Backrooms

I did not see “Backrooms” in the theater, more’s the pity, and when I watched it on my streaming platform of choice, I noticed the run time was an hour and fifty-one minutes. So, I was surprised when a little over ninety minutes in, the end credits rolled. Were the end credits 20 minutes long? They weren’t. There was bonus footage, it turned out, tacked on to the end. None of this altered what I had just seen in any real way, and as writer/director Kane Parsons has explained, it wasn’t meant to, merely intended as an additional layer. “Backrooms,” after all, was not the brainchild of Parsons. It began with a picture of an empty, mucus yellow office space posted in 2019 to a so-called imageboard web site where all manner of anonymous users gradually fleshed it out with a creepy backstory; you entered this space by passing directly through a wall, noclipping a la a video game terminology, and found yourself trapped in “approximately six hundred square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms.” Parsons found the photo and turned it into a short film and then turned the short film into a 25-part web series and now has turned the web series into a movie, layers built upon already existing layers. It’s evocative of how fan theories and online folklore have become as prominent a storytelling method in our time as the traditional analog ones. It’s also what makes “Backrooms” the movie such a bizarre cinematic experience. 

The backrooms of Parsons’s psychological horror movie are located beneath a furniture store in 1990 San Jose, California, the setting and oft-VHS quality aesthetic deliberately evoking an obsession with the past mirrored by the place’s owner, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an antagonistic narcissist harboring a drinking problem and unrealized dreams of being an architect while smarting from a recent divorce. This gets laid out in an early scene of Clark’s therapy session with Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) who encourages role-play, a convenient delivery device for extensive exposition. It also hints at the video game-like levels awaiting Clark in the sprawling backrooms once he discovers them, accidentally noclips into them, and then becomes obsessed with them, returning to them again and again, even dragging in a couple of his employees (Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett) and eventually tempting Mary to enter them too. Those endless levels, though, also epitomize just how many conceptual bits and bobs Parsons throws at the figurative wall: stasis, trauma, clinical diagnoses of life itself, and some sort of DHARMA Initiative-like entity with Mark Duplass as its face. Rather than creating a concise narrative that lands like a punch to the face by way of an ellipsis, Parsons provides just enough of a little of so many things to allow considerable space for Letterboxd users and the Reddit brigade to spawn fan theories and build upon the existent folklore. It’s akin to “The X-Files” movie from 1998, a waystation on some larger journey more than a journey itself from point A to point B. 

“Backrooms” is also so much better and distinct than “The X-Files.” If his inability to tie meaning to form disappoints, Parsons’s formal command impresses, nevertheless. Inside the backrooms themselves, Parsons creates an aesthetic that is like a dead mall video set in Narnia, or maybe Narnia in a dead mall, either way, and effuses a sensation as mundane as it is otherworldly, as disorienting as it is terrifying as it is weirdly thrilling. The camera often seems to be pulling both us and Clark forward, conjuring that inescapable sensation of wanting to see what might be waiting down the next hall, or around the next corner, even as the whole space as we seem to know it continually changes when looking right, or left, or behind. Ejiofor mirrors these myriad sensations in his jittery performance, embodying someone who seems to be mesmerized even as he unwittingly comes unglued, making it all the more disappointing that “Backrooms” eschews a proper arc. (It feels like there is a whole previous scene, or collection of scenes, missing when he explicates that the backrooms are where he belongs.) When he approaches Dr. Kline to tell her of the backrooms rather than, say, the authorities, or the zoning ordinance administration, what might have been a gap in logic is instead baked into Ejiofor’s turn, a furious anger to prove her wrong after she claims not to believe in him and to show her what he perceives as the light. In one moment when Clark pleads with her, his right hand reaches in desperation toward the camera, almost through the camera, it seems, from the high angle and the high-definition device that Parsons deploys throughout, maybe the single most thrilling shot of the year. For a split-second, the movie itself virtually noclips our own reality.

Obsession

What’s old is always new. That even goes for a Gen Z coded comedy-horror hybrid like “Obsession” that dusts off the old Monkey’s Paw trope. In this case, the dangerous wish is granted to a twentysomething socially anxious nice guy who wants nothing more than the girl of his dreams to love him back. Writer/director Curry Barker emerged from the world of short form Internet comedy and his feature film debut has the feel of someone who watched, say, Richard Curtis’s “About Time,” realized there was something (more than) a little creepy about a man using his ability to time travel to win the girl of his dreams, and decided to make a romantic comedy by twisting the tonal dial one degree to the right. And yet, for all its ingenuity at toying with genre tropes, “Obsession” winds up in a blind alley not unlike the forebearers it would jab so often do. What’s old is always new.

