Author: Ben Siler

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Uncle Drew

Uncle Drew is a light basketball comedy about a team of geriatrics returning to former sports glory. The elderly hoopsters are played by younger sports stars wearing wigs and latex. The effect is distancing: The fake old men are cartoons. We spend most of the time with their broad, wig-based impressions, and it’s like a long SNL sketch — or a feature-length Pepsi commercial, which is what it is.

The film stars Lil Rel Howery (Get Out) as Dax, an orphan who finds solace in basketball as a child and coaches teams as an adult to compete in the Rucker Classic Streetball Tournament in Harlem every year. He missed a shot when he was young, blocked by his rival Mookie (Nick Kroll). When Mookie steals his team- and money-obsessed girlfriend (Tiffany Haddish), he must seek out the mysterious Uncle Drew, a former great who disappeared, to lead him to victory.

The mystery dissipates almost immediately. Uncle Drew (Kyrie Irving), introduced by a cameo-rich 30 for 30 episode, which tells the story of how he won a game while holding a ham sandwich, is easily found. Then things descend into vaudeville. Most of the comedy consists of Dax anxiously commenting on the inanity of a setup — how careless a preacher is with a baby he’s baptizing, the thinness of a star player’s promise not to betray him, the oldness of Uncle Drew’s 8-track machine (“If Billy Dee Williams and Diana Ross had a lovechild, it would definitely be in this van!”)

It would be nice if there was more to laugh about than the script’s clichés. In Get Out, Howery was a breath of fresh air, comic relief from a heavy sci-fi/horror parable. Here, the movie he’s commenting on is more ordinary, turning him into a Woody Allen-style neurotic protagonist.

Shaquille O’Neal is Big Fella (during the credit bloopers he says “I’ve come a long way since Kazaam!”) He has an extremely fake beard, operates a dojo, and has a tendency to be separated from the rest of the cast for as long as possible, presumably because he has the highest day-rate. Chris Webber (five-time NBA All-Star) is Preacher, the aforementioned pastor, heavily indebted to Arsenio Hall’s Reverend Brown from Coming to America. He is married to Betty Lou (four-time Olympic gold medalist Lisa Leslie). Reggie Miller (also an NBA All-Star five-timer) is Lights, who is in denial about being legally blind. Nate Robinson (three-time Slam Dunk Champion) is Boots, who can’t walk. All do fine with cheesy humor, though too many adopt a low soft growl as their “old man voice.”

If they were actually played by older actors, this would be a very different movie. You would have to confront how their bodies broke down from their prime and note how society in general has no use for someone once they stop producing. As it is, we know these are elite athletes (most of whom are currently middle-aged sports commentators) playing at being decrepit, like gods in disguise.

When Uncle Drew switches from the silly to actual sermonizing, it falters. Moral lessons include: “This game is all mental”; “You don’t stop playing because you get older. You get older because you stop playing”; “We all need something to look forward to, even if it is just a pipe dream”; and finally, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” I disagree with all of these.

Having sunk all his money into the team, Dax is counting on the championship’s $100,000 prize to stay solvent. Uncle Drew scolds him, “It’s about the love, youngblood. Nothing else.” Dax forgets his financial woes and changes his team’s name from the Harlem Money to the Harlem Buckets.

But feeling pressure to earn money constantly is not a character flaw; it’s result of living under late-stage capitalism. The movie itself feels the pressure, chock-full of the sources of its own funding. Pepsi machines are everywhere.

Nevertheless, a family at my screening ate it up: The father announced, “That was pure fun” at movie’s end, and his little girl could not stop giggling during a scene in which Shaq repeatedly raised and lowered his hospital bed while someone was trying to talk. As for me, I felt like I was already watching this at 2 p.m. on Comedy Central.

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Breaking In

Violence is thrilling in a fictional setting. When heroes visit it upon malcontents, the audience living vicariously through them gets feelings of triumph. This is all cover so that we can assert murderousness in a safe space where it won’t hurt anyone, and go home having let loose our bloodlust. A particularly good cover is protecting the family unit.

Breaking In, a home invasion thriller produced by and starring Gabrielle Union, is paint-by-the-numbers. Exactly what you expect to happen, happens, but there is charm in its efficiency. Shaun (Union) travels with two kids to the countryside to close up her murdered father’s estate in order to sell it. A quartet of thieves are already there, intent upon getting past the state-of-the-art surveillance system. Union must use all her strength to defeat them and save her children. No time is wasted on her father’s murder. There are Shining-like shots of her car on long roads, a brief setup of the generic siblings’ relationship, and images of Shaun looking at her father’s coffee cups and broken picture frames set to sad piano music. Her son (Seth Carr) is shown flying a drone through the house, in order to establish its use for later. Then people start getting grabbed and dragged into shadows, and we’re off.

