Tag: Edgar Wright

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The Best (and One Worst) Films of 2021

Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson in the electrifying Summer of Soul

This year was an up-and-down time for film, as audiences cautiously returned to theaters. But even if box office returns were erratic and often disappointing, quality-wise, there was more greatness than could be contained in a top 10 list. Since I hate ranking, here are my personal awards for movie excellence in a weird year.

Vicky Kreips and Gael García Bernal aging on the beach in Old.

Worst Picture: Old

“There’s this beach, see, and it makes you old.”

“That sounds great, M. Night Shyamalan! You’re a genius!”

Annabelle Wallace wonders what it’s all about in Malignant.

Dishonorable Mention: Malignant

WTF was that about?

Bryce Christian Thompson stars as Shah in “The Devil Will Run.”

Best Memphis Film: “The Devil Will Run”

Director Noah Glenn’s collaboration with Unapologetic mastermind IMAKEMADBEATS produced this funny and moving memory of childhood magic. Glenn topped one of the strongest collections of Hometowner short films in Indie Memphis history.

“Chocolate Galaxy”

Honorable Mention: “Chocolate Galaxy”

An Afrofuturist hip hop opera made on a shoestring budget, this 20-minute film features eye-popping visuals and banging tunes.

Puppet Annette

Best Performance by a Nonhuman:
Puppet Annette

This coveted award goes to Annette, Leos Carax’s gonzo musical collaboration with Sparks, which used a puppet to represent its namesake character, the neglected child of Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, because they couldn’t find a newborn who could sing.

Dev Patel as Sir Gawain in The Green Knight.

Medievalist: The Green Knight

To create one of the strangest films of 2021, all director David Lowery had to do was stick to the legend of Sir Gawain’s confrontation with a mysterious Christmas visitor to King Arthur’s court. Driven by Dev Patel’s pitch perfect performance, The Green Knight felt both completely surreal and strangely familiar.

Cryptozoo is not about Bitcoin.

Best Animation: Cryptozoo

Annette and The Green Knight were weird, but the year’s weirdest film was Dash Shaw’s exceedingly strange magnum opus. Think Jurassic Park, only instead of CGI dinosaurs it’s Sasquatch and unicorns drawn like a high schooler’s notebook doodles come to life.

Bad robot — director Michael Rianda’s The Mitchells vs. the Machines finds one family squaring off against the techno-pocalypse.

Honorable Mention: The Mitchells vs. the Machines

Gravity Falls’ Mike Rianda pulls off the difficult assignment of making an animated film that appeals to both kids and adults with this cautionary tale of the connected age.

Anna Cobb in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Best Performance: (tie) Kristen Stewart, Spencer; and Anna Cobb, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Both Stewart and Cobb played women trapped in nightmarish situations, trying to hold onto their sanity while watching their worlds crumble around them. For Stewart, it was Princess Diana’s last Christmas with the queen. For Cobb, it’s a teenager succumbing to an internet curse. The success of both pictures hinges on their central performances, but the difference is that Stewart’s one of the world’s highest paid actresses, and this is Cobb’s first time on camera.

Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Sandie in Last Night in Soho. (Credit: Parisa Taghizadeh / © 2021 Focus Features, LLC)

MVP: Edgar Wright

Wright started the year with his first documentary, The Sparks Brothers, an obsessive ode to your favorite band’s favorite band. Sparks’ story is so strange and funny, and Wright’s style so manic and distinctive, that many viewers were surprised to learn it wasn’t a mockumentary. Then, he dropped Last Night in Soho, a humdinger of a Hitchcockian horror mystery which evoked the swinging London of the 1960s. Wright continues to deliver the most fun you can have in a multiplex.

Ariana DeBose as Anita in West Side Story.

Best Director: Steven Spielberg,
West Side Story

I feel like this Spielberg kid’s got potential. Hollywood’s wunderkind is now an elder statesman, but his adaptation of the Broadway classic proves he’s still got it. With unmatched virtuosity, he brings Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s songs to life and updates the story’s sensibilities for the 21st century. West Side Story stands among the master’s greatest work.

