Review: Nope

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

It's not often that you can describe a movie as a cross between Steven Spielberg (namely, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"), "King Kong," a more violent version of M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" and Guy Debord's 1967  work of Marxist critical theory, "The Society of the Spectacle."

Director Jordan Peele follows up his cultural landmark "Get Out," a creepy horror movie that tackled racism, and "Us," which posed the question about who we as a society should fear, with a movie that blends horror and comedy with a sociopolitical message much like his earlier films, but with a theme that might require a little more of a lift from its audience.

This is far from a bad thing. In fact, parsing out what exactly Peele is trying to say in "Nope" is often more fun than some of the set pieces, which - although impressive - come a little too often as well as an ending that feels a little anticlimactic. That being said, the film features some very creepy moments, most of which are aided by the fantastic nighttime photography and the gorgeously desolate location in which it's set.

Most people are familiar with the aforementioned influences, but with Debord's work as the exception. Considered a seminal text of the Situationist movement, "The Society of the Spectacle" depicts a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced by representation. It is a society in which relations between commodities have replaced relations between people.

"All that was once directly lived has become mere representation," Debord writes, signifying the importance of the image - which has replaced genuine human interaction - in contemporary spectacle-driven society. "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." 

Not only does the film air-quote Debord, but it literally quotes during its opening this biblical passage from Nahum 3:6: "I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile and make you a spectacle." Filth is undoubtedly dumped on the home of OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) - a brother-sister team that run a ranch in the middle of the California desert that trains horses for movies, and the descendants of Alistair A. Haywood, the Black man seen riding the horse in the first-ever moving picture - by a mysterious flying object over their home. 

Prior to that, the film opens on a more curious scene. The filming of a late-1990s sitcom in which a family has a pet chimpanzee is disrupted when the chimp goes nuts and either kills or disfigures several of the cast members, while a young actor named Ricky (who grows up to be a character portrayed by Steven Yeun) looks on in horror.

Ricky is currently the proprietor of an amusement park that appears to be the Haywoods' sole neighbor, and both Ricky's past and his present doings lend themselves readily to the film's various themes. For starters, during a scene in which the Haywoods pay Ricky a visit to try to buy back some of the horses they were forced to sell due to economic reasons, Ricky gets the opportunity to discuss being the witness to the chimp attack, and instead of relaying his actual experience, he describes the "Saturday Night Live" skit made about it because, it seems, talking about the representation of the horrific event appears easier than facing the actual thing itself.

Equally as important is the scheme that Ricky has going on in the desert. While the Haywoods - after having discovered the UFO floating in the skies above their home - are attempting to capture the "perfect image" by photographing the object with some fancy cameras they bought and the assistance of an electronics store clerk (Brandon Perea) and an acclaimed cameraman (Michael Wincott, whose character reminded me of the Robert Shaw figure from "Jaws"), Ricky draws crowds to his small amusement park with promises of UFO sightings. But much like the chimp who ran violently wild on the TV show he starred in, there's a lesson to be learned about the dangers of trying to make a deal with - or attempting to tame - a predator.

Although Peele allows his audience to fill in the blanks for themselves without spelling it out too much, one of the more fascinating concepts of "Nope" - from the Haywoods trying to capture the perfect image of the UFO (or is it?) to Ricky's commoditizing his horrors from the TV show set - is how modern society transforms the spectacle into the everyday by capturing and then regurgitating horrific images over and over again until they have become ingrained in our memory - think 9/11, the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, the monk setting himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War and endless other images of chaos and death.

Ricky refers to the UFO as "The Viewers" and tells his audience that they - the aliens or whatever they are - are "watching us." In our spectacle-driven society, being alive means being watched - and when people stop watching you, you no longer exist. Or, in the case of "Nope," you cease to exist when you watch the wrong thing for too long.

There's a lot to unpack in this film, and while some have criticized "Nope" for having too much to say but not following through on it all, that's far from a complaint for me. Considering the various concepts that are thrown around with the kitchen sink makes for some compelling viewing. If anything weakens the film - but only just a little - it's the set pieces that drag on and don't amount to as much as you might expect. "Nope" is a great looking film with a fantastic sound design but, as is often the case, what you don't see is often more effective than what you do, and once the cat is out of the bag in this film there's only so much wonder left to be had.

While Peele's third feature isn't quite as groundbreaking as his first or frightening as his second, it's an interesting new direction for the filmmaker. While his first two pictures were smaller horror movies with sociopolitical messaging, his latest has blockbuster designs, but at the same time incorporates the type of intellectual pursuits you'd never expect from most big budget Hollywood movies. "Nope" may be my No. 3 of Peele's movies so far, but it's still well worth seeing.

Review: Where The Crawdads Sing

Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

"Where the Crawdads Sing" arrives with a reasonable amount of expectation attached to it. Based on a bestselling debut novel by a 70-year-old woman - who has been the topic of unusual news stories - and noted as a Reese Witherspoon book club selection, while also drawing Taylor Swift to sing the theme song, the picture has a particularly high profile.

But while the film occasionally teeters into melodramatic territory - including a courtroom drama that takes place throughout the film as the rest is set in flashback - it's a reasonably well-made adaptation of a popular book that makes up for its faults with decent storytelling, solid atmosphere and a good performance by lead Daisy Edgar-Jones.

The film begins in October 1969 in the wilds of North Carolina, where Kya (Edgar-Jones) - known to those in town as the "marsh girl" in a derogatory way - lives. She is arrested and charged in the murder of Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), a popular but smarmy and particularly nasty football player who is found dead in the swamp. 

As she awaits her trial - for which the prosecution will seek the death penalty - the film flashes back to her childhood in the marsh spent with her abusive father (Garret Dillahunt) as well as her mother and numerous siblings, all of whom eventually abandon the place, leaving Kya to her own devices. 

She survives due to her own wits and some occasional help - an early romance, Tate (Taylor John Smith) who ends up disappointing her, and a kind Black couple (Michael Hyatt and Sterling Macer Jr.). who run a local store and strike up business with Kya when she's young.

The film isn't without its problems. It portrays Kya as a free spirit who depends only on herself as she lives alone in the marsh. The townsfolk mostly mistreat her - save for the shop owners, Tate and a lawyer played by David Strathairn, who later represents her at her trial - but Kya's relationships with the film's two love interests - the genuine, but flawed, Tate and the villainous Chase - occasionally portray her as naive to a point that borders on unbelievable. It's a little hard to swallow that Kya would be mistrustful of the town's residents, but would trust an obvious operator like Chase.

Also, Mabel and Jumpin' - the Black couple who help Kya by agreeing to do business with her - often seem to exist solely to help the white lady in distress, although the two actors portraying them bring warmth and do what they can with slightly underwritten characters. 

"Where the Crawdads Sing" is several things at once - a potboiler mystery, a courtroom drama, two love stories, a Southern-fried backwoods drama and a coming of age story. It juggles most of these elements pretty well - although I could have done with a little less of the courtroom drama, though I'm pleased to say that I was incorrect in guessing the film's plot twist, and had assumed it would have reared itself in the courtroom context in a cheesy manner. Thankfully, that didn't occur. The actual plot twist will likely elicit some strong reactions, but it works better narratively than what you might guess it will be.

All in all, the film might not be a great one, but it's an enjoyable - and beautifully shot - adaptation of a popular book. The novel has drawn some controversy, but much of that has been filtered out of the movie. It may not be the awards-garnering film that its producers likely intended, but it's not half bad.

Review: Girl In The Picture

Image courtesy of Netflix.

The new Netflix documentary "Girl in the Picture" runs the gamut of reactions it'll likely elicit from its audience - fascination, horror, disgust, heartbreak - during the course of its often shocking, winding true crime story that would have seemed too outrageous to be true if we hadn't lived through the past few years in this country.

In lesser hands, the film could come off as lurid because - let's face it - the story that inspired it certainly is. But director Skye Borgman's film unequivocally expresses outrage at those in the wrong in this story - although documentaries typically take a side about what they present, they often do it more subtly, but in this case a different approach was warranted.

It's difficult to discuss the case at the center of the documentary without giving anything away - that is, if I could even remember all of the numerous twists that take place - but suffice it to say it's a fascinating tale. When the story opens, we learn of a tragedy in 1990 during which a young woman named Tonya Hughes was seemingly killed in a hit and run in Oklahoma, and several weeks later her young son is kidnapped.

The man at the center of all this is Clarence, Tonya's husband, who authorities automatically suspect in her death, especially after he kidnaps her young son from the school he attends in the middle of the day and takes the principal hostage at gunpoint before leaving him tied up in the woods nearby.

The investigators interviewed in the film - who apparently felt a personal responsibility to get to the bottom of this bizarre case to the extent that it haunted them for decades - note that they knew Clarence would be hard to track, and it's right about this time that I can't really give any away any more details - about who Tonya Hughes was and who Clarence was, two questions that keep resulting in different answers the deeper the authorities dug.

The wealth of interviews obtained for this film is astounding - and it includes Tonya's childhood friends, a co-worker at a strip club where Tonya worked, various law enforcement officials and several other family members whose presence in the picture is fairly shocking, considering how difficult it likely was to figure out how everyone fit into the case.

True crime documentaries are a dime a dozen these days - they're all over the place, and while the subject matter is frequently interesting, the execution is occasionally lacking. That's not the case with "Girl in the Picture," which is mesmerizing not only due to the strangeness of the case involved, but also the breadth of the interviews and the tracking of details for a case that spanned nearly 27 years. Those who watch it will likely be engrossed.

Review: The Black Phone

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

The quality of horror movies has been impressively high in recent years - while there remain a number of bad ones, many of the good ones have been especially rich - and this year has already seen two very strong 1970s-set horror pictures - Ti West's gleefully deranged "X" and Scott Derrickson's haunting "The Black Phone."

Based on a short story by Joe Hill - the son of Stephen King - the film is rich on 1970s period detail without being overbearing about it. There's a great opening sequence depicting a baseball game, and there are numerous scenes of youths in scraps that capture the skinned knees and fist fights prevalent among young boys. There are, of course, a few great needle drops - Edgar Winter Group, Sweet and a great use of Pink Floyd's "On the Run" - and references to "Emergency!" and "The Tingler." But the film's sinisterness is just lurking around the corner from the nostalgia. 

In the picture, young Finney (Mason Thames) - whose "mint arm" will be put to good use by the end of the film - is a shy baseball player in a suburb of Denver in 1978. He has a close friendship with his sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who possibly displays some psychic powers that you might expect in a Stephen King story, and they live with their alcoholic and occasionally abusive father (Jeremy Davies), whom they take turns "taking care of" when he's had too much to drink.

In the early scenes of the film, several young boys - two of whom Finney knows well - go missing, and the nightly news warns denizens of the burb of The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), a man who shows up at the scene carrying a bouquet of black balloons and wearing facial makeup. After he has dragged the boys into a van, he keeps them locked in a soundproofed basement in a home he shares with his brother - who is somehow clueless about it all. He pays visits to his victims donning a creepy mask, and taunts and punishes them before eventually killing them.

Finney becomes The Grabber's latest victim, but the twist is that the ghosts of The Grabber's previous victims call Finney on a black phone - which has a cut cord - that hangs on a wall in the basement room where he is kept. Each of the boys provides a piece of the puzzle to Finney in an attempt to aid his escape,  but it's ultimately the advice of a tough Latino kid (Miguel Cazarez Mora) with whom Finney is friends at school that is most important: Although he doesn't stand up for himself against the bullies at school who torment him, he'll one day have to do so.

For a movie in which much of the action is set in a basement, "The Black Phone" is fairly suspenseful, if not exactly scary. Hawke does a solid job of playing against type, and although we don't learn enough about his character in terms of a back story, he makes his scenes count with a sinister performance of the type I've never seen him portray before.

Both Thames and McGraw are also particularly good, and the latter's confessionals to Jesus - particularly one in which she gets a little frustrated - provided some much needed levity to this dark story. "The Black Phone" may be short on scares, but it's long on mood, features some solid performances, does a great job of capturing its era and makes you care about its characters. 

Derrickson is previously responsible for the pretty scary "Sinister," and similar to that film what makes some of his horror movies so effective is the level of detail and aura he creates for his spooky stories. "The Black Phone" is one of the genre's better offerings as of late.

Review: Elvis

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis" is less of a rock star biopic and more in line with - oddly enough - Milos Forman's "Amadeus," which chronicled the story of Salieri, the man who - according to the movie - accepted some form of responsibility for the titular musical genius' death. In "Elvis," the Salieri character is Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, playing against type as a villain and seemingly having fun hamming it up a little), the king of rock 'n roll's manager.

Similar to Eugene Landy, the psychiatrist/manager portrayed by Paul Giamatti in the Brian Wilson biopic "Love and Mercy," Parker is a manipulator who takes control of his talent's financial affairs and basically runs him into the ground physically in pursuit of more money - in this case, Parker has a gambling addiction.

Luhrmann deploys many of his usual cinematic tricks here - his films are flashy and exuberant, and "Elvis" has some a lot of stylish flair to rank with some of his best movies - namely, "Moulin Rouge" and "Strictly Ballroom" - while also exhibiting some of the more over-the-top elements of some of his lesser features, such as his remake of "The Great Gatsby."

But what holds the film together is, surprisingly, not Hanks - a great actor who gets to have some fun here overplaying the sleazy Colonel, a Dutch immigrant who somehow has people convinced that he grew up in West Virginia and whose penchant for "snowing" people at first impresses Elvis - but Austin Butler who brings Presley to life in ways that I found fairly surprising.

In many ways, "Elvis" takes the routine task of portraying the rise-and-fall epic of a musician - so, we get the rise to stardom; the scenes where Elvis doesn't listen to his wise mother, who warns him about the Colonel; the drug abuse; the divorce from the spouse, etc. - but there's a lot of fun to be had with the combination of stock footage mixing with recreated scenes from Elvis' career, and the live performance sequences are pretty impressive.

The film is, perhaps, a little too generous in how it depicts Elvis paying homage to the Black musicians whose musical styles he adopted for his own music. In other words, I don't think he did nearly so much as the film depicts him doing behind the scenes. The manner to which he was manipulated by his manager, on the other hand, as well as his harrowing descent into a pills addiction, felt pretty authentic.

"Elvis" isn't a great saga depicting a musical icon - some of the best of the past few decades include the brilliant Bob Dylan phantasmagoria "I'm Not There" and "Straight Outta Compton." That being said, it's still pretty fun, even when Luhrmann can't quite get over his trademark obsessions - seriously, what was with the scenes in which modern music played during scenes in the 1950s? The film is at times - to quote an Elvis song - too much, but it's often engaging, stylish and entertaining enough to warrant a recommendation.

Review: Memoria

Image courtesy of Neon.

Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul makes films that are on their own wavelength - and you can either take the plunge and try to tune in or not, although that likely makes little difference to the director, who answer to the name "Joe" for those not willing to give his long name an attempt. For more than 15 years, Weerasethakul has been making strange, slowly paced and hypnotic films that seem to exist in their own universe. "Memoria," which stars Tilda Swinton, is his first in English.

The best of Weerasethakul's work - the unusual, trance-like "Tropical Malady" and the Palm d'Or-winning "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" - require the viewer to lose themselves in the lush imagery, hypnotic pacing and style and almost unexplainable stories that the director likes to tell. His latest isn't any different, although while I found it compelling it didn't rank among his greatest works.

In the film, Swinton's character,  Jessica, is visiting an ill sister who has been hospitalized in Bogota - the reasons given for her potential illness vary from the family dog to a tribe of natives who have cast a spell to prevent outsiders from visiting their lands - and it's easy to see her sense of displacement. She wanders around trying to speak the language, and occasionally finding a disconnect - for example, a scene in which she tries to track down a sound technician with whom she'd struck up a friendly acquaintance.

The reason she'd met with the technician is that, one night in the middle of the night, she heard a loud thumping noise with no apparent cause. Over the course of several days, she continues to hear it while she's roaming the streets or having dinner with her sister and her family. It's unclear whether anyone else can hear the sound, and there's a long sequence during which the sound technician tries to replicate it on his sound boards in his studio.

Things begin to get stranger. Aside from the recurring noise, Jessica is told by her sister that someone she was sure who'd died is still alive, and she can't relocate the sound technician after she tries to find him a second time. Later, she wanders into the countryside and meets a fish scaler named Hernan (Elkin Diaz), and during their discussion about memory and dreams it almost seems as if her dreams have intertwined with his. At one point, he takes a nap on the grass and appears to have died before waking up again and continuing the conversation with Jessica.

So, what is "Memoria" about? The answer is: the same thing that any of Weerasethakul's films are about: the mysteries of our existence on planet Earth. In his previous and best films, a young man goes into a jungle to locate his lover, who has been turned into a tiger ("Tropical Malady") and a man is visited by mystical woodland creatures with glowing red eyes who are supposed to be his deceased wife and son ("Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives").

You might not find a satisfying answer as to what takes place in "Memoria" - although there is somewhat of an explanation in a startling image late in the picture - but as is the case in previous Weerasethakul films, the experience is more about the journey than the destination. "Memoria" might not rank among the director's greatest films - at least, in my opinion - but Weerasethakul's vision is singular, and it's unlikely that you'll see anything else in a theater - which is the only place you'll see this film due to a release strategy in which it will apparently only screen at theaters and never be released on DVD or streaming - like it this year.

Review: Cha Cha Real Smooth

Image courtesy of Apple TV.

 Cooper Raiff's "Cha Cha Real Smooth" might give off the vibe of the type of quirky indie American comedy that you'd see at the Sundance Film Festival - where the film, in fact, sold for a whopping $15 million - but it's a lot more than that as well as a gigantic leap forward for its writer/director/star, whose first feature, "Shithouse," was similarly awkwardly charming, if a little too low-key.

When I reference awkwardness, I'm referring to the type of character that Raiff plays - here, it's the fresh-out-of-college and not-quite-motivated Andrew, whose arrested development is more charming than grating - and in his previous film. In both "Shithouse" and "Cha Cha," the characters he portrays exhibit a mixture of awkward good-naturedness and seeming lack of sophistication in romantic relationships.

As the film opens, we meet young Andrew attending a bar mitzvah with his mother. He notices a much older female party planner as she leads children through a round of the limbo, and sneaks out into the hall to watch her take part in a seemingly fraught phone conversation. 

But back at the bar mitzvah, she jumps back into her role with enthusiasm as if the phone call never took place. Andrew is smitten at her strength and professionalism and the boy - who looks all of 12 years of age - asks her on a date. She kindly explains she's too old for him, and Andrew's protective but bipolar mother (Leslie Mann in a solid supporting performance) tries to provide the broken-hearted boy with some solace.

We jump ahead a decade and Andrew has returned home after graduating Tulane University to stay with his mother; Andrew's young brother, David (Evan Assante), who obviously looks up to Andrew; and Greg (Brad Garrett), the awkward stepfather who means well, but seems to frequently clash with Andrew. Our protagonist is fresh off another heartbreak as his girlfriend has left to study for a semester in Spain and, based on her Facebook profile, is seeing other people. With no other prospects on hand, Andrew takes a job at a fast food joint called Meat Sticks.

His mother tells him that her illness had recently caused her to make a scene at a party, so she asks him to go in her place to a bar mitzvah, where he runs into several old schoolmates and befriends a young mother named Domino (Dakota Johnson in what's likely her best performance) after she takes a shine to his kindness exhibited toward her autistic daughter, Lola (Vanessa Burghardt).

The whole scene clicks with Andrew and he comes up with an idea for a business: party planner for bar mitzvahs. His job is to get children dancing and having fun at the rites of passage, and he is often accompanied by his younger brother, who wants to pick Andrew's brain on how to land his first kiss with a girl he likes, unbeknownst to David that his older brother is fairly awkward when it comes to manners of the heart.

As his friendship with Domino and Lola grows - he offers to babysit her, and these scenes are often charmingly sweet and funny - he begins to develop feelings for the older woman, who has a depressive side that she is unable to hide, and he questions why she is engaged to Joseph (Raul Castillo), a brusk lawyer whose current case frequently takes him to Chicago.

All of this might sound like the makings of a quirky romantic comedy that came from the Sundance factory and is cute enough to make you roll your eyes. In this case, you'd be mistaken. "Cha Cha Real Smooth" is all of those things - funny, charming and displaying a warmth and sweetness that felt like a balm during this particularly downbeat period in current affairs - but it's also deeper and wiser than you'd expect.

For starters, the film is about the unexplainable nature of attraction and how two people click for reasons often unknown to those involved. Domino recognizes that Andrew is young, naive and far behind in life experiences - at age 29, she has an autistic daughter, a husband who left her and she battles depression - and yet, she feels comfortable around him. 

In some ways, the film is a kinder, gentler version of "The Graduate." Andrew in turn starts to fall for Domino, much like he did for the older party planner during the opening scene. He seemingly takes interest in older women who he believes are unappreciated and display an inner strength - and this includes everyone from the party planner and Domino to his mother - or are unnoticed - such as Lola, who is occasionally picked on by boys at the bar mitzvahs due to her being autistic.

Although the film goes in some directions that are inevitable and that you'd expect - for example, Andrew having to face the realization that Domino already has a full life, and that he's still basically a kid - there's a generosity in the picture that extends even to characters that we might initially misjudge. 

The friendship between Andrew and Domino is handled with a surprising delicacy, and both actors are particularly impressive, especially Johnson. "Cha Cha Real Smooth" might have its quirks - Andrew's over-exuberance might initially rub some the wrong way, although we later recognize it's a protective stance - but it's a genuinely kind-hearted, funny and well written and acted film that feels like a hug during a time when most of us could really use one.