Billy Burke and Gabrielle Union face off in Breaking In.

The villains are familiar: they consist of a beleaguered pro who has seen it all (Billy Burke), the eager-to-murder wild card (Richard Cabral), an inexperienced youth having second thoughts (Levi Meaden), and a fourth (Mark Furze) whose most distinguishing feature is looking like Gordon Freeman from Half-Life, with thick-rimmed glasses and a crowbar.

They are introduced bickering and proceed to follow the unsoundly procedural steps by which homicidal thieves regularly underestimate working moms. Burke is best, with majestic swooped-back hair and a mostly there beard. He alternates between the weariness of a guy who has seen this all before and Bond-suave pronouncements like “I imagine in this moment you’re wondering whether you and your kids will make it out alive,” and “You’re a woman alone at the mercy of strangers. Your greatest weakness is trapped inside the house.” (He means her kids.) As the odds increase in Shaun’s favor, several of his lines are repeated back to him. The conversational throughline among his compatriots is calling Shaun a “bitch.”

Gabrielle Union has a light.

My audience was wry. The robbers were a little too hapless for them: they laughed at odd looks on their faces and unintentional moments of awkwardness. Sometimes even the appearance of Meaden’s character, with his dyed yellow hair and unthreatening demeanor, would bring the house down. One such moment was when he began to dry off safe-cracking electronics Shaun had submerged in a sink full of water, presumably because it was a stupid, hopeless task. (The audience even laughed at the final image of the film, probably because of the extreme lateness of police arrival.)

Union is good as a sexual assault survivor, which brings an emotional, personal undercurrent to scenes of her being attacked and thrown about by the different men. Her hard-won dominance over them prompted cheers. The script gave her triumphant lines like “You broke into the wrong fucking house,” and “I’m just a mom,” and my fellow viewers got it. On leaving they noted happily she was a “mean momma,” and the intruders’ mistake was getting near a “lion and her cubs.”

As Union wrote about her own history in regards to the controversy around The Birth of The Nation in 2016, assault in real life produces post-traumatic stress disorder, from which she suffers. It’s only in art that we can find catharsis through violence. Besides the fun of seeing this with an audience perfectly keyed into the familial triumph it was selling, I surmised from Union’s producer credit that it was a personal story she wanted to tell. I watch a lot of amateur true crime stories on Youtube, which I find fascinating. There’s no quicker way to remind oneself of the vastness of our world: the unknown and unexplained dead branch out in every direction in endless patterns. It’s good to find meaning in crime instead of mystery, and see a person purposefully tell the story of making one’s way back from trauma.

Breaking In

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A Quiet Place

Actors Emily Blunt and John Krasinski are both expert at little looks. Their microexpressions often betray a tome’s worth of worry, regret or disdain, Krasinski’s most famously into the camera in the American version of The Office.

Their marriage has produced, besides two children, A Quiet Place, directed by Krasinski and starring the couple. It is a horror film which concerns a family in the country terrorized (as is their entire post-apocalyptic world) by blind monsters who echo-locate and horribly maul anyone who makes a loud noise.

This leads to the family and film being artfully silent. There is little dialogue, and most of it is in American Sign Language. The sound design is highly detailed, emphasizing every tiny movement and scrape as the family goes about its farm life sometimes on literal tiptoes.

John Krasinski

Creaky boards are navigated with care, everyday objects put down like ticking bombs. Every task on the the Abbott family farm is an endless font of worry for both the family and the viewer, who is kept successfully in suspense throughout every simple chore. It’s a literalization of the way in which movies use quiet to soften viewers up before a jump scare, of which there are plenty here.

As in other ambitious modern horror films, like The Babadook and It Follows, fighting the monsters also doubles as a need to heal, in this case guilt and anger over the loss of a previous family member who made a sound. The Abbotts’ daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) feels she is left out, not only because of her negligence in the previous death and her youth, but because she is deaf.

The film’s carefully constructed ambient sound drops out for her scenes, muting them. It’s a nice touch, and one that highlights not only her perspective but mirrors the estrangement nonfictional deaf people feel when they are similarly mistreated, in non-post-apocalyptic situations.

The healing, when it comes, is a little too neat, and eventually the movie is less about metaphorical fears of letting go and more about the logistics of running and hiding from giant monsters. The monsters themselves look like a slightly more tasteful version of Resident Evil Lickers (the film also shares a composer and a final image with the 2002 film), and suffer a little for being familiarly CGI mutants. But they are scary, by simple dint of appearing from nowhere and killing any noisemaker, and work as a serious threat. No explanation is given for their presence, and none needed, as it would just get in the way. An old newspaper hints at humanity’s finding out how they work: “It’s Sound!” screams The New York Post.

Krasinski does good directorial work, and gives Blunt, whose character is pregnant, many opportunities to panic, cry, and stoically work up the resolve to deal with nearby monsters, sounds and children. The family again and again must take great pains to repress themselves, and the work of self-repression builds and builds, until it becomes an unnavigable burden. Their movements cry out.

Emily Blunt

Blunt’s great, almost as excellent at registering horror and shock with thoughtful composure as she was in the scarier cartel drama Sicario. Krasinski’s bearded dad wears a look of exasperation, continually pulled in different directions by the exigencies of monster prevention and the emotional needs of family members. (As with many onscreen dads, proper care of the family unit is a spiritual calling and almost an impossible task: if we did not know he was also the director, his cross would seem just a bit too burdensome.) When the two finally have spoken, whispered dialogue, it feels unusual and focuses entirely on their unresolved emotions.

Horror films are really tragedies. When they’re not concerned with gore or sex they’re about tension, the fear and buildup to the horrible outcome, be it murder or worse. They’re an openly acceptable way for a light entertainment to discuss feelings of despair and helplessness.

They focus on the inevitable lead up to ruin, and the faces of people who see it coming, paralyzed in its sway. Their doom is often unavoidable, their hard work rewarded with bright fake blood and the loss of worry forever. But the discussion of their fate, although it’s fictional and with less critical or popular respect than other art, is enormously cathartic to anyone who feels that doom, in any way, in their day-to-day.

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Tomb Raider

A common complaint about good video games is that they always translate to bad films. The cause of the problem lies with movies. Production houses are vampiristic in their acquisition and regurgitation of intellectual property, but have no regard for the spiritual integrity of their prey. Expecting the studio system to replicate the pleasure of an interactive experience is like having an itch for a book to become a painting or a melody to become a comic strip. It’s understandable to have that expectation when our primary cultural currency is the blockbuster, and you want more recognition for the art that games can be. But a more likely outcome is for games to gain cultural currency as they get better, and for blockbusters to have less.

The posh fictional spelunker Lara Croft has returned for another movie edition of her game series, Tomb Raider. She is now played by Alicia Vikander and is making a living as a bicycle food courier, unwilling to accept her wealthy inheritance because she refuses to give up her missing father (Dominic West) for dead. He disappeared seven years ago, leaving her various puzzle clues, which, upon investigation, result in her following him to a mysterious island off the coast of Japan. There, she finds mercenaries forcing shipwrecked men to dig for the grave of Himiko, an ancient “death queen.” 

Everything is bland. Characterization is minimal. The main emotional traits given to Lara are a feeling of abandonment over her father’s choice to go adventuring rather than spend time with her, and a generic action hero’s empowering journey from not being adept at hand-to-hand combat to being completely so, via anger.

There is a vulnerability to Lara: We are first introduced to her losing at mixed martial arts, and that vulnerability carries throughout each of her death-defying scrapes. As in the games, she traverses a plane trapped on top of a waterfall (a highlight) and outguesses ancient temple deathtraps. Unlike Indiana Jones, there is an emphasis not on roguish humor in response to increasingly outlandish difficulty, but groaning and moaning through stations of the cross. Vikander’s own seriousness works against her: She brings to each horrible occurrence a look of open-mouthed concern which would better fit a dramatic offering where the balancing acts were less predictable. (Overacting like Bruce Campbell would be better.) They also seem very digital, the painterly backgrounds making her leaps look unreal.

Director Roar Uthaug’s best moment follows the simple act of villain Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins) pointing a gun at Croft. Time slows down, and the sound of her heartbeat fills the soundtrack. It dwells on the tactic of threatening a life with a ballistic weapon, staple move of movie bad guys, and makes it unique. But almost everywhere else the feel is boilerplate, contractual. The viewers’ hands during my screening were at their sides. No one made Lara go left or right, or swing or jump. We passively accepted her derring-do like livestock waiting for gruel.

Goggins is great at making florid dialogue sound witty, but can’t save his generic words here. Nick Frost of the Cornetto trilogy has two uncredited scenes as a comic relief pawn shop owner. Hip-hop music lyrically concerned with female empowerment plays on the soundtrack, but mostly traditional orchestral noises encase scenes in textbook aural definitions of what you’re supposed to be feeling. I did like a late de-emphasis on the mystical, which made the film’s use of Asian culture less cringy.

In terms of current fare, I prefer Thoroughbreds, a B-movie featuring two precocious murderous teenagers that likewise commingles female empowerment and violence, but does so through arch dialogue and characterization and juxtaposes psychopathy and high-functioning autism to reflect on how people with the latter might be mistreated.

Tomb Raider doesn’t have as much on its mind, though just by adapting the less sexualized version of Lara Croft from later games, it is progressive. Angelina Jolie in the original film adaptation was a sex symbol first, with the camera focusing on her body and clothes. This Lara is an intermittent damsel always in need of rescue and her own self-rescuer, fighting solitarily against high jumps and crumbling infrastructure. But she has little of the James Bond sang-froid of the Jolie version. To some extent she’s in yet another superhero origin story, and perhaps if there is a sequel, there will be less learning, more adventure. She is boring, but she is studious.

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Wonder Wheel

I was a huge Woody Allen fan for years but haven’t watched his movies since Dylan Farrow published her letter detailing memories of abuse. Until I was assigned Wonder Wheel this week, I avoided his films. Having an object of intense identification (whom I aspired to imitate as a writer-filmmaker) suddenly designated for intense ostracism resulted in alienation: You just don’t think about who you formerly idolized. I loved him; now, I associate him with rape.

,p>His later, hackier works are often pale shadows of movies from the height of his talent. (Instead of watching them, I now periodically consume Farrow family testimony.) Any online discussion of new work instantly becomes a battleground over the specific history of his case. His movies lay the groundwork for many other romantic comedies and dramas, and their association with child rape is an incredibly uncomfortable piercing of the pop-culture bubble.

The bubble should pop. Nevertheless, the first two-thirds of Wonder Wheel has the attributes of a dramatic product that is consumable. We open on Mickey (Justin Timberlake) in a 1950s Coney Island lifeguard tower, addressing the audience. He is a playwright who wants to write a great melodrama in the style of Eugene O’Neill

The beach he surveys is fully realized: a million bright bathing suits in Edward Hopper light. We follow Carolina (Juno Temple) and Ginny (Kate Winslet) as they meet there. Ginny is an actress turned waitress, and Carolina is her stepdaughter, on the run from a Mafioso ex-husband, in search of her estranged father, Humpty (Jim Belushi). They go back to Ginny’s house, and it is a proper stagebound set with the eponymous Ferris wheel in the window, always flooded with artificial golden light. The trio emote in their cramped, fake quarters with screaming and monologues, but the framework saves it.

The O’Neill and Tennessee Williams pastiche forgives the tendency of Allen’s characters to state their thoughts and feelings too plainly. Temple and Winslet are pros; Belushi never quite leaves the quotation marks of his character, an abusive husband who wears a wife-beater. Timberlake pulls double duty as both self-proclaimed author of this world and Ginny’s secret lover. He gives one too many speeches commenting on the action, but there is a coldness to his eyes and a willingness to deceive in his delivery that make him interesting.

Justin Timberlake and Kate Winslet (right) star in Woody Allen’s new film Wonder Wheel.

Ginny and Mickey discuss fatal flaws in tragedy. Humpty threatens to hit Ginny. Winslet’s pyromaniac son (Jack Gore), the only openly comedic character, sets things on fire. Ginny dreams of starring in Mickey’s play and running away with him to Bora Bora. As she begins to obsess over him, Winslet does a great soliloquy swathed in unnatural red light. When things get more melodramatic, her scenes are soaked in neon blue, then harsh white.

Unfortunately, the artificiality that sold the beginning of the movie handicaps emotional connection at its end. Simple moments like a birthday party have no real life. The pauses between lines among minor characters there have the rhythm of an amateur stage production where the timing is flat. What made Allen’s delivery as an actor special was the sense he was both doing a comedian’s routine and reacting authentically to the world he had constructed around him. His anger and fear seemed real.

Without Allen, everyone is Margaret Dumont. The only characters that seem alive are the two female leads. Temple mainly fuels the plot, but Winslet has a great American accent that is best used in cutting anger and brutal sarcasm. The movie should have built toward that, turning her self-hatred outward toward those around her. Instead, at the finish line it fumbles a final monologue by heading toward an emotional state similar to Cate Blanchett’s in Blue Jasmine: denial. 

As with everything, Allen’s biography leaks in. Ginny seems to be a stand-in for Mia Farrow, Timberlake for Allen. The movie is arguably a multimillion-dollar protestation of innocence. Last week, Dylan Farrow wrote a second letter, realleging the abuse and demanding Allen’s removal from the world of prestige filmmaking as the only punishment available (after previous contradictory legal episodes). Her question is not of separating the art from the artist, but of public safety. If Allen is a predator in a position of power, he is able to commit crime and avoid both justice and rehabilitation. Such questions make Allen’s art inconsequential to his nonfiction.

