BRAD'S STATUS

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

Writer-director Mike White and Ben Stiller are a match made in heaven for people who like movies that make them uncomfortable. They both specialize in uniquely awkward scenarios. In this case, Stiller plays the titular Brad, a man pushing fifty who is obsessed with comparing his own life accomplishments with those of his friends from college.

The script for Brad's Status is easily its greatest strength, and clearly a lot of people thought so: those college friends make their own brief appearances in the story, and they are played by the likes of Michael Sheen, Luke Wilson, Jemaine Clement, and Mike White himself. All these friends have gone on to far more success than Brad feels he's achieved, since he started a nonprofit and is "merely" middle-class.

Here was have what is essentially a midlife crisis movie, but a rather unusual one. Brad is taking his son Troy (Austin Abrams) on a trip to Boston to tour prospective colleges, and the curious thing about Brad's deep insecurities is how little he presses them on his son. Brad makes mild missteps with Troy, but generally they have a thoughtful, loving, healthy relationship. It's nice to see a story like this where none of the problems stem from a guy's issues with his father.

Brad's Status, in fact, avoids cliche all around -- except that at one point Brad refers to himself as a cliche. This is in the same scene where a young woman of color literally says to him, "Trust me, your life is enough." The whole of this movie could be distilled to that point, with this straight white man paralyzed by envy and an inability to see his own privilege. This alone could make Brad's Status worthy of academic analysis, given the irony in the film itself still putting all of the focus on a straight white man.

I guess it's the rare movie that could perhaps open the minds of other middle-aged straight white men, though. If there were a message here, it would be "You don't have it so bad." There doesn't seem to be any real dysfunction to Brad's family, which is nice, and allows for a more focused, if subtle, look at a man's fragile ego.

Brad marvels at the ability of his wife, Melanie (Jenna Fischer), to be just satisfied with the things in her life. I am perhaps in the minority here, but Melanie was who I related to the most -- why spend time regretting untapped ambitions? I watched this movie and thought about how there are literally studies showing that wealth makes people no happier than poor people, and actually poor people are often happier. Brad is so jaded he feels he can make a bigger difference in the world by getting rich and becoming a philanthropist than by running a nonprofit. That's objectively debatable, and soon enough Brad's amusingly ridiculous fantasies about his college friends' imagined great lives give way their respective harsh realities.

Mike White is particularly skilled at nuance, and it takes a while to appreciate the quality of a movie like this. At first Brad is so disillusioned with the direction of his life, as he considers the possibilities for his son, I found myself hoping the whole movie wouldn't be this depressing. But fear not -- Brad's Status may be regularly squirm-inducing in its awkwardness, but it gets less dark as it goes on. It ends in a place surprisingly pleasant, and deeply affecting.

Austin Abrams and Ben Stiller have pretty good lives, it turns out.

Overall: B+

THE TIGER HUNTER

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

Context is everything, I suppose. Would I have liked The Tiger Hunter, a pleasant diversion of a feel-good movie, any less if it didn't feel like the perfect antidote to mother! ? I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend anyone rush into theatres to see The Tiger Hunter, and I would warn everyone to stay the hell away from mother! -- yet, if you were to insist on seeing mother!, then The Tiger Hunter is the perfect palate cleanser. It's so oversimplified it's just this side of corny -- if not brainless -- but the performers are every last one of them undeniably sweet and charming.

Something tells me no one involved in the making of The Tiger Hunter expected any direct comparisons to mother!  Well, here I am! But okay I'm done with that line of thinking now. Let's just talk about The Tiger Hunter.

The title is slightly misleading. You get one fleeting glimpse of an actual tiger in the beginning, an imagined flashback to a revered father's time when he saved an Indian village by killing a local tiger. The "present day" of this movie is actually 1979, which means the tiger incident would have been some two decades before. Again with the context: anyone revering the killing of a tiger in 2017 would be met with much derision. It's a different world.

Even 1979 Chicago, to which Sami Malik travels from Indian in search of the good life through an engineering job, is a different world. Sami is played by 38-year-old Danny Pudi, who is himself actually from Chicago. This means the Indian accent he has in the film is faked -- and now I feel a little vindicated thinking his accent didn't sound quite right, especially next to all the genuinely Indian actors in the scenes set in India.

Other than the accent, though -- which is barely noticeable -- Pudi has an irresistible screen presence, his character relentlessly upbeat. Even his smile brightens the screen, as does that of his love interest, Ruby (Karen David), the childhood friend he wants to marry and is trying to impress with a good job so her army general father (Glee's Iqbal Theba) will approve of their union.

Anyway, it sort of makes sense for director and co-writer Lena Khan to set this story in 1979, especially for one about an immigrant. Setting it in 2017 would make it feel far more tone deaf, given all the current politics. Surely 1979 wasn't so ideal either, but it's a lot easier to imagine as a simpler time for people to come to America filled with simple and idealistic dreams.

Sami discovers upon his arrival that the company that had offered him a job has been restructured, and his only opportunity is a bottom-of-the-rung position literally in the basement. This is where he befriends a coworker played by Jon Heder (of Napoleon Dynamite fame). He's also given charity from a Pakisani immigrant (Rizwan Manji) who takes pity on him and invites him to stay at his place. Although it's part of the joke that they get to this apartment and 12 other South Asian engineers with low-level jobs (plus one guy who "looks Bangladeshi, but he's just black" -- one of the odder jokes in the movie), this offer comes so quickly that The Tiger Hunter is rendered its own kind of fantasy very early on.

Everything about this story is simple, and predictable, straightforward, and unchallenging. Sometimes that's exactly what you want. Even as a comedy this story could really have used more depth -- any depth at all, really -- but it's still fine for what it is. It's unoffensive and ridiculously easy to surrender to its charms; to its credit, The Tiger Hunter never quite gets stupid. Sami is just trying to live up to the reputation of his revered "Tiger Hunter" father. Will he succeed? You know the answer to that, but you'll have a nice enough time getting your expectations met.

Danny Pudi stars in the least homoerotic movie ever to feature seven men in a single bed.

Overall: B

MOTHER!

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

The pretension seeping through every surface of Mother! begins with its very title. What's with that exclamation point? To me, it punctuates the contempt I feel for this movie.

From the very first frame, the reaction is What the fuck? It ends with a bit of a What now? Everything in between makes absolutely zero things about it clear. Darren Aronofsky is a truly accomplished director, but I guess in his middle age he's more interested in offering a cinematic version of a stroke. He clearly wants his audience to understand Mother! is about something. What is it about, then? Someone explain it to me. No, I take that back. I wasted two hours of my life on this movie already.

I don't even know how I could offer any spoilers. Mother! is rotten as soon as it starts. But it's a sneaky kind of rotten, like when you chew a bite of food a few times, pleasantly oblivious until you realize there are maggots in your mouth. Too disgusting for you? Well . . . spoiler alert! There's a point in Mother! where a rabid crowd of zealots eat the main character's baby. Why that happens, I couldn't tell you. Darren Aronofsky should have a chat with Cormack McCarthy. Now there's a guy who knows how to make effective use of baby eating.

I couldn't provide a logical reason behind a single one of the choices Aronofsky makes in Mother! Well, except maybe for his decision to cast Michelle Pfeiffer, in one of the countless mystifying and/or pointless supporting roles. Pfeiffer is legitimately hilarious in this movie, which is weird because of how dark and disturbing it is. For a while, anyway. Then it's just oppressively chaotic. By then, Pfeiffer has disappeared. But when she's on screen, she plays the wife of a surprise house guest (a cigarette-hacking Ed Harris) as a deliciously cold bitch. We need to see more of Michelle Pfeiffer.

The point of view is from Jennifer Lawrence's nameless protagonist. Or is it? It would sure seem so, with Matthew Libatique's cinematography incessantly following her around this gigantic house she never leaves, right behind her head. She's consistently bewildered. It's her one emotion during this story that I could relate to.

