THE GREEN KNIGHT

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

Where to start with The Green Knight? Judging by the film’s trailer, you might reasonably expect yet another overdone, Arthurian legend fantasy blockbuster, which was why I dismissed it out of hand when I first saw it. But then, I was swayed by the shockingly positive reviews, and decided it was apparently a must-see. In the end, I find it to be somewhere in between deserving of dismissal and “must-see.”

Ironically, I suspect I would like the movie a lot more were I to watch it one or two more times. I’m just not sure I want to do that. Also, one could reasonably ask: why should I have to see a movie multiple times in order to fully appreciate it? Whatever the case, I spent a majority of my time watching The Green Knight not having any idea what the fuck was going on.

I guess I could have read the source material, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, except that I missed that when it got passed around in the 14th century. Also, full disclosure, I’d had too much chai at an Indian restaurant last night, which kept me awake most of the night, and then I dosed off several times during this movie. In my defense, after I was afraid I was confused because I snoozed through something critical about the plot, the person I saw the movie with confessed he was confused by a fair amount of it as well. So it isn’t just me!

Also, if you go into this movie expecting action set pieces, or even the kind of spectacle typical of summer movies, you will be sorely disappointed. The Green Knight has a pace so measured, it takes probably half an hour before anything happens that truly snaps you to attention. It’s also very artful, packed with layered meaning and allegory that, let’s face it, mostly just flew right over my head. I have to give it credit for being pretty fantastically shot, though. This movie has a lot of unforgettable imagery in it. You just might find a beautiful image cutting through one of your yawns. I often felt like this might be the kind of movie Stanley Kubric would have made had he done a fantasy genre film.

There’s also the fact that the writer and director, David Lowery, was the same guy who did A Ghost Story in 2017—another movie that takes its sweet time in getting to a point where it wins you over. The Green Knight is more exciting than that one . . . marginally. They clearly share a lot of visual and tonal DNA, though, and if you had seen A Ghost Story before and know The Green Knight was by the same guy, you might think, Oh, I get it. Sort of. Maybe.

Let’s see if I can get the basic gist of the story. Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) steps up to the challenge of The Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) to “strike a blow” against him and take his axe, the deal being that exactly one year later, he will return to The Green Knight to receive the exact same blow in return. Gawain chops off the Green Knight’s head, then most of the movie chronicles his quest over the following year to the “Green Chapel” where this reciprocating blow is to take place.

Does Gawain think he’s outsmarted The Green Knight by chopping of his head? Fuck if I know. All I know is that what follows is Gawain in a successive series of vignettes as he encounters people, ghosts and creatures, including women giants and a fox you only learn can talk after a lot of otherwise silent screen time, in one brief verbal exchange. The Green Knight is apparently a human-tree hybrid, by the way. Instead of looking like the Ents from Lord of the Rings, he looks more like Guardians of the Galaxy’s Groot in his retirement years.

He’s a very big guy, by the way. Which means his axe is huge. Gawain is carrying that thing all over the place. I found it kind of distracting that the comparatively scrawny Dev Patel never once struggled to pick the thing up, often with one hand! Also I’m pretty sure there’s a scene in which Joel Edgerton makes a pass at him. This is after a scene in which Edgerton’s character basically offers a woman of his house to Gawain, and we are treated to a quick shot of a hand smeared with semen. That was different. I told you this was not your typical fantasy film, didn’t I? I’m convinced this is all about that director, David Lowery, honestly. He’s jerking his own sensibilities all over this movie.

None of this makes the movie bad, mind you. It does make it far less accessible to mainstream audiences than it might have been otherwise. Only a few people I know would be into this, and if your greatest passion is for CGI set pieces in Avengers movies, this one’s going to bore you to tears. The Green Knight didn’t bore me, it just . . . couldn’t quite reach me. I really wanted it to, however, and that’s something. It has a lot of darkly beautiful imagery to look at, a superficial level to its many layers I could not penetrate. Upon further reflection, once this is available streaming, I may indeed watch it again. At least then I’ll have a far better sense of what to expect, and—movie marketers, maybe take note here—that makes a huge difference.

I mean, I’m glad I didn’t have to live back then!

Overall: B

SUBLET

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

If you like movies that feature almost exclusively characters hanging out and talking, having interesting conversations, then Sublet is the kind of movie for you. That is, if you also find the contextualization of gay queer characters exploring Tel Avid compelling. That contextualization aside, if you’re not into “talky” movies, then this is one you’ll want to avoid. It’s all a matter of cinematic preference, really.