Sly Stone performing at the Harlem Cultural Festival in Summer of Soul.

Best Documentary: Summer of Soul

The most transcendent on-screen moment of 2021 actually happened in 1969, when Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson duetted “Precious Lord” at the Harlem Cultural Festival. Questlove’s directorial debut gave the long-lost footage of the show the reverent treatment it deserves. Thanks to the indelible performances by the cream of Black musical talent, Summer of Soul was as electrifying as any Marvel super-fest.

Riley Keough and Taylour Page are strippers on a Tampa tear in Zola.

Best Picture: Zola

I can hear you now: “You’re telling me the best picture of 2021 was based on a Twitter thread by a part-time stripper from Detroit?” Hey, I’m as surprised as you are. But director Janicza Bravo turned a raw story of a road trip gone wrong into a noir-tinged shaggy-dog story of petty crime and unjust deserts. The ensemble cast of Taylour Paige, Nicholas Braun, Colman Domingo, and particularly Riley Keough is by far the year’s best, and Bravo shoots their ill-fated foray into the wilds of Tampa, Florida, like she’s Kubrick lensing A Clockwork Orange. Funny, self-aware, and unbearably tense, Zola is a masterpiece that deserves a bigger audience.

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Last Night in Soho

Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Sandie in Edgar Wright’s new thriller, a Focus Features release. (Credit: Parisa Taghizadeh / © 2021 Focus Features, LLC)

There’s no such thing as “the good ole days.” The past was just as full of horrors as the present. You just forgot how bad it was, or nobody wrote the bad parts down — or maybe you just didn’t read the people who wrote the bad parts down. 

That’s the ultimate theme of Edgar Wright’s new thriller, Last Night in Soho. It’s definitely a case of an artist trying to have their cake and eat it, too. Wright both luxuriates in nostalgia, and undercuts it at the same time. For an unapologetic popster like Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Baby Driver, examining the dark side of his obsessions has led to the deepest work of his career. And he got there without sacrificing any of the visceral thrills he’s so good at delivering. 

Thomasin McKenzie as Eloise (Credit: Parisa Taghizadeh / Focus Features)

The film’s object of nostalgia is swinging London of the 1960s. That’s the scene that gestated The Beatles and The Who, but Wright’s attention is on the slick pop of Dusty Springfield and Sandy Shaw. That’s the music Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) is listening to in the film’s opening sequence as she dances in a dress made of newspaper. Wright immediately reveals the essentials of her character by whipping his camera around her room. She wants to be a fashion designer, she lives in a small town, where her ’60s obsession marks her as a girl out of time, and her mother is a ghost. 

About that last bit. Ellie has visions, often of dead people, and Ellie’s grandma (Rita Tushingham) reveals that her mother did, too, and these visions eventually became so disturbing and uncontrollable that Ellie’s mom killed herself. When Ellie is accepted into the London College of Fashion, grandma is supportive, but warns that if life in the big city becomes too overwhelming, don’t be afraid to ask for help. 

Dame Diana Rigg as Miss Collins

Her idealized version of London is dispelled immediately, as her cab driver taking her from the train station to her dorm creeps on her. Things get worse when meets her roommate Jocasta (Synnove Karlsen), a coke-snorting mean girl who calls herself “Hurricane Jocasta.”  These living arrangements aren’t tenable for the studious, and somewhat mentally fragile Ellie, so she finds a cheap room in a boarding house run by Miss Collins (Diana Rigg, in her final role). In order to pay for it, and clothes from the fashionable West End shops that surround the college, she gets a job in a dive bar called The Toucan, where she serves drinks to an old barfly (Terence Stamp) who takes an interest in her. 