It doesn't take long to realize time isn't quite linear. Things switch around too quickly. We learn that she helped restore this entire house, a massive house with countless rooms that evidently stands in the middle of a field with no roads to it, after it burned to the ground. "I lost everything," says her husband, played by Javier Bardem. These are two excellent actors who, in this instance, occasionally don't seem so excellent thanks to some clunky or subtly bizarre dialogue. By the end, there's an endless sequence in which reality gets so distorted that I couldn't tell if this was all an echo of a literal apocalypse (a word Jennifer Lawrence actually utters at one point), or maybe her character was nuts and having hallucinations so elaboriate that at one point the house literally turns into a war zone. I'm talking graphically shot soldiers, bullets through the face.

Weirdly -- I mean, this whole movie is weird -- Mother! startled me several times, like it was trying to be a horror movie, but each of them occurs within the first half. I even jumped when the heart that appears in the toilet squirts blood. Oh, and the toad in the basement.

I'm sure film snobs will insist this movie's "deeper meaning" is clear and anyone who can't figure out what the fuck it was about or what literally any of it means is a moron. There's a strong sense of allegory, just nothing even approaching clarity.

I found the massive marketing push over the past couple of weeks to be suspect, and I was right. Someone saw this movie and said, "Let's bombard the public with so much advertising that they give in before they knew what hit them!" I, on the other hand, put my trust in a proven director. But, even the greats typically make one or two steaming piles of shit movies.

Could this have been better if it were edited differently, maybe? Surely? Did all these great actors really read this script and say, "I have to be a part of this!" Did Darren Aronofsky roofie them all? Seriously, I don't understand. I can't remember the last movie I willingly sat through that had so few genuinely redeeming qualities. We're meant to ask, Is any of this real? By the last quarter of this movie I was just thinking, Get on with it! At least give us the detail that ties this mess together. And then the so-called twist comes in the closing scene and it's simultaneously dumb, disappointing, and more confusing the more you consider everything that preceded it. All that's left is the compulsion to warn the world not to waste their time and money on this movie.

Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem are like whaaat and so is everyone in the audience all day forever.

Overall: C-

BEACH RATS

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

Here is a young actor to keep an eye out for: Harris Dickinson, who is a revelation in Beach Rats, as Frankie, a sexually repressed and confused teen living in Brooklyn. Dickinson is himself all of 20 years old, and grew up in London, and yet it's impossible to imagine any other actor better conveying the fine nuances of Frankie's complex range of emotions -- his self-doubt, his inner struggles, even his internalized homophobia.

Writer-Director Eliza Hittman unpacks this story with deceptive simplicity. She also ends it with a frustrating lack of any resolution whatsoever, something at once respectable and maddening. It's the one true complaint I might have about this film, the way it feels like it ends abruptly in the middle of Frankie's story. Being ambiguous is one thing; fading quickly to black at a seemingly random moment is quite another.

Until that end, however, Beach Rats is a uniquely compelling vision, Frankie systematically making your heart break for him. He hangs out with three straight "bro" types whose behaviors he emulates. It's only after an opening scene in which Frankie is on his computer trolling for older men that we find this out. And he meets a sweet girl (Madeline Weinstein) on the boardwalk while hanging out there with said friends. She complicates things as she makes bold moves in pursuit of Frankie, who has difficulty feigning arousal.

Beach Rats is unusually frank in its depictions of sex, no doubt made easier by its lacking of an MPAA rating. Just consider it a hard-R, considering the number of (flaccid) penises that flash on the screen -- several of them on Frankie's computer as he clicks through a Chat Roulette type site evidently local to Brooklyn. But whether they are of Frankie and Simone making fumbling attempts at physical intimacy, or Frankie and several older men he takes to the beach at night, all these scenes are tastefully shot.

The cinematography, in fact, is regularly hypnotic -- even shots of Frankie and his friends blowing smoke rings at a hookah bar. Beach Rats was shot by Hélène Louvart, who has a long resume but also shot Pina, the 2011 tribute to choreographer Pina Bausch that is arguably the single documentary in history that worked stupendously in 3D. Beach Rats employs a lot of handheld camera work which is seamlessly and beautifully integrated into the story.

