Delayed Reaction: The Accidental Getaway Driver

Premise: An elderly Vietnamese cab driver gets taken hostage and used a getaway driver for three escaped convicts.

I'm sorry to say, the best part of The Accidental Getaway Driver for me gets covered in the title. This is a phenomenon I see a lot. Someone reads a crazy news headline and determines that should be a movie. And I get it. "Three escaped convicts use an old cab driver for their getaway" is a hell of a pitch. That's not a movie though. It's the start of a movie.

Director Sing J. Lee does get several good performances out of the movie. Hiep Tran Nghia is an 80-year-old discovery for me. Dustine Nguyen is great as a criminal who doesn't know how bad he's willing to be. And Dali Benssalah brings the crazy. Ultimately, I like the place where the story ends up, with the experience leading to Nghia's character finally opening himself back up to the world. The bulk of the movie didn't do a lot for me though. I just didn't feel the tension I needed to. Perhaps it's because I never actually believed Lee would die. The plan of the escaped convicts exists in an in between space. It's wasn't a brilliant plan falling apart that leaves them flailing. It wasn't something hasty that left them guessing wildly. It was a boring plan. Maybe that's truer to life, but it didn't keep me locked in. To be fair, I don't think tension was meant to be the driver of the movie. Sadly, the assorted conversations between Nghia and Nguyen didn't do it enough for me. I think their relationship is the backbone of the movie that is meant to sustain me and sadly, it just didn't.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Shortcomings

Premise: An Asian American asshole stumbles through his relationships and life to realize that maybe he's the problem.

The best way I can describe this movie is "What if Ray from Girls was Asian American and lived in Berkley?" On paper, that sounds great. Ray became one of my favorite parts of Girls because of how well he cut through the bullshit. He was full of shit a lot of the time, but his indignation was sincere. As much as I enjoyed him though, I realized he worked best as a supporting character.

That's very much the same in Shortcoming as well. I'm with Justin H. Min's Ben much of the time. I'd probably be friends with him. We are kindred assholes in a lot of ways. I needed a break from him though. Especially given how many of his problems were of his own doing.

The movie overall is light on its feet. In his feature directorial debut, Randall Park assembles a strong assortment of underused actors and made a movie that plays really easy. He's not working out his demons with this. Adrian Tomine's screenplay, from their own graphic novel, is really incisive about a specific kind of Asian-American experience. An unsteady balance of indignation and assimilation.

Shortcomings is an easy watch although with frustration from a lead character who can't get out of his own way. It didn't take me very far by the end, but not all stories of personal growth have to be radical.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Disappearance of Shere Hite

Premise: A documentary about forgotten feminist researcher and icon Shere Hite.

I admit, I knew nothing about Shere Hite before this movie. The Hite Report sounded vaguely familiar, but that's about it. I was excited to hear about who she was in this documentary.

When it comes to documentaries, I don't need them all to be groundbreaking. I'm perfectly happy to watch the equivalent of a really entertaining Wikipedia article. That's mostly what this movie is. It covers Shere Hite's life, from her early days as a struggling student and model, to her later days as a self-imposed American expatriate. She lived a very interesting life. Frankly, you don't expect a woman who was the cover model for a Bond movie to become a renowned researcher and best-selling author. It was fascinating to see the discoveries she made in her groundbreaking sex research. And it was interesting to see how her freshman and sophomore publications mirrored the responses to Kinsey's first two reports. As soon as a sex researcher starts talking about the other gender, they get shot down even more.

I think the movie missed some opportunities to use the gift of hindsight. It's heavy on the sexism she faced at the time. There were no lack of talk shows she was on where everyone missed the points and attacked her. The doc approaches it all as though no one has done similar research since her work a half-century ago though. A major point of this doc is that people weren't ready for the truths she was revealing. People at the time often criticized her results. Why not supplement this doc with results of future studies that confirm how right she was?

I often describe documentaries as theses or discoveries. Either they are investigations into something where the filmmaker wants to find out where they will end up ('discoveries') or they are arguments for a specific perspective with evidence to support them ('theses'). The Disappearance of Shere Hite is absolutely a thesis documentary. So, it should lean into proving how she was right. Or, if her findings don't hold up still, it should say that but argue that her work brought topics to light at least. As is, this doc feels like an incomplete argument. Still, it taught me something about a new topic and did so in a reasonably entertaining way.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Bad Behaviour

Premise: A mother seeks enlightenment at a retreat while her daughter works as a stuntwoman for a movie. Eventually, they find their stories intersecting.

