BOB ROSS: HAPPY ACCIDENTS, BETRAYAL & GREED

Directing: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

The new Netflix documentary Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed might be a better experience if you only watch about the first half of it, when director Joshua Rofé fouses on when the famed PBS painter was still alive. As it stands, once I finished the whole film, I found myself thinking mostly about how it was not quite the movie I wanted it to be.

To be fair, the subtitle itself makes things pretty clear: this is a story that either injects or reveals drama in Ross’s legacy, depending on how you look at it. Ross and his wife partnered with another couple, Annette and Walt Kowalski, who are positioned definitively by Rofé here as villains. And maybe they are villains, who knows? The trouble with Bob Ross is that it provides a definitively biased side to the story, with a halfhearted attempt at “fairness” by specifying how they reached out to the Kowalskis, who declined to be interviewed. We learn at the end of the film that the Kowalskis “reached out” after the film was completed, and dispute any claims to their acting counter to Ross’s interests.

Beyond that, we don’t get any of their story. The unfortunate result is that Bob Ross feels rather like a film version of character assassination, a sort of vengeance, against the Kowalskis, who are characterized as litigious monsters, so intimidating that “more than a dozen” potential subjects declined to be interviewed for the film for fear of them.

And, again: maybe they are. This film makes a compelling case that Ross’s will specified that he wanted his empire to be left to his brother and his son Steve, who gets the most air time in this film. Steve’s uncle, who had barely more than half controlling interest, sold it to the Kowalskis, and Steve gets no part of the millions earned by the Kowalskis selling products capitalizing on the Bob Ross likeness.

I’m just over here thinking . . . who cares? Does this story really justify a documentary feature? Does anyone with fond memories of watching Bob Ross on The Joy of Painting thirty years ago really need those memories tainted by this exercise in bitterness? Rofé is trying to build intrigue in a story that has very little, like this is some great big reveal that Bob Ross had associates who were apparently assholes. You want to see a genuinely shocking and infuriating documentary, something that will truly make your jaw drop? Watch Collective. It’s streaming on Hulu.

Bob Ross, on the other hand, is streaming on Netflix, which of course has more subscribers, and is already on their top ten list. I’m sure plenty of (probably mostly older) people are watching this movie and totally moved by it. “I won’t buy any Bob Ross products!” they’ll say, even though they never bought any to begin with. I’m just not sure what kind of difference this movie is making, aside from offering a version of closure to his son and a few close friends. I’d much rather have just watched a documentary about Bob Ross’s life before his death, and about how his public access art instruction show became a minor cultural phenomenon. And really, that’s what about half this movie is. So, maybe go ahead and watch this and just turn it off once it gets to the part where he passed away in 1995.

The Joy of Painting eventually dissipates, apparently.

Overall: B-

REMINISCENCE

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

I basically wasted two hours watching Reminiscence in the movie theater. It’s also available streaming on HBO Max, and I wouldn’t even recommend you watch it there. You’ll still wish you could get those two hours back. Well, if you have any taste or sense of quality, anyway.

This movie really strains to be what I like to call “future noir,” a genre both introduced and perfected by Blade Runner in 1982. Many films since have tried and failed to replicate (no pun intended—bit of an inside joke there) it, this one merely being the latest. It takes an old-school mystery plot and grafts it onto a quasi-apocalyptic future setting. In this case, it’s Miami after significant sea level rise.

A lot of the wide shots of the city are reminiscent (ha!) of the sea level rise depicted in the Manhattan of the 2001 Spielberg film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. You may notice that when it comes to being derivative, there is a bit of a pattern here. And the renditions of all Miami’s skyscrapers wading in waters about two stories deep is a compelling one; in fact the most exciting shot in the whole movie is the opening one, starting with a wide shot from out over the sea, closing in until we’ve reached a section of the city where streets are only partially flooded with a few inches of water.

But, this world as presented by writer-director Lisa Joy, here with her feature film directorial debut, suffers from the same thing as the worlds in all those other Blade Runner rip-offs: it doesn’t feel sufficiently lived in. It’s more like a Sims version of a dystopian city—which, by the way, considering it’s Miami, has a curious and glaring lack of Hispanic characters. Oh, it has a couple, in very small, supporting parts. But they serve as little more than tokens when taking in the broad representation of the city, in a story that, of course, mostly centers white characters. Granted, the biggest part besides that of Hugh Jackman in the lead is Thandiwe Newton, but that doesn’t change the incongruity of a movie with such a large focus on a city whose population is 70% Hispanic or Latino, which treats that demographic as little more than window dressing. Or are we to assume the majority of them disappeared in this vision of the future?

That brings me to my biggest nitpick, which is that so many of the details of this world are just plain dumb. In several scenes on the streets where there is standing water on the road but not on the sidewalks, for some reason people are walking in the middle of the street and not on the sidewalk. I suppose that might be thought of as more“cinematic,” except that there is no logic in it. There’s also a battle scene in an old school band room, with instruments left by empty chairs as if the class once had to leave very quickly, presumably back when, as is mentioned several times, “the waves came.” But if the waves came, wouldn’t they have washed away the guitars and violins? Judging by this production design, the students all had to rush out in time for the room to fill with water like a slow stream from a corner faucet.

Hugh Jackson plays Nick Bannister, a guy who not only spends far too much time with hackneyed voiceover narration, but who makes a living selling time in a contraption that lets people relive the memories of their choice. (Shades of Strange Days meets Inception here.) Versions of this contraption, which for some reason necessitates stripping to your underwear and getting into a glass tube of water with a device clamped to your head, are also used to interrogate criminal suspects. Everything about how this whole process works, and especially the hardware necessary, comes across as wildly unrealistic: nothing of this sort would ever take up so much physical space. It even includes a giant circular platform over which a holographic projection of the memories can be seen by Nick, even though they aren’t even his own memories and he’s not attached to any of the apparatus. It’s all designed with cinematic aesthetics in mind, with no regard for practical realism. Memory is already well known to be wildly malleable and deeply unreliable; in what universe would these projections be so vivid it’s like watching a movie of what’s going on in someone’s head?

No one expects science fiction to be strictly accurate; given the “fiction” part, that would be impossible. But it still has to start from a jumping-off point of known truths, which Reminiscence seems to discard completely.

I’d try to share more about the plot, but on top of all this, Lisa Joy’s script tries way too hard to do way too much, using hollow dialogue in a delivery that often comes across as unrehearsed. Suffice it to say that a mysterious woman in the form of Rebecca Ferguson appears, and is the catalyst for Nick’s obsession after they have a three-month affair and then she disappears. Joy plays with the notion of memory as these scenes unfold in varying moments in the story’s timeline, a device that could be exciting and clever with a better story and actually has been done better by other filmmakers playing with memory and the perception of time.

Reminiscence feels like a first draft that somehow got filmed without any revisions or notes. And okay, so there is a lot of justified resentment out there for studio executives turning movies into something written by committee, but there also has to be a happy medium. Because if this movie is one person’s true vision, it’s a wildly underdeveloped one. This one could have used a pointer or ten.

Behold, the only compelling part of the movie.

Overall: C

RESPECT

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

As always a biopic is tricky. How can you cram someone’s entire life into just two hours—or even, much more commonly these days, two and a half hours? It’s always better to take a particularly notable moment in someone’s life and make a movie out of that. Consider the fantastic 2006 film The Queen, which was about Queen Elizabeth II but narrowed the focus down to the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death. When it comes to biographical representation in film, the more specific, the better.

