Review: Afire

Image courtesy of The Match Factory.

Christian Petzold's "Afire" is interesting in that it causes its audience - well, at least, it did for me - to somewhat sympathize with its lead character, a writer named Leon (Thomas Schubert), while also realizing that all of the criticisms leveled at him by those around him are correct. 

Leon is struggling to complete a novel and has gone with a friend named Felix (Langston Uibel) to a country home owned by Felix's family to try to quietly do some work on it. Felix is also on a bit of an artistic retreat as he plans to work on his photography portfolio while in the secluded spot - but it appears that, similar to Ryan Gosling's Ken, all he wants to do is beach. Meanwhile, Leon awaits the arrival of Helmut (Matthias Brandt), his publisher, who will look over his manuscript.

But from the beginning of the trip, things don't go too well for Leon. For starters, the car in which he and Felix are driving breaks down, forcing them to hike through the woods to get to the cabin. Secondly, the news reports a series of dangerous wildfires that Felix notes are about 30 kilometers away from where they are staying.

To make matters worse - for Leon, at least - it turns out that a mysterious woman named Nadja (Petzold regular Paula Beer) will be sharing the cabin with them, forcing Leon and Felix to share a room. When Nadja's late night extracurricular activities prevent Leon from sleeping, he relocates outdoors and tries to sleep on a pool chair, only to be hilariously tormented by buzzing insects that land on his face.

Another character - Devid (Enno Trebs), a lifeguard at the nearby beach - is the other character involved in the loud sex keeping Leon up at night. However, he soon becomes involved with Felix instead - there's a funny scene in which Leon awakens to noise for the second or third time and realizes that he's now sharing a room with Nadja. 

All the while, Leon feels like the odd - and grouchy - one out. Once Helmut arrives, things only get worse as his publisher appears more interested in Nadja's studies and Felix's portfolio than Leon's novel, which also gets panned by Nadja after he reluctantly allows her to read it. As I'd mentioned, it's a little difficult not to feel bad for Leon, considering his inability to complete his work due to the distractions as well as the blows to his ego from everyone giving his novel the thumbs down.

On the other hand, Leon also comes across as egotistical and, on occasion, a jerk. When Nadja apologizes for the loud late night sex, Leon isn't quick to warm to her. He doesn't notice the burgeoning romance between Devid and Felix, prompting Nadja to point out that he's unaware of what's going on around him due to his only thinking of himself. This is more pronounced later when he fails to recognize Helmut's health issues. Leon also belittles Devid during a conversation about his profession.

Petzold is one of - or, perhaps, the - best director working in Germany today. His breakthrough, "Barbara," was a solid political drama period piece, while "Phoenix" was a beguiling World War II-set mystery and "Undine" was a strange and mysterious movie with fantastical elements. However, "Transit," a film that riffed on "Casablanca" but had a particular modern urgency to it, was his finest work and one of 2019's best films. 

"Afire" might seem, on the surface, a more minor work - and it certainly has a more laid back vibe than "Transit" or "Phoenix" - but it's still a compelling and often funny film about a person with lots of room to grow eventually finding the capacity to do so (or maybe not, depending on your take on the film's final scenes). There's a bit of tragedy toward the end of "Afire," and a somewhat mysterious final sequence. The film takes a little patience, but those willing to give it will likely be rewarded.

Review: Talk To Me

Image courtesy of A24.

Whether it's higher-brow fare like Ari Aster's work - "Hereditary" and "Midsommar" - or a run-of-the-mill Stephen King adaptation like "The Boogeyman," grief has become the new gateway to terror in modern horror movies. The Australian film "Talk to Me" is the latest to take up this trend and the film, for the most part, delivers on both the grief and the scares.

The film opens with a memorable house party in which a guy tries to get his brother - who is seemingly in an odd state of mind - out of his bedroom, only to have all hell break loose. We then meet the central group of friends on which the action primarily focuses - Mia (Sophie Wilde), who is suffering the loss of her mother to apparent suicide; Jade (Alexandra Jensen), Mia's best friend; Riley (Joe Bird), Jade's younger brother who looks up to Mia; Daniel (Otis Dhanji), a former flame of Mia who is currently dating Jade and is apparently religious; and Hayley (Zoe Terakes) and Joss (Chris Alosio), who initiate the others into the dangerous game that is at the film's center.

