"Barb and Star" is Delightfully Bizarre

I don't really miss the "Austin Powers" films, or the "Zoolander" films, or anything else from the sketch comedy-infused parodies of the 1990s and 2000s. I suspect that because I didn't know that "Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar" was a throwback to this era of comedy, it caught me by surprise, and ended up landing better with me than any of those films ever did. Maybe it's just because I respond better to the kitschy charms of a pair of middle-aged midwestern ladies who just want to go on vacation, than the charms of Austin Powers or Derek Zoolander.


In any case, "Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar" is a weird, but terribly charming movie. Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, who previously co-wrote "Bridesmaids" together, are back again, both writing and starring in this feature as Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig). We first meet these two culotte-clad besties as they're being fired from their jobs at a Jennifer Convertibles, and then being ousted from their "talking club" for lying about it. So, they decide to go to the beach town of Vista Del Mar, Florida for a vacation to forget their troubles. Alas, at the same time the evil Dr. Lady (also Wiig) has dispatched her faithful henchman Edgar (Jamie Dornan), to unleash a fiendish plot to kill all the inhabitants of Vista Del Mar with weaponized mosquitos. Yes, it is *that* kind of movie.


The film milks the absurdist premise for all it's worth, following both the mundane and outlandish adventures of Barb and Star in a universe that keeps getting stranger and nuttier as the film goes on. There are spontaneous musical numbers, talking animals, ridiculous action sequences, and celebrity cameos. However, some of the best gags are the simpler ones, like a hotel pianist named Richard Cheese (Mark Jonathan Davis) who sings very inappropriate lyrics, or the talking club being lead by the despotic Debbie (Vanessa Bayer). Barb and Star themselves turn out to be quite loveable, leaning hard into every stereotype of being whitebread midwestern women in their 40s. They talk incessantly, are aggressively pleasant, and love shopping for the cheapest and tackiest items imaginable. On the other hand, they also turn out to be very receptive to having a drug-fueled threesome with a handsome stranger.


The biggest problem I see with "Barb and Star" is that it's not as funny as it could be. It's a solid feel-good movie and a nice escape from reality - especially for those of us still stuck in quarantine - but I found myself more happily distracted by the pretty colors and threats of impending doom than actually laughing. And I expect that it's probably only going to really appeal to a particular niche of viewers - a little older, and a little nostalgic for the glory days of '90s sketch comedy. It also helps to have actually encountered women like Barb and Star before, just to have a cultural point of reference. I suspect this one was dumped on VOD, because the film's distributor couldn't figure out what to do with it.


Still, this is a rare bird that deserves appreciation. I appreciate how oddly wholesome the film is. It's got plenty of sex jokes and some profanity, but it never gets as crass as you might expect it to. As ridiculous as it gets, at its core it remains a sweet-natured movie about the power of friendship. Barb and Star's relationship woes drive the story, and are always relatable and sympathetic. While it's fun to watch Kristen Wiig's take on her very own Dr. Evil figure, she's more entertaining as Star. Annie Mumolo also needs to be in way more movies, as Barb is a delight. And learning that Jamie Dornan has such good comedic timing is the film's best surprise.


Alas, Vista Del Mar isn't a real place, but I'm glad we got to visit.

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Rank 'Em: "Love, Death & Robots" Year Two

The Netflix science-fiction animated anthology series is back for round two, with a smaller episode count, and somewhat toned down content, but gorgeous eye candy.  I feel the level of quality is about on par with the first batch of shorts overall, but the quality varies considerably.  Below, find my rankings, from best to worst.

Very mild spoilers ahead.

"The Drowned Giant" - Based on a J.G. Ballard short story, written and directed by Tim Miller, this is the weirdest, most contemplative short, which works very well as an allegory for man's tendency to abuse and commodify all of nature's most awesome creations.  I especially like the tone of this one, the poignant, scholarly narration over these fantastical images.  Even the final punchline with the circus attraction is strangely compelling.   

"Ice" - This year's Robert Valley directed short looks absolutely fantastic.  It's easily got the best animation, character designs, and production designs, creating an alien environment that shifts between hostile and gorgeous.  There's not much of a story, but the chase and action sequences are really well done, and there's just enough conflict and character growth to make it feel satisfying.  This is easily the best executed one of the batch.     

"All Through the House" - It's one joke that goes for five minutes, and stops exactly when it should.  This version of Santa Claus is certainly one of the most original takes I've seen in a long while, and the CGI animation and certain sound effects are well executed.  The contrast between the Christmasy settings and the, uh, less traditional elements has a lot of impact.  The kids' reaction shots are what really sell it, and that last line is perfect.      

"Automated Customer Service" - No surprise that the most humorous short is another adaptation of a John Scalzi story.  This one has a lot of appeal, with its heavily caricatured geriatric heroes, and an increasingly malevolent automatic voice messaging system that is at least as much of a threat as the killer robot on the loose.  I enjoy the way this one escalates, and you've got to love a short with a stupid looking dog.     

"Snow in the Desert" - This is my favorite of the shorts with photorealistic animation, and I like the way that it ends.  However, everything else about it isn't very memorable - the characters, the dialogue, the worldbuilding, and the themes.  It feels like a promising start to something that could have been much more striking, if the creators had put in more work on the characters.  It gets points for some good moments, though.    

"The Tall Grass" - I really like the designs and the animation style here, which is CGI done to look less smooth and polished than the norm.  However, there's just not much to the story.  It's a spooky little monster tale with a sinister ending, but it's too brief to feel like anything substantive.  I don't think it's a bad short, but it's the one I think could have seen the most improvement from being a few minutes longer.  

"Life Hutch" - This one is frustrating.  It's got Michael B. Jordan as the lead.  It's based on a Harlan Ellison short story.  The animation is so good, I'm not sure which shots are live action and which ones aren't.  However, it's so generic and so unimaginative in the way everything plays out, the short ends up being very underwhelming.  This one came across as more of an effects demo or test than a proper narrative piece.   

