Review: Friendship

Image courtesy of A24.

Andrew DeYoung's debut, "Friendship," is what you might call an uncomfortable movie about an awkward and abrasive person who engages in a lot of cringey behavior. I feel like there's a genre out there that includes other films of this nature - but none immediately spring to mind. It's an effective movie that doesn't always work, but when it does it can be hilarious and off-the-wall.

One element that allows the film to catch viewers off guard is that not only is its lead character, Craig (Tim Robinson), awkward is an almost hostile manner, but the film itself has an almost surreal vibe in that its world doesn't quite reflect the one we're living in now. For instance, all of the characters have cell phones and yet they are frequently getting caught up in the spiral cords while talking on their landlines. One particularly memorable scene - easily the film's funniest - involves Craig trying to score drugs and the result of his taking part in a ritual that leads to a hilarious hallucination.

In the film, Craig has few friends. He works for a public relations firm and seems bored by life. His wife (Kate Mara) has defeated cancer and Craig awkwardly makes the moment all about himself when they are talking during a cancer survivor meeting. She seems to tolerate him - as does his son, who behaves more adoringly toward his mother.

One day, Craig returns a package to a neighbor that was delivered to his address. The neighbor turns out to be local weatherman Austin (Paul Rudd), a sort of man's man with a crew of cronies who hang out at his house regularly - and occasionally break into bizarre impromptu a capella performances of "My Boo" by the Ghost Town DJ's. 

But Austin also has some quirky interests - such as collecting ancient artifacts or foraging for mushrooms by climbing through an underground pipe that leads into city hall (we're never told exactly where this film is set, though it looks snowy and the characters often wear heavy coats). And Craig feels special because Austin pays him a lot of attention quickly and lets him in on his interests.

But Craig makes a series of truly indescribable faux pas during a hangout night with Austin and his friends and is quickly shunted aside. At first, Austin politely tries to brush him off - for instance, when Craig shows up unannounced on the the set of the news show for which Austin provides the weather forecast. Then, Austin gets more blunt.

Meanwhile, Craig's work and home life begin to slip as his character goes the route of Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction. Thankfully, no rabbits were hurt during the making of this film. Craig's awkward and bizarre behavior becomes more self destructive and, at times, pretty creepy.

While I wouldn't say that everything works in "Friendship" - Robinson occasionally plays Craig's weirdness to 11 on a scale of 10 - it's an unusual and uncomfortable film about the joys and dangers of male bonding. It's also frequently hilarious - a scene involving the licking of a toad (don't ask) and what occurs afterward are riotously funny and there's a very funny quip regarding the war in Afghanistan that's awkwardly tacked onto the end of a speech. 

I've never seen Robinson's sketch TV show "I Think You Should Leave," but from what I'm told it also pushes the boundary of offbeat examinations of human relationships. Robinson's portrayal of Craig, while an overall good performance, occasionally goes over the top, but "Friendship" is regardless a mostly effective comedy about a somewhat deranged individual.

Review: Fear Street: Prom Queen

Image courtesy of Netflix.

Trying to cash in on the popularity of Leigh Janiak's 2021 "Fear Street" trilogy, Netflix's fourth entry in the series - which only shares a location and title with the previous films, but not characters or story - does little to inspire confidence that this series has much life beyond its original three films.

Running a brief 81 minutes, "Prom Queen" is a gory slasher throwback that wastes little time on character development, story, or theme and gets right to its series of gruesome murders. Set in 1988, the film takes place amid the battle for prom queen between contestants from posh Sunnyvale and underdog Shadyside. Representing the former is teenage tyrant Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza) and her "Wolfpack" crew of sycophants, while Lori Granger (India Fowler) is the lone Shadyside denizen to enter the fray.

Lori has a best friend, Megan (Suzanna Son), who dresses like a goth, loves gory horror movies, and occasionally freaks people out with gruesome makeup and limb removal gags. Lori's family has a whiff of scandal as her mother was once accused of murdering her husband on prom night some years before, thereby making Lori the classroom "freak" whom the Wolfpack targets as an object of ridicule. She decides to jump into the prom queen competition to change things at the school.

This backstory takes up a scant minute or two as "Prom Queen" quickly starts delivering on what it is most interested in - dismembering teens, especially limbs being hacked off. There's a creative use of a paper cutter in one particularly gruesome death, while another teen finds himself on the wrong end of a buzzsaw. A lot of blood flows in this fourth entry - as it did in the original "Fear Street" films - but the picture is missing the je ne sais quoi that made that trilogy (especially its 1978-set entry) memorable.

Not surprisingly, Lori and Megan's friendship is the most interesting element going here, but it - much like all else in the film - is given short shrift to make way for the nonstop bloodletting. Lili Taylor pops up as a surly principal, while Katherine Waterston and Chris Klein make for an overbearing helicopter parent duo, but otherwise this fourth entry in the series can't hold a candle to the original films. It ends up feeling like every other generic slasher movie of the past however many decades.