Respect attempts to have it both ways, ending its story at the time of Aretha Franklin’s career-high recording of the gospel album Amazing Grace in 1972. (There was an accompanying documentary film crew at that recording, but the film was not finished and released until 2018.) This leaves the last five decades of Ms. Franklin’s life untold—but, given that the film begins with her at age ten, it still crams the first thirty years of her life into a run time of 145 minutes. It’s still too much.

And granted, we all know Aretha Franklin easily earned her status as a legend, which means there’s a lot about her that’s worth telling. Some of it, Respect somewhat frustratingly glosses over, such as the shocking fact that she had her first child at the age of twelve, and her second at fourteen, with this film never making clear who the father was—she never told anyone who the father was. Some handwritten wills discovered in 2019 name someone as a father, about whom still little is known, but as they have evidently not been authenticated, Respect sidesteps offering any clarity on the matter.

Given the mystery surrounding the paternity of those first two children, this makes sense—but then, there’s also Ms. Franklin’s relationship with her minister father, C. L. Franklin (an excellent Forest Whitaker). First-time feature film director Liesel Tommy—with a script by Tracey Scott Wilson, both of them women of color—appropriately depicts this as a complicated relationship, but here also completely sidesteps the quite obvious question of how he handled his daughter getting pregnant so young, not just once but twice. We literally never see them even discuss it.

Instead, we see C. L. Frankling immediately hostile toward Ted White (Marlon Wayans), who would become Ms. Franklin’s first husband. White later fully warrants this hostility, but the film doesn’t give us any reason to understand its immediacy as soon as his introductory scene. All we know is that C. L. hates him and Aretha is plainly attracted to him.

And, it seems, Ms. Frankling had many complicated relationships, including with Ted White, who was evidently an overbearing manager. At least she seems to have a healthy relationship with music producer Jerry Wexler, who helped her finally record some hit records several years into her career. Wexler is played by Marc Maron, a comedian and longtime favorite podcast host of mine. These are the only things that make his performance especially notable, and appropriately so: Respect is a film that rightly centralizes the Black characters and, even with Wexler being by far the biggest part for a white person, even he is fundamentally decentralized in the story—as he should be. Knowing who he is, though, it’s nice to see Maron playing a part so well, especially one that is further from his real-life self than anything else he’s ever done.

In any case, I spent a fair amount of time in Respect tying to identify the “hook,” or the arc of Ms. Franklin’s story being told her, as it spans so many years. The film finally manages it after some time, and once it does, it’s easier to appreciate the film as a whole. And for those of us who did not already know a lot about Aretha Franklin, you learn some pretty interesting stuff, perhaps most notably that Martin Luther King Jr. (played by Gilbert Glenn Brown) was a family friend. Ms Franklin is credited in the film for helping Dr. King and his activism, although none of her activism or charity work is ever directly depicted.

Broadly speaking, there’s a slightly disappointing aspect to the telling of Ms. Franklin’s story here, ultimately coming across as vaguely bland. What helps Respect rise above its fairly standard biopic storytelling is the performances, by far most significantly Jennifer Hudson in the lead role. Her screen presence here is not quite as electrifying and urgent as her Oscar-winning turn in Dreamgirls (2006), but she still delivers a performance worthy of another Oscar nomination, and is doubly impressive once you know she sang live on set.

The supporting performers are uniformly excellent as well, from Forest Whitaker and Marlon Wayans to smaller but notable parts with Mary J. Blige as Dinah Washington and a nearly unrecognizable Tituss Burgess as Reverend Dr. James Cleveland. All of them are still pushed aside, of course, by the presence of Hudson as Ms. Franklin, who reportedly told Hudson she wanted her to play her in the movie. Franklin’s music is iconic, and Respect not only features plenty of it, but several scenes depicting how their arrangements came to be. The sequence in which she and her sisters come up with the hook for the song “Respect” is especially fun.

Beyond that, Respect has its ups and downs, just like the life of the person whose story it tells, and just like any decent biopic. And if this movie isn’t exactly a masterpiece, at least it’s decent, and features great music.

A woman on a bumpy road to self-possession.

Overall: B

THE PROTÉGÉ

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

There’s a lot to love about The Protégé. Or at least, there’s a lot for me to love about it. I have long loved women who kick ass, and historically we’ve been treated to far too few of them, although they have increased in frequency in recent years. But this one offers layers particularly unusual: the protagonist is not just a woman of color, but maybe most importantly, she’s in her forties. She’s a middle-aged woman who kicks ass! Sign me up!

Maggie Q, who plays the titular character (also known as Anna), is 42. Okay, so production wrapped late last year, when she was still 41, and it began in January—with a predictable several month delay due to COVID-19—so onscreen, she’s either 40 or 41. Not that I need to be obsessed about this, but the film never specifies her age; it only shows flashbacks to her childhood in Vietnam, with a young actress whose age I found difficult to determine. 15? 12? Whatever the age, the opening scene is a flashback to 1991, after which we are told it’s “thirty years later” (with no hint at a pandemic in the present-day setting).

Whatever the case, it’s great to see an action movie featuring a middle-aged heroine. Okay, sure, we’ve already seen the likes of Helen Mirren—in her seventies—in multiple movies literally kicking ass and/or wielding a gun. But there’s a novelty quality to those parts, which are all supporting. She’s also white: in The Protégé, Maggie Q is the middle-aged, Vietnamese protagonist. I have no idea how necessary it really is to note this, but Maggie Q herself is multiracial, having been born and raised in Honolulu by a Vietnamese mother and a white father. It’s nice, furthermore, that this same ethnic heritage is reflected in Anna’s parents in the flashback scenes.

I haven’t even yet mentioned the other principal parts, including the assassin for whom Anna is the protégé, Moody, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Moody celebrates his 70th birthday at one part in the story. And then there’s rival assassin Rembrandt, played by 69-year-old Michael Keaton. Everybody’s old! There’s even a notable supporting part featuring 62-year-old Robert Patric, the T2 Terminator himself. (Funny that the flashbacks here are set the same year as Terminator 2’s release.)

I do find myself wondering, much as I clearly loved it, whether the veteran status of so many of these actors will leave wide audiences largely uninterested. Reviews of The Protégé thus far are decidedly mixed, and although I went to see it the night before its published release date, I was still at a 6:00 p.m. showing and there were about five people in the theater. I mean, that was much more comfortable in the middle of the latest surge in COVID cases (combined with my being masked and vaccinated), but didn’t seem to bode well for the film’s box office prospects.

Well, whatever. I quite enjoyed this movie. Sure, the “boilerplate” criticisms are valid, but the performers have real chemistry, slightly less so between Maggie Q and Samuel L. Jackson versus the delightful shared scenes between her and Keaton. And the plot did have a couple of plot twists I did not see coming, especially considering the way the story is presented in the marketing materials. This applies both to Anna’s relationship with Moody as her mentor, and where her relationship goes with Rembrandt.

And, “boilerplate” or not, it’s refreshing to see a movie ease into its story, and its action sequences. I’m not against an action movie opening with a bang, but this one opens with intrigue, and prioritizes character over action. This achieve the intended effect of us really caring about what’s at stake when the action sequences begin, and thankfully director Martin Campbell shoots the action in ways both exciting and coherent. You merely have to wait a little bit for the action, and once the movie gets to it, it’s worth the wait.

Admittedly, there was a few moments when I did wish the writing were a little better. Occasionally, the plot takes a turn both corny and a little obvious, and ironic element for a movie about supposedly ingenious assassins. At the end of the day, it’s still just an action movie. True, it’s one that would be far more likely to be utterly forgettable if all of its leads were in their twenties and thirties. It really is the casting here that sets it apart, and makes The Protégé worth a watch.

It’s less typical than it looks.

Overall: B+

FREE GUY

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

Free Guy is unexceptional, but fun. In a way, it feels like a sign of some level of return to “normalcy,” with yet another ultimately generic action comedy available this weekend. What it comes to the options we have today in particular, it gets the job done. I was adequately entertained.

I suppose this relatively indifferent approach might seem unfair to the millions of gamers out there who are part of a gargantuan group to which I do not belong, and their possible delight in the many “easter eggs” and in-references Free Guy offers them. That, in itself, is fair. This movie was quite definitively not made for me. I still thought it looked fun, though. I am not impervious to the ample charms of Ryan Reynolds. That even I still managed to have a good time is very much to this movie’s credit.

I keep thinking about its visual component—not just the CGI, of which there is a lot, but its overall aesthetic. Most of the story takes place within the world of a video game, and the visuals very much fit the part. I mean, at least based on my limited knowledge of gaming; I haven’t played any video game (aside from, say, Solitaire or Words with Friends) with any regularity since 1989. Still, the visual palate of Free Guy, which is convincingly rendered, packed with detail, and overall just really busy, feels very much of its time. This means that ten or twenty years from now, it will still look just like video game design did in 2020. Will that make it seem dated, or more sort of “retro” in feel? I say this as though any notable number of people will be re-watching Free Guy in 2030 or 2040. This is really just a movie made for its present moment, but at least it succeeds in that aim.

Some of the concept elements are fairly refreshing. Reynolds plays the titular Guy, an NPC (“Non Player Character”) usually existing as background in a given video game, who becomes self-aware. Of course, this is hardly a new concept, but whenever computer programs became “alive” in movies of the past (Electric Dreams, Short Circuit, The Terminator), they did so either via magic or freak power surges, or due to the fabled “singularity.” In this case, Guy has become self-aware by design: an algorithmic program that is designed to learn and grow and evolve. I’m not saying this is necessarily any more plausible than outright magic, but given the rapid growth of AI technology, it’s a hell of a lot more believable.

Guy falls for a player, Millie (Killing Eve’s Jodi Comer), who is searching for proof inside the game that the billionaire owner of the game’s parent company (played with a simmering intensity, but not quite as consistently funny as he was clearly going for, by Taika Waitit) stole the original programming designed by her, in part with partner Keys (Joe Keery). Millie and Keys are longtime friends clearly destined to realize they are meant for each other.

The idea that finding this proof of theft necessitates movement through the world of the video game, as in movies like TRON, is patently ridiculous, of course. But with a movie like this, ridiculousness is the point. The sensory overload of the world inside the video game was often a bit much for me, but clearly designed to replicate the random chaos of a game in which players are tasked with robbing and murdering and blowing shit up. When Guy decides he’ll “level up” by becoming a popular hero and confiscating other players’ guns, the messaging isn’t all that subtle. But, neither does it get beat over your head; Free Guy is much more concerned with being an unchallenging entertainment than it is with being preachy.

Besides, Ryan Reynolds’s “aw shucks” innocence as a bank teller who just wants to be nice to everyone, with a wide-eyed and childlike sensibility, is kind of irresistible. Free Guy would not be half as entertaining as it is without his lead performance. The countless cameos, many of them quick voice-over work for other NPCs, are just icing on the cake. Also, there’s a climactic battle between Guy and an “upgraded” but unfinished and therefore far beefier yet dumber version of himself, in which they manage to throw in weapons and tools from other famous franchises. This is the kind of thing that could easily play as misguided and stupid, but in the capable hands of director Shawn Levy, it’s easy to get a kick out of it.

That’s the overall gist of Free Guy, really. It’s an easy way to get a kick out of something for a couple of hours. You won’t continue caring much after it’s over, but that doesn’t detract from the fun you’ve had in the moment.

The only world he ever knew . . . was not what he thought it was!

Overall: B

FRENCH EXIT

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

French Exit makes me long of the days when it was even possible for a movie to become a cult classic—or in this case, a gay cult classic. Not that there’s anything inherently gay or queer here—but, it could certainly be argued, it has a unique sort of camp sensibility. If this movie had come out, say, thirty years ago, it could easily have found its place alongside movies like Grey Gardens or What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Do people under the age of thirty even know what those movies are?

Now, there are just too many movies to choose from. There are even too many objectively good movies to choose from, one after the other, so a gem like French Exit easily slips through the cultural cracks. And I might even be hard pressed to call French Exit “objectively” great as a film. Plenty of it is uneven, and the actors’ over-enunciating takes some getting used to. But, this is the rare film where, if it’s for you—and god knows, this isn’t for everyone—you’ll be powerless to its pull. I just could not help but love this movie.

It took me a little while, too. In its first twenty minutes or so, I found myself drifting into my own thoughts, then distracted by what seemed like clunky dialogue. A scene in which Lucas Hedges speaks to Imogen Poots in quasi-deadpan tones that brought to mind a regional theater production in which the actors are trying too hard. But, then something magical happened, at around the 25-minute mark, when this movie completely turned me around on it. There are countless scenes in which, incredibly, it managed to be sort of . . . unhinged, but in a subtle way. How can any movie pull such a thing off? This one does it.

Hedges and Poots play would-be lovers Malcom and Susan, their intended engagement broken off indefinitely by Malcom’s eccentric (to say the least) mother, Frances—played by Michelle Pfeiffer, truly above all else, the reason to watch this movie. It must b said, however, that it’s not just her. Pfeiffer and Hedges are almost reliably wonderful in whatever part they play, but countless supporting players in this movie are also sheer delights. Take, for instance, Frences’s lonely neighbor after she moves to Paris to spend what little money she has left. Valerie Mahaffey plays Madame Reynard with a tightly wound comic sensibility that I just could not get enough of.

Did I mention a cat also plays prominently in the story? This movie would be utterly delightful even without “Small Frank,” whose wild significance to the plot I won’t spoil here, but to say his presence enhances the experience would be an understatement. Of course, that’s just so long as you can lose yourself in an odd movie like this, about a socially clueless widow and her grown son living in a friend’s Parisian apartment with little regard to how quickly the very last of their fortune is being whittled away. I’m not sure if “odd” is even the right word for it. This movie’s sensibility is somewhere in the space between “eccentric” and “quirky,” but with a decidedly dark bent to it. In other words, director Azazel Jacobs and writer Patrick DeWitt (adapting from his novel of the same name) somehow knew to make a movie custom made just for me.

Will you feel the same way? Odds are, probably not. But some of you might! I certainly want to share it, and I urge you to watch this film, currently available for about six dollars VOD.

And, sure, some of it makes no sense. Okay, maybe a lot of it. Its deceptively hilarious script makes up for a lot, such as how insanely easily Frances manages to “sneak” her cat through customs after she gets off the boat in France. Or the way Frances finds the fortune teller from the boat with the use of a Parisian private detective, and for reasons that never get adequately explained, they both wind up staying several nights with Frances and Malcolm in the same apartment. This movie is so much fun, you hardly care.

Still, it all comes back to Michelle Pfeiffer. Performances like this are what the word “iconic” was made for. That word is so overused it has lost all meaning, but Pfeiffer brings it full circle. I haven’t loved her so much in a movie since she played Catwoman nearly—let me check my notes—thirty years ago. This woman is a national treasure, she commands attention, and so does this charmingly peculiar movie.

You won’t believe how much you’ll love hanging out with these people.

Overall: B+

NINE DAYS

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

Depending on your level of patience for slow pacing, you might think the new film Nine Days feels like it lasts about that long.

This movie has a lot in it that’s ripe for discussion, but I do think how slow it is will be a challenge for most. It was reportedly a “Sundance Festival Favorite” last year, but let’s face it, few movies that qualify for such a distinction translate into widespread success outside the film festival context. This is that kind of movie. I can see it easily debated among academics, but calling that a great compliment is dubious at best.

Admittedly, Nine Days feels very thematically dense, and yet its themes largely flew over my head. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like it. I just found myself sometimes wondering what the point was. This is a film about “candidates” getting interviewed over the course of—you guesses it!—nine days to see which one of them gets to be born and live a rich life. I’m not sure it’s supposed to be reincarnation, per se; like many of its ideas, Nine Days lacks clarification there.

Only two of the characters are known for sure to have ever been alive before, including our protagonist, the interviewer, named Will (Winston Duke). When we are introduced to Will at the beginning of the film. he is spending a lot of time watching people on a wall full of old TV monitors, taking notes. It takes several minutes for us to piece together that he is watching the lives of his previous “selections.” He is particularly focused on one named Amanda, whose point of view is quite literally the opening shots of the film.

There’s a lot that writer-director Edson Oda does with the filmmaking here that could easily have fallen on its face, and yet works surprisingly well. Those TV monitors, each representing someone’s life living on Earth, is a point-of-view shot, as though we are looking out through their eyes from inside their head. One has to wonder how much of that footage was shot, because it is impressively assembled, and succeeds in its intended effect.

There’s never any explanation of exactly where it is that all these people are, although it’s clearly not the dimension we live in. Early on, a character asks if they are dead, and Will clarifies that it’s best not to think of it as dead or alive. What is it, then? I suppose this world, in an isolated house on a beach, is in some sense a kind of purgatory. Who is Will working for? There’s a guy named Kyo (Benedict Wong) who seems to serve as some level of overseer, although he functions really just as a companion, who usually just hangs out and is sometimes argumentative. We are meant to understand Kyo is someone who has never been alive.

Besides Wong, and Tony Hale as one of the “candidates,” the ensemble cast consists of mostly unrecognizable faces, which serves the story well. My struggle with that story is that I can’t quite figure out what it’s trying to say, unless I want to take it very literally and come away with a somewhat incongruous late sequence that’s all about not taking life’s precious moments for granted. Honestly, a lot of Nine Days feels like far more effort than necessary for the story being told. Why does the framing device have to be so complicated?

And yet, there is something uniquely soothing about its tone. I’m also impressed by its exclusively practical production. There are no special effects to speak of, aside from when candidates occasionally dissipate. Otherwise, it’s all done on set, including elaborate setups that Will constructs like a carpenter, to create “a moment” that candidates liked from all that TV monitor footage.

It must be said, also, that every single performance in this film is terrific. There’s a peculiar moment early on when Will tells one of the candidates that they are in a place where emotions are not felt as “deeply” as they get felt when one is alive. And yet, the characters themselves prove over time to be brimming with emotion, especially when faced with rejection, as only one of them will be selected for life. Oda does a good job of drawing multdimensional, nuanced and distinct personalities among then all, especially Emma (Zazie Beets), a wide-eyed innocent who confounds Will with her almost defiantly evasive answers to his questions.

His questions are very specific. Will presents candidates with scenarios and then asks them what they would do in that situation. The responses are both varied and plausible. Once the candidates are whittled down to two, one of them you see coming a mile away and the other is a bit more of a surprise. Nine Days does get a lot more compelling as it goes along, but it takes its sweet time getting there, as Will spends his days making old-school VCR recordings of moments in his previous selections’ lives, on actual videocassettes. I could never quite decide what to make of these peculiar design choices, with Will working with real-world technological tools but exclusively ones that are long outdated.

Such is the case with much of Nine Days: I don’t quite know what to make of it. Except that the acting is excellent. And maybe someone smarter than me could watch it and help me get a handle on precisely what it’s trying to say. Will goes through a distinct emotional arc of his own, second guessing himself after a tragic turn in Amanda’s life, and eventually has something akin to an emotional breakdown of his own, after being quite pointedly deadpan for a very long time. There are occasionally sudden bursts of emotion in this movie, but most of the time it moves on a very even keel, which if nothing else I have to admit, I found oddly comforting.

If you’re looking for meaning . . . maybe it’s here, maybe it isn’t.

Overall: B

THE SUICIDE SQUAD

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

I cannot deny it: The Suicide Squad exceeded my expectations. To be fair, that was not a difficult task, after the 2016 film Suicide Squad was so roundly panned by critics, combined with underperforming at the box office (if you want to call $300 million at the box office “underperforming”). I never even bothered to see that other film, as by all accounts it was a waste of time—disliked by critics and fans alike—but evidently it doesn’t matter, as The Suicide Squad can easily be considered a reboot, even though it’s all of five years later. This film does have two actor carry-overs from the previous one, though: Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn (now her third time portraying the character); and Viola Davis as specialist Amanda Waller, the woman who tasks the titular squad with what often turn out to be literal suicide missions.

Such is the case with the opening sequence of The Suicide Squad, which turns out to be quite the effective bait an switch. I won’t spoil anything more, except to say that with one major exception, the “squad” we get introduced to is very much a cheeky distraction. This proves from the start that James Gunn, who previously directed and co-wrote the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, was a great choice for this film, infusing it with the cleverly twisted humor it needed, at just the right amount. I might even say The Suicide Squad is by some measure better than both the Guardians films, as though they served as practice for hitting his stride here. This movie is one of the few truly creatively successful DC movies on all levels, silly in all the right ways and never being self-serious. This is a movie that understands how ridiculous it is.

And that, my friends, is how you make a good superhero movie. The editing and pacing are unusually well done, with a plot that unfolds in a way that keeps the story that stands on its own and, although the climactic sequence is still typically large in scale, it avoids the cliché of being about battling a global, intergalactic or universal threat. I mean, okay, there is a giant alien starfish that serves as a sort of acid trip version of Godzilla, and obviously that has global implications. But, the focus of the story remains local—on the fictional island of Corto Maltese, as it happens, a fun shoutout to the original 1989 Batman film (and previously in original Batman comics).

Gunn reportedly made the deliberate decision to use lesser-known supervillains to make up “The Suicide Squad,” another choice that only enhances the experience of this movie, without the distractions of Batman or even mentions of The Joker. In addition to Harley Quinn, Idris Elba as Bloodsport; John Cena as Peacemaker; Joel Kinnaman as Rick Flag; David Dastmalchian as Polka-Dot Man; Daniela Melchior as Ratcatcher 2; and even Sylvester Stallone as the voce of the impressively CGI rendered King Shark, all make up a nice group of messy criminal misfits, granted time out of prison in order to pull off jobs others can’t do—and in some cases actually die trying.

I mean, a lot of people die in this movie. In one sequence, a well choreographed attack takes place in which the Squad winds up dispatching numerous people in all sorts of creative ways, almost as a competition, only to discover they had mistaken the wrong people for their enemies. This gets blithely gleaned over, but whatever; The Suicide Squad never pretends to have a solid moral core. It’s an exaggerated cartoon, its hyperviolence something in the school of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies. You’ll see a lot of blood and dismemberment. A quasi-humanoid shark picks up live people and eats them.

And, somehow . . . it’s delightful. I had a great fun watching this movie. The humor lands consistently, and there are no lulls in the narrative, no point that you might find yourself checking the time. It also has better CGI than it really could have gotten away with, just thanks to its smart script and winning performances—there’s a man-weasel character (called . . . Weasel) that is both disturbing to look at, and rendered with memorably intricate detail. I don’t know how dated the visuals of this film might look in ten years, but right now it’s far better than a lot of other effects-heavy contemporary films. Overall, The Suicide Squad is just a fun hang, with plenty of laughs and a uniquely compelling story, thanks in large part to its twisted silliness.

A bunch of dork criminals will win you over.

Overall: B+