Delayed Reaction: Black Bear

Premise: A look at a marital struggle through different phases of a film production.

 

This is definitely a movie where I feel confident about my read of it yet I’m equally confident that someone who made it would tell me I’m wrong. I see it as a deconstruction of a marriage told through the stages of film production. Like someone has reverse engineered a relationship. It’s a relationship in trouble in a film for the first hour. It’s then about how the relationship in the movie is informed by the fractured relationship during production. And the film ends with the beginning: Aubrey Plaza’s character ready to take her experiences to inform the writing of the screenplay. It’s a clever movie. Perhaps too clever. Like the filmmaker watched Mulholland Drive too many times and wanted to apply it to a love story.

 

Aubrey Plaza holds it together for me. Her natural sarcasm and willingness to try anything lead her performances in interesting directions. She’s impossible to read in the first half then a raw nerve in the second. Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon are fine too, but there’s a reason it’s Plaza on this poster.

 

The first part is overall stronger than the second. It’s just three characters and all three are playing more natural roles. When it shifts to the film production later, it’s more unwieldy. There are so many more characters. Abbott and Gadon don’t seem as comfortable. Even Plaza doesn’t seem fully right until she gets drunk. The comedic tone injected in the second half threw me off too. When it ultimately ends with Plaza about to write the movie, it felt a little self-congratulatory.

 

I respect the effort of this movie. It’s a good idea. It took me a while to get proper footing watching it, which I believe was the point. I’d rather watch this than the more generic movie I thought I was watching at first. It just doesn’t fully work for me. I wish they could’ve found a way to break it into three parts instead of two. Really show of the evolution of the story and the different dynamics in each.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Body of Lies

Premise: A CIA agent attempts to catch a terrorist in the Middle East.

 

It’s nice how there’s seemingly a never-ending supply of populist Ridley Scott movies to stumble onto. There’s aren’t many directors who are more reliable to deliver an entertaining, competent movie. He makes one every year or two, especially in the 2000s. Some are Oscar plays. Others are just for fun. He always gets a cast and has people who know what they are doing on the crew. Body of Lies is a movie that I won’t carry with me for any amount of time. But, when I was looking for a movie to watch that didn’t make me go through a whole emotional journey, I was happy to find this one in my queue.

 

This is a movie from what I call Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dirrty phase. He was boy wonder from about 1993-2000, where he was in full heath throb mode. From 2001-2004 he was in his weaponized youth phase, taking roles like Catch Me If You Can that used his youthful appearance as a way to very serious roles. From around 2005-2008, he picked some “dirt on his hands” roles that played down his looks (The Departed, Blood Diamond, Body of Lies). Roles that didn’t rely on his movie star charisma at all*. Leo never disappears into his Dirrty phase roles. I like his pissant energy though. These guys all have Scrappy Doo energy. I almost feel like if you brought up Titanic to him in those years, he’d tell you to fuck off. I don’t think he’s an optimal Ridley Scott protagonist. He’s a bit too intense. Scott’s best movies tend to have characters who seem annoyed to even be doing this. They’re often sarcastic and/or tired. Like, I can’t imagine what Scott would do with a Daniel Day Lewis showing up on set with all that intensity. Leo makes it work, partly because Scott is not a director whose vision can be overpowered, but it’s not his cleanest fit in a role.

 

*For the record, after that is his Oscar hunting phase (2009-2015) and his current phase that so far I’m calling the “Just for fun” phase.

 

Body of Lies also sums up 2008 Middle East stories in the US. Post Invasion of Iraq, pre-killing of Osama Bin Laden. There’s still some belief that all these efforts will result in something although there’s annoyance that it hasn’t yielded results yet. We weren’t at a terrorist story saturation point yet. 4 years later and this would make a lot more sense as a TV show.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: I Want You Back

Premise: Two strangers form a friendship and alliance to get back together with their exes.