Review: Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Tom Cruise's death-defying stunts continue to nauseate and thrill in equal measure in "Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning," which is likely to be the last in this long-running and well-received franchise. While this episode is among the lower ranks of the eight films in this series, it has its moments of amusement - including what has to be Cruise's most insane stunt to date.

There's not much reason to explain what is going on in this latest installment - if you've seen the other films, you'll recall where the plot left off from the last one; plus, I'm not sure I could explain the film if I wanted to. 

Calling it convoluted would be an understatement as the film flits from continent to continent, featuring one minor character after another providing expository dialogue and Cruise, once again playing super spy Ethan Hunt, racing against time to stop a sinister, globe-trotting villain (Esai Morales) and a super computer known as The Entity that intends to take over the world's nuclear weapons caches and turn them against mankind.

There's a surprise early in the film and a poignant moment or two after one of the series' central figures is killed, but otherwise there are a lot of plot twists and locale changes - and even a few callbacks to previous "Mission Impossible" movies, most notably the first and third. 

The film starts out solidly enough as Hunt and his cohort attempt to find Morales' Gabriel and hack into The Entity to bring a stop to it. Meanwhile, the U.S. president (Angela Bassett) and her advisors question whether to trust Hunt and his team to prevent a cataclysm or to launch a premeditated attack on the other nuclear powers.

The film's middle section is a bit of a slog as Hunt and company try to track down a sunken submarine that might hold the key to destroying The Entity. There's an extended set piece that takes place underwater that is, no doubt, meant to wow, but instead has a stultifying effect. It's not until the film's final third that it gets back on track.

The finale starts with a standoff in a cave, but then takes to the sky as Cruise pursues Morales in a small airplane. Cruise has long been his own stuntman in the "Mission Impossible" films and has taken part in some wild and impressive feats - scaling the world's tallest building or riding a motorcycle off a cliff - but his extended bout on the plane is likely the most impressive and terrifying. I'll give the man credit: He's fearless.

So, while "The Final Reckoning" is not among the best in the series - it's better than John Woo's second entry, but not as good as some of the other sequels - it's a decent enough sendoff for this long-running saga. It has a great cast of character actors who manage to rise above the script's Hollywood action film cliches to give their characters a bit of personality and it features some jaw-dropping stunt work. 

Review: Hurry Up Tomorrow

Image courtesy of Lionsgate. 

It's somewhat of a rarity these days that I run across a movie that's a total misfire. Sure, I see and review plenty of movies that are mediocre, often technically competent movies that are corporatized art meant to sell new installments or bland films of various genres that are run-of-the-mill. But it's not often that I see something that completely misses the mark.

Mel Gibson's "Flight Risk," out earlier this year and not reviewed by me, is one of them. Trey Edward Shults' "Hurry Up Tomorrow" - you know, The Weeknd movie - is another. This is a movie that starts off with its titular character doing vocal warm ups through lip trills and only gets worse.

The film follows a pop star (Abel Tesfaye, AKA The Weeknd) as he seemingly teeters on the brink of self destruction, all while his manager (Barry Keoghan) offers plenty of bad temptations and while a stalkerish fan (Jenny Ortega) lurks in the background, waiting to pounce.

The Weeknd is known for his self-deprecating persona and songs that touch on angst, depression, hedonism, and a desire to escape celebrity status. While I'm not overly familiar with his entire catalogue, I like some of his most well-known songs - "Starboy" and "Blinding Lights," which is used in what must be the most awkward scene of any movie this year.

But there's self-deprecating and then there's... this. In the film, The Weeknd plays The Weeknd, who spends much of his time offstage crying over a relationship that seemingly fell apart, but also admitting that he treated the woman terribly. Then, we get to see him treat her terribly on the phone as he calls her a "bitch" and a "nothing," and the former insult is later hurled at another female character. He also does a fair amount of cocaine, often at the prompting of his manager.

It's hard to tell if "Hurry Up Tomorrow" is an extended, overly stylish therapy session or just an overwrought and self-absorbed project for its pop star lead. While I've admired some of Shults' work - such as "Krisha" or "Waves" - more than loved it, he really lays the style on thick here. It feels like every other shot is a 360-degrees swirl around his lead or a tight shot of his sweating face. 

Then, about halfway through the film, it becomes a variation on Stephen King's "Misery," sort of, leading to the aforementioned awkward scene. It involves Ortega awkwardly dancing and actually explaining to The Weekend how brilliant his music is and dissecting some of its themes. I think the last time I face palmed this hard is when M. Night Shyamalan wrote a bit part in one of his films for himself in which he played a genius author who wrote a book that would save mankind.

The Weeknd and Shults have both seen better days in the realms of music and film and I'd imagine that they will go on to do better things. In the meantime, this is a film in which its title might become a mantra for those sitting through it.

Review: Secret Mall Apartment

Image courtesy of Submarine Entertainment.

What is it exactly that qualifies something as art? Must it be an object or can it be an act? Is it required to be permanent or can it be fleeting? These are all questions that are posed - but not necessarily answered - in Jeremy Workman's documentary "Secret Mall Apartment," which is about a group of Providence, Rhode Island artists who found a vacant spot in a massive mall in the early 2000s and created an apartment, where they were able to spend time unnoticed by anyone for about four years.

The idea for the apartment was borne during a debate in Providence during the late 1990s over how spaced was used. The city, at that point, had seen better days and its administration thought the best way to revitalize it would be to create a massive luxury shopping center. Many of the communities who lived in proximity to it opposed the mall because, as they argued, they couldn't afford to shop there and would soon be squeezed out of the area when property taxes went up.

All of this turned out to be true, including the demolition of a beloved spot for artists and local musicians known as Fort Thunder, which hosted underground concerts and space for burgeoning local artists of varying kinds. One of the artists associated with the spot, Michael Townsend, noticed a place during the mall's construction that seemed to be empty and was far away from the stores and pretty much everything else. He correctly assumed that the room was intended for storage of some sort, but was later forgotten.

Michael and some friends broke into the room and decided to create an apartment for a select group of artists where they could hang out. A group of eight artists - including Michael's then-girlfriend Adriana Valdez Young - bought furniture in the mall and then lugged it up to the room. There's a harrowing sequence of them pushing a couch up a steep ladder in the upper regions of the mall.

"Secret Mall Apartment" is the story of how these eight artists spent time in the apartment - although none of them actually lived there - unobserved for about four years. As such, it's a well-made and interesting documentary feature. It should be noted that when law enforcement eventually cracked down, it was only Michael who faced any sort of repercussions (they were surprisingly minimal), so it's interesting that all other seven artists basically outed themselves by participating in the film.

But while the story of the apartment is interesting enough, if not quite mind blowing, it's the other endeavors of the artists that are most interesting in the picture - namely, a unique onsite sculpture involving mannequins that Michael put together under a bridge in Providence prior to the mall apartment and his group's "tape art" that they used to decorate a local hospital and then placed all over New York City in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in an effort to honor the lives of every person who died at the World Trade Center site.

Of course, this art's format is tape, making it ephemeral, and there's some interesting discussion in the film about how Michael views art and how many of his own works are short-lived and only live on in photos. There's also an argument made in the film that the apartment itself was a work of art, and one of the less compelling elements of the documentary involves another artist trying to recreate it some years later. 

A film like "Man on Wire" is, perhaps, a more memorable documentary on what exactly can define art - in that case, a tightrope artist walking between the World Trade Center towers in the 1970s - than "Secret Mall Apartment." Perhaps, it's because the stakes are lower in this film. Regardless, it's a mostly interesting documentary about a region-specific art movement that you've probably never heard of, but will likely find compelling nevertheless.

Review: Another Simple Favor

Image courtesy of Amazon.

Paul Feig's "Another Simple Favor," a sequel to the quasi-popular 2018 film "A Simple Favor," is one of those sequels where it appeared that the entire cast wanted to vacation in a gorgeous spot, so they built an entire film around it, kind of like Adam Sandler has been doing in recent years.

Against all odds, the film brings the two lead characters from the original back together again and introduces a slew of new ones - there are Italian mobsters, FBI agents, book agents, twins, creepy aunties whom we didn't know existed, and various others - and plops them all down on the gorgeous Italian island of Capri.

As the film opens, the once-mousy Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick), who is now an author, albeit not quite a best-selling one, and true crime online influencer (is this a thing?), is promoting the book about her experiences with murderess Emily (Blake Lively) when the latter pops up at a book signing and basically threatens to sue Stephanie if she doesn't attend her wedding in Capri. The explanation for why she's no longer in prison for murdering her father and sister is flimsy at best.

Suddenly, Stephanie is in Capri with a book agent (Alex Newell), a character who does not need to exist for the purposes of this movie, and Emily, but also Sean (Henry Golding), the sort-of ex of each of them, as well as Dante (Michele Morrone), the beefy scion of an Italian mob family that is at war with another family that, for whatever reason, will be attending the wedding.

Elizabeth Perkins pops up as Emily's mother, while Allison Janney is a mysterious aunt whose behavior gets stranger by the moment. There's also a bumbling FBI agent (Taylor Ortega) who is following Stephanie around and Portia (Elena Sofia Ricci), Dante's unfriendly and seemingly sociopathic mother. There's also another character who becomes integral late in the film whom I can't discuss without giving away spoilers.

Needless to say, Stephanie is skeptical as to why Emily wants her there, and isn't comforted much when Emily regales her with a tale of a god who brought people to the island to entertain him and, when they didn't, threw them off the cliff.

Shortly after everyone's arrival, a murder occurs - and then another. There's a lot going on in this film - some of it amusing, some of it not so much - and the picture often feels like it's juggling numerous plot lines, styles, and genres. Sometimes it's funny, while at other times it plays up the murder-mystery element Occasionally, a character might be charming or funny, only to be later revealed as a lunatic.

"Another Simple Favor" has its moments - the tete a tetes between Stephanie and Emily are occasionally amusing - and there are some scenes I could have done without, especially a sequence involving the usage of a truth serum. The original 2018 film was one that didn't really need a sequel, yet the finale of this one hints at more to come. 

This is a film that could be described as busy. Juggling multiple storylines can lead to success if each of the plot lines are intriguing. Some of the ones in "Another Simple Favor" are amusing enough, but others fizzle out, resulting in a sequel that's only intermittently successful and, more often than not, running on fumes.

Review: The Shrouds

Image courtesy of Janus Films.

Everyone has their own manner of processing grief, and occasionally some methods might veer toward the unusual. In David Cronenberg's latest film, "The Shrouds," which was conceived of in the wake of the loss of Cronenberg's wife to cancer, the central character, Karsh (Vincent Cassel), uses methods that are off-putting to women as he attempts to get back on the dating scene. 

In one of the film's opening scenes, his latest date is taken aback to learn that Karsh - who owns both a cemetery, restaurant located on the cemetery's property, and a company known as GraveTech that acts as an Internet-connected mausoleum - has created technology that allows grieving people to watch their loved ones decompose within their graves. 

Why would anyone want to do this? Karsh explains that he was with his wife every step of their lives since they met and feels horrible to think that her body is alone in its grave. Therefore, he and GraveTech's users can log onto a screen in which they see their loved one's body within the grave. In the casket, they are covered by "shrouds" with cameras in somewhat of a reference to the Shroud of Turin.

But something is afoot. One night, the mausoleum is vandalized, with several of the graves having been overturned, and Karsh is locked out of the technology that allows him to view his wife's body. Could it be the Russians or the Chinese, whom he is told might be trying to compete with his technology? Is it an act of protest from a group denouncing the moral implications of the technology? Could it have something to do with his wife's relationship with the doctor that treated her whom Karsh never met, but suspects something of a romantic element might have been taking place?

He gets paranoid suggestions from Terry (Diane Kruger), a dog groomer and twin sister of his wife, Becca (also Kruger) as well as a conspiracy theorist. He gets more tech-savvy answers from Terry's ex-husband, the nebbish Maury (Guy Pearce). Karsh also gets involved with the blind wife (Sandrine Holt) of a Hungarian billionaire who wants to utilize the technology as his own impending death from illness looms - and there's a possibility that this scenario might play a role in the mysterious sabotage.

Cronenberg has long been known as the king of body horror, which derives from so many of his films having to do with the horrors of the body's ailment, whether it's the gooey remake of "The Fly," the twisted tale of twin doctors "Dead Ringers," the recent surgery-heavy "Crimes of the Future," the medically-themed "The Brood," or "Videodrome," a film about losing the sense of one's reality that suggests "leaving the old flesh behind."

In many ways, "The Shrouds" also feels like an answer to the director's moniker. Throughout the film, Karsh has dreams in which Becca comes to his bed nude at night and her body is seen slowly disintegrating from her disease. At one point, she shows up with a missing breast or an arm. During a scene in which they cuddle, her hip suddenly snaps because of the frailty of her bones. While Cronenberg's body horror movies suggested the frailty of the flesh, his latest is based on the very real horrors of the body's wasting away due to age or disease.

While I liked "The Shrouds" and found its labyrinthine conspiracy theories compelling and mysterious, the picture ranks more in the realm of some of his more recent films such as "Maps to the Stars" or "Cosmopolis," rather than some of the aforementioned body horror classics or the work from his highly productive late 20th century-early 21st century period - for example, "Crash," "Spider," "A History of Violence," "Eastern Promises" or "A Dangerous Method."

Cassell makes a compelling lead as a seemingly Cronenbergian stand-in and the rest of cast - Kruger playing double duty, Pearce as the squirrelly technology expert, and Holt as the mysterious wife of the Hungarian billionaire - are also good. Despite some squirmy sequences involving decomposing corpses, "The Shrouds" is a bit milder than some of the director's other films, especially the recent, grim "Crimes of the Future." It's not one of his best, but it's possibly his most personal and overall a good film.