That socially anxious male is Bear (Michael Johnson) and his crush on Nikki (Inde Navarrette) is not so much unrequited as unexpressed by him, evoked in an opening fake out where he practices spilling his guts. When given the chance, though, and even when she asks him point-blank if he likes her, he cannot summon the courage to confess. So, when Bear goes to purchase a replacement necklace for one Nikki has lost, he instead buys a One Wish Willow novelty stick. It is a selfless action manifesting instead as a selfish one, in other words, and with an air of desperation in his voice, he wishes that she would love him more than anyone else in the world. It’s “Big” metamorphosing into “Fatal Attraction” as Nikki becomes clingy, codependent, and crazy in a way that haunts the nightmares of men’s rights activists everywhere. And even as Bear seeks a way to reverse the process, he simultaneously remains reluctant to do so, wavering between each course of action. Indeed, if the ending evokes nothing less than Romeo and Juliet, Bear’s tragic flaw is not impetuousness but cowardice, the nice guy archetype rewired as the worst guy ever.

Horror movies often walk a fine line between macabre and humor, where what you are seeing becomes so horrifying that involuntarily, you almost can’t help but laugh. And maybe owing to his background, Barker demonstrates a penchant for walking that line throughout, like a sequence in which a steering wheel is remade into a battering ram, a gruesome visual reinterpretation of The Laughing Song. The casualty in that sequence is Sarah (Megan Lawless), who harbors her own unrequited crush on Bear, a character that the movie never really sees because Bear never really sees her either. No, Barker would yoke us to Bear’s point-of-view, to suffer along with him as he suffers his own lack of self-awareness and failure to act. The thing is, Barker intermittently violates this idea, such as in a comically frightening shot held of Nikki at home after Bear has departed, or in the camera moving independently of Bear when he and Nikki go out to dinner. It reminded me a little of “J*ker,” honestly, an ostensibly provocative movie that undermined its own provocations with a muddled point-of-view that it did not seem to understand as muddled. 

Nikki is intended to be seen through Bear’s point-of-view too. That’s why she remains something close to a cipher, a projection of his own desires as much a real person, and when she becomes supernaturally possessed on account of his wish, she in turn becomes a terrifying exaggeration of those desires. “Obsession” furthers that idea by rendering Nikki as being aware of her fate, lived in episodes where she snaps back and is present before essentially being reclaimed by the evil spirit inside her, creating a host of conflicting emotions and registers that Navarrette skillfully toggles between and melds together to create a breathless portrait of a person literally possessed. The real Nikki is there, in other words, not just the amplified projection, and asking Bear for help. Yet this imaginative touch effectively opens its own Pandora’s Box of moral complications. If Nikki is sentient, scenes of her and Bear sleeping together become nothing less than sexual assault, which “Obsession” does not gloss over so much as not even recognize in the first place, a revealing omission. What’s more, the headlong rush of a conclusion that brings Bear face to face with the outer limits of his own self-absorption turns the concluding shot into a punchline that simultaneously just writes Nikki off. It’s clear that she’s a victim, but of whom? Bear? Barker? Or both?

Hope

Na Hong-jin’s two-hour-and forty minute sci-fi action-thriller “Hope” begins not with a slow build but a cold plunge, as if “Jaws” immediately dropped us aboard the Orca with the hunt for the great white shark already in progress. One minute, we’re standing with Hope Harbor police chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) on a rural road investigating the perplexing, grisly death of a cow and the next he’s tracking some unseen monster on foot through the rubble of his South Korean village with a shotgun. The dexterous camera yokes us to his point-of-view, making it feel as if we are along for this terrifying ride as much as he is along for the ride when he winds up in the car driven by rookie cop Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) with the gas all the way to the floor. That we don’t get a sense of Hope Harbor before its destruction is not an unintentional oversight preventing emotional connection but a deliberate choice emphasizing the confounding immediacy. The scene is set via context clues, signs warning of enemy infiltrations, oblique references to fencing, and ordinary citizens armed to the teeth. This is the Korean Demilitarized Zone, in other words, and yet, the emergent enemy is not from the North but outer space, a revelation shrewdly teased out over the course of this hour-long opening chase. And when the payoff finally comes, “Hope,” it turns out, is just getting started.

Yet, in widening its scope to reveal far more rampaging aliens than just the one, and all not alike in form, it gradually becomes clear that Na’s pacing works better throttled up than throttled down. He not only introduces more E.T.s, but also more humans, like an old man getting stitched up in the hospital with a story to tell and hunting party in the forest who find themselves as prey, none of whom are conveyed with any real dimension. Even a bout of friendly fire that seems readymade to reveal character from the extreme circumstances ultimately comes to nothing. Maybe this could have been glossed over had “Hope’s” action stayed in the stratosphere, but in ramping back up, it becomes oddly repetitive, consequently monotonous, and so reliant on machine gun fire that by the end it had literally given me a headache. One endless sequence on a highway becomes emblematic of a movie that does not seem to know how to call it quits. What’s more, the striking tactility of so much of the first hour is undercut by much of the creature design that feels disjointedly inserted from a video game. It’s not just the old rule of thumb that the less you see of the monster(s), the better, but that one character’s evocative description of them being a mush of peas and beans proves too much to live up to.

The imagery is all the more disappointing given Na’s willingness to see the aliens as more than unthinking predators. He demonstrates this via narrative revelations of his screenplay, but even more than that, through a pair of captivating lengthy close-ups of deceased outsiders. These seem primed for classic horror movie jump scares, holding and holding the shots until...nothing happens. Like Chief Ko finding himself unexpectedly moved by looking long and hard at the creature he’s chasing when he’s supposed to be taking aim with his rifle, Na lingers over these alien faces to instill compassion. But even if he does, he continually undermines it, giving his his characters, including Chief Ko, so many familiar action movie one-liners that he seems to suggest these aliens really are just brainless beasts to be dispatched. The sequence in which Chief Ko enlists a doctor to perform an alien autopsy yields ferocious blood-splattered comedy, though the movie itself does not seem to know what we’re supposed to be laughing about.

The monotony of the overstretched conclusion, meanwhile, is ironic because “Hope” leaves us not just with myriad loose ends and unresolved feelings but literally drops a whole other gigantic question right out of the sky. When this question arrives, it will leave you feeling like the characters on screen, literally unsure what you are seeing in more ways than one. This lack of resolution, though, leaving the human characters spiritually stranded, running along a road toward figurative points unknown, conjures the sensation of ontological response that we are generally told would go hand-in-hand with the discovery of not being alone in the universe while simultaneously imparting the unmistakable sense that they are not really the protagonists in this story. In that way, the whole two-and-a-half hours plus might have paradoxically locked into place without locking anything into place at all. Except that afterwards, I discovered “Hope” was merely set-up for a sequel, a post-movie revelation as the most predictable revelation possible, leaving me not only disappointed but retroactively insulted, unmasking a movie without even the courage of its seeming enigmatic conviction. 

The Odyssey

“A time of apparent magic” explains the title card that opens Christopher Nolan’s two-hour-and-fifty-three-minute version of Homer’s Odyssey. You can practically hear the scoff just off camera. For all that’s been made about Nolan’s commitment to putting us there, the Bronze Age, that is, from practical effects, to lighting, to a score utilizing era-appropriate instruments, “The Odyssey” proves more modern, and not just because everybody is speaking in contemporary American accents. Nolan’s version of Odysseus (Matt Damon) is one conspicuously in the throes of PTSD brought on by a Trojan War unpacked as a traumatic event while the gods are minimized, underscored in a crack of thunder that may or may not represent Zeus, like a special effect in a middle school play, which I might take to be Nolan’s tongue in his cheek if I thought he ever laughed. Humorless, revisionist, just as every translation of Homer’s Odyssey adopts its own point of view, so does every adaptation, like this one, in which the fabled ancient Greek epic poem is transformed into, uh, well, what else: a Christopher Nolan movie.

Odysseus, King of Ithaca, has been away for 20 years, 10 spent fighting and winning the Trojan War, 10 wandering in his struggle to return home. This has left his kingdom in peril with suitors occupying his home, seeking to marry his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), while his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) looks on, wanting to help, but not sure how. Honoring both Homer and his own nonlinear propensities, Nolan has chosen to use the chunk of time Odysseus spends on an island with Calypso (Charlize Theron) as his unconvincing framework. It’s not so much that in his version Nolan plays coy with why Odysseus is trapped there, and as if afraid to render his protagonist contemptible for stepping out on his wife eschews Calypso repeatedly taking him to bed, as it is an overriding air so morose as to beggar belief when she remarks on their having such a good time together. No, these scenes are just a flagrant vehicle for him to process his trauma, never dramatic in and of themselves, and with a staid air that weighs the whole enterprise down.