That game involves gripping what is apparently the severed, embalmed hand of a powerful medium and saying "talk to me." Once a spirit appears, the person holding the hand must say "I let you in," and the spirit takes over their body. The catch is that the person must release their grip from the hand within 90 seconds or the spirit might decide to stay.

The first time that Mia takes part in this, she is captivated - but then becomes convinced that she can communicate with her dead mother, which becomes a problem when you're only supposed to stay in the spirit's grasp for 90 seconds. Naturally, this whole scenario goes south when one of the characters is under the spell for too long - and that particular character suffers some particularly gruesome punishment as a result.

In the days to come, Mia claims to still be tormented by the presence and the character injured at the party - now in the hospital - continually tries to cause bodily damage due to the spirit's ongoing presence. The other characters do not experience what Mia is seeing and, therefore, become a little wary of her presence.

"Talk to Me" has an impressively creepy vibe, although some of the jump scares feel like the type you'd expect in lesser movies. Much like the masterful "It Follows," the film - which is the directorial debut of brothers Michael and Danny Philippou - has a vibe of ever-present dread that goes a long way toward creating atmosphere, and the performances are all good, Wilde especially.

Perhaps, I wasn't quite as enamored with "Talk to Me" as some other critics. I thought it was solid, but those comparing it to "It Follows" or some of the other great horror movies of recent years - I'd include "The Witch," "Hereditary," "X," "Watcher," and "The Black Phone" in that company - are maybe overselling it a little. It's definitely an effective, well made, and mostly enjoyable horror picture, but I see it more as a good jumping off point for its creators, rather than a new genre classic. Regardless, it's worth a watch.

Review: Barbie

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

The fact that director Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" exists at all is incredible. This is a movie that takes an icon of consumerism - one of the best selling and most beloved toys of all time - and crafts a film around it that tackles feminism, existential angst, corporate greed, toxic masculinity, being comfortable in one's own body, and the ridiculous double standards through which women in the workplace must suffer. To top it off, the filmmakers sneak in numerous jokes at the expense of the multi-billion dollar company that created the toy and whose logo appears onscreen before the film's title.

Co-written by Gerwig - who in three films has become one of the most interesting among the crop of young American directors - and Noah Baumbach, "Barbie" kicks off with an extended "2001: A Space Odyssey" reference and begins as a kooky, candy colored comedy about Barbie's (a great Margot Robbie) perfect life in Barbieworld - where everyone is named either Barbie or Ken, except of course for poor Allen (Michael Cera), who just can't catch a break - where her feet never touch the ground, her toast always flies out of the toaster and lands on her plate, and everyone is always glad to see her, especially Ken (Ryan Gosling, also wonderful), who always craves her attention.

But one day, things begin to get weird: Barbie falls off her roof, rather than floats down into her car; the water in her shower is cold and her milk has expired; she notices cellulite on her thigh; and, gasp, she begins pondering death. What the hell is going on? Barbie is told to consult Weird Barbie (a funny Kate McKinnon), who tells her that something is going on in The Real World that is causing problems in Barbieworld, and that the girl who is playing with her is likely projecting her own problems onto Barbie.

Barbie travels to the Real World and, in the process, finds that Ken is a stowaway travel companion. Once there, the two continually get arrested as Barbie finds that The Real World isn't as peaceful or progressive as Barbieworld - where there's a woman president and a Supreme Court completely comprised of women - while Ken is excited to discover the patriarchy, which he exports back to Barbieworld after he flees, leaving Barbie on her own in The Real World. Barbie discovers that the girl she is seeking is actually a grown woman, Gloria (America Ferrera), with a sulky teen daughter (Ariana Greenblatt) and a job at Mattel, where she has been sketching designs for Barbies that more closely resemble real women.

Greenblatt's teenage character lambasts Barbie upon first meeting her, telling her that Barbie set feminism back by creating unrealistic body images for women - which comes as a shock to Barbie, considering that the place from which she hails is run by women and significantly more progressive. 

Upon returning to Barbieworld - with Ferrera's and Greenblatt's characters in tow - she realizes that the Kens have turned it into a patriarchal hellscape where the other Barbies have been brainwashed into happily serving the Kens beer upon request and Barbieworld's constitution is set to be overturned. Barbie must collaborate with Gloria as well as the other Barbies - who are of different races and body sizes - to save the day. 

With "Lady Bird" and "Little Women," Gerwig became one of the most exciting new voices in filmmaking, although she'd been acting for some years prior, and "Barbie" is another unique addition to her oeuvre. And what makes it so is that it takes one of the most recognizable icons of American culture and creates a story around it that is such a far cry from the way in which most people have come to see it.

"Barbie" is significantly better than any movie revolving around a popular toy has any right to be, and that's because Gerwig and company have made a movie that speaks to our present moment and delivers ideas in such a fresh, funny, compelling, and often downright weird manner. I'm not sure that anyone other than this director could have made such a unique movie about this particular character.

Review: Oppenheimer

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

It is astounding - and also encouraging - that one of the two movies capturing the public's imagination at the moment (the other, of course, is "Barbie," another film about existential angst) is a three-hour art film with a blockbuster-sized budget that primarily features people sitting in rooms debating science, taking part in bureaucratic investigations, or weighing the advancement of science with becoming "death, the destroyer of worlds," as Robert J. Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), quoting Hindu scripture, puts it. 

While the summer's sequels, comic book adaptations, and other typical go-to movies for the season have been flailing, Christopher Nolan's ambitious opus "Oppenheimer" (along with Greta Gerwig's offbeat "Barbie," a movie that is miraculous if for no other reason than it got made at all) appears to be signaling that audiences are hungry for something more. If the summer movie season's two saviors end up being, for lack of a better phrase, thinking persons' movies, then I'm all for it.

Making "Oppenheimer" must have been daunting. Even writing about it is. The film eschews the typical biopic tropes - although we do get a little bit of Oppy's school days, complete with an attempted poisoned apple incident - and much of the characterization of the brilliant scientist is left to Murphy's expressive face to do the heavy lifting. If Oppenheimer comes off as a bit of a cypher, this is seemingly an intentional tactic.

As I'd mentioned, this is a film about ideas - many of them, in fact, and most of which are fascinating. "Oppenheimer" explores the gulf between scientists' work and the influence (or lack thereof) they have on how it is put into practice, but also about the social responsibility of invention and whether the ability to create something should necessarily result in its being brought into actuality (something those working in A.I. these days should ponder).

There are no less than three framing devices in this gargantuan picture - one involving a secretive conversation between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein that reminded me of Scarlett Johansson whispering into Bill Murray's ear at the end of "Lost in Translation"; an investigation years after the creation of the atomic bomb that is mostly carried out in a drab room to determine whether Oppenheimer will get to keep his security clearance after his enemies have set into motion accusations about his left-wing past; and a confirmation hearing for a cabinet position in the Eisenhower administration for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), a senior U.S. Atomic Energy Commission member who held a grudge against Oppenheimer for humiliating him years before and who acts as the Salieri to Oppenheimer's Mozart.

Much of the film is spent in rooms in which Oppenheimer and his team discuss plans for the atomic bomb and the creation of their workspace in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where they'll ultimately test it. Oppenheimer is managed by a military man named Groves (Matt Damon), who is wary of Oppenheimer's past but inherently trusts his duty toward his country. The scientists who make their way into Oppenheimer's orbit include Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), who wants to focus on a hydrogen bomb, which is not favored by Oppenheimer; Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), a friend who is uncomfortable with Oppenheimer's brief brushes with communism in the past; close friend Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz); and Danish physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh).

The film is loaded with excellent supporting turns - including Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer's lover, Matthew Modine as engineer Vannevar Bush, Casey Affleck as a creepy military man who is interested in weeding out communists in the scientific community, Alden Ehrenreich as a senate aide to Strauss who gets in the film's best quip, and Jason Clarke as Robert Robb, who led the inquiry into whether Oppenheimer should keep his security clearance.

Naturally, this film is Murphy's show. He's in most of the film's scenes and his performance is sure to be one of the year's best. Damon is excellent as Groves, Krumholtz gives a terrific supporting turn, and Downey Jr. gives his most memorable performance in years as the slippery Strauss. The film's scene stealer is Emily Blunt, portraying Oppenheimer's wife, who has a particularly memorable scene when she goes head to head with Robb.

For a movie this long and ambitious, there are a few choices that didn't particularly work - notably, one in which Gary Oldman portrays President Harry Truman as a bit of a dunce and a jerk. However, I disagree with complaints that the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima should have been portrayed. In fact, the film handles this somewhat brilliantly. I think the idea is that the scientists working on the bomb are cloistered and somewhat removed from the real-world impact of the bombing of Japan. The decision to not show this reflects this - but also, there's a powerful scene in which Oppenheimer addresses a room full of people after the dropping of the bombs, and he tries to talk tough about it, all the while envisioning what the room full of people would look like had the bomb been dropped there. He tries to convince himself of the righteousness of the cause, but is obviously unconvinced.

To fully capture the entire three-hour experience of "Oppenheimer" - from its fascinating detail-oriented behind the scenes of the creation of the bomb to the apocalyptic waking dream of its lead character in the powerful finale - in a review is likely a fool's errand. Suffice it to say that this film is an example of a major artist being well funded to create an ambitious work of art and finding great success in the venture. "Oppenheimer" is one of the year's best and is a truly unforgettable experience.

Review: Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One

Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Tom Cruise continues to defy gravity and, much like Dorian Gray, aging in "Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One," an exhilarating and breathless summer blockbuster with almost nonstop forward momentum, much like its star. Last summer, Cruise was credited with saving the moviegoing experience with the well-liked and financially successful "Top Gun: Maverick." He just might do it again this summer with this film.

The plotting in "Dead Reckoning" - and I find it amusing that part one of what one might suppose would be a two-part finale (it apparently isn't and Cruise intends to keep doing this indefinitely) would run a whopping two hours and 49 minutes - is so labyrinthine that explaining it all would be a fool's errand. 

Regardless, summarizing the picture would involve discussing how a Russian submarine being sunk at the film's beginning has something to do with a dangerous piece of AI known as The Entity, which has become sentient and, therefore, desired by all the world's nations, which see it as a weapon that could result in their world dominance.

Naturally, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team - consisting these days of the characters played by Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Rebecca Ferguson - are called in to obtain the two keys that control The Entity - or something to that effect - and must aim to keep it out of the hands of a number of dangerous individuals, most notably a figure from Ethan's past known as Gabriel (Esai Morales).

I'm sure that more of Ethan's connection to Gabriel, what The Entity is capable of, and how a new character - a thief named Grace (Hayley Atwell) who gets added to IMF - fits in with all of this will be explored more in part two, but suffice it to say that what makes "Dead Reckoning" so compelling is a combination of utilizing Cruise's charisma and the slate of great character actors in the film (which also includes Cary Elwes, Vanessa Kirby, Shea Whigham, and Henry Czerny), the film's exotic locales, and the incredible set pieces, of which three in particular stand out.

The first is a chase scene through the streets of Venice that rivals the recent Moroccan one in the Indiana Jones film. Cruise and Atwell attempt to elude a villain in a tank-like vehicle while driving a tiny Fiat in a sequence that is as funny as anything I've seen in any recent comedy. There's also the cliff-jumping sequence involving Cruise and a motorcycle that has been advertised in the trailers and an incredible sequence in which a group of characters try to escape a train that is plummeting off a blown out track.

I've long hoped that Cruise might one day return to the adventurous roles that he once took on - such as "Born on the Fourth of July," "Magnolia," or "Eyes Wide Shut" - but it seems that expensive blockbuster films such as this one are what he enjoys doing. And to give him and the filmmakers credit - along with the recent, brilliantly choreographed John Wick sequel, "Dead Reckoning" is among the best of its kind in recent memory. As far as summer blockbusters go, this latest "Mission Impossible" stands tall.

Review: Joy Ride

Image courtesy of Lionsgate.

Director Adele Lim's feature debut, "Joy Ride," has a handful of gut-busting laughs - most notably, a playground bullying episode gone awry early in the picture - but also occasionally insightful moments involving identity and self discovery and even a touching scene or two about friendship. It's also extremely raunchy and maybe not quite as funny as some reviews may have led you to believe.

As the film opens, two young girls - a Chinese girl with parents from that country and another girl of Asian descent (I've worded this accordingly due to the possibility of spoiling a plot twist) with adoptive white parents - meet on a playground. They become fast friends and grow up to be Audrey (Ashley Park), a hotshot lawyer, and Lolo (Sherry Cola), an aspiring artist who is crashing with Audrey because her career hasn't taken off.

Audrey is being sent by her company - which is mostly comprised of douchey white guys who believe they are being allies because they threw her a "Mulan"-themed party - to Beijing to land a deal of some sort. Audrey enlists Lolo, but also college roommate and actress Kat (Stephanie Hsu), as interpreters. Lolo also brings along eccentric cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), who provides plenty of hijinks. 

The film's setup could be compared to "Bridesmaids," albeit with a cast of young Asian women, or "The Hangover" films, due to its raunchiness and the presence of Deadeye, who is the Zach Galifianakis character here. It also, oddly, bears some similarity to "Return to Seoul," a very good film from earlier this year in which a restless young French woman of Korean descent travels to her home country to find the mother who gave her away at birth.

In "Joy Ride," Audrey's business venture in Beijing becomes dependent on her finding her birth mother, who gave her away to the white couple who have been her parents all her life, after the man with whom she is doing business insists that she introduce him to her family at an upcoming event. It's a bit of a flimsy premise that acts as an excuse for the four women to travel across China and eventually - again, no spoiler here - to another country.

There are a number of funny moments to be had - the aforementioned playground scene, another in which the women must consume a massive amount of drugs to escape police notice after it turns out that the woman with whom they are sharing a train compartment is a drug dealer, and a series of sex scenes involving a basketball team that the women run across. Some other moments aren't as successful - most notably, one in which the women pose as a K-Pop band.

Similar to "Bridesmaids," and any number of other movies involving groups of longtime friends who occasionally neglect each other, there are some meaningful moments late in the picture as Audrey realizes how good her friends are to her, and there's some interesting stuff here involving the experience of not fitting in anywhere - for example, Audrey doesn't feel like she fits in with her white co-workers, whereas the fact that she has white parents and speaks only English causes her problems on the other side of the equation. 

"Joy Ride" has its moments - both funny and heartfelt - although it's not, perhaps, as daring as it intends to be. Yes, it's very raunchy, but it occasionally feels like it's trying too hard to prove something - similar to the likable "Booksmart," it aims to be more outrageous than its male comedic counterparts ("The Hangover" or "Superbad," movies that I never truly warmed to in the first place). However, "Joy Ride" succeeds in that it's better than those movies, although none of them are anywhere near as successful as "Bridesmaids," the gold standard of recent years for movies about groups of friends - men or women - behaving badly. 

Review: Insidious: The Red Door

Image courtesy of Screen Gems.

Star Patrick Wilson steps into the director's chair for this final - well, allegedly - chapter of the "Insidious" saga, at least the story involving the Lambert family. There are a few choice scares and a father-son bonding story that make the sequel at least a little more interesting than your typical entry in a horror series that's been going on for more than a decade.

However, "Insidious: The Red Door" is mostly just a mediocre exercise in the type of horror movie tactics that we've seen time and again - jump scares, slowly approaching and unsettling objects, and people taking part in foolish behavior for the purpose of putting them in harm's way when any normal person's instinct would be to run like hell.

The film picks up a decade after the previous "Insidious" entry featuring the Lambert family. Since then, Josh Lambert (Wilson) and his son, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), now a brooding teenager about to go off to college, have been hypnotized so that they don't recall that they have the ability to astrally project into an evil region known as The Further, and they've forgotten all the trauma that their family endured.

As the film's opens, Josh's mother has died, and Josh still looks back in anger at the father whom he believes has abandoned him. He has since gotten a divorce from Renai (Rose Byrne), and the couple's kids live with her. In an attempt to reconnect with Dalton, who's an aspiring artist, Josh offers to go on a road trip to drop him off at his first semester in college.

The trip doesn't go too well, and no sooner has Dalton been left to his own devices, things start to get weird. But first, Dalton finds out that his college roommate is a young woman named Chris (Sinclair Daniel), whom he befriends, although the concept that a university would house - unbeknownst to them - a young freshman man and young freshman woman together is, perhaps, the film's biggest stretch of the imagination.

In an art class, a teacher counts backwards from 10 to get her students to use their memories to paint something personal, and Dalton's resulting work is a painting of a red door, which then sets things into motion. As his memories flood back - and Josh simultaneously starts having strange visions - Dalton recalls how he can astrally project, and he heads back into The Further.

There are a few decent scares here - including one particularly nerve-wracking one at a frat party and another in which Josh can't see an approaching figure through the windows of his home - but "The Red Door" mostly relies on cheap jump scare tactics and brief flashes of the demon that made such a shocking appearance in the original "Insidious."

The first film in the series was a legitimately frightening and original horror film, one of the best of the genre from the era in which it was released. Since then, there have been two sequels to the original and two prequels, none of which were nearly as frightening or as compelling as the original. I'll give Wilson points for trying to turn the finale into a family drama involving an estranged son and father, but ultimately this is a series that ran out of juice a while back.