Matt Smith, a former Doctor Who, as Jack

Ellie does get more sleep in the new room, but that sleep comes with vivid dreams of the West End in the mid-’60s featuring a girl named Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy), an aspiring singer who falls for Jack (Matt Smith), a manager with an eye for new talent. The beautiful, confident Sandy represents an ideal self for the mousy small-town girl, and when Ellie dyes her hair blonde like Sandy’s, boys start to notice her. But Ellie’s dreams take a dark turn as Sandy falls deeper into the seedy side of London. The 1960s produced great music and fashion, but it was a man’s world. Young women like Sandy put up with brutal misogyny, even from men who professed to love them. The mystery of Sandy’s fate starts to weigh on Ellie, as her visions invade her waking life.  

Wright is inspired by stylish English films of the period by directors like Nicholas Roeg, but the screenplay, co-written with Penny Dreadful scribe Krysty Wilson-Cairns, critiques the material it celebrates. It’s the director’s first film with a female protagonist (although he has created many memorable women, such as Ramona Flowers), and the change in perspective seems to have invigorated his imagination. The cast is aces, including veterans like Rigg and Stamps and the brilliantly paired co-leads of Taylor-Joy and McKenzie. 

Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin McKenzie make out with Doctor Who.

Wright’s one of contemporary cinema’s most inventive visual stylists, and this film is a feast of in-camera effects and plain old misdirection. While in the visions of the past, Ellie and Sandy can only see each other in mirrors, even as their identities are merging, Persona-style. This presents endless opportunities for Wright to pull some boffo visual gags. But even as the director is emptying his trick bag all over the screen, the story keeps humming along at a brisk pace. This helps later in the film, when it gets harder to keep all the plot plates spinning. Last Night in Soho is a pop confection that’s not just empty calories. Don’t miss this opportunity to see a master like Wright at the top of his game. 

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The Sparks Brothers: Your Favorite Band’s Favorite Band

Russell and Ron Mael, The Sparks Brothers.

Earlier this week, I got to watch New Orleans filmmaker Randy Mack experience The Sparks Brothers live on Twitter. It went something like this: 

5 min: “Hilarious Mockumentary” 

10 min “Wait, is this real?” 

15 min “Well-doctored vintage footage—funny!” 

25 min “OK, this must be real.” 

30 min “haha ‘Muff Winwood’ what a sick parody” 

35 min “fuck I think it’s real?” 

45 min “*head explodes*”

Yes, Randy. Sparks was, and is, a real band. They are not, as everyone inexplicably thought, British, but rather from Southern California. Brothers Ron and Russell Mael have been making music together for 50 years. Ron is a keyboard virtuoso with a deadpan scowl and a wicked sense of humor. Russell is taller, blessed with more conventional good looks, and a precisely controlled voice that can be Freddie Mercury operatic or Robert Plant screamy, according to the needs of the song. They made their recording debut in 1967 as Halfnelson with the little-heard “Computer Girl,” which got the attention of legendary prog-rock musician and producer Todd Rundgren. The reason most people think they’re from the UK is that they were discovered on the right side of the pond before they were accepted in America. In 1974, they appeared on the classic BBC show Top of the Pops to sing “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us,” and soon the song was burning up the charts. 

Ron Mael with Russell dummy from a vintage music video.

It’s tough to say what Sparks sounds like, because they radically change their sound every other album, and they are reportedly now working on their 25th full length. They started out as Pink Floyd-like psychedelia, but were well-positioned to go glam because of Russel’s rock god locks and Ron’s uncanny ability to absorb new music and immediately create a synthesis that’s smarter and better than the inspiration. The biggest coup of their career was when they almost single-handedly created the synth pop branch of New Wave after hearing Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and cold-calling Italo-disco producer Giorgio Moroder. The brothers fired their band, bulked up on synthesizers and drum machines, and made the album No. 1 in Heaven. “The Number One Song in Heaven” and “Beat the Clock” became huge hits in Europe and inspired a legion of musicians to put down their guitars and make music from bloopy noises. 

The Sparks Brothers is director Edgar Wright’s first documentary. The Sparks superfan is better known for his stylish, groundbreaking pop confections like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Shaun of the Dead. Wright weaponized his musical obsession in 2017 with the balletic car chase movie Baby Driver. His restless, inventive visual style fits perfectly with Sparks’ wry, heady music. His energetic editing keeps the proceedings light and eminently watchable throughout its two-hour-plus running time.  