I watched this as part of the online Sundance film festival. That's coloring my perspective on this. In a way, Bad Behaviour is the ideal Sundance movie. Sundance is a high-profile film festival yet it's for independent films, often from new or emerging filmmakers. There are, of course, films that come right out of Sundance as fully-formed hits. CODA won Best Picture just last year out of Sundance. More often though, Sundance movies feel like Short Stories. They feel incomplete almost. Like a filmmaker had 80% of an idea for a movie and just decided to make it as is. The films get modest budgets and can attract name actors, but the bigger the star, the more it feels like they are doing this because they had a hole in their schedule.

Bad Behaviour is the debut feature from Alice Englert as writer and director. She put together a pretty strong cast for this, including herself, Jennifer Connelly, and Ben Wishaw. The film is very watchable. There are a lot of great performances. Englert is strikingly at ease on screen despite the many hats she's wearing. Connelly gets a showy performance. And Wishaw gets too be a little cooky. The film had my attention early on as it told separate stories of Lucy (Connelly) and her daughter Dylan (Englert). Lucy is a somewhat needy mother, calling Dylan more often than she'd like, even as Lucy is at an enlightenment retreat. At the retreat, Lucy, an actress who peaked as a teen, keeps finding her occasional breakthroughs ruined by a young model (Dasha Nekrasova) who has the world bending to her. Meanwhile, Dylan begins an on-set relationship with one of the stars of the movie. Both Lucy and Dylan's situations fall apart in spectacular fashion in back-to-back scenes in the middle of the movie that jolted me out of any complacency. Full props to Englert for her bubbling tension early on and payoff with those scenes.

After that mid-peak, the movie does sputter to an end. It brings the mother and daughter together to have them hash out their problems, but that doesn't amount to much. Only a couple days later I'm struggling to remember how the movie even ends. By the end, the main thing holding my interest was figuring out if Englert was trying to say anything about her own relationship with her famous mother. Englert's mother, after all, is Oscar winner Jane Campion. Fair or not, it got hard for me not to read into any conversation between Dylan and Lucy through that lens.

Taken on its own, Bad Behaviour feels incomplete. It's an idea that couldn't quite fill a movie. However, as an early showcase of what Englert brings as a director, it's pretty exciting. Englert shows real talent in bringing the material to life. She gets a nicely unhinged performance from Connelly who seems starved for interesting material. Even if this movie didn't blow me away, it makes me curious for what Englert might make next.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Fair Play

Premise: A relationship gets put to the test after an unexpected promotion shifts the power balance in a young couple working at a hedge fund.

My opinion of this film depends a lot on how I'm coming at it. As a sexy workplace thriller, this movie has the goods. Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich are hot as hell. They look great in expensive business attire. Writer/director Chloe Domont delivers in her depiction of the high stakes finance world and the excesses of it. If you are looking for the equivalent of a movie that would star Michael Douglas in the late 80s or 90s, Fair Play is absolutely it. I was super pleased to see both Dynevor and Ehrenreich knock it out of the park. I was worried that Dynevor wouldn't translate outside of the Bridgerton setting and I was worried that a couple underwhelming roles would tank Ehrenreich's career. Both come out looking great in this. Dynevor shows more strength than I've seen before and Ehrenreich wears unlikability better than expected.

It shouldn't be that surprising that Domont handles this material so well. Her mostly journeyman career as a director has included work on shows like Suits and Billions. She's used to working in this affluent world. What I found most impressive about her work here is how she let me hate this world fairly. I'm used to most depictions of the finance world one of two ways. It's either lifestyle porn or it's Sodom. Domont mostly lets the world speak for itself. Watching this, I both wanted no part of this world but also could see how it could attract someone with more of a competitive drive. Probably my favorite part of the movie is a sequence in the middle when the leads are both working furiously to earn back a massive loss at work.