"Pop Squad" - Most of my objections to this one are due to the bland, generic visuals - which look way too much like outdated video game cutscenes - and the awful soap opera dialogue.  The antinatalist premise could have been more interesting if handled differently, but the choices here are so obvious and so preachy that they left me unmoved.  The opening shot looks great, but I'm afraid it's all downhill from there.    

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"Invincible" Gets Intense

Minor spoilers ahead.

We've reached the stage where we're seeing regular subversions of the superhero genre in the mainstream, an impulse that is generating all kinds of interesting media.  Amazon Prime has a new animated series, "Invincible," that is one of the better examples of this trend.  Like "The Boys," it takes all the usual tropes of your typical superhero origin story, and proceeds to do something outrageously violent and unnerving with them.  Superheroes have been so closely tied to animation, that it feels very satisfying to have a show like this really take advantage of the strengths of the medium to create something so unapologetically adult.  

Created by Robert Kirkman, based on his own comics series, "Invincible" takes place in a world very familiar with superheroes and supervillains.  Various super-teams are active, and it seems like there's always some mad scientist, interdimensional invader, or super-powered criminal wreaking havoc somewhere.  Our main character is teenager Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), the son of the most powerful superhero on Earth, Omniman (J.K. Simmons), and a lovely realtor named Debbie (Sandra Oh).  After getting his powers, Mark decides to become the superhero Invincible and follow in his father's footsteps.  However, he soon discovers the difficulties of balancing school, superhero work, and his relationships with his friends, William (Andrew Rannells) and Amber (Zazie Beetz).  And Omniman is also keeping secrets.  

"Invincible" is one of the few animated series with hour-long episodes.  Otherwise, it looks deceptively like your standard DC or Marvel superhero series of the past few years.  The designs are brightly colored and many major characters are based on DC superheroes.  There are analogues to the Justice League and the Teen Titans in the series, with Omniman clearly a take on Superman.  The animation is a little higher quality than the norm, especially the action sequences, which are beautifully fluid and often epic in scope.  This also makes the jarring instances of gory violence all the more shocking.  The voice cast is great all around, with a significant number of high profile actors in the mix.  The superhero group, the Guardians of the Globe, have members that are all voiced by alumni of "The Walking Dead."

There's a lot being made of how mature the content in the show is, specifically the absurd amount of violence.  However, for the most part the story plays out on roughly the same level you'd expect from your average teen show.  Mark spends most of the series dealing with typical adolescent woes - his love life, parental expectations, and his own uncertainty about the future.  He meets other teen superheroes like Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs), whose own issues are explored in subplots.  Really, the series only feels unusually adult because animated superhero media is often so infantilized.  The content here isn't remotely on the same level as something like "The Boys."  There's little sexuality, no nudity, and barely even any strong language.            

However, the writing is very, very good.  I like the way that this universe is set up and explored, and how we get to know so many interesting secondary characters.  I love that Debbie is a major character who has her own storylines, and we get a good look at her relationship with Omniman.  I love the way that Omniman is so morally gray, and he's less two-dimensional than someone like Homelander, in spite of being animated.  I love the wide variety of villains, and how normalized the fantasy aspects of superheroing are in the "Invincible" universe.  And I appreciate the way that Kirkman plays on our expectations of superhero media to deliver some good humor and thoughtful commentary.     

    

"Invincible" has already been renewed for multiple seasons, and since it's based on a comics series that has already wrapped up, I expect that the level of quality will remain consistent. I'm very excited to see how this is all going to play out, and what other surprises the show has in store.

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Winslet Wins in "Mare of Easttown"

Spoilers for the first episode ahead.

The prestige miniseries about a  female police detective solving a crime in a small community with a lot of secrets has become its own genre, with "Top of the Lake" and "Sharp Objects" standing out as some of the better ones.  "Mare of Easttown" sets its story in Eastern Pennsylvania, and its success is due in large part to how well creator Brad Inglesby and director Craig Zobel are able to capture the specificity of this corner of the world and its staunch, blue collar characters - their particular dialect, lifestyle quirks, and behaviors.  Family bonds are strong, and every family seems to have ties to every other family, but of course there are lurking dysfunctions and tragedies everywhere. 

Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) is a local police detective, and former basketball star, who has failed to find a missing teenage girl, Katie Bailey (Caitlin Houlahan) for a year.  Her family life is complicated, and she currently lives with her mother Helen (Jean Smart), teenage daughter Siobhan (Angourie Rice), and young grandson Drew (Izzy King).  Things escalate after another teenage girl, Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny), turns up murdered, one with a troubled history and ties to the family of Mare's best friend Lori Ross (Julianne Nicholson).  A county detective, Colin Zabel (Evan Peters), becomes Mare's new partner in the investigation, and a visiting academic, Richard (Guy Pearce), becomes her new love interest.

I like that the  first episode of "Easttown" takes its time to really get the audience situated in it's universe before any major events happen.  This is a place where drug use and poverty are rampant, teen pregnancy is commonplace, and infidelity seems to be a given.  The middle-aged women - Mare, Lori, and Katie's mother Dawn (Enid Graham), are the ones keeping families from falling apart worse than they already have, while the men around them are ineffectual or absent at best.  Everyone seems to have suffered a long list of traumas, and the worst of the neglect and abuse falls on girls like Erin.  I've never been more appreciative that a show cast age-appropriate actors to play the teenagers, so we get the full impact of seeing these young characters in some truly awful situations.  

Kate Winslet anchors the show, giving Mare a grounded toughness and grit that is very appealing.  She looks very much her actual age, and is styled very minimally, so I buy her as a police detective, and more importantly as a mother and grandmother trying, and often failing, to keep her family together.  She's still beautiful and charismatic enough that it's no mystery why Guy Pearce's character is attracted to her, but at the same time it seems perfectly normal to see her eating junk food and wrangling a small child at the doctor's office.  As much as "Easttown" is about a murder investigation, it's also just as much a character piece about Mare.  I like the way the show offers a slow, but steady stream of information about her past, balancing her personal troubles with the unfolding investigation so neither ever dominates the narrative.  