I quite enjoyed it. Sublet is directed and co-written by Eytan Fox, who has a history of exploring queer character in his films. He did the 2002 film Yassi & Jagger, a gay romance between two Israeli soldiers; he also directed the phenomenal film Walk on Water, about a bereft Israeli widower hit man who befriends a gay German tourist with the intent of gathering information about his Nazi war criminal grandfather, which wound up being my fourth-favorite film of 2005.

Fox is not especially prolific—he hasn’t directed a feature film since 2013—but he clearly has talent. That said, Sublet feels like a smaller film than some of his earlier works, at least in terms of production, theme, and ambition. That’s no major reflection on its quality; sometimes a story benefits a great deal from stripping down to simplicity. And even this film has its share of layers and nuance.

It’s the story of a short term relationship between men of two very different generations. We never learn the respective ages of Michael (John Benjamin Hickey), a New York Times travel writer visiting Tel Aviv for five days, and Tomer (Niv Nissim), the young man from whom he sublets his apartment and who winds up showing him around the city. But, we can find the ages of the actors, which are 57 and 27, respectively. That’s a thirty-year difference—an almost shockingly wide difference now that I consider it with actual numbers. It could be argued that the most impressive achievement of Sublet is that for most of its run time it depicts this relationship as platonic, until it isn’t. But it’s never creepy or especially salacious; in fact it’s surprisingly sweet. I can think of few, if any, other movies that manage to make such a relationship feel totally acceptable and natural.

Part of it is that the relationship is very brief, by design: Michael and Tomer only know each other for five days. Michael has a partner back in New York, and is processing a tragic event that occurred recently in their lives. Tomer actively avoids labels, which is why I hesitate to call him “gay” but he definitely qualifies as queer; he has idealistic ideas of living without any constraints of monogamy or even commitment. There’s a uniquely realized scene in which Tomer invites another young man over via “the Israeli Grindr,” as he puts it, “for both of us,” and ultimately it qualifies as the one sex scene in the film. It’s the kind of scenario in which one participant could easily be manipulating another, but it never comes across that way. At that point, though, Michael politely leaves the two younger men to each other, in that particular moment making the right decision.

Even this is a few days into Michael’s visit, his and Tomer’s connection developing organically. Fox introduces each day as the beginning of what becomes basically five chapters (“Day One,” etc). Tomer is intent on crashing on friends’ couches for the week, but Michael suggests he just stay at home and sleep on the couch, and in exchange Tomer will serve as his tour guide to see “the real” Tel Aviv for his travel piece.

As the story thus progressed, I was reminded of the Before Sunrise films, with such a focus on two characters forging a connection through a succession of intellectually stimulating conversations. The themes and topics covered in the Before Sunrise films are far denser than they are here, but it’s broadly the same idea. And in contrast to the Richard Linklater films, Eytan Fox throws in minority sexuality and cross-generational ideas and ideals. It makes for very compelling viewing, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I very much am. At times, the acting in Sublet feels slightly unrehearsed, but its well crafted script is its greatest strength. By the end, I was more moved than I might have expected to be at the start. That kind of pleasant surprise is always a welcome turn of events.

Sometimes it’s not so hard to bridge the gap.

Overall: B+

[available VOD, $4.99.}]

Advance: STILLWATER

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

I wonder how people who are actually conservative feel about it when they get depicted on the silver screen by actors we know to be liberal? I would imagine they approach it with deep cynicism. I often appreciate it when I see depictions of conservative people onscreen that seem to be nuanced, but for all I know the very type of people in the attempted depiction find it ridiculous at best and offensive at worst. God knows that’s how I would approach any famously right-wing actor depicting a liberal character. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, either. And when it comes to Stillwater, which I actually sincerely enjoyed, Matt Damon’s lead performance as an Oklahoman construction worker living temporarily in France often came across, even to me, as less an authentic portrayal than a guy cosplaying a Midwestern conservative.

At least the performance is understated. Damon certainly goes in a new direction here, as a man obsessed with getting the evidence necessary to exonerate his grown daughter serving prison time for murder, in Marseille.

There are shades of Amanda Knox here, obviously. If we want to say this is based on that story, it’s loosely based at best. “Inspired by” is probably more appropriate, with some expected themes of how Americans are viewed by Europeans. Damon’s character, Bill Baker, meets a woman named Virginie (Camille Cotton) and her little girl, Maya (an excellent Lilou Siauvaud), forging a close relationship with them after Virginie offers him help in translating as he goes in search of evidence. Even though he’s been told by lawyers that there is no hope for reopening his daughter’s case.

She’s been in prison five years already, one of the many unusual choices in storytelling here by writer-director Tom McCarthy (Spotlight). The truth of the circumstances that landed Allison in prison are meted out very sparingly, and never through any flashbacks—a wise choice, as it keeps us in the present-day of the storytelling. By the time the story starts here, Allison is already approaching probation, and is closer to release than she is to having been sentenced. As such, Stillwater becomes less of a mystery, although there remain elements of that, than a drama about how Bill and Amanda forge, maintain, or lose relationships in their lives.

The casting of Abigail Breslin, now 25, as Allison is an inspired choice. Matt Damon clearly immersed himself into the role of Bill with great effort, learning an Oklahoman accent, gaining weight. Breslin hardly had to do anything physical; she clearly fulfills the promise of her precocious performances as a little girl and has maintained her talent, which in contrast to Damon is the most memorable thing about her performance. That said, she has grown into a look that makes her a very convincingly progressive daughter of a stoic Midwestern man who prays before every meal.

There’s a lot to love about the relationship between these two in Stillwater. It has plenty of complications, but literally none of them have to do with her being a lesbian and his being conservative. in fact, he seems to accept her as who she is by default. Allison’s sexuality is really never brought up as any kind of “issue,” and in fact the overtly sociological details involve racism, and particularly anti-Muslim sentiment, in France. Bill, for his part, is a recovering addict, a guy who fucked up so many times as a father that Allison can’t trust him. They have other issues. People forget that liberal people, and decent conservative people, actually do exist in red states, and it’s nice to see a movie make the rare decision to reflect that. It’s even nicer to see a lesbian character for whom her sexuality is truly incidental, especially within this context.

I found myself surprisingly taken by the plotting of Stillwater, which takes no hard swings and yet makes many subtly subversive choices, particularly in contrast to typical storytelling in cinema. There is one turn of events involving Bill and a young man he considere a suspect, which gets a little close to the much more dramatic vigilantism in a movie like Prisoners (which took those hard swings, and was still a better movie). Bill gets himself in over his head in a way he would never plausibly get out of it in the real world, and then he gets a too-convenient pass, with some critical questions that are just left unanswered. In a way, that’s maybe the hard swing Stillwater should have taken, but still didn’t. This movie is otherwise too straightforward to say it has any genuine plot twists, but it does offer a solution to the central mystery that is comfortably unpredictable.

In any event, with Stillwater, the value is in the details, particularly with these Americans immersed in French culture, the people around them making their own assumptions about them. The reminisce about the media having been “ferocious” about Allison’s case. Arguably the most fascinating thing about this movie is that the whole story takes place in the aftermath of, rather than before or during, the most consequential event in these people’s lives. Somehow, it works.

An American in Paris.

Overall: B

Opens July 30.

PIG

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

Nicolas Cage has now been in movies for forty years. Some of his earlier roles are legitimately iconic: Raising Arizona, Moonstruck, his Academy Award-winning role in the incredibly depressing Leaving Las Vegas. How long has it been since he had a role as memorable as those? Arguably, the 2002 masterpiece Adaptation. Even that was nearly two decades ago.

I won’t pretend to be intimately familiar with Cage’s filmography since then. The man has more than fifty film credits in the past twenty years alone, and I have seen maybe ten of those. Cage has widely become known to be an active parody of himself in recent years, which has left me comparatively disinterested. Which is to say, I can’t really say with objective authority that his performance in Pig is his best in twenty years—since Adaptation. But, I still suspect it to be true.

And this is the thing about Pig. If you go just by the premise, you might think it fits perfectly into Nicolas Cage’s late-career gonzo trajectory. It’s about a recluse in the forests outside Portland, Oregon, who goes in search of the people who kidnapped his truffle pig. Anyone familiar with Cage’s recent output who hears that might quite understandably expect something weird and over the top. Instead, Pig defies expectations in just about every way imaginable.

In fact, the less you know about it going in, the better. So what can I say about it, then? I’m tempted to call it “John Wick with a pig” just as a misdirect. Except, I will tell you this movie is not an action movie. It’s very much a drama, shot lovingly both in and around Portland, with layered themes that prove unexpectedly moving. One would never judge from the opening scenes, in which Rob and his pig are hunting truffle mushrooms, that it would somehow lead to a riveting scene in a fine dining establishment with Rob convincing the chef that he’s wasting his life on things for which he has no passion. I may want to rewatch this movie just for that scene alone.

Also, perhaps: a bit of a heads up. The pig itself gets very little screen time. So if you love pigs, keep that in mind. But don’t fret, either: no violence against the pig (or any animal) is ever depicted. You might think for a bit that Rob might be the perpetrator of some violence, but there’s none of that either. There are just the two scenes in which Rob gets beaten pretty badly by other people.

And this leads me to my one peeve about this movie: Cage, as Rob, spends the entire run time of the film not just in the same grimy outfit, but with his face beaten and crusted over with blood. I had a hard time getting past that. Sure, Rob has been a recluse for so long he no longer gives a shit about his appearance or what people think of him. But, he doesn’t even want to wash the blood off his face, even while visiting high end restaurants? This would feel slightly more plausible if, say, the people he visits regularly said something about his hygiene. Surely he smells horrid. A young man who buys the truffle mushrooms from him asks in an early scene if Rob is sure he doesn’t want some kind of shower installed in his cabin, and he is later asked if he needs medical attention, but that’s it. I found this far more distracting than director and co-writer Michael Sarnoski surely intended.

And don’t get me wrong, Cage is still plenty weird in this movie. It’s just not in the ways you might expect—and it’s still possibly the most understated performance he’s ever given. (In the aforementioned scene Rob shares with a chef, it’s the other actor—David Knell—who truly shines.) It’s Cage’s restraint that truly impresses, although he does let slip one small outburst that serves as one of the few truly funny moments in the movie.

Overall, Pig is meditative, existential, a rumination on grief and loss. Every principal character in this film has lost a person dear to them, and have taken their lives in different directions that can still all be traced back to that loss. Eventually, Adam Arkin shows up, in a scene in which we see how food can be used as a tool to trigger specific emotions and memories.

In other words, the truffle pig is just a jumping-off point. An unorthodox one, to be sure, but it also serves its purpose, making Pig one of the most memorably unique films to come along in years.

Is the pig a metaphor? Let’s discuss over wine.

Overall: B+

ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN

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

My take on this Roadrunner documentary about Anthony Bourdain may be a little unexpected, or at least unusual. It starts with the event the film predictably ends with: his suicide. One of the many associates of Bourdain interviewed for the film comments on how celebrities who kill themselves inevitably wind up revered, given mural treatments and talked about “like they’re gods.” Director Morgan Neville then cuts right to, of course, a wall mural of Anthony Bourdain.

These sorts of artistic portraits of prominent cultural figures keep them at arms length, making it impossible to see them for who they really were. After seeing Roadrunner, which presumably aims to close that gap, I hardly feel like I have any greater grasp on who Bourdain really was. And, as someone with little interest in either cooking broadly speaking or particularly reality television, I barely knew who the man was to begin with.

It is indeed unfortunate that his suicide is now by far what Bourdain is best known for—something another interview subject mentions. It’s certainly the most pertinent thing I ever knew about him. Curiously, Neville spends the majority of the film just running through the bullet points of Bourdain’s increasingly famous career. I kept wondering when we might get some insight into whatever led to his suicide. The best I could glean is that in the end, the pressure of fame just became too much for him, but the film comes to no definitive conclusions.

It’s clear that Bourdain had many people who loved him. By many accounts, he became increasingly an erratic sort of asshole in the last few years. There is little doubt that he was a nuanced man. My personal issue here is that Roadrunner failed to paint a portrait of this man in a way that made him seem all that interesting to me.

And it’s not like it’s an impossible thing to do, even for someone like me with no connection to celebrity chefs. Just last week, after all, I rather enjoyed the documentary film Wolfgang, about Wolfgang Puck. That’s a guy who fashioned a career out of his greatest passion, and that is a joy to see no matter what the passion is for. Anthony Bourdain, by contrast, first made a name for himself by revealing salacious trade secrets in the 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential, then later gained fame by eating a litany of exotic and bizarre foods around the globe in culinary themed travel reality series.

It’s clear that Bourdain meant a lot to a lot of people, but somehow I remain . . . unconvinced. I hold no particularly negative thoughts about him; by all accounts he was complicated, maybe a good man, someone who made mistakes, someone struggling with mental health. All these things are valid. But was he something special? If he was, this movie did not work hard enough to convince me of it.

That’s the clarifying element: it’s more about this film than it is about the man himself. There are many scenes presented without context—are they scenes, or outtakes maybe, from one of his TV series?—where Bourdain is having lunch at a restaurant, or visiting a museum, having a conversation we are clearly meant to take as illuminating for them or for us, or maybe both. But I could never lose sight of the fact that we are only seeing the footage because there were cameras around. When we see Bourdain meandering around a sunny villa somewhere in Europe, with voiceover discussing a period of social withdrawal or loneliness, we are actually seeing something in which he actually is around people: the camera crew.

There’s an element of contrivance in Roadrunner that doesn’t quite sit well with me, featuring all these “intimate” scenes that are by definition anything but. When we see footage of straightforward interviews with Bourdain’s friends, family and colleagues, and they break down crying, those are authentically emotional moments. Morgan Neville tries to present other, previously recorded footage in the same way, and it doesn’t work. It certainly doesn’t help that Neville also apparently “deepfaked” some of Bourdain’s voiceover narration, which makes the idea of authenticity feel muddled at best. (What he says in these lines are words he actually wrote; he just never was recorded saying them.) And sure, plenty of documentaries use voiceover narration reciting things a deceased subject of the film said or wrote, but it is typically very clear that we are not listening to a literal recording of the subject’s voice.

A lot of work went into this film otherwise, which I can respect. Plenty of people are also quite taken with the film (it has a score of 80 on MetaCritic), which I can also respect. The movie just didn’t do it for me.

You want to be force fed this stuff?

Overall: C+

BLACK WIDOW

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

There’s something easily confusing for casual watchers of Marvel movies, when it comes to Black Widow. This movie is set after the events of Captain America: Civil War, which came out in 2016, and effectively sets Black Widow in 2016. That’s at least a couple of years before the events of Avengers: Infinity War, and seven years before the ultimate fate of the Black Widow character revealed in Avengers: Endgame. Just to spice things up a little, let’s throw in the fact that Endgame was released in 2019 but set in 2023; Black Widow is released in 2021 after an originally scheduled 2020 release due to a real-life pandemic; and the fact that although this is the first feature film dedicated to Black Widow, even though it’s the eighth MCU movie in which the character appears (ninth if you count another movie’s mid-credits sequence).

If you weren’t confused before, maybe you are now? I’ve only managed this level of understanding thanks to a couple of podcasts and a bit of online research. I maintain, however, that a movie should make itself clear without the need for extracurricular research, and nothing in the actual content of Black Widow makes this setting in the timeline clear—at least not to anyone without a photographic memory of the entire MCU timeline. The way I see it, this is a strike against both Black Widow and the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Luckily, Black Widow still has a lot going for it. Namely, that it mostly works as a self-contained film, in that if you don’t even know it’s part of this far larger “cinematic universe,” that makes the movie arguably less confusing. Even more importantly, it’s just a lot of fun.

This is now the fourth superhero movie in recent years that focuses on a woman superhero, which is still a small enough number that it invites deeply unfair comparisons. Personally, I liked all the others about as well as any of the others, for different reasons in each case which averaged out to about the same quality of blockbuster cinema: the original Wonder Woman (2017) exceeded expectations before devolving into the same climactic battle with a bland villain we’ve seen in countless of these movies; Captain Marvel (2019) was fun but largely forgettable, save for a truly delightful alien cat; and although Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) was met with derision both wide and deep, I thought it was fine.

With the exceptions of a few threads among those three films that could be singled out as moving things forward in a positive way, particularly for representation of women in film, they also have something else in common: an undercurrent of mediocrity. Theres a key difference on this front with Black Widow that I love: it’s not just about one woman as the main character, nor is it just packed with badass women supporting characters who serve the story of the main hero. Black Widow is all of those things at once, and I can think of no other superhero movie that can claim the same.

I just love how prominently women play into every level of plotting in this movie. The central story revolves around the sisterly relationship between Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow) and Yelena, two trained assassins who learned at a young age that they were not really sisters and were just part of an artificially constructed American family of Russian spies. The quasi-sisters are played by (as we all know) Scarlett Johansson and the incomparable Florence Pugh. Pugh sits surprisingly comfortably in the blockbuster action role, after a series of memorable parts in often disturbing dramas. Honestly, given the changing nature of movie making in America, my greatest hope for Pugh is that she takes this large paycheck parts so that she can continue turning incredible dramatic performances in smaller budget films and still make a living.

The parents in the aforementioned Russian family are played by David Harbour and Rachel Weisz, both of whom play prominently in the story here, Harbour being a Russian “super soldier” largely regarded as that nation’s counterpart to Captain America. Whether they are meant to be seen as villainous or heroic, or at what point they cross over from one to the other, is a little muddled, but as with any movie like this, don’t think about it too much and you’ll be fine. For Harbour’s part, his performance is by far the hammiest in the entire film, and seems to be a bit polarizing among audiences. I actually found it entertaining.

There is also some clarity needed when it comes to “the villain” of Black Widow. Technically, it’s Ray Winstone as Dreykov, a Russian mastermind who has developed an army of exclusively young women assassins who are victims of his chemical brain alteration that allows for mind control. A lot of this stuff is both ridiculous and very James Bond, but that doesn’t distract from how fun the movie is. Anyway, the villain effectively is actually yet another woman, with the unfortunately hokey nameof “Taskmaster” (Olga Kurylenko). She is Dreykov’s prized pupil of mind control, programmed to learn the fighting style of anyone she fights.

As such, Black Widow’s two main heroes are women; their most challenging adversary is. woman; they are aided by a complicated but equally heroic mother figure (along with an exceptionally strong father figure, yay gender equality!); and several scenes feature a large group of mind-controlled woman assassins. The latter group is generally and predictably easily dispatched, but the point is this: where most blockbuster movies feature just a few key female characters—even if they are the protagonists—with the entire rest of the significant parts rounded out by men, Black Widow completely flips that script.

And maybe audiences are finally getting used to this idea? Both the original Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel were pointless victims of insane amounts of sexist backlash, and I haven’t seen anything like that in response to Black Widow. Presumably this is due to a host of factors, not least of which is the fact that audiences have been seeing Black Widow as a supporting character in other MCU movies already for a decade. The difference is that Black Widow really leans in with its casting of women (to be fair, the only women of color are among the mind controlled assassins, and none of them get any real lines, let alone anything even remotely like character development—but, one step at a time, I guess), and for once, it seems to be working with audiences.

Of course, none of that would be making much difference if the movie did not work on its own merits, and it does. Black Widow is far from perfect, it had multiple scenes of such jaw dropping implausibility that I literally rolled my eyes, and it puts Black Widow herself through so much turmoil that one has to wonder how any Avengers get any rest at all, even when they’re supposedly “taking a break.” The villain is once again obsessed with megalomaniacal goals of world domination, something I tired of long ago and is usually a reason for me to skip superhero movies. Except, I like to get tickets to movies that focus on women and minorities so I can add to the audience size and help prove that such movies do have an audience. In this case, it absolutely proved worth it, mostly thanks to a dazzling cast with real, across-the-board onscreen chemistry with each other.

Sister Act Redux

Overall: B+

WOLFGANG

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

I’m not even a foodie. I probably have one of the least refined palates around. But, much like my enduringly unconditional love of my hometown of Seattle won’t keep me from also loving it when someone else loves another place where they live, there is real joy in seeing someone engaged with their passion, doing what they love. Everyone has their thing, and few of us get to make that what we do for a living. The documentary Wolfgang, streaming currently on Disney+, leaves me feeling like Wolfgang Puck must be truly one of the luckiest people in the world.

It’s not like that hasn’t come without any price, of course. I’m actually glad director David Gelb makes it a point to mention these prices, but treats them with subtlety, and indicates that the relationships affected are left with continued care for him rather than resentment. His second wife, Barbara Lazaroff, with whom he had his first two children, eventually divorced him but is still listed as the cofounder of the Wolfgang Puck Food Company (now Wolfgang Puck Worldwide). Wolfgang’s intense focus on his restaurants and their expansion came at the expense of time with his children, but one of those first two kids, Byron, is the one of his now-four kids featured as an interviewee in this film. He appears wearing a chef’s jacket, indicated immediately that he followed in his father’s footsteps.

I can’t help but regard Wolfgang as an unusually well-made documentary film, as I tend to be fundamentally disinterested in cooking shows—but, this documentary about who amounts to the first-ever “celebrity chef” had me rapt from start to finish. This guy has a compelling story, having grown up in Austria with an abusive stepfather who told him “real men stay out of the kitchen.” From that perspective, Puck serves as a great role model for children of all genders.

There are moments when Wolfgang the film leans a little heavily into the celebration of the man who started the phenomenon of “celebrity chefs,” of which there are no countless. I’m not sure I’m on board with the insinuation that celebrity is worthwhile for its own sake. But, to Puck’s credit, while he clearly enjoys his unlikely and massive success, judging by this film anyway, he seems surprisingly grounded, a man of great personal and financial wealth who wound up just being a sweet, if still very busy, old man.

Wolfgang is packed with examples of ideas and products he apparently started. A wood stove in an open kitchen in the restaurant. The trendy restaurant location where A-list celebrities gather to see and be seen. A smoked salmon pizza. The “first chef since Chef Boyardee” to take his own dishes and turn them into branded frozen and canned food products. (I happen work for a local chain of natural foods grocery stores that sells his canned soups.) A lot of these examples are things we have long taken for granted, and it’s fascinating to see how what is now omnipresent was once an innnovation.

On the technical side, one of my favorite things about Wolfgang is the cinematography. I’m not sure I have ever seen an otherwise conventionally constructed documentary so well shot, with several scenes featuring smooth tracking shots, sometimes surrounding the subjects. There’s a sequence near the end where we get to see Wolfgang, his current wife, and all of their children gathered for a home cooked dinner, and it is at once a polished, seamless visual and an intimate portrait of family bonding over food.

The fact that I enjoyed this movie so much really says a lot for it, I think. I suspect bona fide foodies would enjoy it even more, as not only is Wolfgang’s life story, detailing his emigration from Austria to Los Angeles, a fascinating one, but you get to see a whole lot of the food he cooks. As a vegetarian, most of the shots of food don’t appeal to me at all. It most assuredly will to others. This is a guy who made it to the top for truly humble beginnings, through persistence and hard work. The American Dream is a pipe dream for most, but this is a guy who somehow managed to embody it.

On the menu: sizzling charisma.

Overall: B+

THE TOMORROW WAR

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

If you want to have any hope of really enjoying The Tomorrow War, don’t overthink it. In fact, just don’t think about it at all. Just let it wash over you, and don’t think about how much it outright steals from far better movies before it, from Aliens to Edge of Tomorrow. It also, bizarrely, has a lot in common with completely forgotten alien-invasion action movie Battle: Los Angeles, released ten years ago: it’s a “war movie” about a battle between humans and aliens, and . . . ten years from now, The Tomorrow War will be just as forgotten.

The Tomorrow War does deserve some credit over Battle: Los Angeles, at least. It gives a lot more screen time to the aliens—something it even has over Edge of Tomorrow (2014), even though that’s still a better movie. The Tomorrow War does shy away from some of the more stereotypical casting, with a majority of key supporting parts going to nonwhite actors and women. In particular, the relationship between Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) and his daughter (played by both Ryan Kiera Armstrong and Yvonne Stahovski) is one that far more typically would be between a man and his son in other movies. All that said, it seems worth pointing out that this movie’s hero protagonist remains a straight white guy, to whom all others ultimately defer. The one exception is his daughter, Muri, who is still one of many characters who orbit around him in regards to the plot.

In any event, The Tomorrow War is entertaining enough—for maybe an hour and 45 minutes, anyway—it’s just fundamentally unoriginal, from every angle. The funny thing is, the same could be said of every other movie cited so far to which it owes its existence. Of course, that is technically the case for virtually any movie. The key difference is that those other movies had a new take, or a new twist, on old tropes. Even the seminal 1996 blockbuster alien invasion movie Independence Day openly played with the old tropes it celebrated in a new way—and, ironically, that movie had a Black protagonist, and is the one movie of its ilk that gets specifically name checked in The Tomorrow War: “I’m just glad Will Smith isn’t alive to see this.”

There’s a lot to pick apart in The Tomorrow War if you feel like spending the time on it. For the most part, it would be a pointless endeavor. The people who are excited by it won’t find the nitpicking to be relevant, and those who aren’t excited by it won’t bother to watch it anyway. A few people out there might be asking the question, “Is it any good?” The best I can say in response to that is . . . it has some redeeming qualities.

It’s better than Battle: Los Angeles was, anyway. Even though that movie and this one have the same basic fundamental problem, which is an over-focus on military style battle sequences, lots of machine gun fire, against aliens who are incredibly difficult to kill. I quickly became desensitized to it. I found the jump into thirty years into the future to be the most interesting thing about it—a burning future Miami skyline is a cool visual—but then (spoiler alert!) the “climactic” sequence is stripped down to dullness, a battle in a present-day snowscape of the Arctic.

Honestly, the most interesting thing about The Tomorrow War is that it’s the first “blockbuster” movie of its genre to be released straight to streaming, in this case Prime Video, with no theatrical release at all. It’s hard to gauge the motivations behind these decisions these days, whether they stick to a traditional theatrical window before any streaming access, or do a dual release on both, or go strictly straight to streaming. This may be the first film of this high a profile and production to go with that last option in a post-COVID world. I find myself wondering: would I have preferred to have seen this in a theater? I can’t decide. I’m glad I didn’t spend extra money on a movie ticket, so, well, I guess that answers that question.

Will more people see it this way? That remains to be seen. The movie is far less likely to make as much money as it would have with a theatrical release in the past, I would think. I can’t stop going back to Battle: Los Angeles, to which this is more similar than any other movie, and that one made all of $85 million domestically, on a movie with a budget of $70 million. Its worldwide gross of nearly $212 million ultimately justified its existence, I guess. And, again: The Tomorrow War is a better movie than that one was, at least. And we live in a far different world of cinema today than we did ten years ago, when I don’t even have to tell you to save yourself the money and just wait for it to appear on streaming: this movie is already there. And if your expectations aren’t that high to begin with, and you just want an entertaining sci-fi action diversion, this movie will do the trick this week.

I mean, if you want to sit through 140 minutes of people shooting at aliens, anyway. This movie would have been much improved with at least thirty minutes trimmed from it, but then, with no theater showing turnover to worry about, streamers clearly aren’t as concerned about run time. I can tell you this much: I enjoyed this movie for what it was, flaws and all, for a good majority of it. But then, with maybe half an hour left to go, I just got bored with what was ultimately more of the same. Even on streamers, there are far better options available—even within the sci-fi genre! Granted, you may have already consumed the better options, so what then? I don’t know, read a book! Or, okay, go ahead and watch this movie, which isn’t terrible, but it sure isn’t great either.

Credit where credit is due: most of these people survive, at least. Maybe even all of them! I just can’t remember for sure in regards to one of them.

NO SUDDEN MOVE

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

What exactly defines a “noir,” anyway? I’ll freely admit I could be off base here, but when I think film noir I think 1940s, black and white, crime drama, maybe mystery. Lots of stark imagery, lots of shadows. I may have a narrow idea of what qualifies for the genre. I have long thought of Blade Runner as “future noir” because of its blend of crime drama and clear 1940s aesthetic influences, even though it was set decades into the future.

Hmm. “A genre of crime film or fiction characterized by cynicism, fatalism, and moral ambiguity.” Okay, fine. No Sudden Move definitely fits the bill.

Of course, so could countless other crime dramas, particularly ones—as this one does—that double as a period piece. What distinguishes No Sudden Move as a “noir film” as opposed to simply a crime drama that happens to be set in 1950s Detroit?

The literal French translation is black film. A curious point, given the story and setting here, Detroit at the height of its prominence in America, when it had 1.8 million people and was the fifth-largest city in the United States (behind, at the time, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles); the city ranks 14th today, having declined in population by nearly 64% over the past seventy years. Furthermore, several of the characters are Black, with Don Cheadle getting top billing. There’s something you don’t see in “classic noir,” but it certainly gives new meaning to the idea of film noir.

The rest of the principal cast is either Black or white, although one of them is Latino: Benicio del Toro, who gets second billing. He and Cheadle play Ronald and Curt, respectively, who are hired along with the young white guy Charlie (Kieran Culkin) to “babysit” a family at their house while the dad (David Harbour) is escorted to the office of his boss (Hugh Maguire) to steal an incriminating document about the automobile industry in his safe.

It’s quite clear that a lot of actors have great respect or Steven Soderbergh as a director, and are either eager or happy to take part in often large ensemble casts for his projects, regardless of the medium. Lately Soderbergh is using HBO as the conduit for his output, most recently with Let Them All Talk, starring Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen and Diane Wiest as old friends on a cruise. That movie and this one could not be more different, except that they serve as the latest example of how prolific and eclectic Soderbergh is and has long been. Plus—and this is key—they are the kinds of movies that get little support for major studio releases in movie theaters anymore, and so they get released direct to streaming.

This is almost certainly less lucrative for Soderbergh, but all evidence points to his being more creatively fulfilled. And when it comes to No Sudden Move, a whole lot of name actors seem to agree, with the cast also including the likes of Brendan Frasher (almost unrecognizable), John Hamm, Ray Liotta, Matt Damon, and even Noah Jupe as David Harbour’s teenage son.

If I had any particular criticism of this film, it would be that, as is typical of films of this type, the women aren’t given enough to do. A fair number of women get speaking parts, and No Sudden Move at the very least passes the Bechdel Test, and a key twist near the end involves one of the women and is impossible to see coming—all of which I appreciate. None of this changes the fact that every woman onscreen, including even Amy Seimetz as David Harbour’s wife, are fundamentally secondary not just to the plot, but to all of the men involved in it. I want to see a crime noir that is “modernized” in a way that gives women equal footing in the way the plot unfolds, rather than them just being angry or resentful about their husbands’ behaviors and personal associations.

That said, we take what we can get, and among the men at least, this is a hearteningly diverse cast. And the script, by Ed Solomon (Men In Black), brings all these characters together in uniquely satisfying ways. That “babysitting” job of the aforementioned family goes sideways very early on, and every turn that follows is just unpredictable enough to be not overdone, and the story remains consistently compelling from there to the end. When it comes to crime dramas, No Sudden Moves holds up to the tenets of the genre.

These two experience a lot of close calls.

Overall: B+