 

One of the underrated aspects of a proper RomCom is that it’s easy to assemble a good cast for them. It turns out, actors enjoy an easy job for a decent paycheck working in chill conditions with presumably pleasant people. That’s the sense I get from I Want You Back. The movie doesn’t get anyone who isn’t normally gettable. It just gets a lot of them. Charlie Day and Jenny Slate are nice leads. Scott Eastwood and Gina Rodriguez are good choices for the exes. It is a bit of a shame to see Rodriguez underused here. I was delighted to see Manny Jacinto and Clark Backo as the new partners for the exes. It’s like Jacinto and Backo are in a training program to lead their own RomComs in a couple years. You’ve got Dylan Gelula and Mason Gooding there in the background, living their own RomCom about a couple trying to get rid of their irresponsible roommate. Pete Davidson shows up for some reason. They even get Benjamin Mackenzie for a scene. And while I know Mackenzie is in his mid-40s, it still feels rude to me to have him as the father of a teenager. Look at all those names. How am I supposed to not watch this movie?

 

Once you get past the cast, there isn’t much to this movie. We’ve all seen RomComs. We know how this is going to play out. They aren’t in the business of pulling the rug out from under anyone. I’m not sure I’d want them to try and get ahead of the audience for this either. There are some small choices I appreciated. I like that it doesn’t make anyone the villain. The exes aren’t toxic people who Day and Slate shouldn’t want to be with. They are just compatible with other people. Same with the rival love interests. It would be easy to sell out Jacinto as a himbo jerk, but they decide to redeem him instead. I appreciate that the movie doesn’t oversell the moment when everyone finds out about Day and Slate’s plan. It ultimately doesn’t matter. The others are rightly pissed, but they do seem to appreciate that their plan was ineffective.

 

My biggest issues with the film are more key to its success, sadly. Day and Slate never read as more than friends to me. The characters don’t feel written to their strengths. Along those lines, the movie isn’t very funny. There are long serious stretches. Even some of the comedy set pieces fall flat. When Day gets trapped in the laundry bin as Eastwood proposes to Backo and proceeds to have set with her is funny on paper. I spent most of the time dreading the idea that he’d get caught, yet they also don’t take advantage of how awkward that was for Day. The movie is full of missed beats: moments where the director notices the scene is lacking energy, looks around at the wealth of screen talent around him, and comes up with a quip or zinger. So, no matter how winsome the cast is and how genuinely good-spirited the movie is, this is a RomCom that doesn’t sell me on the Rom or the Com. There’s only so good it can be.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Uncharted

Formula: Raiders of the Lost Ark ^ Tomb Raider

 

The dirty little secret about a lot of blockbusters is that they are pretty generic on paper. Raiders of the Lost Ark could easily have been a forgotten adventure movie. The things that make it special are easy to say and staggeringly difficult to pull off. It has characters with clear and engaging personalities who are simple enough to immediately understand. It’s packed with set pieces that are edited, blocked, and executed perfectly. The music is iconic and fills in all the holes of the editing. Often, a similar movie will fail and the only explanation really is that Raiders just did it better. I imagine that must be maddening for a filmmaker. It also makes it damn near impossible to review a movie like Uncharted without some hindsight. People will openly call it derivative when it’s released, not appreciating that many of the movies they rewatch for years are derivative too. That ends up being a strength, not a weakness. Raiders is derivative. That’s why I like it.

 

I liked Uncharted. I know nothing about the games. I don’t care to. Something tells me that if I realized how many winks to the game there were in the movie, I’d be annoyed. This movie is like many, many movies I’ve seen before. Movies I enjoyed more, but – here’s the key – movies I did enjoy. It’s a $120 million movie that looks like it cost that much. It has a mix of stars, familiar faces, and new faces that takes advantage of the effect of each.

 

The story is a little convoluted and definitely silly. Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) is an orphan treasure hunter who moonlights as a bartender and pickpocket. Fellow treasure hunter, Victor Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg), lures Nathan to join him on the hunt for Magellan’s lost treasure on the promise of reuniting Nathan with his long-lost brother. They pick up a loose-ally in Chloe Frazer (another treasure hunter). Some billionaire (Antonio Banderes) is also looking for the gold and hires a hunter/assassin (Tati Gabrielle) to get to the treasure first or kill Nathan and co. if she gets there second. With that setup, the movie is just following everyone as they solve puzzles while travelling all over the world. It’s fun.

