Review: The Beach Bum

Image courtesy of Neon.

Harmony Korine's "The Beach Bum" is the cinematic equivalent of that Florida Man Twitter feed come to life. The role of Moondog is one that Matthew McConaughey seems to have been born to play, but why he'd choose to do so is another thing.

Riffing somewhat off his last film, the flawed but much better "Spring Breakers," Korine has engaged in another exploration of oddballs and sleazeballs in Florida, but with diminishing returns. At least "Spring Breakers" was filled with great photography and a strong James Franco performance, whereas "The Beach Bum" is just one scene after another of hedonistic abandon and nonstop rambling from the entire cast.

The film is nearly plotless, other than Moondog being called back to Miami from the Florida Keys by his wife, Minnie (Isla Fisher), because their daughter is getting married. Meanwhile, Snoop Dogg pops up as Minnie's occasional lover and Moondog's friend. Jonah Hill plays Moondog's agent and has an unplaceable and not particularly convincing accent. Jimmy Buffett is cast as, well, himself.

Much of the film is merely Moondog meandering from one scenario to the next - the wedding, a sudden death, Moondog's eviction from his home, his being sent to rehab and some bad behavior with a young man (played by Zac Efron) he met at rehab. The final scenes involved Moondog's attempt to complete a book of poems - and the ridiculous results of that project.

McConaughey had been on a roll for the past few years, but 2019 has not been kind so far, between the disastrous "Serenity" and this film, which he could have played in his sleep in his early 20s. It doesn't help that the film frequently borders on the ludicrous - it features what has to be the least convincing death scene I've seen in a film in some time, a sequence featuring Martin Lawrence as a boat captain that is tedious and a lack of closure for the film's various plot threads.

There is one line of dialogue that hints at the better film "The Beach Bum" could have been had it pursued a different train of thought: "You know the best thing about being rich? You can be horrible to people and they just have to take it." It's a line of dialogue, spoken by Hill's character, that sums up our current national moment.

Despite its middling results as a film, while watching "The Beach Bum," I felt that it was a movie for the Trump era - a celebration of vapidity, hedonism, gaudy wealth, trashy behavior and a lack of concern for anything outside one's own bubble. Had Korine's film addressed this concept in more than merely a few lines, his latest movie would have been much more than what it ends up being - a series of aimless scenes in search of a unifying concept.

Review: Gloria Bell

Image courtesy of A24.

Sebastian Lelio's "Gloria Bell" - which is a remake of the Chilean director's own 2013 movie "Gloria" - provides a solid showcase for Julianne Moore and does a decent job of capturing the desperation and loneliness of being alone at a certain age. The film isn't, perhaps, as strong as its source material, but as far as remakes go, it's a pretty good one.

In the film, Moore plays the titular character, a woman who works at an insurance agency, still consults her elderly mother for life decisions, has two children who love her but are caught up in their own lives and hasn't had a very successful love life after having divorced 12 years earlier.

As the film opens, we get the sense that "Gloria Bell" could end up being a film in the mold of "The Meddler," the charming film in which Susan Sarandon couldn't stay out of her grown up daughter's business. There are some scenes early in Lelio's film when it appears that Gloria is trying to live vicariously through her children - but we soon learn that they have their problems of their own. Her daughter, Anne (Caren Pistorius), is smitten with a Swedish surfer and is trying to decide whether she will move to Scandinavia, while her son, Peter (Michael Cera), has a newborn child and a seemingly absentee wife.

We come to learn that Gloria wants to be the center of someone's universe. The only individual who consistently pays her attention is a scrawny cat that manages time and time again to break into her house. Gloria spends many of her evenings at a social club for adults that seems to have the entire disco canon in its repertoire. There, she meets Arnold (John Turturro), a divorcee who pursues her vigorously, but refuses to introduce her to his grown daughters - whom we finally meet in a hilarious scene late in the picture. He also appears to be at his daughters' beckon call at any given moment.

Part of "Gloria Bell" focuses on Gloria and Arnold's on-again, off-again relationship. There are moments when we can sympathize with both of them. There's a particularly awkward scene during which Arnold is invited to a family gathering, only to have Gloria sit and reminisce with family members and ignore him completely. It's also hard not to feel bad for Gloria as Arnold constantly runs off to take phone calls from his daughters and ex-wife.

"Gloria Bell" isn't quite as impressive as Lelio's recent Oscar winner "A Fantastic Woman," and last year's "Disobedience" is also slightly better. But Moore is a great actress to have as your lead, and she ends up driving the film. For much of the picture, Gloria is somewhat of a lost soul, searching for her life's meaning by attempting to connect with the aloof people in her life. During a party at the film's end, she takes to the dance floor and it's obvious that she has found her inner freedom. "Gloria Bell" is an often funny and occasionally moving story about navigating through the loneliness that can be involved in growing old.