Backing up Winslet is a very strong cast, with Jean Smart and Julianne Nicholson turning in other standout performances.  There are several younger actors who are new to me - Cailee Spaeny, Mackenzie Lansing, and Jack Mulhern - and who I expect I'll be seeing more from in the future.  It's really the performances and the worldbuilding that make the show, much moreso than the fairly rote murder mystery that plays out with a few too many twists and red herrings.  "Easttown" probably would have benefitted from cutting an episode or two, removing some of the more obviously manufactured cliff hangers and false leads.   

Still, this is all around one of the best miniseries in this vein that I've seen in a long time.  It's a treat to see Winslet in a role that fits her talents, and the production does everything right.  This is also a comparatively easy watch next to some of the other prestige television we've seen recently, and not nearly as bleak as I was expecting it to be.  In the end, "Easttown" wants to uplift Mare and women like her, and that's always a welcome thing to see.   

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The First Six Episodes of "The Nevers"

I spent significant chunks of the 1990s and the 2000s watching Joss Whedon shows, and there was never really a question that I was going to watch this one.  Whedon has been cancelled for being a terrible person, and HBO has done its best to distance him from the latest series he created, "The Nevers."  He hasn't appeared in any of the marketing, and will be replaced as showrunner for any subsequent seasons. However, "The Nevers" is so clearly a Whedon project, featuring so many familiar Whedonisms, it's impossible to ignore his contributions.  

So, in an alternate universe version of Victorian London, a strange event causes many women and a few men to develop mysterious superpowers.  Dubbed, "The Touched," they're treated as threats to the ruling elite, as a new resource to be exploited, or as unfortunates to be saved, depending on the person.  Two of the Touched, Amalia True (Laura Donnelly) and Penance Adair (Ann Skelly), run the Orphanage, a home for the Touched that have nowhere else to go.  They're supported by an invalid spinster, Mrs. Bidlow (Olivia Williams), and staunchly opposed by Lord Massen (Pip Torrens), who is convinced the Touched are dangerous.  Other characters include the murderous madwoman Maladie (Amy Manson), a hedonist entrepreneur Hugo Swann (James Norton),  Mrs. Bidlow's conflicted brother Augie (Tom Riley), a West Indian physician, Dr. Cousens (Zackary Momoh), and Inspector Frank Mundi (Ben Chaplin).

Among The Touched, there's Lucy (Elizabeth Berrington), Primrose (Anna Devlin), Harriet (Kira Sonia Sawar), Desirée (Ella Smith), Mary (Eleanor Tomlinson), and Myrtle (Viola Prettejohn) - and I won't reveal their specific powers, because discovering those is half the fun.  And the show really is an awful lot of fun, in a big, splashy kind of way, even though I'm not sure whether it's actually good.  It's every single Joss Whedon series (and a few of the movies) condensed into one big, messy Victorian "X-men" pastiche.  The pace is quick, big new reveals and twists are coming constantly, and HBO provides a hefty budget to make it all look fabulous.  In the third episode, there's a sensational fight scene between a man who can walk on water and one of our heroines that takes place both on and under the surface of a lake.

However, and it's a big however, "The Nevers" also features many of Joss Whedon's usual bad habits - there's a whole, terrible subplot involving a skeevy brothel, the dialogue is very stylized and often sounds ridiculous for this time period, and there's an awful lot of hastily skipping over the uncomfortable implications of certain situations.  You can tell with the minority characters that he's trying to be better, but he's not trying hard enough.  And if you're at all familiar with Joss Whedon's work, nearly every single character feels derivative of one from an earlier series.   Amalia has Buffy the Vampire Slayer's power set and quips, plus the existential issues of Echo from "Dollhouse."  Penance is essentially Kaylee from "Firefly" with an Irish accent.  Maladie is another "fun" mentally ill person.     

          

It makes me feel very guilty about enjoying the series as much as I do.  However, there are many, many other very talented people involved in the show.  The actors, especially Laura Donnelly and Olivia Williams, are strong, and mostly able to make the show feel less silly than it is.  The production design and costuming work is gorgeous.  The VFX crew is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.  The amount of work involved in putting this show together was clearly monumental, and it's an awful shame that it's been compromised by Whedon's bad behavior.   

"The Nevers" is at its best in little moments and specific scenes.  And there are enough of them that I keep being convinced to ignore all the uncomfortable parts of the show and watch the next episode.  There's clearly enough good pieces here for an entertaining, memorable series, and I sincerely hope that the show will be able to go on to be better without Whedon than it was with him.     

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"Infinity Train," Part Four

After the deeply emotionally fraught third season of "Infinity Train," I wasn't expecting a fourth one to happen so quickly, but apparently this was already in production last year, and the creators were hoping to continue the show for several more seasons. In fact, this latest batch of episodes serves as a terrible tease for the following season - which is not going to be made for the foreseeable future.

Min-Gi (Johnny Young) and Ryan (Sekai Murashige) are a pair of Asian-Canadian musicians who have been best friends their whole lives.  They start to grow apart after graduation, with guitarist Ryan striking out on his own as a solo performer, and synth-player Min-Gi getting ready for college.  They wind up on the Infinity Train together, with personal growth numbers that are mysteriously linked.  They team up with a sassy talking concierge bell named Kez (Minty Lewis), who is a magnet for trouble, and meet many other creatures as they try to find their exit from the train.  

This season of "Infinity Train" is much lighter and goes down easier than the last two, but it also doesn't reach the same kind of highs.  I like the new characters, especially Kez, who is really the first of the train's fantasy denizens who learns to be a better person alongside the two leads.  Min-Gi and Ryan are a fun pair with relatable problems, and the writers do a good job of giving them flaws and faults.  They're among the oldest protagonists we've had so far, and their woes feel more personal to the creators.  The train cars we see in this season are great.  My favorite is the car with an endless line to get into a club.  A close second is the art museum car, home to one of the creepier monsters that "Infinity Train" has featured.  This season is lower stakes and functions as a bit of a breather compared to the others, but it does have its share of thrills and chills.  

The production value of "Infinity Train" remains consistently high, and I continue to marvel at the talent involved.  J.K. Simmons and Margo Martindale pop up to voice some pretty wacky minor characters - a giant pig baby and a butterfly judge respectively - and there are a few returning actors who I won't spoil here.  The music is more prominent this time around, because so much of the plot has to do with music and the give and take of a creative partnership.  Chrome Canyon has been one of the show's MVPs, and I'm glad that this season gave them a chance to seize a bit more of the spotlight.  

For the show's fans, however, the most interesting elements are happening around  the edges of the main story.  This season takes place in the 1980s, when the Infinity Train was a very different place from how it appeared in previous seasons.  There are events happening offscreen during the course of this season that hint at filling in important backstory for other major characters we met in other seasons.  You can piece together a few things, but the big revelations were reportedly saved for the fifth season, which was supposed to have a story that ran concurrent to this one.  

So again, it's frustrating that the show is leaving so much unfinished business.  I am really gunning for "Infinity Train" to return in the future in some form, even if it's not as an animated series.  There are still an awful lot of mysteries that need resolving, and a lot of this world that I'd still love to see further explored.       

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"The Flight Attendant" Has Great Highs

The best thing about "The Flight Attendant," created by Steve Yockey for HBO Now, is that it's very fast-paced and engaging.  It's one of those murder mystery shows where nearly every episode ends on a cliffhanger, and you get satisfying payoffs constantly.  The second best thing is Kaley Cuoco, playing the ordinary woman who wakes up next to a dead body, and spends the rest of the season trying to piece together what happened, while getting thoroughly tangled up in a larger conspiracy.  Well, she's not quite ordinary.  In the grand tradition of detective noir, Cuoco plays Cassie Bowden, a flight attendant who lives an enviable party-girl life, but has a lot of secret vices and terrible traumas in her past.  

Cuoco has no trouble carrying the show, bringing just the right amount of comic energy to keep the proceedings light, while still selling the darker, thornier psychological underpinnings.  The murder sends her life into a downward spiral, and Cassie engages in a lot of self-destructive behavior.  However, it takes a while to appreciate how screwed up she actually is, because Cassie is so vibrant and has a fun personality.  She is very good at pretending that everything is alright.  Her fellow stewardess Megan (Rosie Perez) and her attorney gal-pal Annie (Zosia Mamet) both automatically call Cassie their best friend, even though neither of them know her all that well.  Her brother Davey (T.R. Knight) is more reluctant to trust her, as he's the only one who knows the truth about her troubling past and lingering demons.      

When the murder happens, Cassie gets so blackout drunk she only has fragments of memories of the night she spent with the victim, Alex (Michiel Huisman).  Soon, she's digging into his life for clues, while being stalked by a scary assassin lady (Michelle Gomez), and hounded by FBI agents (Merle Dandridge, Nolan Gerard Funk).  The show employs a neat gimmick where Cassie occasionally pops into a physical space that represents her mind, and she interacts with a version of Alex as she remembers him.  This dramatizes her internal thoughts in an appealing way, and allows for more fanciful visuals.  Sometimes Cassie and Alex will argue over what to do next, or puzzle out clues together.  Sometimes they'll observe what's going on outside of Cassie's head, and comment on the scene together.  Cassie's childhood traumas are represented by deer and rabbits, and they can literally invade her headspace.

Even without these jaunts into quasi-fantasy, "The Flight Attendant" takes place in a pleasantly heightened world, where corporate espionage and organized crime seem to be commonplace, and everybody's got a secret.  Being a flight attendant has never looked more appealing, as the characters are constantly travelling all over the globe and enjoying the local nightlife and amenities.  The action takes place across three cities - Bangkok, New York, and Rome - and it all looks gorgeous.  The show features copious amounts of eye-catching production design, and Cassie has a wardrobe to die for.  The jazzy score from Blake Neely does a lot to set the mood, keeping tensions high during the chase and suspense sequences, and underlining the nervous humor.

There's not much new or novel in "The Flight Attendant," but the execution makes all the difference.  Even though a significant amount of the narrative is about watching Cassie hit rock bottom and confronting the ugly truths about herself, the show functions very well as an appealing piece of glitzy wish-fulfillment.  Our heroine is sympathetic and relatable, but also credibly a glamour girl who is sharp enough to step into the roles of detective and spy.  Cassie even manages to attract handsome casual partners on every continent, including Buckley (Colin Woodell) and Enrico (Alberto Frezza), with a refreshing lack of self-consciousness.      

I look forward to future seasons of this one.

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It's the Snyder Cut!

First things first.  The four hour long director's cut of "Justice League" is a significant improvement over the 2017 version.  The tonal clashes are mostly gone, and all the characters are much more fleshed out and well-developed, especially the villain Steppenwolf and the new superheroes, Cyborg and Flash.  Zack Snyder is fully in control here, and indulging in all his favorite bits of stylistic indulgence - slow motion, awkward needle drops, and desaturated visuals.  The bleak, joyless atmospherics are actually kind of nostalgic.

The theatrical cut of "Justice League" had the fundamental problem of being a half-finished project that was overhauled by Joss Whedon, a director with completely different sensibilities from Zack Snyder.  Even if I still prefer Whedon's punchier take on some of the material to Snyder's, the directors' cut is a better experience  because it's finally something cohesive.  The four hour run time doesn't feel overlong, because the whole thing has been restructured into serialized chapters.  The characters gel better.  The plot points are set up better.  There is actual suspense and buildup to the big, stupid fight scenes.  And make no mistake that the fight scenes are very big and very stupid, but that's what we're all here for, right? 

What surprised me the most about the new version is how much of "Justice League" has been entirely reworked.  There must be at least an hour of completely new and restored footage, including a mostly different third act, and additional scenes to set up Aquaman, Flash, and Cyborg.  Remember that this was the movie that introduced Aquaman?   Warners didn't skimp on the budget, so all the effects and creature animation look stellar.  Superman's CGI upper lip issues are gone.  The villains, Steppenwolf and Darkseid, are still cartoonish and half-baked, but they look amazing.  Another big change is the score, supplied entirely by Junkie XL instead of Danny Elfman, keeping everything moody and grim.     

Despite all the improvements, this version still has many problems.  It's ponderous, overserious, and downright gloomy at times.  Roy Fisher looks great, but is stuck with one scowling expression for the whole film.  I miss some of the laugh lines from the theatrical version.  I don't like the extended epilogues at all, and think they're easily the worst part of the film.  A lot of scenes feels tacked on, especially the cameos from other DC characters.  Some of the more fundamental issues, like the angsty depiction of Superman, still carry over from the previous installments.  I'm sad to say that Amy Adams and Henry Cavill still seem utterly disconnected as Lois and Clark.  And Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne gets more screen time, but not any more depth.   

I know that everyone has complained about Snyder's use of slow-motion to the point where it's kind of a given, but good grief, he really overdoes it here.  It's gotten to the point of parody, especially combined with the self-serious music and certain aesthetic choices.  I can already see the spoofs involving a certain sesame seed, a photograph of Kevin Costner, and the already infamous "ancient lamentation" tracks.  Still, I have to admire Snyder for doubling down and committing to this.  I mean, if it's going to be "Zack Snyder's Justice League," he might as well go full Zack Snyder.   

A film the size of "Justice League" getting a redo is practically unheard of, and I'm happy that Snyder made good use of the opportunity.  Considering all the story trouble that his previous DCCU movies have had, I wonder if the problem has been that he doesn't function so well under the intense pressure of blockbuster filmmaking's usual constraints - the rushed schedule, limited screen time, and crazy expectations.  On the other hand, the longer version of "Batman v. Superman" didn't do that film any favors.  Or maybe, it just wasn't long enough.     

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The Great Directors Week: My Favorite Ang Lee Film

I've been spacing these posts a little too far apart, and letting them pile up.  So, I'm devoting a full week to new installments of my "Great Directors" series.  Enjoy.  

"The Wedding Banquet" is a film about love, not just romantic, but also filial - about the lengths that a son will go to in order to maintain his parents' happiness.  They expect him to find a wife, to have children, and to follow the only path that they know to a happy and respectable life.  Played by Gua Ah-leh and Sihung Lung, the parents are lovely, wonderful people who care very much for their son and do not deserve to have their hearts broken.  The son, Wai-Tung, played by Winston Chao, is also a very sympathetic figure who deserves to have a happy life with his American partner.  No one can be expected to change their ways, but it turns out that there's quite a lot of room for compromise.  

I saw "The Wedding Banquet" for the first time a few months after I saw "The Farewell," and it was everything that I wanted that movie to be.  Maybe it's because Ang Lee's portrayal of the Taiwanese and American culture clash feels much closer to my own experience, even though I was never a gay man in the 1990s.   I suspect it's because Wai-Tung's relationship with his parents and other relatives overseas is more like mine - with the mismatched expectations, the long distances, and the little fictions that everyone maintains to keep the comfortable status quo.  In "The Farewell," Awkwafina argues with her relatives about whether it's morally right to maintain a lie being told to an elder.  In "The Wedding Banquet," such discussion is not even attempted.  It's unthinkable to upend the traditional norms and admit the subterfuge, even when everyone figures out the truth in the end.    

Built around the happy chaos of the parents' visit to America, a hastily conducted sham marriage, and the complicated fallout, the film is structured as a classic farce with many satirical moments.  However, it's a comedy that has very few punchlines and is far more interested in its characters' relationships and communication issues than the usual laughs and mayhem.  Still, the movie is very funny, especially the wild wedding banquet of the title, where Lee is able to put the raucous Chinese wedding traditions onscreen in their full glory, and gives himself one of the greatest director cameos of all time.  The authenticity of the portrayal makes all the difference - the drinking, the pageantry, and the tight-knit community where everybody knows everybody else, even thousands of miles away from Taiwan.  

I'm not surprised at all that the film is based on events from the filmmakers' own lives, or that Ang Lee, Neil Peng, and James Schamus wrote and rewrote the film in both English and Chinese multiple times, before finally settling on a film that was a good mixture of both.  This was only Ang Lee's second feature, a rare Taiwanese and American co-production that raised his profile considerably on both sides of the Pacific.  Nobody else made films about Asian characters like this in the 90s, or showed the full complexity of their family and social dynamics.  It was because of his work on "The Wedding Banquet" that Lee was hired to direct "Sense and Sensibility," which really launched him to superstardom.

Lee's filmmaking style was still coming into focus at this stage in his career, but he was already very comfortable with intimate dialogue scenes, and doing a lot of interesting things with settings and space.  I like how he works in so many wider shots that simply let the action play out, and observes the characters from a more distant vantage point.  It does so much to help ground the story in a contemporary, familiar milieu.  Frankly, as Lee's cinema has gotten more and more removed from his early films and early subject matter over the years, it's a side of him that I've missed.  More filmmakers are making films about the Chinese and Taiwanese diaspora, but nobody makes them like he does.      

What I've Seen - Ang Lee

The Wedding Banquet (1993)

Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)

Sense and Sensibility (1995)

The Ice Storm (1997)

Ride with the Devil (1999)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Hulk (2003)

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Life of Pi (2012)

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016)

Gemini Man (2019)

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The Great Directors Week: My Favorite Frank Perry Film

I've been spacing these posts a little too far apart, and letting them pile up.  So, I'm devoting a full week to new installments of my "Great Directors" series.  Enjoy.  

Frank and Eleanor Perry were a husband and wife filmmaking team, sometimes referred to as "The Perrys."  Frank directed and Eleanor wrote.  Their work was almost all contemporary dramas, often intensely psychological character pieces.  The partnership resulted in six films together, and several more separately, after they parted ways.  Their success often feels like a reflection of the era when they thrived - New Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that brief moment where movies could be about truly adult subjects and adult themes without compromise.  You could make weird, difficult to categorize films like "The Swimmer," or "Diary of a Mad Housewife."  You could make a tragic, painful movie about growing up, like "Last Summer."

There was a vein of deeply felt cynicism about relationships and social constructs in the 50s and 60s that seemed to run through everything.  "Last Summer" embodies this, following the friendships and romances that develop among four bored teenagers vacationing on New York's Fire Island.  From the outset, the dynamics are unbalanced.  Two of the kids are from wealthy families, and the other two are not.  One girl is beautiful, cruel, and beginning to test her ability to manipulate and influence others.  One girl is overweight, awkward, and already touched by tragedy.  You can see the awful ending coming long before it happens, but there's such a familiarity and such a magnetic pull to the early scenes of the kids' casual encounters and conversations.  Everyone is so heartbreakingly normal, and the horrible things that happen to them are heartbreakingly normal too.

The lazy summer atmosphere, the empty landscapes, and the occasional glimpses of uninterested parents quickly exiting the frame, all contribute to the creation of this rare, specific moment in time where the story unfolds.  You know immediately what kind of headspace the four characters are inhabiting before they even say a word.  Body language is often more important than the dialogue, especially in the case of Rhoda, the awkward, idealistic girl who is marked from the beginning as an outsider to the group.  Rhoda was played by Catherine Burns, who received an Academy Award nomination for her work in this film, but reportedly hated the end result.  I don't blame her.  The performance is brilliant and vulnerable, but the framing of it is so merciless, it borders on the disturbing.

The Perrys are able to get into their characters' heads, and show the patterns of their thoughts on film in a way that I've seen few other filmmakers manage.  They capture the experience of being a fifteen or sixteen year old left to their own devices, suddenly aware of the new possibilities of sex and power, yet painfully inexperienced in handling the emotions that come with them.  There's such a clarity to the visual language and the editing, such a careful handling of the tone.  A frivolous moment can quickly turn into a dangerous one, or vice versa.  In the hands of different filmmakers, "Last Summer" might be framed as a cautionary tale, about the dangers of peer pressure or moral lapses.  The Perrys, however, show their characters' darker impulses are on some level innate and natural, the inevitable result of group dynamics, sexual tensions, and simple curiosity.    

"Last Summer" is one of several high profile X-rated films that were released at the end of the '60s, and quickly became notorious for its graphic ending.  Though highly regarded at the time, audiences were less receptive and the film became an obscurity for decades.  However, a film this good will be rediscovered eventually.  I have no doubts about it whatsoever.  It remains a haunting, emotionally devastating film that captures so much of the sadness and the cruelty of adolescence, that it barely feels dated, even fifty years later.   

What I've Seen - Frank Perry

David and Lisa (1962)

Ladybug Ladybug (1963)

The Swimmer (1968)

Last Summer (1969)

Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970)

Doc (1971)

Play It as It Lays (1972)

Man on a Swing (1974)

Rancho Deluxe (1975)

Mommie Dearest (1981)

Compromising Positions (1985)

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The Great Directors Week: My Favorite Rob Reiner Movie

I've been spacing these posts a little too far apart, and letting them pile up.  So, I'm devoting a full week to new installments of my "Great Directors" series.  Enjoy.  

It's rare in this day and age that directors excel in so many different genres.  Rob Reiner, however, managed to make classic films in the spoof, coming-of-age, horror, romantic comedy, courtroom drama, and fantasy adventure genres - not just good films, but some of the best ever made.  Your favorite Rob Reiner film depends on what kind of a movie fan you are.  As I'm a fantasy fan at heart, naturally my favorite is "The Princess Bride," one of the undisputed classics of the 1980s.  

Everyone knows this film.  Everyone quotes this film.  Everyone has an impression of Andre the Giant, or Wallace Shawn, or Mandy Patinkin to pull out for special occasions.  The William Goldman novel and script are legendary.  As a film nerd, I must point out that this is a spoof on the swashbucklers of the 1930s and 1940s.  However, for my generation, who mostly didn't have much exposure to these old adventure movies, "The Princess Bride" was often taken at face value.  And its genius has always been that it works anyway, in spite of all the meta humor and the framing device with the sarcastic young Fred Savage rolling his eyes at Peter Falk's knowing grandfather.  Every tropey, sappy, sentimental, silly, over-familiar beat of the fairy tale works, and works beautifully.

 "The Princess Bride" is one of those films that I only saw in bits and pieces during my childhood, and occasionally mixed up with other fantasy movies like "The Never-Ending Story."  I finally watched the whole thing in one sitting after I read Goldman's novel as a teenager.  That's when I finally got the humor, and everything else snapped into place.  "The Princess Bride" has less in common with the old Errol Flynn movies than it does with other '70s and '80s movie spoofs like "Young Frankenstein" and Reiner's "This is Spinal Tap."  The laughs are gentler and more kid-friendly, but the absurdity and the specificity of the caricatures are aimed at more discerning grown ups.           

The universality of the film never fails to amaze me.  For some, the entry point is Inigo Montoya, the stirring, romanticized ideal of a man of unimpeachable honor on a quest for vengeance.  For some it's Buttercup and Westly overcoming the endless hurdles to their love.  For some it's the comic bumblings and heartwarming friendship of Fezzik and Inigo and Westly, when they join forces against the loathsome Humperdinck.  For me, it was Fred Savage, because I was once one of those know-it-all brats who thought they were too smart to enjoy an earnestly told story, and was delighted to discover otherwise.  These days, I find myself sympathizing a lot more with his patient grandfather, for obvious reasons.     

Trying to figure out why the film works so well feels like an exercise in futility.  The filmmaking is geared toward showcasing the comedy and the performances, and takes most of its visual inspiration from the films that it's paying homage to.  My guess is that the film's magic has a lot to do with its tone - the perfect balance between the satirical, cynical side of the story, and the nostalgic, impossible joy of the Cliffs of Insanity, the fire swamp, Miracle Max's miracles, and the promise of True Love.  And there's such a wonderful rapport that Reiner has with his actors, letting everybody do their best work and leave a real impression on the film.  Even parts as small as the booing lady and the ditzy old king have their chance to shine.   

"The Princess Bride" is one of the best examples of a film that found its audience over time.  It went from a modest box office success to a cult film to a bona fide timeless classic that seems to be constantly being rereleased in theaters and on home media.  It's even responsible for one of the only good things to have come out of Quibi: "Home Movie: The Princess Bride," an impromptu COVID-era remake orchestrated by Jason Reitman and a passel of homebound celebrities - including Rob and Carl Reiner.

What I've Seen - Rob Reiner

This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

Stand by Me (1986)

The Princess Bride (1987)

When Harry Met Sally... (1989)

Misery (1990)

A Few Good Men (1992)

North (1994)

The American President (1995)

Ghosts of Mississippi (1996)

The Bucket List (2007)

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The Great Directors Week: My Favorite René Clair Film

I've been spacing these posts a little too far apart, and letting them pile up.  So, I'm devoting a full week to new installments of my "Great Directors" series.  Enjoy.  

One of the often overlooked pioneers of early cinema is the French director René Clair, who did his best work at the beginning of the sound era, in musicals and comedies.  He was one of the first to use sound as an element of his comedy, characterized by complex set pieces, fanciful concepts, and a certain optimism about life and humanity, even in hard times.  Despite his successes with sound, his filmmaking always felt more reminiscent of the silent era, with their larger-than life characters, gag-based humor, and simple narratives.  

Most of Clair's best loved films are about the working class, and feature large casts of ordinary folks who inevitably get caught up in big chases or commotions by the end of the picture.  "À Nous la Liberté," or "Freedom For Us," is a fable about two escaped prisoners who take very different paths.  One becomes a lowly vagabond who falls in love, and one becomes a rich factory owner whose crimes catch up to him.  The whole thing is a satire on the modernization and mechanization of labor, where toiling away at the factory is equated with miserable incarceration, and much humor is mined from the endless conveyor belts, assembly lines, and timekeeping machines.  It has long been rumored that Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" lifted its sequences of factory chaos from "Liberté," though Clair himself dismissed this.  It's difficult not to have lingering doubts, however, when you look at the similarities in the production design and the anti-capitalist themes of the two films.    

       

"À Nous la Liberté" was Clair's third sound feature, and by this point he had largely worked out how to use sound for his own purposes.  One of his biggest breakthroughs was the realization that sound didn't have to be used realistically, but could be used as an element of fantasy the same way he used his visuals.  So in "Liberté" there's the lovely sequence where it appears to the hero that flowers are singing, before it's revealed to be a phonograph just out of sight.  The relentlessness of the assembly lines are echoed by clattering xylophones, and the percussion of the marching prisoners' shoes.  Songs are also an important element of all of René Clair's early films.  Though there aren't often full musical numbers, everyone sings.  A chorus narrates events through song.  The two prisoners keep singing lines from the title song to each other, usually when they're about to try and get away with something.    

René Clair was one of the first directors who was successful enough to have creative control over nearly all aspects of his films, from the scripts to the editing.  This gave him the ability to experiment and innovate in his filmmaking the way that few others did at the time.  His roots were in surrealist and avant garde cinema, and he got his start making amusing shorts like "The Crazy Ray" and "Entr'acte," where he essentially played with the film form, seeing what it could do.  As his productions became more complex, they embraced a certain artifice - he nearly always shot on meticulously prepared sets, and his films presented a very idealized, often nostalgic view of France and the French.     

There's a charming naivete and Utopian worldview to the film's ending that is awfully poignant in retrospect.  Simply handing over the new automated factory to the workers means that nobody ever has to work again, and they can all spend their time at their leisure.  And after failing in their attempts at romance and financial ventures, in the end, the two prisoners decide to go off and be happy tramps, washing their hands of society altogether.  I don't think it's any surprise that the work of René Clair is considered a major precursor to the films of my favorite French filmmaker, who would return to many of the same themes - Jacques Tati.         

What I've Seen - René Clair

The Italian Straw Hat (1928)

Under the Roofs of Paris (1930)

Le Million (1931)

À Nous la Liberté (1931)

Bastille Day (1933)

The Ghost Goes West (1935)

I Married a Witch (1942)

And Then There Were None (1945)

Man About Town (1947)

Beauty and the Devil (1950)

Beauties of the Night (1952)

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The Great Directors Week: My Favorite Blake Edwards Film

I've been spacing these posts a little too far apart, and letting them pile up.  So, I'm devoting a full week to new installments of my "Great Directors" series.  Enjoy.  

I was surprised to discover Blake Edwards' "Victor/Victoria" airing on a weekday afternoon on one of my local syndicated stations a few years ago, a station known for hosting a lot of conservative programming and old reruns from decades past.  It was edited, of course, to remove instances of sex and nudity, but the plot was left more or less intact despite the eyebrow-raising subject matter.  Then again, I shouldn't have been surprised - the comedy is so gentle, so elegant, and so tastefully deployed that it was nearly impossible to take offense.  And Julie Andrews bringing down the house with some of her best showstoppers doesn't hurt either.

Based on a 1933 German film that was previously remade at least three times, "Victor/Victoria" is a classic farce about a down-on-her-luck soprano who finds success pretending to be a "female impersonator," a polite early term for a drag queen.  However, as far as I can tell, the version written and directed by Blake Edwards is the first to incorporate gay characters - the darling rascal Toddy and the steady bodyguard Squash - and to acknowledge and celebrate the gay nightlife of 1930s Paris.  The primary relationship is an emphatically heterosexual one, between Julie Andrews's Victor/Victoria and James Garner's gangster King Marchand, but delivered in a fascinating genderfluid context.  Watching Julie Andrews playing with androgyny and with her screen image recalls Marlene Dietrich's famous cabaret performance in white tie and tails.  Another major influence was surely "La Cage aux Folles," which enjoyed stage and screen success a few years earlier.  

Of course, the biggest reason they got away with it is because "Victor/Victoria" is a slapstick comedy coming from Edwards, who is best known for his madcap "Pink Panther" movies.  The plot is greatly concerned with mistaken identities, love triangles, criminal ventures, and keeping up appearances.  Nearly every steamy moment where Garner's character questions his sexuality is played for laughs or to add more complications to the ridiculous plot.  Every insightful observation about the characters' sexual politics also doubles as a pithy punchline.   The film's great irony is that the gay characters are perfectly comfortable in their sexuality and masculinity, while the straights are tying themselves in knots, trying to figure out who and what they are to each other.  A great source of comedic energy is Lesley Ann Warren, who plays the jealous showgirl trying to keep King Marchand's attentions, and is absolutely shameless in her tactics.  The part of Toddy, the charming huckster, was originally envisioned for Peter Sellers, but I can't imagine anyone but Robert Preston in the part.  His cheeky delivery of "Gay Paree" is a delight.   

The film was clearly created as a vehicle for Julie Andrews, the way many of Edwards' later films were.  This is the best of their collaborations, and features some of Andrews' most iconic screen numbers - "The Shady Dame From Seville," "Le Jazz Hot," "Crazy World," and the adorable duet "You and Me," where she gets to play off Preston.  But as impressive as her singing is, it's the rest of her performance that continues to entrance me.  Andrews walks a fine line, maintaining such a beautiful, ambiguous balance between masculline and feminine, that I always feel disappointed when the spell is broken at the end of the movie, and Victor/Victoria is obliged to become Victoria again.  

Blake Edwards was a popular entertainer first and foremost, so capable at delivering laughs and engineering sparkling romances, that he was able to push boundaries much further than people thought you could at the time.  There are plenty of viewers who never notice that Holly Golightly is, as Truman Capote put it, an "American Geisha," and I expect that many simply overlook the fact that there are any LGBT folks in "Victor/Victoria" at all.  Everyone in the movie is so warm, and so sweet, and so funny - it doesn't feel like you're watching anything revolutionary at all.       

What I've Seen - Blake Edwards

Operation Petticoat (1959)

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)

Days of Wine and Roses (1962)

The Pink Panther (1963)

A Shot in the Dark (1964)

The Great Race (1965)

The Party (1968) 

Darling Lili (1970)

The Return of the Pink Panther (1975)

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)

10 (1979) 

Victor/Victoria (1982)

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The Great Directors Week: My Favorite Mikio Naruse Film

I've been spacing these posts a little too far apart, and letting them pile up.  So, I'm devoting a full week to new installments of my "Great Directors" series.  Enjoy.  

Of the major Japanese directors, Mikio Naruse is one of the least well known in the west, though he operated at the same time, and used many of the same actors as the more famous luminaries like Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu.  Naruse's films were almost all contemporary dramas about the lives of ordinary people.  They examined various social ills, and the transition of Japan into the modern age.  He took a special interest in the struggles of women, who were often caught between traditional Japanese values and the demands of modern society.   

"Late Chrysanthemums" stars Haruko Sugimura, a familiar face from countless Ozu films where she usually played a gossipy neighbor or relative.  Here, she has a rare leading role as O-Kin, a former geisha and businesswoman.  She spends most of her time in the film collecting debts and interacting with other former geisha, who all owe her money.  Everyone we meet is struggling in the post-war era to get along and make ends meet.  The film is low on incident, but does a good job of capturing little moments of heartbreak and melodrama.  O-Kin and her friends are long past their prime, their glory days far behind them.  They have few options in a Japanese society that is still terribly restrictive to women, especially to disreputable figures like former geisha.  Happiness seems as elusive as financial security.  At one point, the return of an old client seems to bring some hope, but alas, his arrival only leads to disappointment.

The harsh realities of women in middle age would seem to make for a depressing film.  However, the actresses are so personable, and each of their personal tragedies is so deftly drawn, the narrative easily drew me in.  It helps that the retired geisha are initially introduced as broader comic types - the miser, the nagging wife, and the dissatisfied mother - before we get to know them better and learn how fraught their lives really are.  Our heroines suffer from illnesses, addictions, poverty, social repression, and persistent loneliness.  Only one managed to get married to a dependable man, and the ones who had children find no joy in them.  The womens' friendships bring them some comfort, giving them a chance to reminisce over the good times and commiserate.  However, there are limits, especially in the case of O-Kin, whose relationships are all compromised by her status as a moneylender.  Initially she seems like the luckiest and most well-off of the ex-geisha, thanks to her shrewdness, but her success has come at a price.  

"Late Chrysanthemums" is based on a collection of three short stories by feminist writer Fumiko Hayashi, whose work was adapted by Naruse for several films.  Their work had similar aims - depicting the darker side of urban Japanese life with as much realism as possible.  Unhappy marriages, disrupted families, and economic instability characterized most of their projects, in stark contrast to the more romanticized views of their more celebrated contemporaries.  Naruse's later films grew more and more tragic, and his worldview more pessimistic, but most of them ended with the heroines bravely picking themselves up and carrying on.  In "Late Chrysanthemums," change is inevitable, and all four of the women have to take responsibility for themselves.     

Naruse's filmmaking style is simple and unfussy, and has been praised for its subtlety and sensitivity.  Everything he did was to help emphasize the dramatic weight of his stories, down to the smallest details of the set designs and shot compositions.  What is so striking about "Late Chrysanthemums" is that it appears so ordinary.  Like it's unglamorous lead actress, the film's depicted tragedies are commonplace and easily overlooked, which makes its unusual poignancy all the more remarkable.

What I've Seen - Mikio Naruse

Repast (1951) 

Mother (1952)

Lightning (1952)

Sound of the Mountain (1954)

Late Chrysanthemums (1954)

Floating Clouds (1955)

Flowing (1956)

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)

Yearning (1964)

Two in the Shadow (1967)

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