However, if I look at this as a film about gender dynamics in a workplace and relationship, I'm underwhelmed. The plot of this movie is that Dynevor and Ehrenreich are carrying on a secret relationship. Soon after they get engaged, Dynevor gets a promotion they both thought Ehrenreich was going to get. At first, Ehrenreich is ecstatic for her. That's short-lived though, and he begins a death spiral, fueled by jealously and a realization that he lacks whatever x-factor she has. It's a very familiar story. Maybe it's a different setting than I've seen before, but it's nothing new. And it's very extreme. What hurts is that Dynevor is the sole lead in this. We aren't following Ehrenreich's decent as closely as her rise, so few of his jealous boyfriend reactions feel as nuanced as her responses to them. The movie does still end with a dynamite scene, but it's not quite great enough to make up for the lesser story beats that led up to it.

Most days, I'll choose to look at this from the "sexy, tense thriller" perspective. However, if I hear too many people praise the originality of the movie, my contrarian side may pop up.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Victim/Suspect

Premise: Rachel de Leon investigates cases of young women who report that they were sexually assaulted who are then arrested for making false claims.

Let me make one thing immediately clear: the idea of this documentary is great and valuable. It's infuriating hearing about all these cases of police not believing women about their sexual assaults, and it's genuinely dangerous for them to arrest the women based on minimal "evidence" of wrongdoing. Given the difficulty of prosecuting sexual assaults in the first place and the personal difficulty to even report, it's awful to think that people must be afraid of getting arrested if the police don't find the claim credible enough. I really want to make all this clear. I'm very much on the side of the topic of this documentary.

But I sure hated this documentary. I simply hate this style of documentary. It is way overproduced. There are so many unneeded establishing or background shots. I hated all the scenes that played like recreations of discussions that Rachel de Leon had. It all made this feel like I was watching a reality show like The Hills or The Kardashians. It was so polished that it made the topic seem more trivial.

This movie is also way too much about Rachel de Leon. In my Premise above, I was very intentional about how I said that. It's not a documentary about arresting the reporters of sexual assault featuring the work of Rachel de Leon. It is a Rachel de Leon movie about her investigating the topic. I think it's great that de Leon did all this work, but this isn't about her. I was so annoyed every time the movie cut away from a gutting tale of a women who was assaulted then not believed to show de Leon playing Smash Brothers and explain investigative journalism 101.

Here's a quick, imperfect test of a documentary. Look at the title. Victim/Suspect. If de Leon is neither of those, then I don't want her to be the star of this. I kept holding out a - well, hope is the wrong word, but it's the best I've got - hope that the film would eventually reveal that de Leon had a personal connection to this. Like it had happened to her or that one of the stories they’d covers was someone she knew already. Something to explain why she was so central to the movie. There wasn't anything like that.

As I said, I really do think the topic of this doc is valuable. I even think de Leon's work should be celebrated. Surely there must be a journalism 101 rule that a journalist should never be bigger than the story though. That's where Victim/Suspect misses the mark.

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Starling Girl

Premise: A teen girl in a fundamentalist Christian community has an affair with her youth pastor.

I was worried going into this movie. The film is set it Kentucky. I'm from Kentucky. More specifically, the film is set in a remote rural community in Kentucky. I'm from Louisville. But in both cases, people just hear Kentucky. Frankly, I've had my fill of unnuanced depictions of how backwards and backwoods Kentucky is. It's similar to how Indiana people must feel about every show about boring Midwest life getting set in Indiana. Look, I'm not even saying they are unfair depictions of large portions of Kentucky. The bar is just set higher now for what I'm in the mood to put up with.

It goes back to a point I made after watching Junebug. Most films and shows that get made do so from a few production hubs - Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta, maybe Austin, Vancouver, and a few others. The people who populate the film industry either grew up in it or moved from the middle of the country to, most likely, Los Angeles. To them, anything that isn't NY or LA is Mayberry. So, it gets very hard to find takes in film of places outside of those major hubs with any thoughtfulness or at least a lack of judgment.

So, with all those unfair concerns to bring to a little Sundance movie, I decided to watch The Starling Girl. After all, Eliza Scanlen has always been good in stuff.