That story takes a darker turn near the end, and that's after learning that his father is dying of cancer. He has a younger sister with her own interest in boys, and a mother with clearly too much on her emotional plate. Then Frankie and his friends hatch a plan to get drugs off one of the guys he finds on that website -- he convinces the guys that it's all he uses the site for. Frankie does a lot of drugs, including snorting pills he snatches from his father's prescriptions and crushes into powder.

Now all they want is weed. But in this endeavor, things get increasingly uncomfortable. A feeling builds, that this is going nowhere good. Where it heads is something that could have been worse. It could also be a lot better. Such is the case with Frankie. But if you're looking for either a definitive sign of hope or confirmation of hopelessness with this poor kid, you won't find either one of them here. Will his turmoil go on for the rest of his life? You might leave this movie just overcome with the wishful thinking that one day he'll be okay. That feeling is a credit to both the film's assured direction and Harris Dickinson's unsurpassed performance.

Harris Dickinson gives a uniquely heartbreaking performance in Beach Rats.

Overall: B+

HOME AGAIN

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

Home Again had a unique effect on me. I can't think of any other movie that started out inadvertently creeping me out and ended by winning me over with its objectively contrived charms. I can't even think of anyone I would recommend this movie to, at least not fairly. If I wanted to jump right into sweeping generalizations, I'd say that superficial and/or easily entertained middle-aged women would love it. Okay maybe also superficial and/or easily entertained middle-aged gay men.

Everyone else? Not so much. Smug intellectuals and anyone who fancies themselves a movie connoisseur would revel in tearing this movie apart. This movie isn't for them anyway.

Home Again has much in common with Nancy Meyers movies like Something's Gotta Give (2003) and It's Complicated (2009) -- and for good reason: it's written and directed by Meyers's own daughter, Hallie Meyers-Shyer, practically as an homage. I'll give her this much credit: Meyers may be well-known for placing characters in lavishly decorated homes that seem far more expensive than they could possibly afford, but Meyers-Shyer actually lends the impeccable home some real plausibility. Reese Witherspoon's Alice Kinney lives in a gorgeous home left to her by her late dad who was a famous film director. And after all, Meyers-Shyer knows from having a famous film director parent.

The plausibility of the premise is another story. Alice, on her fortieth birthday, meets a blandly handsome twenty-something, Harry (Pico Alexander), at a bar, and takes both him and his two friends home. Harry sleeps in her bed after getting sick before they can consummate a would-be one-night stand, and his friends pass out on living room couches. Before she knows it, Alice's formerly famous actor mother (Candice Bergen, given not near enough to do) is suggesting she allow these "struggling artist" types who are trying to get a movie made to stay a few nights in her guest house.

Harry is a director, and his friends are writer George (Jon Rudnitsky) and actor Teddy (Nat Wolff). Together they form this one-dimensional trio of young Stepford Men whose main quality is that they all embody what every adoring old lady imagines their grandson to be, which is to say, flawlessly wholesome. These guys are always just barely off from how normal humans interact with each other, another writer could really take this into another direction and reveal them to be pod people. Honestly, I don't think Hallie Meyers-Shyer really knows what it's like to be young and trying to make it as a filmmaker in L.A. These kids get all the luck, encounter no grime or starvation, and somehow successfully move in on what in L.A. qualifies as a upper-middle-class family. Anywhere else, Alice would simply be rich.

Somehow, though, even in L.A., Alice has no entitlement complex, and neither do these three young men. That seems left up to the "socialite" played magnificently by Lake Bell, who briefly employs Alice as the fledgling interior designer she's attempting to reinvent herself as.

And that's the thing about Home Again, really: the performances. The material is far too trite for any of it to be exactly Oscar-worthy, and yet all of the seasoned players elevate the material. Meyers-Shyer's writing has serious room for improvement, but Reese Witherspoon hasn't met a single line of dialogue she can't make work. It doesn't take long to start rooting for Alice, even though her problems are so benign. Everyone in this movie is so relentlessly pleasant, not even Michael Sheen as the separated husband can manage to be unlikable. Alice has two young daughters who are, of course, both precocious and adorable.