That sounds like a long movie, but there’s a lot of story to cover, and the Mael brothers, now in their seventies, are endlessly fascinating characters. Wright is not alone in the Sparks cult. They are, as the tagline goes, your favorite band’s favorite band. From Beck to Björk, Duran Duran to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, author Neil Gaiman to comedian Patton Oswalt, everyone wants to weigh in on the brilliance of the Maels. 

Animated sequences fill in the gaps in The Sparks Brothers.

Sparks, while they perpetually hung around on the musical B list, made frequent television appearances in the ’70s and ’80s, which means Wright has a ton of archival footage to work with. Especially entertaining are the duo’s appearances on American Bandstand. At one point, Dick Clark asks “Who is the oldest?” to which Ron deadpans “You are.” For some of the juicier stories, which happened without cameras rolling, Wright resorts to animating the visuals. This is pretty standard for documentary recreations these days, but the director, like the band, keeps changing styles. Some of the stories are told in stop motion, while others are hand-drawn animation and CGI. 

Why, exactly, Sparks were perpetual also-rans in America is a good question. Wright takes a couple of stabs at answering. Maybe it was Ron’s Hitler mustache. (It’s a Charlie Chaplin mustache, Ron would insist.) Maybe they were just too smart for the audience, or they never stuck around in the same style long enough for their following to grow beyond the loyal cult. But as the film progresses, that question becomes less and less interesting. What makes The Sparks Brothers a must-see is the brothers’ impish wit, ample charisma, and bottomless well of unique talent. And they’re still at it. In July, the musical Annette the boys wrote and scored, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, will open the Cannes Film Festival. It’s Sparks’ world; we just live in it.  

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Sundance in Memphis: Brothers and Sisters

The Sparks Brothers

There’s a lot of remarkable things about Sundance 2021, but it will be remembered as a year of great music-related documentaries. After the shattering Summer of Soul opened the virtual end of the festival, next up was The Sparks Brothers. Director Edgar Wright made his name with snappy comedies like Sean of the Dead and the almost-musical car chase picture Baby Driver. For his first documentary, he tackled “your favorite band’s favorite band.” Sparks are the brothers Ron and Russel Mael, who are not, in fact, British, but from California. Wright makes clearing up that misconception his first order of business as he plunges into the fascinating, convoluted history of the group.

After being inspired by the British Invasion, the Mael brothers broke into the business as Halfnelson. From their first recording session in 1967, where they created a song called “Computer Girl”, the duo staked out a wry, witty outsider sound. Over the next five decades, they declined to dumb it down or repeat themselves, even when that meant alienating fans who might have just discovered them. Their work veered from Floyd-esque prog rock to the shimmering, Georgio Moroder pop of 1979’s “The Number One Song In Heaven”, which defined the New Wave synth-pop sound that would dominate the airwaves of the 1980s, and still resonates strongly today.

Wright has plenty of material to work with. Sparks made numerous television appearances over the years, including a triumphant breakout on England’s Top of the Pops and near-annual confrontations with a baffled Dick Clark on American Bandstand. (“Which one is the oldest?” Clark asked the brothers. “You are,” replied Ron.) His interviews with the brothers, still stunningly charismatic as they enter their 70s, make clear that the frequent stylistic shifts were not merely done to chase the latest trend, but were just how Ron and Russel’s collective mind works. They couldn’t keep doing the same thing over and over again if they wanted to—and at times during their epic, up-and-down career, it probably would have been better if they had shown some consistency. Even their failed projects, such as the years they spent collaborating with Tim Burton trying to create an animated musical based on a Japanese manga, were ahead of their time.

Wright is a superb filmmaker who brings his restless mind to the documentary, creating a film that is just as vibrant as his fiction work. His fanboy enthusiasm for Sparks shines, and as he devotes running time to the testimonies of fans, he shows he’s not alone. The 2-hour-plus running time seemed long at first glance, but there’s so much story, character, and style on display that it whizzes by. While it lacks the gut-punch emotionalism of Summer of Soul, The Sparks Brothers is a load of fun.

Ailey

Next, we decamped the drive-in for another documentary that proved engrossing. To most people, Alvin Ailey is a brand that is synonymous with modern dance. The American Dance Theater that bears his name in New York is considered the pinnacle of the form. But as director Jamila Wignot’s film reveals, the legend was also a human being. Ailey grew up as the only child of a single mother in Jim Crow-era Texas, where the problems of his Blackness were compounded by his obvious homosexuality. He gravitated towards dance in school, but it wasn’t until a liberating trip to Los Angeles that he found his calling and gave himself permission to pursue it.

A pitfall that docs like Ailey often fall into is assuming the audience knows too much about the famous person they’re profiling. You might know Ailey was famous, but his personal trials and tribulations don’t mean much unless you can understand his talent. If you’ve never seen Ailey himself dance before, the early filmed performances of dance pieces like “Revelations” will be a…well, a revelation.

After establishing his artistic bonafides and the legacy of the groundbreaking dance theater he founded, Wignot turns to Ailey’s personal life. Consumed with dance, he appeared to many around him as a cipher. As one dancer reveals, the world didn’t want to know who Ailey was. They only wanted the legend. The dancer loved by everyone was intensely lonely, having only one boyfriend of note who ultimately walked out on him in the midst of a house party and never returned. Ailey is a more conventional film than The Brothers Sparks, but Wignot’s transparent style is ideal for this story of sacrificing all for art.

Twins Ani and Alessandra Mesa star in the neo-noir thriller Superior.

After two docs, we returned home to cap the night with Superior. Director Erin Vassilopoulos previously collaborated on a short film of the same name with twin sister actresses Alessandra and Ani Mesa. The feature version sees the sisters reunited after six years of separation. Vivian (Ani Mesa) stayed in their small town and married straitlaced Michael (Jake Hoffman). Meanwhile, Marion (Alessandra Mesa) learned to play guitar, joined a band, and is touring the world. She returns to her hometown after trying to leave her abusive husband Robert (Pico Alexander). Apart, the twins had assumed their own identities. Once reunited, they start to look and act alike again, even as one sister tries to uncover the secrets the other is keeping.

Once again, the David Lynch influence is strong with Superior. This time, instead of the psychedelic inner explorations of Twin Peaks: The Return, whose influence is all over the narrative competition field, Vassilopoulos channels the queasy sexual charge of Lost Highway. The Mesa sisters are mesmerizing as they take an identity-swapping Persona turn on neo-noir.

Miya Cech stars as Sammy in Marvelous & The Black Hole

Tonight, the final night of Sundance screenings at the Malco Summer Drive-In kicks off with Marvelous & the Black Hole, by Adventure Time and Steven Universe writer Kate Tsang. Newcomer Miya Cech stars as Sammy, a troubled young girl who meets an unlikely mentor in the magician Margot, played by Rhea Perlman.

Larry Krasner in Philly D.A.

The final film of Sundance’s first foray into Memphis is documentary Philly D.A., directors Ted Passon and Yoni Brook’s story of civil rights attorney Larry Krasner’s 2017 run for district attorney of the city he sued more than 75 times.

To buy tickets for the final night of Sundance in Memphis, go to the Indie Memphis website.

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2017: The Year In Film

In America, it was the worst of times, but inside the multiplex, it was the best of times. Mega-blockbusters faltered, while an exceptional crop of small films excelled. There was never a week when there wasn’t something good playing on Memphis’ big screens. Here’s the Flyer‘s film awards for 2017.

Worst Picture: Transformers: The Last Knight
There was a crap-flood of big budget failures in 2017. The Mummy was horrifying in the worst way. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales sank the franchise. There was an Emoji Movie for some reason. What set Michael Bay’s nadir apart from the “competition” was its sneering contempt for the audience. I felt insulted by this movie. Everyone involved needs to take a step back and think about their lives.

Zeitgiestiest: Ingrid Goes West
In the first few years of the decade, our inner worlds were reshaped by social media. In 2017, social media reshaped the real world. No film better understood this crucial dynamic, and Aubrey Plaza’s ferociously precise performance as an Instagram stalker elevates it to true greatness.

Most Recursive: The Disaster Artist
James Franco’s passion project is a great film about an awful film. He is an actor dismissed as a lightweight doing a deep job directing a film about the worst director ever. He does a great job acting as a legendarily bad actor. We should be laughing at the whole thing, but somehow we end up crying at the end. It’s awesome.

Overlooked Gem: Blade Runner 2049
How does a long-awaited sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, directed by one of the decade’s best directors, co-starring a legendary leading man and the hottest star of the day, end up falling through the cracks? Beats me, but if you like Dennis Villaneuve, Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, smart scripts, and incredible cinematography, and you didn’t see this film, rectify your error

Best Scene: Wonder Woman in No Man’s Land
The most successful superhero movie of the year was Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman. Midway through the picture, our hero leads a company of soldiers across a muddy World War I battlefield. Assailed on every side by machine gun fire and explosions, Wonder Woman presses on, never wavering, never doubting, showing the fighting men what real inner strength looks like. In this moment, Gal Gadot became a hero to millions of girls.

Best Memphis Movie: Good Grief
Melissa Anderson Sweazy and Laura Jean Hocking’s documentary Good Grief rose above a highly competitive, seven-film Hometowner slate at Indie Memphis to sweep the feature awards. It is a delicate, touching portrait of a summer camp for children who have lost loved ones due to tragedy. Full disclosure: I’m married to one of the directors. Fuller disclosure: I didn’t have a damn thing to do with the success of this film.

MVP: Adam Driver
Anyone with eyes could see former Girls co-star Adam Driver was a great actor, but he came into his own in 2017 with a trio of perfect performances. First, he lost 50 pounds and went on a seven-day silent prayer vigil to portray a Jesuit missionary in Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Then he was Clyde Logan, the one-armed Iraq vet who helps his brother and sister rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Stephen Soderberg’s Logan Lucky. Finally, he was Kylo Ren, the conflicted villain who made Star Wars: The Last Jedi the year’s best blockbuster.

Best Editing: Baby Driver
Edgar Wright’s heist picture is equal parts Bullitt and La La Land. In setting some of the most spectacular car chases ever filmed to a mixtape of sleeper pop hits from across the decades, Wright and editor Jonathan Amos created the greatest long-form music video since “Thriller.”

Best Screenplay: The Big Sick
Screenwriter Emily V. Gordon, and comedian Kumail Nanjiani turned the story of their unlikely (and almost tragic) courtship into the year’s best and most humane comedy.

Best Performance By A Nonhuman: Sylvio Bernardi, Sylvio
In this hotly contested category, 2014 winner Caesar, the ape commander of War For The Planet Of The Apes, was narrowly defeated by a simian upstart. Sylvio, co-directed by Memphian Kentucker Audley, is a low-key comedy about a mute monkey in sunglasses (played by co-director Albert Binny) who struggles to keep his dignity intact while breaking into the cutthroat world of cable access television. Sylvio speaks to every time you’ve felt like an awkward outsider.

Best Performance (Honorable Mention): Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks: The Return
David Lynch referred to his magnum opus as an 18-hour film, but Twin Peaks is a TV series to its core. The Return may be the crowning achievement of the current second golden age of television, but without MacLachlan’s beyond brilliant performance, Lynch’s take-no-prisoners surrealism would fly apart. I struggle to think of any precedent for MacLachlan’s achievement, playing at least four different versions of Special Agent Dale Cooper, whose identity gets fractured across dimensions as he tries to escape the clutches of the Black Lodge.

Best Performance: Francis McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Sometimes the best film performers are the ones who do the least, and no one does nothing better than Francis McDormand. As the mother of a murdered daughter seeking the justice in the court of public opinion she was denied in the court of law, McDormand stuffs her emotions way down inside, so a clenched jaw or raised eyebrow lands harder than the most impassioned speech.

Best Director: Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
Lady Bird is destined to be a sentimental, coming-of-age classic for a generation of women. But it is not itself excessively sentimental. Greta Gerwig and star Saoirse Ronan are clear-eyed about their heroine’s failings and delusions as she navigates the treacherous psychic waters of high school senior year. Gerwig, known until now primarily as an actor, wrote and directed this remarkably insightful film that is as close to perfection as anything on the big screen in 2017.

Best Picture: Get Out — In prepping for my year-end list, I re-read my review for Get Out, which was positive but not gushing. Yet I have thought about this small, smart film from comedian Jordan Peele more than any other 2017 work. Peele took the conventions of horror films and shaped them into a deeply reasoned treatise on the insidious evil of white supremacy. Sometimes, being alive in 2017 seemed like living in The Sunken Place, and Peele’s film seems like a message from a saner time.

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Baby Driver

Of all the movies in theaters right now, Baby Driver kicks the most ass. Edgar Wright says he first conceived his film in 1994, and it shows. That was the year Quinten Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction premiered, plunging the indie film world into years of hep cat criminals snarling stylized dialog at each other. Tarantino’s use of pop music, drawn freely across genres from the past and present, was something new. Everyone wanted to try it, but not everyone had Tarantino’s ear.

Ansel Elgort in Baby Driver

1994 is also the year the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion recorded Orange. The former Pussy Galore frontman had made a pilgrimage to Memphis the year before to discover Stax soul and record with lo fi legend Doug Easley. Orange opens with “Bellbottoms”, a 5-minute epic that shifts gears from lush Issac Hayes strings to Oblivians-inspired, runaway train punk. Wright opens Baby Driver with a bank-heist/car-chase scene set to “Bellbottoms” that he’s obviously been planning in his head since the first Clinton administration. With Baby (Ansel Elgort) lip synching the words as he tears balletically through Atlanta’s nightmarish streetscape, the sequence plays as a perverse marriage between La La Land and Mad Max: Fury Road.

The best way to experience Atlanta.

Atlanta is just as much of a character for Wright as Los Angeles was to Damien Chazelle. Baby (Ansel Elgort) is a creature of the streets, a supernaturally talented car thief whose knowledge of the city’s endless array of onramps to nowhere is surpassed only by his knowledge of banging tunes. His favorite leather jackets, with black body and white sleeves, make him look like Han Solo from a distance.

A while back, Baby tried to boost a car belonging to Doc (Kevin Spacey), a gangster in the mold of Harvey Keitel’s The Wolf. Rather than killing him, Doc decides to give him a job as a getaway driver, enabling a string of daring daylight bank robberies that, naturally, end in spectacular high-speed chases. The taciturn Baby is already having second thoughts about the collateral damage left behind by his partners in crime when he meets Debora (Lily James), a waitress at the local diner who instantly captures his heart. They make plans to run off together, but Doc keeps pushing him to do job after job, each one more dangerous and audacious than the rest.

Lily James and Ansel Elgort get cozy.

The plot’s pretty standard grindhouse crime fare, but it’s the execution that matters to Wright. Baby Driver sometimes feels more like a series of intertwining music videos than a feature film, with its 30-song soundtrack bleeding into the film’s reality at unexpected times. The editing by Scott Pilgrim cutter Paul Machliss is as immaculate as it is propulsive.

Ansel Elgort, Jamie Foxx, Elza Gonzalez, and Jon Hamm taking no guff.

Wright’s having a blast, and his fun infects the cast. Jon Hamm grows a beard and lays it on thick as a heavy named Buddy, who is hopelessly in love with the assault-rifle-toting sexpot Elza Gonzalez. Jamie Foxx brings unpredictable menace to Bats, a bank robber with a major impulse control problem.