In the nicest way possible, I'll say The Starling Girl is pretty average. I've seen every level of this movie before. An Education and The Tale did underage affairs. Saved and Yes God Yes covered sexual awakening in a small religious community. The Starling Girl doesn't carve out any space I haven't seen before. So, I had to focus on how well it was doing this familiar thing.

In that respect, it was well done. The cast is good. Since Sharp Objects, Eliza Scanlen has been specializing in a sort of innocent edge. I think it's a strong performance of someone realizing they don't fit in a place, despite their efforts. Most of the trouble she gets into in this movie stems from her chasing something she can't find in her normal life. Lewis Pullman as the much older youth pastor she falls for offers less, although that has more to do with the character than the performance. You see why Scanlen would be drawn to him, but there isn't much depth to him beyond that. As Scanlen's parents, Jimmi Simpson and Wrenn Schmidt bring much more lived-in performances than I expected. I really like how for them, this community is something they opted into. They lived a life before. That life took a toll on Simpson in particular. He made the conscious choice to build a family in this community, and like Scanlen, he struggles to conform to their standards. That is my favorite thing about this movie. While it doesn't endorse the world, it also isn't concerned with trying to tear it all down. It's a movie about not fitting in, not about making a value judgment and rebelling. I think that’s truer to life.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Fremont

Premise: An Afghani refugee attempts to find meaning and connection in her new life of the US.

Let me cut to the chase: I loved this movie and it's one of three from this Sundance that has really stuck with me. It's one of the most "Sundancy" movies I saw of the 20 Sundance offerings I watched. It's a simple movie with only a few locations. It relies more on mood than plot. Sometimes the decision to go black and white can really annoy me. I don't know if in this case it was a stylistic decision or a budgetary one. Either way, it matched star Anaita Wali Zada's vibe. This is a dryly comic performance. I loved how much she did by not giving an inch. Her silence in response to a prompt from another person was like saying "You know what I'm going to say to that, so how about you respond as though I said it already?" The fact that she gets a job as a fortune cookie writer seems like something that only exists in a movie, but I'm willing to go with it.

Ultimately, it's a movie about loneliness and struggling to connect. Zada manages to play her character, Donya, both incredibly guarded yet exposed in key ways. She's entirely impenetrable unless you know the exact way to get to her. That's why the meet-cute with Jeremy Allen White late is so, well, cute. And the amount of the meet-cute the movie gives is perfect.

I don't think Fremont will work for everyone. It seems a bit cold at first and you do have to work to find the things to grab hold of. Like Donya though, once you get underneath the hard exterior, there's a really sweet movie underneath.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Missing

Formula: Searching + Screen Gems

Searching is a favorite movie of mine. It hit all of my sweet spots. I enjoy all forms of Found Footage. I respect the challenge of Searching only being told via computer screens. And, since I’m very bad at predicting twists or trying to solve mysteries as I watch something, I got to enjoy every new turn and development as the movie progressed. I had an absolute blast watching it in theaters and I still enjoy watching the process of it in repeat viewings. I wasn’t aware that Missing was being made, but when I found out there was a pseudo-sequel to Searching coming out, I was a lock to see it.

Missing does share much of Searching’s DNA. It’s also a story of a protagonist finding a missing loved one who disappeared, all told through computer screens. This time, it is a teen girl, June (Storm Reid) who goes looking for her mother (Nia Long) after she doesn’t come back from a trip with her boyfriend (Ken Leung) to Colombia. It's all told through assorted devices and June is another person who exclusively uses Facetime and livestreams for every moment of her life.

In the general sense, I got what I needed out of the movie. The story is sufficiently loopy. It's fairly inventive with ways to progress the story through screens. And it embraces the challenge of much of the story being in a completely different country. It's fair to say I'm likely to see any film in this style, simply because I like the style.

However, Missing is the movie I worried Searching would be. It's a very Screen Gems movie. Screen Gems is, of course, Sony's genre wing. I associate it with extreme stories. That Beyonce movie Obsessed is the prototypical Screen Gems movie in my mind. Sort of a throwback thriller that would rather go big than go smart. Missing simply goes too big in every sense. The story itself if huge. There are murders and frame jobs and hidden identities in an international plot. If the Searching story is just barely plausible, the Missing story is completely unbelievable. There's also the feeling of a lot of short cuts. All the footage is super crisp and perfectly lit. To catch scenes, too often the explanation is just that the camera happened to still be on. With the found footage style, I'm pretty lenient on what footage I'll believe, but even I have a line. Missing crosses that line. It makes the mistake of thinking that the reason Searching worked was the style, not the creativity to make the style work.