 

The cast is about 80% there. Holland and Wahlberg are a nice pair but it’s a little clunky. Holland works really well with mentor/mentee relationships. He’s not as good at being chummy yet. And I can’t wait for him to lose some of the boyishness in his face. Also, I can’t be the only one who Holland and Wahlberg look too similar. They have similar hair and builds. Their personas are different, but they read visually as very similar. I’m curious to see Sophia Ali in more things. She fits nicely in an adventure movie. Kind of like an off-brand Lara Croft, which I mean as a compliment. While she is striking, I’m not sitting there wondering who put the model into this action movie. She’s only a year older than Holland but she plays her role like someone who has been in this business for a long time. Banderas doesn’t do a whole lot but I love Tati Gabrielle as the villain. She carries herself like a video game bad ass. Not a hair out of place. Poise at all times. She kind of terrifies me. Everything you want in an adventure movie villain. Part of the problem overall is that the cast is out of balance age-wise. Holland, Ali, and Gabrielle are less than a year apart in age. Then there’s Wahlberg a quarter century older than all of them. Yet, the movie treats Wahlberg, Ali, and Gabrielle like the contemporaries. It feels weird when Wahlberg’s nickname for Holland is ‘kid’ when Holland is the same age as all the other central characters they are dealing with, who he treats like old chums.

 

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It’s not perfect and there’s room to make sequels much more fun. It’s a competent adventure movie, and adventure movies don’t need to be much more than competent. As much as anything, it’s nice to see Tom Holland succeed as a leading man not in spandex.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Quick Reaction: The Two Faces of January

I’d like to apologize to this film. In the days leading up to this, I binged Inventing Anna. Directly before watching this film, I watched the Tinder Swindler. I picked The Two Faces of January based only on the cast with no idea what it was about. Had I known if was another crime/con story, I never would’ve picked it, because I was way past my saturation point on those. Unfortunately, I did watch it and I had no patience for it. I certainly like watching Oscar Isaac, Kirsten Dunst, and Viggo Mortensen on screen in exotic south eastern European locations. The drama didn’t pull me in though. It didn’t help that they killed off Dunst so early. I’ve lost patience for stories about violence to the female character being a motivator for the male characters. Besides, I absolutely watched this with the intention of seeing Dunst and Isaac being attractive around each other.

 

The movie has some decent twists. It’s sort of a B- The Talented Mister Ripley if you are in the mood for that. The movie probably deserved more than I came into it with, but it’s not nearly good enough for me to watch it a second time.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Tinder Swindler

Premise: A documentary about a swindler…who works on Tinder…

 

I’m of a split mind about this movie. On the one hand, the story is insane and by making it a documentary, they are able to edit it to effectively show the simultaneous nature of the cons. This gives it a momentum that other forms would lack. On the other hand, this really feels like a glossy Dateline special. There’s nothing wrong with that. It just changes how I examine it. I don’t tend to write much about TV anymore. There’s too much of it and it’s much harder. Shows evolve over time, unlike movies. The constraints on time and budget as well as the number of hours, stories, and characters to play with mean I have to give different considerations to TV shows that wouldn’t fly with movies. If a movie has a B-plot that’s a total misfire, that can tank it. Even my favorite shows though have story arcs that are weak or performances that are best not mentioned. Season 2 FNL is the easy example.

 

I bring this up with the Tinder Swindler, because I struggle to determine which metrics to judge this with. If it’s the documentary equivalent of a Hallmark movie, I look at that different than a festival release. But here I am writing about it, so I guess that means I’m putting it in the serious doc grouping.

 

Simply put, the Tinder Swindler doesn’t pass the Wikipedia test. Did it add significantly more than a Wikipedia dive? Not really. Simon Leviev used Tinder to seduce women. He tricked them into thinking he was rich and maintained relationships with them for a while. Then he swindled them out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each. That’s the basis of a good story, but the filmmakers aren’t able to dig deep enough to make this more compelling than Wikipedia. They get three of the women and no one in Leviev’s camp. That’s pretty weak. On the victim’s end, three accounts don’t suggest the scope of his crimes. He conned many people out of millions. I want this doc to feel exhaustive in its attempt to track people down. It should feel like they had to turn people away because they had too many interviews. I want to feel the scope of his carnage. With just three – admittedly, the three most important in catching him – it all feels pretty small. On Leviev’s side, he’s too much of a mystery. From what I could gather, Leviev’s con is pretty impressive. He’s playing a huge confidence game. He has conspirators and juggles multiple marks at once. He gets out of prison at the end and is already back to living large. Like, he’s a crook, but he’s clearly quite good at this, yet we have no insight into him.

 

In my mind, I think about one of my favorite documentaries: The Imposter. If I imagine that as a 20/20 special where they interview 2-3 family members and an Interpol agent, the story would be interesting but incomplete. The fact that it gets Frederic Boudin to tell the story and the family her conned and agents to interrogate his claims is what fleshes it out into a feature film of substance.

 

So, in short, The Tinder Swindler is an undeniably intriguing story. Parts are satisfying. It dips its toes into discussions of victim blaming. The investigation feels very surface level. It’s more of a staged reading than a full production, to put it in theater terms.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Pig

Premise: A man goes looking for his stolen truffle pig.

 

I appreciate the movies like Pig every Oscar season. Each year, there are a few movies that people want to will into Oscar consideration. Nothing about the movie says that it would ever be noticed by the Academy overall, but these supporters try anyway. And, in their defense, it does work on occasion. Screenplay probably most often. The vast majority are like Pig though. While fans beg for it to get Nic Cage an Oscar nomination, really what they are begging for is that movies like Pig even enter the discussion. What’s fun about these movies is that people really drill down to the single best thing about the movie. Instead of asking for a movie to get Academy consideration, they’ll pray for it just to get the Cinematography nomination or for that one supporting character to show up in the 5 nominees. I like that, because they are usually right about that one thing. In the case of Pig, it’s a good enough movie, but Cage is the highlight.

 

Pig is a weirdly lovely movie that Cage makes work. The story is that a loner truffle hunter gets his pig stolen then dives into the Portland cooking underworld to get it back. That is a dumb story. Perfect for Nic Cage. I sometimes forget he is an Oscar winner. The trick to him is that he’ll bring everything to a role and he needs a filmmaker who can resist asking for him to give everything all the time. Pig is a wild movie, yet it repeatedly holds back from going fully insane. So Cage’s performance becomes a case of “he can’t burn himself if you don’t hand him a match”. I really enjoy how subdued the conclusion of the film ultimately is. It builds the legend of Robin Feld effectively without it crossing into being a joke.

 

Nic Cage is only 58, which feels wild. He’s been around and active so long that it seems like he should be older. He’s got a lot of time left in his career. There’s a very real possibility that he’s in an actual Oscar discussion for something in a decade, and people will point to films like Pig as evidence that he’s been doing under-the-radar good work for a while. Pig could be to Cage what Mud was to the McConaissance.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Man Who Wasn’t There

Premise: A small town barber gets caught up in a murder investigation.

 

On a fun note, this is my last Coen Brothers movie. I’ve now seen all 19 (including The Tragedy of Macbeth). There are a few that I barely remember and need to see again like Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, and Intolerable Cruelty, but dammit, I’ve seen them. Retention wasn’t part of the assignment. The Man Who Wasn’t There is easily among my least favorite of theirs. That is a high bar, of course.

 

The word I always default to with the Coens is “idiosyncratic”. It’s hard to imitate that tone. When they try to tamp it down, I don’t tend to care for the results. That’s why The Tragedy of Macbeth left me cold. Blood Simple feels a little anonymous. No Country for Old Men is arguably the exception to the rule, but a lot of the reason that works is that they somehow channel that same energy into menace. The Man Who Wasn’t There is similar to a lot of their movies on the surface. It’s a noir crime movie with colorful characters. Where it differs is that instead of being a neo-noir, they are making a straight-up film noir. It’s like they shot every scene, told the actors “Now let’s do it again but with less”, and used the second take for every time. I found it dull in a way that Coen movies never should.

 

Side Rant: I’m getting really bored of the “black and white” cheat code to an Oscar nomination. That’s the only Oscar this film was nominated for and it’s a reminder that we’ve been playing this game for decades now. Can I please get the rules of what makes good Cinematography? I’m pretty sure black and white films keep getting noms because black and white is striking. I don’t think that’s all there should bed to it. Or is it similar to loud movies getting sound nominations? I do think The Man Who Wasn’t There is a good looking movie. I’m just annoyed at how transparent the logic is for praising its cinematography.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: First Cow

Premise: Two men in Oregon County steal milk from the only cow in the area to make a treat that will earn them the money they need to get to San Francisco.