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Goodbye Christopher Robin

Biopics, with their vaguely cancerous-sounding name, are the scourge of the entertainment industry. They make the fussy details of life programmatic. Characters must always state their intentions in declarative sentences. Orchestral soundtracks must always manhandle viewers into scheduled emotions. What is it about actual lives, especially British period ones, that are so resistant to movies?

One reason is that they have predetermined ends before a screenwriter ever sits down. Another is that you’ve already experienced the most interesting aspect: the acts or accomplishments the story buttresses. In the case of Goodbye Christopher Robin, that accomplishment is beloved children’s series Winnie the Pooh, about a bear and his friends who live in the woods. Goodbye is about the emotional neglect author A.A. Milne visited upon his son while making him the star of his books. It hits the note of parental abandonment well, but the staid tones of early twentieth-century Britain flood it and preserve the thing in amber.

There are points for trying, though. Some attempts to enliven—a croquet ball turning into a hand grenade in a pre-credits sequence, or Christopher Robin A-Ha video-ing his way through illustrations from the books—fall flat. Others work, from smart editing bluntly cutting off the ends of cookie cutter scenes, or the emphasis on the less-than-ideal qualities of A.A. (Domhnall Gleeson) and wife Daphne (Margot Robbie). They pretty much give the raising of their child over to his nanny (Kelly MacDonald). Child actor Will Tilston as Christopher Robin is good at beaming a wide smile—his constant reaction to Ashdown Forest/Hundred Acre Wood— but is a little more blank with other emotions. Gleeson is good with the arch cynicism of a World War I vet, but less solid at portraying gruffness and shellshock.

Domhnall Gleeson and Margot Robbie as A.A. and Daphne Millne in Goodbye Christopher Robin.

Milne moves the family to the English countryside to write a book arguing against the notion of war. His PTSD comes in the form of fright at champagne corks and balloon pops. He heals and bonds with his son while making up stories about his stuffed animals. Moments dedicated to naming them —Tigger, Piglet, Eeyore— play like the Star Wars prequels (“Anakin Skywalker, meet Obi Wan Kenobi”) in their reliance on previous work for impact. But the movie gets childhood play right, like when Christopher Robin later accuses Milne of only playing with him in order to write a book.

Some lines have the feeling of compression of life for drama, like “Childhood was wonderful, it’s growing up that was hard,” or “I’ve had enough of making people laugh, I want to make them see.” Director Simon Curtis’ earlier My Week With Marilyn had a good Michelle Williams performance as Marilyn Monroe, but neutered the other half of her love affair, making him an innocent when the source material promised a more interesting cad. In Goodbye the only emotions that worked for me had to do with abandonment. Those that had to do with war or whimsy seemed puffed up to sell their importance. Next to the wars that bookend the movie, the annoyance of fame to Christopher Robin, his motivation for joining the army, seems minor.

Will Tilson (left) as Christopher Robin, along with the stuffed inspiration for Winnie the Pooh and friends.

Films like My Boy Jack, about Rudyard Kipling and his son, and Ken Burns’ documentary The Roosevelts, which dealt with Theodore and his son Quentin, covered similar material with a super-masculine historical father enthusiastically sending his boy off to World War I. Here, the Milnes prophesize they can’t keep their child out of war before he’s born, and feel doomed as World War II gets closer. A.A. has no machismo like Kipling or Roosevelt to hurl his son into violence; his flaw is his coldness (or, living in a world where there will be more fighting).

Cinematically, World War I is World War II’s shadow. Instead of a worthwhile fight against evil it’s a meaningless slaughterhouse. That’s actually more modern, and appropriate, as film portrayals of organized group murder go. WWII is the exception that proves the rule, and undergirds our military-industrial-entertainment complex. We see it much more often on our screens, though Inglourious Basterds’ post-modern take might mark the end of its reign.

The Winnie the Pooh books and television show seemed to encourage emulation of its gentle main character. It’s exciting for Goodbye to resituate that call for gentleness between two wars, as the message of a veteran father to his affection-starved son. But reaching for such honey it gets stuck.

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The Florida Project

It’s a neat trick in storytelling to have emotions come in late. Frontload your story with the crassness of everyday human interaction, then sucker punch the audience in the home stretch with the emotions drama usually has from the start. Comedies like Withnail and I or In the Loop do it. It mirrors how life is: Your routine predominates, but entropy leaks it away to reveal passion or despair.

Sean Baker’s breakout hit Tangerine pulled this off well, sketching a comic, over-the-top Los Angeles skid row but slowly winding its way to the emotional concerns of its lead prostitutes and john. Baker’s follow-up, The Florida Project, is longer and more pastel, with twice the scenes that veer into humorous non sequiturs about life in the cheap hotels next to Disney World. This time, it’s a little long in the buildup. It keeps its heart off its sleeve almost all throughout.

Our gateways are impish six-year-olds who appear at first as the annoying kids of Magic Castle and Futureland, de facto housing projects originally for tourists. The kids are introduced spitting on a car from a balcony. When its owner threatens to come after them, they tell her, “Go ahead, you ratchet bitch. You are shit” and other phrases humorously beyond their years. They speak mostly in one-sentence jokes and behave like little con men, telling blatantly false sob stories for ice cream money, turning electrical breakers off for fun, and setting an abandoned building on fire. But slowly they become more likeable. Beleaguered apartment manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe) shifts from responding to their infractions to being protective, letting their zest for life infect his own.

Both their joy and terror are imitations of little nightmare Moonee’s (Brooklynn Prince) mom, Halley (Bria Vinaite), who never stops grifting, but can never pay the rent. Halley is the movie’s central figure, resolute against the quieter notes of a more traditional struggling film mom. She sells thrift perfume in parking lots and steals Disney World passes from her johns. Unlike Tangerine‘s Sin-Dee, who constantly shot off one-liners and whose hard edges eventually showed softness, Halley’s lust for life long ago curdled into self-rationalization. She encourages the kids’ reign of terror.

Bobby also never quite makes the obvious dramatic step of covering for the family and endangering his job. Instead it blinds him. He sneers as he puts Halley’s rent money under UV light and coldly films her vacated room to prevent her from establishing residency. The characters’ place on the cooler end of the spectrum is a clue to the film’s larger themes: People who can’t make money get tossed aside, and those who endanger others’ ability to obtain it are the highest-order threats. This keeps ostensibly good people like Bobby from reacting humanely.

The kids of The Florida Project

The kids are like the free spirits of Daisies, Los Olvidados, Looney Tunes, or the credits suggest, Our Gang. They are less characters than just tiny factories of funny observation and unchecked will. They can only afford one ice cream cone and share it, then fight adults over cleaning up drops. They call asbestos “ghost poop” and free associate pet alligator names. Moonee wipes ketchup on her pillow and declares it her right.

This is a follow-up to a hit in every sense. It has a higher budget, a famous actor, and plays many of the same tricks to less effect. But those tricks are worthwhile. The universe the kids inhabit is tacky: They walk repeatedly through wide shot compositions of rundown tourist traps, one with a giant plastic wizard perched atop. The hotel they live in is purple.

The people are slightly less garish. Is it exploitation? The movie’s wry in how it presents them. It certainly does not give them the level of dignity Moonlight did. Baker has a People of Walmart aesthetic. There’s an element of “look at these crazy poor people and revel in their pluck.” But there is a humanity, even with characters who keep their inner selves hidden and present only hard edges. Late in the story, when Halley gets a hug, she looks bewildered. When one of the kids reacts to the unfairness of her situation, it’s a long, uncomfortable close-up of a crying child — and well-acted. Life does not present itself as a series of speeches but rather as humdrum interactions that reveal themselves piecemeal. Slowly, you learn about a person.

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As Game Of Thrones Builds To An Epic Finale, What Has Been Lost Along The Way?

Game of Thrones‘ transition into sloppy blockbuster storytelling somehow feels exactly right: What better way to subvert expectations than to undermine its own fame for smart narrative? The lack of attention to detail in its scripts grows, but the community has already been made: this is the bread and butter of millions. As with Westerosi religions, you do not need anything meaningful at the center to worship.

Daenerys Targarian (Emilia Clark) rides into battle on Drogon.

If you are unfamiliar, the series’ plot and title itself are a wonderful shorthand for how humanity misuses its collective resources, for both the medieval and modern idea that those adept at becoming rich attain power then maintain and bequeath it, abandoning the common good in its stead. They ignore threats like global warming, inaccessible health care, dragon riding invaders, or ice zombies. The series is on its second-to-last shortened season and has become a worldwide phenomenon. It itself has become rich, and like all things with money attached, there is an enormous pressure to make more of itself.

As an acolyte, I am snobbish towards those who treat the series like football—and this sometimes extends to its makers. I’ll be lured back with the next bit of spectacle, then the process will repeat. The show has always been escapist fantasy tinged with a wonderful amount of dread about the human condition, and our aforementioned inability to deal with possible collective doom, be the system feudal or democratic. Episodes like this season’s penultimate “Beyond the Wall,” dispense with all that in a flurry of plot that doesn’t hold up to even the minor inspection of one viewing.

The Night King (Vladimír Furdík) has mad javelin skills.

In that episode, our heroes head north into the Land of Always Winter to capture a ice zombie and bring it back to Queen Cersei as proof of the existential threat posed by the Night King and his White Walkers. There, they do action movie things until a final, beautiful sequence involving a dragon’s death. Because the setup makes no sense (Queen Cersei already has a zombie on her staff. The Wall is supposed to block all White Walkers. No one objects to a plan that means certain death to Jon Snow, the King of the North.) and the rules of time and space break down to facilitate a series of dei ex machina, the episode has become a bit of a rallying cry online. It is at least among the regular viewing and reading that I, like a sports fan, use to ritually wash down each episode. (For starters I recommend the Israeli college professors GoT Academy and the smoothly voiced conspiracy theorist Preston Jacobs.) It has united fans of the novel who are unable to get over expectations for complicated storytelling with those who just need character motivation to make slightly more sense.

The show has been rudderless for awhile now. Without George R.R. Martin’s books as base, complex story has faded. Now, our heroes’ whim-based decisions are cogs in plot machinery, and most of the artistry has shifted to wonderfully realized action setpieces. But still, these climactic moments are better than most cinematic epics.

On the plus side, Flaming zombie polar bears.

There are worse fates. The show has done its homework for years, studiously adapting the books internecine politics, and now in its dotage it can abandon them and devolve into an action movie battle of unabashed good and evil.

Game of Thrones will probably stick its landing with aplomb, considering how excellent it is at climaxes. But its very success lessens its impact a little bit. A show like Deadwood, cancelled in its prime, has the forever-young quality of James Dean or Marilyn Monroe: its characters are forever caught in a cliffhanger in which evil capitalist George Hearst dominates and controls them, and it comes across like an ugly truth. Martin has said the ending to his books, which will be spoiled before they ever come, will be “bittersweet.” To match that, the show needs to err, as it did in its start, on the side of displeasing its viewers.

The Sisters Stark: Sansa (Sophie Turner) and Arya (Maise Williams) have a rocky reunion in Game Of Thrones season 7.

Both book and show’s emphasis on royals ruling nations while detouring to highlight the problems of serfs doesn’t quite sell the sadness of real history. We are handed quite a lot of information about a select few and their wars and reigns, but less information about the commoners with whom we share an affinity. The everyday life of most is lost to time while the wealthy’s every wart is recorded and propagandized. Martin did recently allegorize the anti-feudal 1381 Peasant’s Revolt (in his prequel The Princess and The Queen) which in real life birthed the wonderful phrase, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” Spoiler: the nobility killed the peasants.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

My Cousin Rachel

Femmes fatales in film are regarded as misogynist for their kneejerk evil but feminist for lacking the doormat and sounding board qualities which define the majority of cinematic female characters. We don’t know whether the title character in the period suspense drama My Cousin Rachel is one, or just a woman subject to the whims of an obsessive suitor. Philip (Sam Claflin), our main character, treats her alternately as angel of light and an exotic figure of suspicion. First we hear about her in letters which imply she poisoned his cousin/adoptive father in Italy, after marrying him. When she arrives, she is gentle and charming, although with a penchant for serving people vats of specially made tea. An offscreen doctor says her husband died of a brain tumor which made him paranoid.

Rachel Weis and Sam Clafin in My Cousin Rachel.

Philip, who heretofore spent his scenes detailing the harm he will cause Rachel (Rachel Weisz), is immediately smitten. An orphan entering his mid-twenties, he notes he has “never seen a woman cry,” and his need for love overrides his caution. Weisz must play Rachel both as a widow getting over her loved one’s death by hanging out with someone who looks like him, and also as a figure of mysterious Italian letters, unexplained horse rides and inquiries about the will. The film’s only problem is Philip’s inexperience and gullibility which, while provoking suspense, are a little repetitive. The family attorney (Simon Russell Beale) and his godfather (Iain Glen, a.k.a. Jorah Mormont, in best unheeded counselor mode) warn him again and again, yet he seeks to woo Rachel with the wealth he will soon inherit. It’s hard to root for someone who only makes bad decisions to further the plot, which weights our sympathies with the possible murderer.

Notably for a period film, Philip’s servants are visible. Outnumbering him, they live lives unconcerned with his affairs, eating, cussing and getting paid all while knowing to steer clear of his drama. (They also find time to ominously sing the British folksong “The Three Ravens”, about birds discussing a knight’s corpse abandoned in a field. I would have preferred The Twa Corbies.)

Director Roger Michell (Changing Lanes, Notting Hill) and cinematographer Mike Eley start with what looks like most British period dramas, but as Philip loses focus, so do they, using objects blocking the frame, rack focuses and a handheld camera to mirror Philip’s mental state. The editing speeds up as things get more intense, and overall the film holds you in suspense. Based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier, it nevertheless is a bit old-fashioned. Du Maurier provided the basis for two Hitchcock films, but not for the one this film most resembles, Suspicion. Because the character of Rachel remains too elusive, the psychology is old hat. We never leave Philip’s viewpoint, and Rachel’s ambiguity is never big enough to let Weisz make a complete portrayal. She suggests a grieving woman constrained by her time and relationships, via half-sentences and shyness. The film is best as a haiku-like sketch of a widow in need of different social norms.

My Cousin Rachel

For a more vibrant period drama suspense thriller, I would recommend Chan-Wook Park’s The Handmaiden, which replaces that director’s appetite for violence with sex. Here Weisz’s “limitless appetite” is alluded to a few times as warning to Philip, but during the only sex in the film she stares at the sky and thinks of England. For a more adventurous movie with Weisz, I’d recommend Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, which segues from a meditation on socialized monogamy into a critique of how everything is socialized. My Cousin Rachel is enjoyable but not ambitious. Its sex is restrained, its deaths hidden. The tactfulness that just happens to beits style is also that of the endless wave of British period dramas that have washed on our shores every year since before I was born.

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Film Features Film/TV

Free Fire

The only time I ever fired a gun, I did so at the behest of coworkers on a lunch break. Terrified of holding something that could accidentally kill, I immediately pointed in the direction of the target, fired until it was empty so I could hand it back, and took no joy. Guns are primarily a filmic thing for me. They are how a character declares dominance over another or mastery over the plot. They deliver tragedy, finality, and twists.

Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump’s Free Fire is squarely in the canon of purely cinematic bulletry. In a rundown 1970s American warehouse, gun dealers and IRA members meet to facilitate a sale of M16s. The deal goes bad, and all parties become trapped in the warehouse shooting at each other. They’re character actors (Sharlto Copley, Noah Taylor), at first expressive in outdated slang and hair and then, as everyone is nicked and becomes woozy from loss of blood, through increasingly odd pronouncements. They tease each other across the way, laugh, call timeouts, forget which side they’re on, and generally behave like little kids at play. The gunfight is the entire film. Like other action movies, it doesn’t lead to much more than murder, but Wheatley and Jump’s art-film care is evident. The fun is in how intricately far gone the situation can become. Each person gets pinned down in his own little corner of the warehouse. Geography-wise, we often can’t tell who is aiming at whom, but the lack of clarity adds to the tension. I worried every talking head onscreen would explode.

Free Fire is an improvement over the couple’s previous High-Rise, which also concerned slow entropy toward murder in a ramshackle space. Adapting J.G. Ballard’s novel about a societal collapse occurring only within one 1970s apartment building, they never found a way to make its absurdity more than clinical and detached, full of beautiful images but airless. Here there is mood and momentum, but the visuals are less intricate. The warehouse starts as a color-corrected swath of yellow and black, but as the fight goes on, the colors open up: the red of a van, the brown of Armie Hammer’s scruff, the various liquids and solids that come out of and fall onto everyone.

Hammer’s Ord (probable surname Nance) stands out for his goofy self-regard. As bullets weaken him, he goes from broad-shouldered alpha male to chummy raconteur using a crowbar for a cane. Lounge lizard Vern (Copley) is also memorable, a more insecure showboat. Blood loss leads him to dress in cardboard armor to protect against sepsis, and the various substances that coat him eventually make him look like a gray-headed werewolf. As their arms and legs start failing, I took it as metaphor for old age felling cocks of the walk.

Brie Larson and Cillian Murphy, the prettiest and with the least disagreeable traits, play the nominal audience-identification figures. Wheatley and Jump care about the plot a little in regard to Larson’s femininity versus all the boys, who forego shooting at her for a while out of gentlemanly courtesy. But the bro-hood that develops among the shooters, the sense of comradeship and childlike play, is the film’s best note.

Free Fire is more successful than the recent Belko Experiment, which used a Battle Royale template to satirize the workplace and rang hollow. Here we have Reservoir Dogs crossed with the comedic fights from Pineapple Express. What the tone does is undermine action like the lionized shootout in Heat, where the accurate, deafening gunfire sounds and military precision of the bank robbers subconsciously celebrate their form and machismo. Free Fire brings to mind a nice moment in The Assassination of Jesse James, when an 1800s gun behaves accurately for the period and misfires, costing its owner his life.

Cinema is love of image, and a man with a gun is a conductor with a baton, calling the world to his will. It is important to be able to call him a buffoon. The men dying in this fictional warehouse are venal, squabbling, and manic. Their anthem is an ironic John Denver eight-track left playing in a van. There is nothing ennobling about their violence. But there is humanity in the mistakes that bump them off, and black comedy in the stupid, small ways life can drain from us all.