If it isn't clear by now, my advice is to go watch Searching. If you loooooved Searching, you might like Missing. If you were tepid on Searching, absolutely skip Missing.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Movie Reaction: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Formula: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse + More Multi-Verse

Hello there. It's been a while. I've missed you. I've been on a hiatus for a few months now. I've been in a rut for a while, trying to reassess some long-term projects I've been working on: figuring out what is burning me out and what is giving me life, so to speak. I needed to poke my head out for just a moment though to talk about a movie that really excited me.

I love what Sony has stumbled onto with their Spider-Man rights. The MCU has a lot of things I love about it, but it can fall into ruts where it feels like they are making more installments simply because they are supposed to. Sony did get in on this by loaning Spider-Man to the MCU. That has freed them up to let other ideas come to them more naturally. I don't love the Venom movies. I do like they they are happy to be this odd detour when it comes to a Marvel universe. It certainly doesn't feel like any circumstances are forcing them to make the movies. It just seems like a fun idea the pursued. As bad as Morbius was, I don't wholly reject the idea of it, existing in its own world.

That same freedom led to the Spider-Verse movies. Into the Spider-Verse wasn't positioned as a blockbuster. It really seems to exist because someone had a clever enough idea that Sony decided to go ahead with it. I loved Into the Spider-Verse in a way I didn't see coming. Despite that, I still went into Across the Spider-Verse wondering if the first movie was a fluke.

It was not.

Like most sequels, Across the Spider-Verse expands the world of the first movie. While Into the Spider-Verse was about a single fractured reality inviting others into it, Across the Spider-Verse is a full-on dimension-hopping adventure. About a year has passed since the first movie, and Miles (Shameik Moore) has improved at being Spider-Man. He feels alone though, as all Spider-Men do. He has this secret identity but no one close that knows. It turns out, all the adventure in the first movie did - where he met Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), and the gang - was make him feel even more alone with them gone. Shortly after a run in with a seemingly hapless villain who uses holes to move around (voiced by Jason Schwartzman), Gwen finally shows up to hang out with Miles. There's a distance though that he doesn't understand. He ends up following her to another dimension when she leaves and discovers an entire collective of Spider-Men: one that he's not welcome in. This group is led by a brooding Spider-Man named Miguel (Oscar Isaac) who teaches Miles some hard truths he refuses to accept. As you would expect, MIles' lack of acceptence has inter-Verse consequences and leads to a showdown with huge stakes.

It's a wonky plot, but much like Into the Spider-Verse, Across manages to keep it straightforward while making it as much about personal stakes as world-ending consequences. It still has that great animation design that feels comic book-y and mixes in a lot of different styles comfortably.

What remains my favorite thing about this movie, as with the previous, is how perfectly it uses the Spider-Man mythology. Superhero ubiquity can be a gift and a curse. We all know the story of Spider-Man. Often, movies will realize this and try to find a new way to dress it up. It's a different angle of the same shot (i.e. we see Bruce Wayne's parents die a dozen times but never look at why that exact event is so essential). Into the Spider-Verse leans into everyone already knowing the mythology. It's not that it winks at the audience though. Rather, it offers the audience an alternative to what they already know. And Across the Spider-Verse hits this even harder. It's not just "what if the same beats happen in every story." It's "what if those beats are the foundation?" and "what happens if you change those beats?"

Simply put, I'm buzzing after waiching this. The movie is still full of Spider-Man jokes and Spider-Man wit. It's a massively rewarding watch for anyone who goes in thinking they know the Spider-Man story. It also has a frenetic energy and sense of scale that most animated movies lack. While this is a stylized cartoon world, the fights and chases are exciting. If I'm being honest, I don't need to find the biggest screen and best sound system to enjoy most great animated movies. Up worked just fine on a normal screen. Across the Spider-Verse is an event animated film that I wish I saw on XD or IMAX.

The only bad thing I can say about the movie is that it ends on a To Be Continued and now I have to wait to see the next one.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend