the walkway and into The Great Before, an enchanting place of blue fields and violet hills, where souls are molded for their Earthly descent to occupy a human. Mistaken for a mentor, Joe is assigned to 22 (Tina Fey), an insubordinate soul that has refused entering a human body for centuries, discouraged by the unpredictability of human life. Rather than guiding 22, however, she becomes something more like his co-conspirator, helping finagle a way to get Joe back into his body on Earth.

It is an inherently fascinating juxtaposition, a child, essentially, who does not want life to begin and an adult, more or less, who does not want life to stop. That 22 also takes Joe to The Zone, the mystical place where artists and athletes are said to lose themselves, but portrays it as a place where people are just as apt to lose themselves completely, “Soul” not only paints its two main characters as lost souls but brings to vivid life the scary side of obsession. Indeed, it redefines an earlier scene of Joe losing himself in music not as less moving than corrosive. From here “Soul” metamorphoses once again into a body switch comedy when the unlikely duo’s descent to Earth results in a mix-up: rather than re-entering his own body, Joe enters the body of a cat, while 22 enters the body of Joe. Though Joe finally transforms into something like 22’s shepherd through his feline form, the underlying connotations weigh this genre shift down. 

Though the nature of the movie’s soul suggests something apart from color, that’s the kind of cozy myth “Soul” cannot help but counteract in casting a white woman to give voice to 22, meaning it is a white voice coming out of a black body, a fundamental problem Docter clearly recognized by enlisting the black Powers as co-director. Granted, the involvement of Powers yields some of the movie’s strongest material, like a pair of scenes in a barbershop that feel delightfully as much like their own world as anything in The Great Before. As it is, however, an otherwise refreshing animated examination of black lives is compromised by this half blind point-of-view. 

At the same time, for all the The Great Before’s unique visual splendor, evincing its counselors as two-dimensional, almost like cubist paintings plucked from the canvas, as if whatever is Up There is beyond our imagination, the place itself is nevertheless strangely, even frighteningly, reminiscent of our world. Indeed, counselors dole out traits to souls like they are engines or hoods on an automobile assembly line, soul creationism, in a sense, mixed with the quota-based tempo of an American manufacturing line. Must even the afterworld assume the air of Amazon.com, Inc.?

It is in direct conflict, in fact, with how 22 autonomously grasps her essence. In this way, the body switch scenes, while tone deaf, are also the movie’s best, a variation on the idea of New York as a place to flee for reinvention. The animation of NYC might not be as imaginative as its invented worlds, inherently constrained by the real-life place, yet nevertheless achieves a transcendent beauty all its own. The dollops of autumn light, the way the light falls across the street, at once feels like both an identifiable New York and one that exists only in an idealized memory while everyday objects like a slice of New York-style pizza and a helicopter seed lyrically evince life’s (Earth’s) overwhelming beauty. “Soul” may be overstuffed and inconsistent, but when that seed falls from the sky, for a moment, being alive seems so simple. 

The Whistlers

There is a moment in “The Whistlers” when a dirty Romanian cop, Cristi (Vlad Ivanov), and some gangsters have occupied a warehouse on La Gomera in the Canary Islands. There is an unexpected knock at the door. They answer, finding an American film director, explaining he is scouting locations, wondering if he can examine the warehouse interior. If this might suggest the moment when “The Whistlers” transforms into a movie within a movie, the truth is, it is already a movie, in a manner of speaking, portraying the Romanian surveillance system not simply as the state monitoring its citizens but as a kind of omnipresent movie camera itself, evoking life as reality TV where you are always ‘on’. Look at how director Corneliu Porumboiu frames the gangsters when the American director appears, in a wide shot and spread out, the blank backdrop rendering them as actors in some sort of storefront theater. Not for nothing is one of the few places the characters can communicate without a watchful eye the movie theater, a perversion of the old Godard line about cinema being truth twenty-four times per second.

The title refers to a whistled register of Spanish called El Silbo, used by some inhabitants of La Gomera to communicate across great distances. In this case, the gangsters will teach Cristi to whistle El Silbo to evade the never-ending surveillance to aid their efforts to spring a pal, Zsolt, from the clink. This is such a neat idea that it’s disappointing Porumboiu does not explore it further, less interested in the mechanics of El Silbo and Cristi learning them then as a kind of metaphor for the movie’s inspection of linguistics. (It might be a Romanian movie centered on a Spanish language but much of the dialogue is English.) A hotel called the Opera factors into the plot, yes, eventually, though the hotel clerk, not to mention Porumboiu, mostly get a rise out of forcing arias upon visitors and the audience; vibrato is a language too. A sex scene, meanwhile, between Cristi and Gilda (Catrinel Menghia), his gangland go-between, becomes its own weird means of risqué communique, like “Citizenfour” crossed with “Last Tango in Paris”, happening only to throw off the police state watching outside his apartment and in. When Cristi gets a little too rambunctious, Gilda pushes him back down, an ersatz impassioned now now.

Whether we are meant to laugh at this scene is hard to know, epitomizing “The Whistlers’” drollness. When Poromboiu cuts to the surveillance agent watching Cristi and Gilda get physical, there is pointedly no reaction, comical, titillated or otherwise. It’s only when the movie cuts to the next scene, Cristi in the Canary Islands, that we realize her act of nominal passion was paramount in getting him there. That is when I chortled, the moment evoking the old Bob Newhart idea about a joke you laugh at in the car on the way home, an apt description of “The Whistlers” itself, a movie to be worked out in the car ride on the way home. In fact, the movie does not build to anything, despite teasing out a possible romance between our two bed play actors, so much as stretch everything out, suddenly stopping in the middle of itself over and over again to throw up an intertitle with a character’s name and then either flash back or flash forward, expanding the puzzle in the midst of putting it together rather than adding pieces to it and getting closer to completion.

If the Romanian New Wave, of which Porumboiu is part, has generally eschewed music to heighten the verité, Porumboiu has occasionally employed music, albeit in very specific, interesting ways. His “Police Adjective”, to which “The Whistlers” is very much a companion piece, involved a conversation about song lyrics that essentially defined the movie’s relationship to the nature of bureaucratic language. “The Whistlers”, on the other hand, opens with an extended passage in a car roaring along scenic Canary Island roads as Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” blares. It feels more like Tarantino, frankly, a moment with no need to justify itself beyond its manifest coolness. Indeed, the la la las of the song have always sounded to me like that kind of indispensable pop music poetry, inherently without meaning, more about eliciting a striking sensation, which may as well define “The Whistlers” itself.

The College Admissions Scandal

No one comes to Lifetime Movies for the production. That’s why the austere lighting of a Starbucks as a sort of stressed out parental clubhouse is no different than the austere lighting of the home of Caroline (Penelope Ann Miller) and Jackson (Robert Moloney) DeVere, which is odd given Caroline’s job as an interior decorator but then we’re not here to play plausibility police. No, Lifetime Movies live and die on their point-of-view, whether aiming for pleasurable trash or a kind of early evening afterschool special. Director Adam Salky, in borrowing myriad real-life details for “The College Admissions Scandal”, seems to be aiming for the latter, even if occasionally his co-lead, Mia Kirshner, seems to be going for the former. Indeed, Salky eschews the prominent celebrity aspects of the factual story to make the parents in question more run-of-the-mill rich, which not only downplays the inherent juiciness of this tabloid fodder but then tries reframing it more as helicopter parenting love gone wrong – at least in the case of the DeVeres. If “The College Admissions Scandal” only superficially nods at its two most famous busted, Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, Kirshner at least seems to take Loughlin’s supercilious not guilty plea as motivation; her Bethany Slade is better than you. The way she walks through that Starbucks evokes someone who has been studying Mariah’s “Shake It Off” video.

If the names Huffman and Loughlin are conspicuously absent, “The College Admissions Scandal” officially name checks the scandal’s mastermind, Rick Singer, played by Michael Shanks in a revolving wardrobe of vests and polo shirts, sort of country club scoundrel chic. He’s such a scoundrel that even when the DeVere’s son, Danny (Sam Duke), doesn’t want to participate, Singer has a duplicitous workaround, which Caroline and Danny agree to. Bethany’s daughter Emma (Sarah Dugdale) is more willing to go along with the ruse, though the film remains careful to portray her as less of a spoiled brat and more of someone in need of daughterly de-programming. Given Lifetime budget limitations, the details of this plot are recounted not in some Diet Scorsese montage but out loud, often by phone, where the two smirking FBI agents listen in, scenes so ham-fisted they can’t help but be hilarious. This is an obscure reference, assuredly, but for God’s sake, reader, we’re in the middle of a Lifetime Movie review, and so I realize now, over 20 years later, that in “Wild Things”, when responding to her daughter’s accusations against her teacher of assault, Theresa Russell incredulously asking “Sam Lombardo?” [“lom-BAR-do”] was unintentionally parodying, or maybe just embodying, every phony, “look-the-script-says-I-gotta-spell-this-out” incantation.

The movie opens with Caroline in the company of a small Greek Chorus of other parents fretting over the college aspirations and applications of their respective children. This is literally all they discuss. In fact, we don’t learn that Caroline is an interior decorator until much later, though even then her profession is mostly a throwaway, a means to add some peripheral business to a couple scenes, nothing more. No, Danny’s future is her profession, as it is for Jackson. He’s a lawyer though the only time we see him at work doesn’t involve arguing a case or thumbing through a legal book but celebrating his boss’s son getting into Princeton. Status! Moloney, in fact, hardly looks like a lawyer, giving a performance leaning heavily on his facial stubble and wide eyes born of sleepless nights. He is not playing at the same cacophonous volume as Al Pacino in “Heat”, but Moloney made me think about how Pacino’s bug-eyed insanity was a product of his character doing coke. Except that in the final cut of “Heat” all the scenes of him doing coke were cut, just leaving behind the bug-eyed insanity. I’m telling you, Jackson DeVere is doing coke when the camera isn’t looking. And while that’s not so suggest his son is doing coke, Duke’s performance is eerily like father like son, sweaty and emotionally messy, befitting the wannabe emo singer-songwriter.

If these two are tortured, Bethany is the furthest thing from, as Kirshner sort of channels the haughty energy of Frances Fisher in “Titanic” being evacuated to the lifeboats while simultaneously telling her maid she wants a cup of tea. The movie’s best scene, which is to say the one that best hits the desired Lifetime aesthetic of exaggerated thematic comicality, finds Bethany steamrolling her lawyer’s (Ash Lee) advice so brazenly he looks less like a high-powered attorney than, to quote ID4, “the orphaned child Oliver asking ‘please sir, I’d like some more.’” Lawyers know the law, but the law has no jurisdiction over the lifestyles of the rich & famous.

High Life

Set in a spaceship beyond the solar system bound for a black hole, Claire Denis’s “High Life” begins with images of cooing baby girl. She is not on the ship alone, don’t worry, but in the company of a solo male caretaker, Monte (Robert Pattinson), outside the ship making repairs, who we eventually see communicating with his little girl by way of some sci-fi sort of baby monitor, the editing of alternating close-ups helping forge an intimacy despite their being apart. That intimacy, however, is compromised when Monte drops a tool, watching it drop into the void, and then stares out into that nothingness, the black of space stretching out into eternity. It’s an apt child-rearing metaphor, I imagine, where even the joy your young one brings does not prevent sometimes seeing deep into the abyss of exhaustion. It’s just as apt a metaphor for life itself, not a new observation but one Denis nonetheless engenders by emphasizing the abyss so brutally and insistently you might swear, a smirk similar to the one sported by the leading lady, who we will get to. Indeed, once Monte is back on the ship, we see him caring for this baby girl, Willow, in a series of blissful images before we then see him disposing of the lifeless bodies of his apparent crew mates by tossing them out the hatch where they just...float away, making them look like so many tears in the stars.

At that point “High Life” becomes flashback-heavy, cutting not just between past and present but even occasionally between earth and space, a way of learning how we got here, suggesting a puzzle, though it’s a puzzle that connects emotionally more than mechanically. This is not narrative cinema but a mood piece, and the mood is vulgar, underlined in the colors, frequently toggling between an icy blue and neon, each one depicting space as just another place for sleaze and scuzz. If “Alien” could sometimes feel like truckers in space, “High Life” feels like one of those 24 hour adult emporiums just off interstate exits for truckers, brought home in the astutely monikered Fuck Box, where many of the ship’s denizens frequently lock themselves, answering the question of how space pioneers on years-long missions might indulge age-old human desire.

Even if their mission, as we gather it, involves trying to harness energy from the black hole, that is barely addressed and hardly followed through, all these explicit images evoking creation and reproduction settling on something more akin to “2001’s” Star Child as Frankenstein’s Monster. The modern Prometheus, in this case, is Dibs (Binoche), her Rapunzel-ish braid suggesting an even more tangled version of that fairytale, who is not the mission’s commander but exerts control over the commander by sleeping with him, before he eventually bites the dust, his crude final plea and her cold, cold denial of it putting into harsh perspective Denis’s view of the human mind as a repository for pure filth.

In the meantime, Dibs uses the crew as mere specimens for gathering semen, trying to engineer a child. And though her character’s backstory evinces some reason why, her motivation is better conveyed merely in Binoche’s mad doctor air, a haughty smile judging everyone around her, moving seductively, like the star of some 1970s Times Square peep show. For a few minutes, “High Life” even becomes one, allowing us into the Box where Dibs pleasures herself, though Denis mostly keeps the camera in back, setting her white body against the deliberate black of the box, brilliantly comparing this image to the earlier one of dead bodies floating through space, rendering the most innate human desire, no matter how much Binoche leans into it, as no different than the void.

That sensation is evocative of the pessimism coursing through “High Life”, which also manifests itself in bouts of excessive violence, frequently sexual in nature, characters reduced to their animalistic urges, further emblemized in an encounter with another spaceship with one of the movie’s many overwrought metaphors, this one so labored I laughed out loud. The only counterweight to such extremes is Tchemy (Andre Benjamin) tending to the ship’s garden, where the color of green becomes as visually replenishing to us as the greenery’s actual oxygen to the crew, or how Monte takes a vow of celibacy, equating him with a monk, and which Pattison brings out in a performance that is as restrained as Binoche’s is florid.

Granted, even here Denis can’t help but mash our buttons, a jump cut speeding ahead to Willow’s teenage years making it seem, if only for a fleeting moment, that their relationship might now skew illicit. Even so, it is in this relationship and the emergent grim circumstances that brought it into being where Denis’s repetitive emblems of creation still shine through, “High Life” ultimately, almost unbelievably resembling the sensation of vines growing through revolting, stained cement.

Under the Silver Lake

Even if skunks are indigenous to Silver Lake, the infamous hipster urban empire giving David Cameron Mitchell’s neo-noir its title, their smell comes more to epitomize Sam (Andrew Garfield), a self-appointed private eye, of sorts, who in “Under the Silver Lake” gets sprayed by a skunk, a lingering sensation not un-obviously defining his foul nature. If such repugnancy is liable to put off some viewers, that is entirely part of the point, Garfield’s hands-in-his-pockets moping betraying raging narcissism and just plain rage. If his name is meant to evoke Sam Spade, he is more akin to that untraditional heir of Sam Spade’s, The Dude of “The Big Lebowski”, though The Dude was more a product of the counter-culture while Sam is bred on pop culture, emblemized in the Playboy issue he stole from his father as a kid and still keeps on his night stand, a totem of arrested adolescence and his penchant for viewing women strictly as objects. Indeed, there are no real female characters to speak of in “Under the Silver Lake”, even if there are plenty of female actors, blatantly evinced in their character names, monikers like Balloon Girl and Yellow Miniskirt. To paraphrase The Dude talking about impresario Jackie Treehorn: Sam treats objects like women, man.

The only female character who earns a normal name is Sarah (Riley Keough), and who Sam only meets because he happens to be spying her, her and Topless Bird Women, that is, as these two shout at one another across apartment complex’s common area, a moment Garfield plays with an OMG open mouth that looks very much like a little kid having just stumbled on his dad’s adult magazine collection. She spots him, however, and they hang out later that evening, and though they make plans to hang out again, she up and moves out of the apartment complex that very night. If it seems innocent enough, Sam is programmed to see conspiracies everywhere, seen cataloguing Vanna White’s eye movements on Wheel of Fortune, convinced she’s imparting some secret code. When Sam questions his apartment manager (Rex Linn) about Sarah’s move, the manager doesn’t tell him to mind his own business but explains it’s perfectly normal, a moment Linn plays with a hysterical weariness, truly evoking a Boomer fed up with these supercilious Gen Z snots thinking Everything Is Not What It Seems. Not that Sam will be stopped. After all, he keeps sluffing off the rent his manager wants, not because he doesn’t have money, even if his car is repossessed, because he still throws it around regularly, but from some sense of entitlement. And though he hardly knows Sarah, which is comically pointed out to him much later in the movie, he feels entitled to her salvation too.

R.E.M.’s “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”, heard midway through, becomes the anthem for Sam’s quest: “I’d studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines,” sings Michael Stipe. The clues to finding Sarah, Sam is convinced, are strewn about pop culture, which is everywhere, if only you know where to look and what you’re hearing, unseen code contained within song lyrics, maps on the backs of cereal boxes showing you the way, his investigation spurred along by a prominent Silver Lake conspiracy theorist holed up in a mansion as bunker truth-telling zines like Jerry Fletcher so many summers ago. The zines feel like a throwback to another pop culture era, as are many of the myriad references here, which is why R.E.M. pops up in the first place, heard at some underground club’s aptly named “Old Music Night.” Then again, if pop culture is the answer, Mitchell takes great care to also peel it back as a lie, brought home clearly in a wigged out sequence where Sam confronts a wrinkled songwriter. If this moment, while set up, feels wholly invented by the director to make an explicit point, its absurdity is still true to the film’s overriding spirit, the songwriter cackling with evil glee as he pounds out notes to various generational anthems he claims to have written, none for anything more than money, deliberately portraying these cultural capstones as mere melodies in the name of capitalist avarice.

The payoff of Sam’s winding investigatory road might feel perfunctory in and of itself, yet the very idea that Sam’s conspiracy theories prove at least partially true still soften so many of the punches to pop culture’s gut. Even the myriad references seeming to elicit mere dead ends come across like buried references for repeat viewings, a chance for the self-impressed paranoids “Under the Silver Lake” purports to take to task to contrive Fan Theories, eternal “No, you don’t understand…” explanations upon explanations. It’s a contradiction that “Under the Silver Lake” can’t quite overcome, though it’s a contradiction “Under the Silver Lake” also embraces, brought home in the closing shot, a virtual sneer on Garfield’s face crystallizing the character’s sense of entitlement and superiority. In the end, the movie sprays skunk on us.