The Odyssey emerged from songs and spoken tales that preceded it and has in effect been influencing stories of all varieties in the centuries since, and so anyone that it takes it on is naturally going to see it in their own way. Still, there are times when it feels less like Nolan is interpreting The Odyssey so much as he is repurposing it for parts to construct a sort of spiritual summation of his whole oeuvre. You see it straight away in one of the movie’s first shots of the trojan horse half-buried in the sand, evoking the concluding image of “Planet of the Apes” and immediately impressing upon you the sense of destruction rather than victory, foreshadowing the war between the Greeks and Troy as nothing less than an ancient world atom bomb a la “Oppenheimer.” In wandering those 10 years afterwards, Odysseus has lived long enough to become a villain, cough, cough, at least in his own mind, not so much the complicated man of Emily Wilson’s famous 2017 translation, never mind the wily trickster of the original epic, as a one-note brooding stoic. If The Odyssey is in so many ways about homecomings, this might be where Nolan’s own identity, or at least, his predilections, most tellingly merge with Homer’s ultimate intent: of course, his King of Ithaca would become Batman.

Robert Pattinson, at least, is not brooding as Antinous, the foremost suitor of Penelope (along with Corey Hawkins as Polybus), giving some real president of Alpha Beta fraternity energy. In a weird way, Pattinson might be having too much fun, in so much as his malevolent sniveling invites a bloodlust in the denouement that inadvertently runs counter to the lessons that we are supposed to have learned along the way. Antinous meets his match, however, not in Telemachus, whose arc can feel perfunctory with all that’s going on, but Penelope. Along with Samantha Morton giving life to Circe’s righteous anger, Hathaway’s performance is “The Odyssey’s” best, both honoring Nolan’s modern vision while still effusing grand melodramatic flourish. And though Nolan generally prefers medium shots to close-ups that would befit these larger-than-life characters, in a reverse shot over Holland’s shoulder, Hathway suddenly lunges forward in the frame, fashioning a close-up all on her own. 

She fares better than Zendaya, anyway, who is ostensibly playing Athena, though like Theron, seems to intentionally downplay, thinking the performance will be made in the camera, only to be stranded in diminishing, dull frames unworthy of a Greek goddess. (She has resembled a Greek goddess on the red carpet for the movie’s promotion more than in the movie itself.) Then again, Nolan sees Athena less in terms of mythology than psychology, turning her into nothing less than an Imaginary Friend, providing a form of recurring consultation for Odysseus so that when she ultimately disappears, we know he is now emotionally and mentally healed, the hoariest trope in the screenwriting manual. It is emblematic of how Nolan sees the gods in more abstract terms, evoked in Odysseus’s struggle to believe in them at all, which on some level makes it both his most audacious and most cautious revision in so much as it feels like he is taking this 3,000-year-old story of polytheism and revising it for vacation Bible school.

The presentation of Athena, however, ties back to the presentation of Calypso, both of which relate to “The Odyssey’s” biggest problem, Nolan’s filmmaking style, or a lack of one, more accurately, meaning that no matter how spectacular the scenery and sets, there is a pervasive stodginess. He filmed on 70mm IMAX cameras, the first feature film ever to do so, and yet, it feels like a crutch for his own lack of visual imagination. He essentially transcribes what is on the page to screen rather than bringing it to life, like Penelope’s burial shroud, or Odysseus’s faithful dog Argis, but two plot points that Nolan injects with no real feeling. Would it have been impossible to render the song of the sirens as bewitching as the poem says? Perhaps, but isn’t that why you go into filmmaking, to envision and make perceptible that which seems impossible on the page? Isn’t that the dream of filming The Odyssey, not just to rework the text for our own times but to animate one of our world’s foundational stories? You’d think, but in the end, Nolan’s Odyssey lives its title card a little too much: a movie of apparent magic.

Project Hail Mary

“Project Hail Mary” might be littered with pop hits, from Harry Styles to the Scorpions to The Beatles, but the artist I kept thinking of was one not literally accounted for on the soundtrack: Max Martin. The ballyhooed Swedish record producer is known for so-called melodic math, a rigorous musical formula designed to maximize a pop song’s potential as a hit. That’s not bad, necessarily. Math is a universal language, as “Project Hail Mary” reminds us, but also, movies is magic, to quote Gregory Hines in “History of the World, Part One,” and the best blockbusters so seamlessly integrate their math that, in the end, magic is all you see. Though there is plenty to like about “Project Hail Mary,” too often all I could see were co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s figurative equations scribbled on a blackboard.

The math in “Project Hail Mary” is evident right from the start when Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up aboard a spaceship with no idea how he got there or where he’s going – in other words, Jason Bourne - assassin + astronaut = Ryland Grace. This way, Drew Goddard’s screenplay creates dual narratives, one going backwards to show us the genesis of his mission and another going forward to show us how that mission plays out. Grace (who is always called by his surname rather than his first name, and so shall we) is a middle school science teacher whose burgeoning academic career came undone when he authored a controversial paper. It is that very paper, however, that prompts Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) to recruit him for an international task force seeking answers to a mysterious microorganism spreading across the surface of the sun and causing it to dim, threatening the existence of humanity. An effusive American and a deadpan German, Gosling and Hüller form a fabulous odd couple, and whether the science makes sense to you, flies right over your head, or some combination of the two, it gets by on Hollywood terms via their two-person act.

When Grace determines that other stars in the solar system are being dimmed by this same microorganism save for one, Tau Ceti, a mission is prepped to fly the 12 light years there, figure out its secret of resistance, and then send the results home to concoct a cure. It’s a suicide mission, albeit a heroic one, and yet, two of Grace’s crewmates never make it all, failing to wake up from their induced comas, leaving him 70 trillion miles from home and all on his own. Though the tone in the subsequent scenes might have a problematic trickle-down effect we will get to in a moment, they also have an action-packed spunk that despite the onboard computer’s disembodied voice (Priya Kansara) conveniently giving Grace someone to speak with, frequently suggest a silent movie, Ryan Gosling as Harold Lloyd in “The Astronaut,” say. Yet, the equation dictates two buddy acts, one on earth and one in space, and so, Grace makes first contact with a five-legged rock-like alien that he nicknames Rocky as man and E.T. team up to try and save their respective home planets.

Rocky, voiced by James Ortiz and brought to life via puppetry, suggests Wilson the volleyball in “Cast Away” but manifested as Russell, the holy terror wilderness explorer stowaway in “Up,” fused with “The Fifth Element’s” manic Ruby Rhod with a HAL 9000 voice. Admittedly, it’s something of a Your Mileage May Vary situation, like how a lot of people seem to like “The Trip” movies but the celebrity impressions wear me out, and from my perspective, Rocky was…a lot. And the brief sequence where we see Grace driven batty by Rocky, too, does not cheekily temper its DEFCON 3-level annoyance but highlights why it’s a significant problem in the first place. What’s worse, though this emergent friendship is meant as to cure Grace’s default mode of isolation from the world around him, Lord and Miller’s narrative and aesthetic busyness prevents that alienation from existing in anything other than theory. And that underlines the big miscalculation in “Project Hail Mary’s” equation, exhaustive giving way to exhausting, brought home in just how long it takes to bring the whole shebang home, laying on so many false endings that I palpably sensed myself starting to tune out. That I did not entirely is a testament to Hüller, the kind of impending apocalypse project manager I would be inspired to work for, proving that you can stare down the end of the world with a droll expression.

The Moment

“The Moment” of Aidan Zamiri’s mockumentary satire refers to the long tail of success from British pop artist Charli XCX’s sixth studio album “Brat” and the cultural phenomenon that it spawned, one colloquially known as Brat Summer. That phenomenon, however, and the album itself, are never really explored or even explained in detail. No, true to its title, “The Moment” picks up at the point where the artist’s original intent, whatever it was, has been co-opted by the culture at large and turned into something out of the artist’s control. And so, the questions “The Moment” asks are: when, exactly, does a pop culture craze end, and how does it end, and why does it end, and who ends it? These questions have been asked before but even so, Charli XCX, who conceived the story that Zamiri and Bertie Brandes turned into a script, finagles creatively meta ways to ask them. Indeed, the question of when Brat Summer will conclude is literally posed aloud by none other than Stephen Colbert in an ersatz Charli XCX interview on The Late Show. I LOL’d. 

If Charli (we will refer to the character as Charli and the actor as XCX) seems ready to let the moment end, the surrounding industry types seek ways to prolong it, creating a Brat credit card and urging her to do what music stars have done time immemorial and make a concert film. In essence, that’s what “The Moment” is, the making of the making of the concert film as clueless handlers hire a director (Alexander Skarsgård) who cultivates an air of collaboration and openness while simultaneously practicing neither, seeking to transform Brat into a version of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. No doubt this stems in part from the real-world tension between XCX and TayTay, but it is, nevertheless, hilarious to see Charli throwing herself on the mercy of the industry machine by dangling from a stationary harness.

The format might draw from “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984), but the titular band in the mockumentary godfather was all about delusions of grandeur while Charli is wracked with exhaustion and self-loathing and seeks to sabotage her own concert movie. That suggests “This Is Spinal Tap” less than the mockumentary styled “Curb Your Enthusiasm” HBO pilot as do Charli’s comically cringe encounters with various people that drop in and out of her orbit. XCX effuses nimble comic timing and a genuine skill at deadpan in these moments, like the one on her tour bus where she hesitantly peers around a corner to reluctantly allow the driver to drop some ostensible knowledge, evincing celebrity as forever walking on eggshells rather than living among the clouds. If I were writing a Letterboxd review of “The Moment” I might just write that Charli XCX gives the performance of the year as Larry David. She’s a misanthrope for the TikTok generation.

I know, I know. Letterboxd, TikTok, Brat, Charli XCX, what is any of this in the first place? And that’s the thing about “The Moment”: it fails to offer any entry point for anyone who is not completely plugged into current pop culture unless you are the rare middle-aged dude such as myself who happens to totally be into Charli XCX. (I was the oldest person in the theater at my showing.) Likewise, a non-Charli’s Angel might watch “The Moment” and come away thinking, “Well, who is Charli XCX?” Adhering to narrative rules that we get to know the character before the character loses all sense of herself would yield a more powerful closing punch, no? Except the point of XCX’s shape-shifting persona has always been obfuscation of the person, and even more than that, an awesome defiance of the fan service that has come to define so much of modern pop culture. That’s one of the reasons I admire her artistry so much. And if the extreme close-ups of Charli throughout “The Moment” evoke a desperate desire for the camera to peel away the persona, she pushes back at every turn, brought home in a dizzying denouement where she might as well put “Brat” in a burn barrel out back, pour some gasoline on it, and light a match. 

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

Death Kills, says the t-shirt of Spinal Tap bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), but then, you can’t kill rock and roll, as the Prince of Darkness once sang. And so, if you thought you had seen the last of the fictional heavy metal band of Rob Reiner’s landmark, eternally hilarious 1984 mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap,” they are back. Smalls, lead singer David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), and guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), spurred from some mysterious breakup 15 years ago to play one more contractually obligated show in the wake of the death of their manager, Ian Faith. The contractual obligation is a pretty good joke, but unlike the original, “Spinal Tap II” demonstrates little interest in taking the piss out of the music and concert industries themselves. Live Nation is just sitting there and…crickets. The funniest jokes are modest, and the inter-band tension feels half-hearted at best. The film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum once noted that despite the original’s merit’s, “it spawned what could be the laziest of all current subgenres, the supposedly satiric pseudodocumentary,” and so, rather than exist as its own spiritual heir, “Spinal Tap II” feels more akin to its sluggish spawn. Then again, “This Is Spinal Tap” was so successful in part because of its sincerity and that sincerity saves the sequel which isn’t the same thing as saying it’s good.

In writing about Bruce Springsteen’s reunion tour with The E Street Band in 1999, the esteemed Greil Marcus noted that what made their performances successful was that the Boss could still fail while, say, The Rolling Stones couldn’t. The Stones we’re “fixed,” Marcus wrote, “their books written, their prophecies behind them,” while Springsteen, on the other hand, still wanted more than he could have, was still taking risks live and on record, some bound to miss the mark. And it’s more than a little ironic that Spinal Tap is reuniting, so to speak, the same year that another fabled British band, Oasis, reunited after so long apart. And Oasis? As it turns out, they are too big to fail. Their prophecies were written a long time ago, as were Spinal Tap’s, and if Liam Gallagher is still out here wearing parka jackets with popped collars, then it only makes sense that Marty DiBergi (Reiner) is still out here wearing his USS Oral Sea OV-4B ballcap. That hat underlines much of the movie, which is content to literally retell many of the same jokes from the first one, as if the characters themselves are “This Is Spinal Tap” fans quoting lines to one another, just as Spinal Tap is content to play all the same songs from the first movie rather than compose any new ones. The people are here for “Big Bottom.” I don’t think it’s anymore a spoiler to say their new live performance of “Stonehenge” concludes with another disaster than to say Oasis has been concluding every reunion show with a double barrel blast of “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova.”

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.