 

It feels like Kelly Reichardt is going to be one of my “white whale” directors: directors who I want to really like but are missing that last piece to get me there. I’ve only seen Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow. I like both movies. I dig her aesthetic. She puts together good casts and her storytelling is delightfully simple. I need that last push to get to where I understand how the New York Film Critics Circle could give First Cow their Best Picture award. I think I can get there. I still have a handful of her movies to see. Kind of like Jane Campion* with Power of the Dog, Reichardt may also be just one film away. For now, she’s in the category of directors like Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, or Wes Anderson who I fully accept as talents but haven’t made a film I really love that makes me ride or die for them.

 

*Look, I know it’s lazy on paper to compare two female directors like this, but they really do have some similar movies. Both look at the unglamorous side of the old west (in the US and New Zealand) and get similar kinds of performances out of actors.

 

The relative simplicity and low stakes are what work for me in First Cow. The central conflict is stolen milk and the grand dream is just to make it to San Francisco and start a shop. There’s a good message in there about the American dream and how hard the “bootstraps” message actually is to pull off. I like that Reichardt doesn’t connect all the dots for the audience. Like, the end. I’m assuming the protagonists are killed by the guy following them with the rifle, but the movie stops before that. It felt a bit too thin overall for me, similar to how Meek’s Cutoff was unresolved in ways. Perhaps I’m the one who needs to change how I watch Reichardt’s movies. For now though, this fell slightly short of me really digging it.

And, I realize that 1820s snacks don’t hold a candle to today’s sugary treats, but I badly want to try an oily cake. Anyone have a recipe? Do I just glaze a sugar cookie with honey?

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Kimi

Premise: A customer service employee for an Alexa-like device hears a crime on a disputed recording that puts her in the center of a massive conspiracy.

 

How sure are we that Stephen Soderbergh isn’t behind COVID? Here me out. It feels like he’s been preparing for this his whole life with his career. He works cheap and quick, starting with Sex, Life, and Videotape back in the day. He’s experimented with cheap and guerilla filmmaking all the way back to Bubble in 2005. He’s been shooting films like Unsane and High Flying Bird on iPhones lately. Everything about Let Them All Talk feels like a COVID production except that it was filmed on a cruise ship. So, by the time he makes Kimi, you could convince me that he already had it planned exactly like this pre-March 2020.

 

The natural comparison in my mind is Locked Down: another COVID era thriller released on HBO Max by a prolific filmmaker. It’s not a perfect comparison. Locked Down was made at the height of COVID restrictions whereas Kimi was made when pretty much everything had opened back up. They have a similar sparseness though. I can’t imagine either film crew was large. They are light on production elements. Insignificant scoring. Production design is simple and the staging of shots not complex. The real difference between the movies is that Soderbergh knows how to make this kind of movie and Locked Down’s director, Doug Liman, doesn’t.

 

Kimi is a lean movie that knows it only has 90 minutes before the audience will start asking more questions. Zoe Kravitz is such a star in this. It’s crazy how comfortable on camera she is. Anytime I see her in something, she seems so unbothered by the fact that the camera is rolling. That doesn’t necessarily mean she has the charisma to lead a blockbuster or the chops to win a major award someday. It just means that if you put her on screen, she’s going to look like she’s a woman just living her life. That meshes perfectly with how Soderbergh likes to do things. I hope he gets her again for future films.

 

The conspiracy she uncovers is just intriguing and fleshed out enough to work. It reminded me a bit of The Conversation, which is a high compliment. I enjoyed this cast. A lot of familiar faces, not names. I don’t know if any of them have worked with Soderbergh before. I’d love to know the casting process that ended up with Rita Wilson on set for a day as an HR bureaucrat or David Wain to film a skype role as a dentist. In a lot of ways, this felt like when I was a kid building things with LEGO. I’d build a big castle, then I would try and figure out what I could build with all the extra pieces I had left. Kimi is a movie made out of the extra pieces. They found the locations they could rent for cheap and got whatever actors they could for days they weren’t busy and made a movie.

 

Had this movie been a minute longer, I would not have liked it as much. It’s the right length with the right cast. I had fun watching it. I appreciate how uncomplicated her rampage with the nail gun was, and the 911 call right after was funny. Soderbergh is really in his element here. It’s not his finest film, but it’s one of the entries that makes his filmography as fun as any director you’ll come across.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend