BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C
Specal Effects: B
Production Design: B+

Michael Keaton was 36 years old when he appeared in the 1988 film Beetlejuice—only Tim Burton’s second feature film as a director, it’s easy to forget. He’s 73 now. And this is one of the many elements of the sequel out this weekend, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, where there’s a bit of a dichotomy: in the “Beetlejuice” makeup, Keaton looks roughly the same as he did 36 years ago. But, there was a famously unique energy to his character in 1988 that is frankly lacking now. Beetlejuice just doesn’t have the pep that he used to. He’s still a wild nut, but there’s an undercurrent of tired old man in there.

This can be extrapolated to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a film overall, and by extension, to its director, Tim Burton. This is a man who spent the better part of two decades making dark classics for the modern age, from Edward Scissorhands to Batman to Sleepy Hollow to Sweeney Todd. Ever since then, his career has been one long paean to mediocrity.

Is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice any different? The answer is: yes and no. This is only the second time Burton has directed a sequel, and the last time was 32 years ago (and there’s an argument that Batman Returns was one of the best sequels ever made). Beetlejuice is a one-of-a-kind film that has been beloved by multiple generations, an execution of dark weirdness that could never have worked without all the pieces fitting just the right way. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has thus cultivated a kind of anticipation that a Burton film hasn’t managed in years.

I hesitate to say that it lives up to such expectations. As expected, there’s a lot going on in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and still, somehow, it drags much of the time, particularly in its first half. This movie is all of 114 minutes long, and it feels longer. Too many scenes linger on things that neither wow nor delight. And if we count Beetlejuice himself as an antagonist, then he is one of three, which is arguably two two many: the others are Jeremy (Arthur Conti), a local boy who befriends Astrid (Jenna Ortega), the teenage daughter of widowed Lydia (Winona Ryder) and is predictably not what he seems at first; and Delores (Monica Bellucci), the soul-sucking—literally—ex-wife of Beetlejuice who is resurrected and hell-bent on reuniting with him. And in both cases, we get very good performers saddled with parts that wind up being of little consequence in the end. Bellucci in particular, here channeling Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas as a dismembered corpse stapled back together, has an electric screen presence, and not enough to do to move the story forward.

This is one of the common problems with these “lega-sequels.” The first film had a straightforward, simple plot around which all the creative chaos could revolve. The second has to tie itself in convoluted narrative knots just to get mostly the same cast of characters back together.

In this case, Lydia’s dad has died. This was a character played by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Jones in the first film, who does not appear in this one. And yet his character, Charles, has a surprisingly large presence in this film. In one sequence, he appears in claymation. It’s actually pretty funny how they handle it.

And that’s the thing with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: there are many things in it that are hilarious, or super fun. It’s the many other parts that are neither that are the problem, and render the film disappointingly even. This is a movie with some very high highs, and some very dull lulls. It averages out to a movie that is just okay, which is a step down from earlier Burton films that were just wall-to-wall delights. In the end, this is a movie that is just riding on the coattails of its cinematic forebear from three and a half decades ago.

On the upside, it has some reliably solid performers. Catherine O’Hara’s Delia Deetz is the one character who makes the most sense after all this time, clinging to a desperate idea of evolving with the times with her pretentious art. Jenna Ortega is perhaps the best thing in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, proving she can elevate any material she works with. On the other hand, Willem Dafoe seems miscast as a former actor turned ghost detective, hamming it up in ways that often fall a little flat. And Winona Ryder’s Lydia, now deeply emotionally frail, seems incongruous with the bold but emotionally insecure teenager from the first film, or at least the self-assured version of her by the end of it. (It’s a fair counterpoint that spending a lifetime seeing ghosts could do a number on a person.) In the end, even the cast has better and worse, averaging out to—well, average.

If there’s anything that definitively does not disappoint about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, it’s the production design. It’s a relief that this film doesn’t try to “update” the look of the first one so much as augment it; there are bits of CGI here and there, but always well integrated into a plethora of practical effects. Beetlejuice’s office staff of shrunken-head workers, like so many other things in this movie, have antics that sometimes land and sometimes fall a little flat.

In retrospect, sadly, I have to say that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is about as good as I could have possibly expected. I so hoped it would exceed my expectations, but these days Tim Burton is nothing if not consistent. This is a guy with some real creativity left in him, but whose dark mojo peaked a long, long time ago. This is a movie that satisfies insomuch as we’ll take what we can get.

There’s great fun to be had if you’re willing to wait around for it.

Overall: B-

GOOD ONE

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B

I’m still ruminating on how I feel about the way Good One ends. On the one hand, the final shot is slightly jarring, leaving us with a feeling of an inexplicably abrupt ending. On the other hand, upon reflection, it could be regarded as a metaphor for the three relationships at play through most of the film, set on a forest hiking trip. Either way, in its indelibly subtle way, it’s really kind of a bummer.

The plan, originally, was for it to be a foursome on this trip: Chris (James Le Gros) and his teenage daughter Sam (Lily Collias); Chris’s oldest friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) and his teenage son Dylan. Things are immediately thrown off when Dylan, a resentful son of divorced parents, refuses to come, leaving only Chris, Sam and Matt to go on the trip.

There’s a key scene somewhere in the middle of this film, in which Sam observes that Matt had been eating snacks in his tent, telling him he probably shouldn’t do that. Chris catches wind of this and flies off the handle, framing it as being “reckless” with his teenage daughter, given how far and wide a bear can be attracted by food. It’s the one time Chris exhibits anything close to fierce protectiveness of his daughter.

But then something happens later, something vaguely creepy that sits somewhere in the space between a gray area and something some might find genuinely triggering. In this instance, Chris is either dismissive or pleads for Sam to let it go. There seems to be a slight connection here to when three young men who are also hiking in the area take it for granted that it’s fine for them to set up camp right next to them. We never see any evidence that these three young dudes pose any threat, but that is beside the point: when Sam gives even the slightest hint that this makes her feel uncomfortable, Chris’s immediate response is to tell her it’s fine. There may be a minor theme building here.

Good One takes a lot of time to get to any details this concrete, as we spend the better part of an hour doing little more than just hanging out with this trio. This film deals almost exclusively in nuance and subtlety, and only through keenly observed detail do we register that both Chris and Matt have some form of arrested development, and Sam has more instinct for both maturity and survival than either of them. As written by writer-director India Donaldson, there is intention behind every single thing we see onscreen, how benign a huge amount of it seems notwithstanding.

Matt is a little difficult to figure out, both as a person and as a created character. He can be a little flaky and boneheaded, overpacking his backpack or hiking in denim jeans or forgetting his sleeping bag. This lends him a bit of shaky ground for plausible deniability, when it comes to the way things turn between him and Sam later in the film. It’s the kind of thing that some might find up or debate: is this man in any way predatory, or is he just a clueless dipshit?

How you respond to this may very well depend on your own personal experiences. I, for one, am leaving toward clueless dipshittery as a cover for predation. It should be stressed, however, that Good One never takes an explicit stance on this matter.

Good One is about as “indie” as an indie movie is going to get, and it certainly won’t be for everyone. To anyone but the keenly observant, nothing of note even happens in this movie until roughly halfway through, until which time it seems we are just watching this trio hike through the forest. Matt is genuinely saddened by his son’s refusal to come on the trip with them, and this is something Sam notices more effectively than her dad—Matt’s best friend—does. This contributes to a sense of empathy that Donaldson effectively creates, for all three of these characters. It’s also a big part of the tricky emotional navigating we have to do when Matt says something to Sam that objectively crosses a line, but without crystal clear intent.

It’s not often a film challenges us in such a specific way, which affords Good One a unique kind of respect. I must admit I don’t know a lot of people who would be into that, as it requires the ability to appreciate pointed ambiguity in art, the kind that diminishes the pleasure or fun in it. I keep thinking about the pivotal moment in this film, but I’m not sure I want to be. I’m left with a deep appreciation for a cinematic accomplishment I would also like to move on from.

She’s told she’s a good one, but not by the right one.

BETWEEN THE TEMPLES

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: C-
Editing: B

Between the Temples is very strong out of the gate, opening with a scene of unusually effective cleverness and wit. We immediately meet Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman), hearing from his two moms (Caroline Aaron and Dolly De Leon) that they think it’s time he see a doctor. As soon as Ben says he’s open to it, the doorbell rings, and we’re meeting the doctor in question. After she asks him to touch her face, we’re still thinking she must be some kind of “free spirit” therapist or something. The meaning of what we’re seeing becomes clearly something we weren’t expecting very quickly, and for a moment we’re thinking, Wait. What?

It’s very unusual to say this, but this is actually a good kind of “Wait, what?” It’s an expertly delivered misdirect, a kind of opening punch line that sets up an expectation for the entire film. And then the film doesn’t quite live up to that expectation, and never achieves the same kind of precise execution again.

We quickly learn that Ben lost his wife to a tragic, freak accident about a year ago, and is still struggling to move on. He’s the cantor at his synagogue, and has a lifetime of singing experience, but still can’t get himself to sing again. By wild chance, he runs into his music teacher from elementary school (Carol Kane), now asking him to call her Carla. And Carla, who is half Jewish, imposes on Ben’s bat mitzvah class and says she wants to have one because she never got to as a kid.

As a premise, this is all very compelling, with solid performances all around. Jason Schwartzman is alternately sweet and heartbreaking as someone slowly moving out of his grief. Carol Kane is always a welcome presence, although her Carla is a little more difficult to pin down. She’s also a widow, and perhaps is just looking for some company. Carla and Ben’s relationship blossoms into something that skirts the edges of romance.

I may very well have enjoyed this story more, if it were not for cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who makes what I found to be frustratingly distracting choices at every turn. Between the Temples is wall-to-wall with quick zooms, wildly shaky handheld cameras, and off-puttingly tight close-ups, often of people putting food into their mouths. There must have been some intention behind all this, but damned if I could figure out what it was. In practice, it felt like a cinematographer making whatever choice inspired him at the moment, with no connecting overall vision. I tired of it very quickly.

That aside, the cast is wonderful. It’s nice to see a movie in which a same-sex couple is completely incidental. Caroline Aaron is arguably a bit typecast, but still delightful, as Ben’s fretful Jewish mother. Dolly De Leon, as the other mom who converted to Judaism upon her entry into the family, is much the opposite: between this and Ghostlight and Triangle of Sadness, there’s no telling what kind of part she’ll pay next. Madeline Weinstein is perfectly cast as Gabby, the rabbi’s daughter who is also “a complete mess” and nudged into the direction of Ben. Matthew Shear is effective in just the two scenes he shows up in, as Carla’s careless and insensitive son.

There’s something about Nathan Silver’s direction, all these shaky scenes with a lot of rambling mumbles of characters speaking over each other. It’s like “mumblecore” as directed by Robert Altman. I tried, and failed, to identify a clear purpose in this style of filmmaking. I like that Silver leaves us in the end with an ambiguity as to whether Ben and Carla’s connection indeed has any element of romance. Or, at least, whether it’s requited. There’s a big family dinner scene near the end that is one of the most awkward things I have ever sat through.

I guess you could say Between the Temples is less “will they or won’t they” than it is “are they or aren’t they,” but it touches on certain romantic comedy tropes in an effectively subversive way. Some might leave this movie feeling great, and others may leave feeling ambivalent. I had the rare experience of sitting in a space squarely between those two things.

It’s like Harold and Maude if Harold were older, Maude were younger, and both were sad and lonely instead of just morbid.

Overall: B

Advance: HIS THREE DAUGHTERS

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B+

Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen are all well established as singular performers, and all of their talents are very much on display in His Three Daughters, mostly a three-hander about estranged sisters reconvening to say goodbye to their father in hospice care. There’s something just slightly off about the presentation in this film, though, written and directed by Azazel Jacobs. There are so many extended monologues, where a character is ostensibly speaking to another person but after a while is functionally talking to themselves, it has the striking feeling of watching a filmed play. I found myself wondering if, indeed, this movie would actually play better as a stage production. It would be easy enough to produce, the entire story set in one New York City apartment.

Jacobs previously directed (but did not write) the 2021 film French Exit, which was absolutely not for everyone but which I was deeply delighted by. I still think it’s criminal that movie could never gain a genuine cult following the way oddball movies used to be able to. That film took a wild turn into the fantastical, whereas His Three Daughters is much more straightforward and sentimental. It’s immediately clear that this is a family drama, dealing with sibling rivalries and grief.

The sisters are Katie (Coon), Rachel (Lyonne), and Christina (Olsen). They were all raised by a father who remains unseen in a back bedroom until the very end of the film, but soon enough we learn that Rachel had a different mother who died when she was very young, and a different biological father but this one raised her as his own. The mother of the other two also died while they were young, a point of commonality that becomes a part of both their tensions and their connection. Rachel, a stoner who spends a lot of time in her bedroom tracking sports she has bets riding on, has kind of checked out while her two sisters have descended on the apartment—Katie from just another New York City borough, and Christina from thousands of miles away. Katie takes it upon herself to take control and is quick to judge, and Christina is sort of hippie-adjacent, spending the most time in the room with their dad, singing possibly Grateful Dead songs to him and doing yoga during her breaks.

These women have clearly distinct and well-drawn personalities, and it’s easy to believe them as sisters. Still, there’s a slight sort of detachment to the dialogue—and the rather striking number of extended monologues. The film opens with Carrie Coon delivering a monologue as Katie, nothing but a white wall of what we only later realize is this apartment as the background. It feels rather like a self-taped audition and doesn’t doe the film any favors in setting the tone. After several minutes, the camera cuts to Lyonne as Rachel, listening to her in resigned silence. Rachel is the quietest one for a while, but soon enough all three of them are talking plenty. His Three Sisters is mercifully short on histrionics, which makes the one genuine screaming match between the three of them all the more effective.

As the story unfolded, I felt more connected to all three of these women, the excess of monologues notwithstanding. In the end, this story of forging connection through shared grief left me genuinely moved. There is a turn at the end, when Vincent, their dad (Jay O. Sanders), suddenly comes out of his room and even gets his own monologue. For several minutes, this genuinely threw me for a loop. The monologue ends with a gentle reveal that made me feel a little better about it, even though the sudden shift of perspective to a character we didn’t even meet until this point is a bit jarring.

His Three Daughters is a Netflix movie that will get a brief release in select theaters on September 6, then will be available on the streamer September 20. These three actresses are always worth watching, and this film is thus as good a way to kill 101 minutes as any. I’m not sure there’s any real necessity for theatrical release with this one, though. This is exactly the kind of movie that’s perfect for watching at home, with some tissues handy.

Let’s work through their shit together.

Overall: B

BLINK TWICE

Directing: B-
Acting: A-
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C

Blink Twice opens first with a trigger warning. This is the first of many things in this film to be ambivalent about. In this case, it sets a tricky sort of precedent. On the one hand, surely some people will appreciate it. On the other hand, I spent the first half of the movie wondering exactly how horrible the “mature themes and depictions of violence, including sexual violence” we were primed to expect would be, as depicted onscreen.

How bad is it, then? The good news is, we get only one, relatively brief scene, which is not excessively explicit or graphic. It is still, however, objectively horrible—it depicts a kind of dark, unconsentual debauchery that might have fit in, more explicitly depicted, in a movie like Caligula. It also marks a sharp tonal turn from the rest of the movie, which has a lightness and even winking vibe to it, until we discover the billionaire tech bros hosting this private island getaway are horrible monsters.

I can’t decide whether the movie would have worked better without the trigger warning. There’s something to be said for a true reveal of monsters who seemed at first to be charming. As it is, we are primed not to trust these billionaire White guys from the start. Not that we need a trigger warning for that to be the case, mind you. But the trigger warning was apparently not part of the original plan, and was reportedly added just before release, because the movie It Ends with Us received criticism for not having one. (The trailers for that movie were relatively subtle about it but still made it fairly clear that domestic violence would factor in the story.)

There are plenty of insensitive people who love to poke fun at the very notion of “trigger warnings.” There are still times when such things are very much appropriate. I just can’t decide how useful it could possibly have been in Blink Twice. But this is mostly because I can’t decide precisely what to make of the movie overall. It would seem director and co-writer Zoë Kravitz, in her directorial feature film debut, took a wild swing with this one—and did not quite hit. I have a lot of questions.

I would love to know more about Kravitz’s intentions with several of her artistic choices. Casting a Black woman, Naomi Ackie, as the main character, Frida, has to have been a deliberate choice. The rest of the cast of women includes several White women and a few other women of color; the men who have brought them to this island are all exclusively White, all but one of them middle-aged (some of you may be disheartened to learn that this definitively includes Channing Tatum). But it’s a curious choice for this film never to address race directly at all, and by default place White women, women of color, and Black women on an equal playing field. This gives Blink Twice a problem shared with the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale, in that it simply does not reflect reality.

And Kravitz, while not directly depicting reality—we all know this is a movie—is clearly trying to reference reality with this movie. It directly quotes the “believe women” adage, and at times seems to be trying to be a version of Glass Onion, contextualized in the “Me Too” movement. Compounding matters is the inclination of Blink Twice to be “fun” in a similar way, which trivializes sexual assault at the same time it purports to be taking it seriously. The result is something a lot less fun than the marketers of this movie would lead us to believe. We get some “scorned woman” revenge, and an inevitable turning of the tables, but it rings hollow, engaging in the very tropes Kravitz seems to think she is innovating.

Without getting too far into spoiler territory, I will say that key plot points involve memory manipulation, and the insistence of tech billionaire Slater King (Tatum) that “forgetting is a gift.” It would seem there is a splash of Bill Cosby going on here, and as the story goes on, our heroine figures out a way to conjure her repressed memories. There’s a turn at the end involving King’s own memory that seems almost clever in the moment, but I now cannot make it make sense.

A movie like this only truly works when it has clarity of purpose, and that is the fundamental thing missing from Blink Twice. I cannot trash it completely, because it has excellent performances across the board, which alone would indicate that Kravitz has some bona fide directing talent. She got consistent performances out of a stacked cast, which includes Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, and even Geena Davis, who hasn’t had a high-profile film role in a good 25 years (she’s had several high-profile TV roles, to be fair). Casting Davis is both clearly deliberate and a bit on the nose, given her founding of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, 20 years ago now. Blink Twice has parity in male and female characters, although not one of the male characters is a good guy—something I’m sure will incense some far-right dipshits. Normally I would be here for it, but it only works if the movie sticks the landing.

Instead, I left Blink Twice with more questions than answers, and not in any satisfyingly provocative way. I’m talking basic plot points. This is a rare movie that is often beautifully shot and has intricately layered performances, but a baffling script and inscrutable editing. The actors perform with the conviction of people who understand the director’s vision, which leaves me to wonder what crucial details may have just wound up on the cutting room floor. Or maybe they are all just patting themselves on the back for being a part of a film that has “Something To Say,” but without fully understanding what the hell it’s saying exactly.

He’s not the only thing here worthy of suspicion.

Overall: B-

ALIEN: ROMULUS

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

Alien: Romulus plays a lot like it’s just “The Alien Franchise’s Greatest Hits.” Whether that’s a good or bad thing is a matter of opinion, but I mean it very much as a compliment.

There’s a fine line between homage and artistic theft, and this film often straddles that line. There’s a lot of fan service going on here, and if you’re familiar with the previous Alien films, you will find yourself watching, as if on a visual scavenger hunt, for the references and visual nods to virtually all of them. I, for one, had mostly a great time with this.

The score, by Benjamin Wallfisch (Blade Runner 2049), almost immediately features recognizable musical references to the Jerry Goldsmith score from Ridley Scott’s classic original 1979 Alien. (Side note: it’s a bit of a stunner to realize this franchise is now 45 years old.) The story takes place either on or just above a colonized planet very reminiscent of that featured in James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens, complete with elevator shafts and high wind levels—only in this case, it has an established, bustling society rather than a decimated group of fledgling colonizers. Even the films widely considered “lesser” in the franchise get nods, including a pretty obvious recreation of the most famous shot from David Fincher’s 1992 sequel Alien3, in which the alien hovers harrowingly close to Sigourney Weaver’s face. And this film’s already controversial final act is a basic recreation of the infamous final sequence from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1997 sequel Alien Resurrection, only with the concept inverted. Not even the prequel films are excluded, as we get introduced to a creature with a passing resemblance to (but clearly not narratively connected to) the humanoid aliens from Ridley Scott’s 2012 semi-prequel Prometheus.

I have not seen the two prequels anywhere near as many times I have seen the so-called “Quadrilogy” of original films in the franchise; as far as I can recall, I have still seen Ridley Scott’s 2017 follow-up to Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, the one time. Which is to say, for all I know, Alien: Romulus also has some kind of direct nod to Covenant as well, and I just don’t remember it well enough to recognize it. The same could be said of Paul W.S. Anderson’s 2004 crossover Alien vs. Predator (which I did see but very much wish I hadn’t) or Colin and Greg Strause’s 2007 follow-up Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (the one feature film featuring “xenomorphs” that I never bothered to watch, by all accounts wisely), although these are quite rightly not considered officially part of the Alien anthology, and I rather hope that, rather than there being references that I did not recognize, Romulus director and co-writer Fede Alvarez and writers Rode Savages and Dan O’Bannon simply did not bother with them.

The story beats of Alien: Romulus pretty faithfully mirror those of the 1979 Alien, right down to the team of working class miners getting picked off one by one until one of the women emerges as the unlikely hero. This gives the story a certain quality of predictability, but Romulus still has plenty about it that makes it stand apart. Perhaps most significantly, the principal cast is all quite young—all adults, but somewhat barely: Cailee Spaeney (Civil War), for instance, is all of 26 years old, and her character, Rain, could easily be read as several years younger. None of the previous films in the franchise featured a principal cast exclusively of characters so young, and the characters here get introduced to us behaving with a kind of dipshittery authentic to their age.

Of course, we simply cannot have an Alien movie without a “synthetic” (“I prefer the term artificial person,” we are told), here a character named Andy, played by David Jonsson in easily the film’s best performance. Andy is a nearly obsolete model, a lifetime companion to Rain who was long ago orphaned by the dangers of the mining work her parents did. Jonsson has a uniquely nuanced understanding of a robot programmed to convey the subtle emotions of someone with a childlike devotion to a functional sibling, yet a relentless drive towards his “directive.” Depending in what disc gets inserted into a port in his neck, his directive is either to serve what’s best for Rain, or what’s best for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, causing subtle shifts in allegiances depending on where we are in the story—and, thankfully, Romulus never goes down the clichéd route of a robot taking on implausibly human motivations counter to programming.

It’s difficult to gauge how successfully Alien: Romulus might play to someone coming to this franchise for the first time with this movie. It’s certainly true that the experience is enhanced by a broad knowledge of nearly all the films that came before it. Even the obvious references land with somewhat varied success, and an iconic line from the 1986 Aliens gets uttered in a way that doesn’t work as well as the smattering recognition of appreciative chuckles through the audience might suggest. There is even an appearance of an actual character from an earlier film, which I won’t spoil except to say that it’s a digital recreation of an actor who has since passed on, and the one instance in the film of obviously subpar visual effects. (The rest of the movie looks great.)

The bottom line is that Alien: Romulus is a consistently and undeniably entertaining action-horror thriller, its most critical successes being its propulsive pacing due to skilled editing, and several sequences with exeptional cinematography. This feels like a lived-in world, fleshed out in new ways in spite of its admittedly unavoidable familiarity. If anything, it could be argued that it has a bit too much going on, but given the nesting layers of threats—not all of them from the xenomorphs—posed to these characters, it all clicks together surprisingly well. The most important thing I can tell you about this movie is that I had a blast, and it’s not often that can be said of the seventh film in a franchise.

Remember me? Remember this? It warms the heart to reminisce!

Overall: B+

BORDERLANDS

Directing: D+
Acting: C-
Writing: D
Cinematography: C+
Editing: C
Special Effects: C

There are so many things wrong with Borderlands, it’s hard to know where to begin—but, much as it pains me to do so, I am going to start with Cate Blanchett. Who knew she was even capable of bad acting, let alone being possibly the worst performance in this movie? Granted, an absolutely abysmal script—cowritten by director Eli Roth and Joe Abercrombie—didn’t do her any favors, but Blanchett is an actor of such talent and stature that one could reasonably expect her to elevate the material. Instead, it’s the opposite.

A big problem—among, oh my god, so many—is that Blanchett was cast in a movie like this to begin with. No one can blame her for wanting to have a little fun, but can she not recognize quality fun? Perhaps not. She’s like an alien trying and failing to act human in this part. It’s as though she spent decades playing parts with genuine gravitas, then dipped her toes into the pool of blockbusters—in this case, specifically video game adaptation—and discovered she had no idea what she was doing.

This brings me to Jamie Lee Curtis, who perhaps thought this was a the logical next step after the wild and brilliant ride that was Everything Everywhere All at Once. But when her charaacter, Tannis, is introduced a fair amount of time into the movie, we are literally warned that she is an “oddball” and “says a lot of weird things.” She then proceeds to spend the rest of the movie never saying anything particualarly weird at all. The oddest thing about her is a pair of dark protective glasses, and Curtis’s line delivery that has a incongruous dash of childlike chipperness. What, exactly, are these people doing?

Floudering in a narrative sink hole, that’s what. It’s truly depressing so see the likes to Cate Blanchett, after spending way too long with pointlessly expository voiceover narration, sit down at a bar and utter the words, '“I’m too old for this shit.” We have heard that line so many times in so many movies, it’s no wonder she says it with no conviction whatsoever.

It’s slightly ironic, then, that it’s the cast who aren’t such huge movie stars who better hold the camera in Borderlands. To be fair, Kevin Hart is a huge star too—as a comedian. He isn’t particularly funny here (almost no one is), but he has fairly natural delivery as Roland, the guy who kidnaps a young woman from what appears to be a space ship prison (this is never explained). That woman is “Tiny Tina,” played by Ariana Greenblatt, who gives the best performance in this movie—not that that’s a high bar. But least when she’s not hampered by leaden dialogue, she’s both compelling and fun, exuding a genuine charisma.

Blanchett plays Lilith, a bounty hunter hired to retrieve Tiny Tina for a corporate mogul (Edgar Ramírez) who may or may not be her father. When Lilith returns to her “shithole” planet of Pandora (very original) in search of Tina, she discovers a snarky robot named Claptrap who is programmed, to his own dismay, to serve Lility until her death. And Claptrap, while hardly the best movie robot in history, is the one consistently good thing in this movie. His lines, and particularly Jack Black’s delivery voicing him, got a good number of giggles out of me.

The production design, mostly rendered by subpar CGI, is very junkyard inspired, decaying husks of appliances and vehicles covered in graffiti, this being the general vibe of Pandora, where legend says there is a “vault” that holds the secrets to human potential once under the protection of an ancient alien race, or some such nonsense. The tone that Eli Roth is clearly going for is very much like the seminal 1997 Luc Besson film The Fifth Element. Except that movie had a director who knew what he was doing, it had a cast of natural movie stars who understood the assignment, and most importantly, it had an assured handle on both pacing and wit. Borderlands has none of these things. If not for Claptrap, I’d say it was completely witless. And not all of Claptrap’s lines land successfully either; he’s just got a greater success rate than any of the other characters combined.

The most frustrating thing about Borderlands is that it actually could have been good. Being silly doesn't inherently mean bad, but it needs just the right calibration. It’s not just that Borderlands is all spectacle and no substance. It’s that overall it rings hollow. The characters have all the dimension of video game characters left dormant, with no one even playing them—even while they move and speak. There’s nothing driving this story but going through the motions. At one point Lilith walks past an abandoned park merry-go-round and I wished I could have just spent two hours riding that instead. It would have been objectively more rewarding.

Behold, the hole they will never dig themselves out of.

Overall: C-

SING SING

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A
Cinematography: A+
Editing: A

Not to diminish the phenomenal performances or anything, but very early on in Sing Sing I thought to myself: I need to look up who the cinematographer was on this movie. It was Pat Scola, whose resume is rather diverse: he shot Pig (2021) as well as this year’s A Quiet Place: Day One. These were decently shot films, but honestly nothing truly special on that note. When it comes to Sing Sing, however, not only is it evidently by far the best film he has shot, but it should rightly put him in the sights of many talented directors to come.

If Scola doesn’t get nominated for the Best Cinematography, it will be a crime. Granted, there was no doubt a great amount of collaboration between him and this film’s director and co-writer, Greg Kwedar—here offering merely his second feature film, eight years after his debut, a film called Transpecos. (Side note: that film appears to have been fairly critically acclaimed in its own right, and I now wish I had even heard of it, let alone seen it.) But, it was Scola behind the camera, shooting a film set almost entirely, with the exception of the final scene, inside the maximum security prison that is this film’s namesake.

Few people would expect a film set entirely inside a prison to be shot so beautifully, but this becomes clear from the start of the story—and it sets us up for a beautiful story, based on a real theater program, and featuring a whole bunch of former inmates who had been a part of the program. This is the case with a majority of the cast, with the one notable exception of Coleman Domingo, whose own incredibly performance is undiminished by how much the inmate cast shines, especially Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin—who plays himself. Many of this cast plays themselves, in a way never seen in film before, especially so successfully. A few of them play fictionalized characters.

Maclin is incredible. So is Domingo. The rest of the cast is astonishing, considering the behind-the-scenes details. Sean Dino Johnson, who both plays himself and is also a board member for Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), which runs this program, gets a short monologue that is particularly moving.

Sing Sing could have easily been a documentary feature, and one just as memorable and affecting as a narrative film featuring these actors. But this film, as it actually exists, is far more in the spirit of the purpose RTA serves, which the film touches on: it teaches these men how to be vulnerable, how to harness their feelings in healthy ways, how to make it one vital aspect, among many, of their rehabilitation. Most crucially, it showcases these men doing exactly what they learned to do: act. This is an award-worthy ensemble if ever there was one. It’s too bad the Academy Awards do not have a “Best Cast” award—but the SAG Awards do, and they’d better take note.

In this story brilliantly fashioned to showcase all of this talent, John “Divine G” Whitfield (Coleman Domingo) is the unofficial ringleader, delving deep into these productions every season, but now hoping to present compelling evidence of his innocence at an upcoming clemency hearing. In one of the few parts actually played by established actors, the troupe director, Brent, is played by Paul Raci, playing a role similar to the one he played in the also-excellent 2020 film Sound of Metal. Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin plays a version of himself as an inmate who signs up for the program, a man putting on airs as a gangster but with surprising knowledge of Shakespeare, but with significant insecurities once he is accepted.

In the first meeting he attends, Maclin puts forth the proposition that they put on a comedy, because they all have enough tragedy in their actual lives. Whitfield, who has written a script his hopes they will use, is a bit disappointed, but Maclin clearly has a point. Honestly, I mention this mostly because after seeing the bits and pieces of the time traveling comedy play Brent then writes, I really wish I could go see this play in its entirety.

Which is to say: Sing Sing absolutely nails every part of everything it sets out to do, from showcasing talent to telling a perfectly calibrated story that could have been corny or maudlin in lesser hands. At an hour and 45 minutes, even its runtime is perfect, after countless films of recent years, from blockbusters to dramas, becoming reliably overlong. The script, by Greg Bentley and Greg Kwedar—from a story developed by Kwedar and Clint Bentley along with both Maclin and the real “Divine G,” based on the book Break-in’ The Mummy’s Code by Brent Buell (the character played by Paul Raci)—is incredibly tight. It’s a work that could be studied as proof that extra time need not necessarily be taken to tell a profound story with lasting impact. Sometimes it’s limitation that bears perfection.

Sing Sing even gets its meta elements right, standing for both solid storytelling and growth through art at the same time. We see character development and human development at once, in real time. I haven’t even gotten how incredible it is to see an overused monologue from Hamlet performed in a way never seen before, from an unusual performer who delivers the lines with unique conviction and beautifully infusing it with a personality and background Shakespeare himself could never have dreamed of. Sing Sing is a miracle of a movie, gathering the parts of what should be tropes, and instead moving us all forward.

An “Eye” and a “G”: both divine.

Overall: A

DÌDI

Directing: A-
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Here’s a compelling question for me to ask myself: if Dìdi were a movie with the exact same script, but the characters were all White, would I be as impressed by the film? The boy at the center of the story would have to have equivalent but slightly different means of diminishing himself in an attempt at impressing potential friends, but that would not be so big a challenge. And given how deeply impressed I was by the 2018 film Eighth Grade—my #1 movie that year—I am incline to say the answer to that question is yes, even though there is no way to say for certain. It must be said, however, that even though Dìdi is very much in the same vein as Eighth Grade (just more of a “boy version”) and less about the Asian-American experience than a very American reflection of it, the fact that it is about an Asian-American family is a big part of what sets this movie apart and makes it memorable.

It certainly doesn’t hurt that every single character is exceptionally well cast. One might wonder if the excellent star Izaac Wang, who plays the teenage title character, is related to writer-director Sean Wang, except that is merely a coincidence of a common last name (Izaac was born to a Chinese father and Laotian mother; Sean is of Taiwanese descent). Other cast members include Shirley Chen as Vivian, Dìdi’s older and antagonistic sister who is preparing to leave for college; Joan Chen as their mother, Chungsing; and a diverse array of friends Dìdi either struggles to make or struggles to keep.

A special mention must be made about these friends, as Dìdi is fundamentally about this, in a way just about anyone can relate to, either as someone in their mid-teens or someone who vividly remembers being that age: the anxieties, the insecurities, the random ways of acting out without necessarily even knowing why. A big part of this film’s greatness is the specificity of context to convey a pretty universal experience. But when it comes to the “bro-y” types of boys Dìdi hangs out with, this film absolutely nails the depictions: from his initial friends who are mostly of Asian or Middle Eastern heritage (played principally by Raul Dial and Aaron Change) to a later trio of slightly older skateboarders, notably non-Asian, he is eager to impress (Chiron Denk, Sunil Maurillo, and Montay Boseman). They all provide a lot of comic relief in their often teen-boy dopey antics, which also never feel any less than utterly real. This extends to many other kids in bit parts, a favorite moment of which is when a girl says after a friend has been introduced, “She’s a dumb bitch.” (This becomes a cleverly subtle callback later.)

Such is the case with every part of Dìdi, including the mother’s dreams of making her painting hobby into something more, all while struggling to mother her two children in the absence of their father, who we never see in the film as he is in Taiwan for work. The other family member we see in the house provides plenty of her own levity, Zhang Li Hua as “Nai Nai” (they pronounce it “nay-nay”), Chungsing’s mother-in-law and thus the household’s live-in Grandmother.

The trailer to and other marketing materials for Dìdi make it look a lot more chaotic than the surprisingly nuanced depiction of Dìdi’s family and social life it is, albeit with several chaotic flourishes. Dìdi, whose given name is Chris but whose initial friend group has nicknamed him “Wang-Wang” because his last name is Wang, is an early-years YouTuber (a couple of establishing shots indicate that the year is 2008), learning how to make cool videos, and this is what inspires him to offer his “filmer” services to the skater teens. A natural question, then, is whether this film is autobiographical, and reportedly Sean Wang drew from his life as inspiration, but did not directly base this story on it.

There is also a lot of visual depictions of ‘08-era social media websites, most notably both MySpace and Facebook (it’s easy to forget they actually co-existed for a short period), the camera following where we are meant to understand where his eyes are going—an unusually skilled manner of cinematography with social media representation in film. We also see a lot of AOL Instant Messenger chat exchanges, including with a girl on whom Dìdi is crushing hard, Madi (Mahaela Park). A couple of times, we see Dìdi type out a message that is honest and vulnerable—in once instance I found myself thinking: Send it, send it!—only to let insecurity get the better of him and delete it.

In any event, I left Dìdi feeling deeply impressed with it, and the more I think about it, the better the movie becomes in my memory. The stellar performances across the entire cast are both a reflection of actors with a startling awareness of the social nuances of other people their age, and of an assured director who has offered an astonishingly accomplished narrative feature film debut (he has done a couple of documentary features). Dìdi is a coming-of-age story of the very best kind: utterly specific yet utterly relatable.

Izaac Wang learns to play his instrument in real time.

Overall: A-

KNEECAP

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Kneecap is at times rotely predictable, it stretches truth to fit plot points of a pretty standard story arc, and it tries a little too hard to be 8 Mile crossed with Trainspotting.

That’s about the extent of my criticisms. So let me tell you now why I left this movie incredibly impressed.

This is the story of an Irish rap trio called Kneecap—hence the title, and a reference to paramilitary punishments during “The Troubles” that lasted in Northern Island from the sixties through the nineties. I went into this movie with the vague idea that it was based on a true story, began to have doubts about that due to the plot contrivances, and then found myself taken aback by actual live footage of performances during the end credits, showing what appeared to be the exact same people who played the parts of the three rap band members. I looked it up while leaving, and indeed, vocalists Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap play themselves. It turns out, the comparison to 8 Mile—in which Eminem played himself in a film based on his own rise to rap stardom—is both apt and fair. Except I would argue Kneecap is a better movie.

The third member of the group, DJ Próvai, is played by a a relatively average looking guy who is very believable as a music teacher who discovers the other two kids’ written rhymes in their indigenous Irish language and encourages them to make music out of it. He looks like a guy who fits right in with any indie film out of the United Kingdom. Surely he’s some relatively well-known actor? Nope, he also plays himself (looking a lot more like an average guy in the film than he does in interviews, incidentally).

It’s pretty rare to get a biographical film in which the subjects both play themselves and are good at it. Kneecap does feature some much more famous actual-actors, most notably Michael Fassbender as Móglaí Bap’s father, who faked his own death a decade ago. (I still know very little about the strictly true story of this trio, and have my suspicions as to how “true” the depiction is of this dad character.) The cast also features Simone Kirby as Móglaí’s reclusive mother, and Josie Walker as a violent policewoman so villainous as to be reduced to caricature (okay, so I do have that other criticism). The performances are solid across the board, with those of the three band members as good as any.

And the thing is, Kneecap is undeniably entertaining, from its first to its last shot. It features surprisingly catchy music and beats, and its clever editing and occasional animated flourishes do elicit memories of Trainspotting, but only in complementary ways. The filmmakers openly cite Trainspotting as an influence, and while there is a fine line between homage and artistic theft, Kneecap fits squarely on the side it should.

Director Rich Pepplatt, who cowrote the script with Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara, takes a refreshingly neutral approach to the rap trio’s gleeful drug use, which they defiantly rap about in their lyrics. I might have mixed feelings about all the drug use devoid of consequences, but I also have the wherewithal to know that I am far too removed from its context to judge. Maybe they really are a few hooligans who are wasting their lives with dipshittery, but who am I to know? Kneecap also leans hard on the idea that the group’s defiant use of Irish language is a deeply political act that is changing their society, and I have no idea whether that was ever truly their goal. Either way, it’s an effectively inspirational story idea, and a reflection of real-world struggles of oppressed people.

Here’s something I doubt a whole lot of other people thought about while watching Kneecap: I kept thinking about Sinéad O’Connor, who was alienating listeners by speaking out against Irish injustices decades before the guys in Kneecap were. She has a half-rapped tirade about the Irish Potato Famine on her fourth album, and in 2002 she released a collection of Irish folk songs, several of them in the Irish language. How aware are the Kneecap guys of her career, I wonder? All that said, I would hesitate to assert that Kneecap could never have existed without her, their genres are so completely different. If Kneecap is indebted to anyone, it is American Black rap artists, and to this movie’s credit, there is a brief moment when that debt is directly acknowledged, reflecting a global solidarity of the oppressed.

If nothing else, the film Kneecap makes a deeply valid point, in its message of preserving Indigenous languages, no matter how it’s done. Many of the statements heard in the film by British authority figures arguing against making Irish an officially recognized language are focused on how few people speak it anymore–which only serves as an argument for preserving it. The guys in Kneecap may be rapping in Irish about gleefully hedonistic pursuits, but there’s something to be said for it inspiring listeners to learn the language. If this film itself inspires any more Irish people to learn and keep the language alive, then it has served a dual purpose, being thoroughly entertaining as it furthers a cause.

They’re ready for their close-up: Kneecap plays themselves.

Overall: B+