Review: Birds Of Passage

Image courtesy of The Orchard.

If Ciro Guerra's previous film, the sublimely haunting "Embrace of the Serpent," took some cues from Werner Herzog, his latest - co-directed with Cristina Gallego - feels more like an Alejandro Jodorowsky film, but more ethnographic in nature, during its opening scenes. The film will eventually settle into becoming a familial crime drama, of sorts, but it never quite loses the mysticism of its early sequences.

As the picture opens, a young woman in a desolate stretch of northern Colombia in the late 1960s has just completed a ritual period of isolation and her family is celebrating her emergence, meaning that she is now ready for marriage. The girl, Zaida (Natalie Reyes) takes part in a ritualistic dance and is joined by a young man from a neighboring family named Rapayet (Jose Acosta). However, the overbearing matriarch of Zaida's Wayuu family, Ursula (Carmina Martinez), insists that Rapayet collect a dowry consisting of numerous goats, cows and necklaces.

To raise the money, Rapayet joins forces with a pal named Moises (Jhon Narvaez) to sell a large amount of marijuana to some gringos seeking it. Before long, Rapayet and Moises have become involved in the drug trade, forcing them to rely upon a relative of Rapayet's who lives in the mountains, grows marijuana and has some high demands. After Moises makes some bad business decisions, Ursula and the family elders insist that Rapayet get rid of him, and the entire family ultimately becomes embroiled in the drug trade business.

In a more typical movie, this type of story would have been handled as a straightforward crime drama, but Guerra and and Gallego present the story in a variety of ways - as a bloody drug and crime drama, a mysterious and gorgeously shot film about Wayuu traditions and an exploration of Colombian history.

With just two films - "Embrace" and this one - Guerra has distinguished himself as a unique cinematic voice. His films both have somewhat psychedelic auras to them, but they are never aiming to be cult items. The photography in both films is stunning, the stories are told at measured paces, they both have ethnographic elements and the pictures are filled with images that are haunting and surreal.

This is one of the absolute best movies I've seen so far in 2019. Told in four chapters that chronicle the rise and fall of two families who are bound together at first by blood, and then by illegal dealings, "Birds of Passage" is a film I'd highly recommend. It provides a fascinating window into a culture that most people likely don't even know exists.

Review: Us

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Jordan Peele has seen the enemy and it is "Us." The director follows up his wildly popular and critically acclaimed "Get Out," a horror movie with a socially conscious message, with another picture that mixes thrills - and more of them as "Us" is much creepier than its predecessor - with social commentary in a devilishly clever way.

Throughout the film, the characters frequently come across the numbers 11:11 - on a clock and on a sign held up by a doomsday type. In Jeremiah 11:11, it says, "Therefore, this is what the Lord says: I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them."

In "Us," this disaster is one of our own making. The first shot of the film is of a TV set on which an advertisement for Hands Across America, a benefit event during which millions of Americans stood hand-in-hand in a human chain to raise awareness for homelessness. In the background are several VHS cassettes and, appropriately, one of them was the 1984 horror movie "C.H.U.D.," a film about monstrous vagrants.

We then cut to an eerie sequence during which a young girl visits a theme park in Santa Cruz with her parents in 1986. After straying away from her parents, the girl, Adelaide, wanders into a seemingly abandoned hall of mirrors at a boardwalk fun park and has an unsettling experience, bumping into a girl who appears to be her doppelganger.

Years later, Adelaide (now played with aplomb by Lupita Nyong'o) is taking a family vacation with her jovial husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), and two children - teenager Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and shy Jason (Evan Alex), and she balks after Gabe suggests they take a trip to Santa Cruz to meet up with some friends played by Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker. It's clear that her childhood experience at the boardwalk has haunted her.

After spending a day at the beach, the family arrives home to find a creepy family clad in red and carrying large golden scissors casting shadows on their driveway. After Gabe fails to scare them away, "Us" turns into a tense home invasion thriller. Adelaide is horrified to realize that her doppelganger has returned to torment her, and she has an entire family in tow who look exactly like Gabe, Zora and Jason. Terror ensues.

During a scene in which Adelaide and her family are tied up, we start to get a hint of where Peele is going. Upon being questioned as to who they are, Adelaide's doppelganger replies, "We're Americans." In the United States, much time is spent talking about who one should be afraid of - hordes of immigrants making their way to our borders, people on the other side of the political spectrum or people who look or think differently than the way we do. But, Peele is saying, the real enemy is us. We are our own worst enemies and the villains in the story.

It would take too much space to describe who this doppelganger family is. I'll leave it at this: they're known as the "tethered" and Adelaide's family is far from the only one being terrorized by the time "Us" is all over. If the enemy is us, then the tethered could be seen as the forgotten of America, although their origin is the only part of the film that is slightly underdeveloped. At the film's beginning, we are told that there are thousands of miles of unused tunnels underneath the ground in America, and this is seemingly the place from which the tethered have emerged. The picture ends with a shocking plot twist.

While the social commentary element of "Us" is a little more nebulous - but in a good way - than in "Get Out," Peele's sophomore film is much scarier. As much as I liked "Get Out," it never gave me the chills as his latest did. Regardless, it's clear that Peele is one of the most exciting new genre filmmakers. Those who loved "Get Out" and are fearful of being let down by "Us" can rest assured that the film simultaneously terrifies while providing sharp and resonant commentary on the collapsing state of our nation.

Review: The Image Book

Image courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Jean-Luc Godard's "The Image Book" is similar to many of the films that the great French director has made since 1980 - cryptic, semi-coherent, fitfully fascinating, often repetitive and only to be understood completely in the mind of its creator.

You have to give Godard credit. He's 88 years old and still doing his thing without much interest in how his work is perceived. During the 1960s and 1970s, his work - although radical and groundbreaking - still coupled basic plot elements and characters with his New Wave stylistic techniques and political commentary.

But since 1980's "Every Man for Himself," Godard has gravitated more and more toward the type of assemblage films - the most noteworthy of which is the fascinating "Histoires du Cinema(s)" -  that is his stock in trade in the latter part of his career. His films are made up of images, semi-ironic title cards, croaky voice-over narration courtesy of the director, political statements and dialogue that is elusive by nature.

In "The Image Book," Godard throws away the whole cinematic construct altogether. At least some of his recent films featured actors (I'm thinking Patti Smith in "Film Socialisme"). There are none to be found here, other than the ones that pop up in clips from old movies that the director loves. The best use in "The Image Book" is a scene from Max Ophuls' "Le Plaisir," in which a man dances and dances and dances until he finally collapses. This shot is the final one in the film, possibly hinting that Godard has finally made his last statement on film. The director once ended one of his classics - "Week End" - with a title card that read "fin de cinema (end of cinema)," but it would have been just as fitting here.

So, what is "The Image Book" about? Good question. There are passages showing hands cutting film on a Steenbeck, while others are shot with the crudest video imaginable. There's an entire sequence in which he praises Arabic society. There's a brief shot of gay porn that is intercut with a scene from Tod Browning's "Freaks." There are clips from old Godard movies, passages read from philosophers, conversations in French without subtitles.

One might say, as some have over the past few decades, that the director is merely taking the piss, so to speak. I'm not so sure. If anything, Godard's films of recent years - the most interesting of which was "Notre Musique," the most frustrating "Film Socialisme" - have seemed deliberate.

My advice is that you should you choose to experience the film, sit back and let the images and words wash over you and take from it what you will. "The Image Book" is far from Godard's best work - hell, I'd say the same about many of his assemblage films of the past 30 years, which to me don't come close to his 1960s and 1970s classics - but it's certainly quite unlike anything else you'll see in a movie theater this year.

Review: Climax

Image courtesy of A24.

Imagine "Fame" directed by the Marquis de Sade and you'll have some sense of what you're getting yourself into with Gaspar Noe's "Climax," another drug fueled horror show by the French provocateur that surprisingly intermingles some joyous sequences with the typical shock value you'd expect in a Noe film.

Noe has long been among Europe's enfants terribles - along with Lars Von Trier, Bruno Dumont and Ulrich Seidl - who shows up every few years at the Cannes Film Festival with a new movie that will likely make viewers run for the aisles. His previous work includes the shocking "Irreversible," a very well made and horrifying film that I'll likely never watch again, as well as the trippy but overlong "Enter the Void" and the overwrought semi-porno "Love."

Although the grim aspects you'd expect in a Noe film - as well as the loud blaring house music, dizzying camerawork and drug induced hallucinations - are present in "Climax," I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the director had more on his mind this time around than merely jolting audiences.

The film follows a day in the life of a dance troupe circa 1996 - the film is apparently based on a real incident, whatever that means - that has camped out in an old, secluded building to rehearse. "Climax" opens with interviews of the troupe's various members, a diverse cross section of men and women of varying sexual preferences and ethnicities who appear to be purposefully representative of France's multicultural makeup. In the troupe, there are two German women, a number of black men and women, a Muslim, several white performers, one or two gay men and a few lesbians.

Following the interview sequences that kick off the film, we are treated to an absolutely electrifying dance rehearsal sequence, in which all of the performers dance in a circle as each member moves toward the camera and practices their best moves, all to the tune of thumping house music. At times, Noe's camera travels to the ceiling a la Busby Berkeley and observes from above as the dancers show off on the dance floor. There are a number of dance sequences throughout the course of the picture, but the first one is easily the best.

The film's next movement is the least compelling. The camera travels back and forth throughout the rehearsal room as various pairs of dancers talk about other members of the troupe and discuss their sexual preferences. It lingers for long periods of time on two groups of men who explicitly discuss how they have slept with all of the women in the troupe. Although these scenes do a decent job of setting up the group's dynamic and explaining the various relationships between its members, there's only so many times that one can hear about a character fucking another's brains out.

As they celebrate the end of their rehearsal, the dancers realize that someone has spiked the sangria they are drinking with LSD. Soon, the characters begin to turn on each other, accusing various dancers of having been the culprit. The Muslim dancer is the first to be accused since he doesn't drink alcohol and he is thrown out of the rehearsal space, forced to battle the snowy elements outside on his own.

Resentments rise to the surface, characters become paranoid and all literally goes to hell. A character catches on fire; a mother locks her young son in a closet to keep him away from the other dancers, who are high, but this ends in tragic results; and a pregnant woman undergoes a particularly grueling episode.

Throughout the film, Noe flashes title cards with statements on them - at the film's beginning, there's one that reads "A French Film and Proud of It!" Later, one in line with Noe's worldview - "Death is an Extraordinary Experience" - is seen. But the one that is seemingly most noteworthy regarding this film's overall concept is one that reads "Life is a Collective Impossibility." "Climax" is, perhaps, a microcosm of our current world on fire.

While the film isn't as mercilessly effective as "Irreversible" or visually ambitious as "Enter the Void," it contains some of the most impressive moments of Noe's career so far. The opening dance number is phenomenal and the camerawork, often spinning around and around and leaving characters upside down is occasionally breathtaking. Other scenes drag on too long - the original interviews, the scenes in which characters discuss their sex lives and some of the horrors in the film's final act - but the picture also finds the director tackling material that is more thought provoking than usual.

Noe's films are undoubtedly an acquired taste. They're not for everyone. But "Climax" finds the director at his most compelling, at least thematically, and there's a little bit of joy in the film's early scenes to accompany all of the horrors that follow. The film may or may not have a deeper context regarding the current state of multicultural France, but it doesn't bang you over the head with it. "Climax" is an interesting experience.

Review: Everybody Knows

Image courtesy of Focus Features.

Those familiar with the work of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi know that his films tend to be complex studies of moral ambiguity that often incorporate elements of thrillers. His masterpiece "A Separation" was a fascinating, Oscar-winning film about the distance between what we perceive to be the truth, and what actually is. His other recent films - "About Elly," "The Past" and "The Salesman," another Oscar winner - are tense movies that explore small human dramas, but also have mysteries at their centers.

His latest, "Everybody Knows," his first film in Spanish, fits in perfectly with his overall body of work. The film starts as a reunion picture, in which a large family converges on a small town in Spain for a wedding. But we learn that resentments have long been buried among its members over land disputes, and that a long-ago romance between one of its members, Laura (Penelope Cruz), and a servant's son, Paco (Javier Bardem), who has since purchased a piece of the family's property and built a successful winery, was never quite resolved.

However, during the course of the wedding, the lights go out. When they come back on, Laura discovers that her teenage daughter is missing. The family soon realizes that she has been kidnapped, and a $300,000 price tag has been attached to her being returned safely. The long buried resentments rise to the surface as the family desperately attempts to prevent the police from hearing about the kidnapping - the girl's life has been threatened if the authorities are contacted - and come up with the ransom money.

Farhadi's films often use stillness and inaction to create tension, and that is certainly utilized in "Everybody Knows," perhaps a bit too much as the film is slightly longer than it probably should be. That being said, while not among the director's best films, his latest is beautifully shot, engrossing and driven by solid performances from its cast.

Although Cruz is very good as the concerned mother of the missing girl, Bardem steals most scenes as Paco, a decent man who still clearly cares about Laura, despite her family's unkind attitude towards him. One of the film's more interesting elements is how it incorporates class tensions into the mix. Paco is looked down upon by the family, while most of the villagers resent Laura's family, despite the fact that many of them rely on the family for wages. In other words, Laura's daughter's kidnapper could be literally anyone, which keeps things suspenseful.

The story is further complicated when Laura's husband, Alejandro (Ricardo Darin), shows up to get involved. Laura and her husband live in Argentina, and the film depicts them as being slightly estranged from the rest of the family. Tensions are further exacerbated as Alejandro's approach to finding his daughter is leaving it up to God, while Paco and Laura are more concerned with practical matters. A plot twist that I won't give away further complicates the situation.

While the answer to the film's riddle shouldn't surprise anyone, Farhadi's latest juggles various elements - family and relationship dramas, class tensions and a thriller plotline - fairly deftly. As I'd mentioned, "Everybody Knows" isn't one of his best films, but it's still pretty good - and certainly fits in with his overall body of work.