There are no shitbags in this universe! In Los Angeles. That alone should disqualify the whole movie. But, as the story went on, I found myself won over by this objectively stupid movie, because -- well, that's what well-executed fantasies do. Home Again doesn't present itself as a fantasy, which is one of its many problems. It also has three Millennial men so "decent" they come off as anachronistic. It's like members of the Cleaver family from Leave It to Beaver time traveled to present day but somehow just didn't notice. Although, okay, Harry Cleaver does have sex with a forty-year-old woman. Leave it to someone in the Meyers family to make even that come across as wholesome.

Not that it can't be, mind you. It's just that in the Meyers world, there are no truly deep character flaws -- only minor mistakes the world's exclusively good people quickly learn from. Honestly, nothing about this movie is sensible, except for the idea that a woman can date a younger man and not be judged for it. It's disconcerting to see such a ridiculous story carried by winning performances.

Reese Witherspoon and Pico Alexander make an attractive inter-generational sandwich.

Overall: B-

THE TRIP TO SPAIN

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

One has to wonder: are Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon just going to keep making these movies every few years, for the rest of their lives? Honestly I wouldn't mind so much; as long as the quality stays relatively consistent, I'm likely to keep coming back. Whether I recommend it to others is another question.

The Trip in 2011 was light, breezy fun; The Trip to Italy in 2014 was more light, breezy fun. The Trip to Spain is also light, breezy fun, but there is a reason I don't change the words used to describe it: it's fundamentally still more of the same. Fun, yes -- but hardly original at this point.

The one thing that sets this installment apart, aside from the specific country of its setting (the original took place in Coogan and Brydon's native Britain), is a potentially baffling twist ending. It's widely open to interpretation, and not necessarily in keeping with the spirit of the previous two films, or even this film up to that point. It feels very much like a cliffhanger, but could it be a pointed ending to what will only ever be a trilogy?

It's difficult to imagine a fourth film picking up from here and then somehow reverting to another light jaunt through the countryside, our two heroes sampling fine restaurants at a different location every evening. But, I suppose, with the right talent, it could be pulled off. If the same pattern were to continue, we'd have another installment in 2020. Presumably it would also be directed by Michael Winterbotom, who directed all three films as well as creating the British television series of the same name that preceded them. It also starred Coogan and Brydon.

In any case, like its predecessors, The Trip to Spain features these two traveling together, driving from town to town, occasionally visiting tourist spots, but most of the time onscreen is spent with them sitting at dinner tables in restaurants. The two men verbally spar with each other, mostly through comic impressions, the majority of which are of Michael Caine or Sean Connery -- just as they were in the other films. As I said: more of the same.

That said, it's still funny. There is very little in the way of plot in these movies, and occasionally punch lines take rather long and circuitous routes to their arrival. It's relatively specific humor: if you don't get it, you'll probably be bored; if you do get it, you'll be entertained. I fell into the latter category.

There's also an added undercurrent of melancholy, with more discussions about aging and how that affects career and relationships. In a way <i>The Trip</i> series is thematically a comic version of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise series, although those movies are far more profound, and made nine years apart instead of three. These ones, to their credit, are funnier.

And a little bit self-deprecating, too. Coogan and Brydon play fictionalized versions of themselves -- for instance, in real life, Coogan has a 21-year-old daughter; in the movie, he has a 20-year-old son. He does mention in the movie that he's been nominated for two Oscars, which is true (although he doesn't mention they were for the same movie). His phone conversations with disloyal agents are likely a little to the left of reality, but he does depict himself as an actor type who could benefit from a little more self-awareness. This feeds in a bit, arguably, to that twist ending, although many audiences are going to find it more offensive than merely provocative as intended. Maybe for Winterbottom that's part of the point.

Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan tell it like it is through more celebrity impressions in The Trip to Spain.

Overall: B