But the music is the real star of the show. In yet another homage to Hustle & Flow, when Baby isn’t running from the law, he makes beats on his eclectic analog equipment. Carla Thomas, Sam and Dave, Martha and the Vandellas, The Beach Boys and The Commodores all get loving treatment. The Damned classic “Neat Neat Neat” becomes the car chase anthem it was always meant to be, while both T. Rex’s “Debora” and Beck’s “Debra” get dedicated to the leading lady.

Baby Driver aspires to be cinema, a film experience that brings fans together. It should definitely been seen in the theater, if for no other reason than to fully experience the mesmerizing sound design. It’s a terrible shame that, with a dozen channels of flawless digital sound reproduction at their disposal, the vast majority of filmmakers are content to just make explosions louder, or do that awful “whamp” noise from Inception again. Wright aims for a much higher bar, and clears it with ease.

Baby Driver

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Trainwreck vs. Ant-Man

Last weekend’s box office race involved two seeming opposites: Marvel’s Ant-Man and Trainwreck, the collaboration between comedy titans Amy Schumer and Judd Apatow. But after a Sunday double feature of the two films, I was struck by their similarities and what they say about the current risk-averse environment in Hollywood.

Ant-Man stars Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, a former electrical engineer whom we first meet as he is being released from San Quentin, where he was doing time for a Robin-Hood robbery of his corrupt former employer. His wife Maggie (Judy Greer) has divorced him and is living with their daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) and her new boyfriend, Paxton (Bobby Cannavale). Scott tries to go straight, but after he’s fired from his job at Baskin-Robbins, in one of the more creative product placement sequences in recent memory, he takes his friend Luis (Michael Peña) up on his idea to break into a Victorian mansion and clean out a mysterious basement vault.

But, as the comic book fates would have it, the mansion is the home of one Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), an old-school superscientist who discovered a way to reduce the space between atoms and thus shrink himself down to the size of an insect. For years, he and his wife operated in secret as a superteam of Ant-Man and the Wasp. After a desperate mission for S.H.I.E.L.D. to stop World War III, she disappeared into subatomic space, and he took off his supersuit and vowed to keep the world-changing and potentially dangerous technology under wraps.

Under Pym’s tutelage, Scott sets out to stop the scientist’s former protegee Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) from selling his own version of the shrinking technology to the evil forces of Hydra by stealing a high-tech Iron Man-type suit called the Yellowjacket.

Ant-Man is not as good as this year’s other Marvel offering, Avengers: Age Of Ultron, but it scores points for originality. Written by Attack the Block‘s Joe Cornish and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World‘s Edgar Wright, who was originally slated to direct, the film tries — and mostly succeeds — to combine an Ocean‘s Eleven-style heist flick with a superhero story in the same tonal range as Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. It’s burdened with the traditional origin-story baggage, but the sequence where Scott discovers the powers of the Ant-Man supersuit by shrinking himself in the bathtub and fleeing running water, hostile insects, and a vacuum cleaner is another triumph for special effects wizards Industrial Light & Magic. Rudd, a veteran of many Apatow comedies, including Knocked Up, is exactly the right guy to sell the mix of comedy and superheroics, and some sparks fly with furtive love interest Evangeline Lilly as Pym’s double agent daughter Hope van Dyne. For the sections of its 117-minute running time when it’s focusing on its core plot, Ant-Man is a good time at the movies.

For Trainwreck, Amy Schumer’s vehicle for transforming basic cable stardom into a feature film career, she surrounded herself with some very heavy hitters. First and foremost is Apatow, the producer, director, and writer with his fingers in everything from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Girls. The pair execute Schumer’s first feature-length screenplay with verve. Schumer stars as Amy, a New York magazine journalist who is basically a fleshed-out version of her public persona. In a sharp inversion of the usual romantic comedy formula, she is a quick-witted, commitment-phobic hookup artist dating a hunky man-bimbo named Steven (John Cena), who just wants to get married, settle down, and raise a basketball team’s worth of sons in a house in the country. Soon after her chronic infidelity torpedoes her relationship, she is assigned to write about a prominent sports doctor named Aaron (Bill Hader), who counts LeBron James among his patients. The two hit it off, and she soon violates her “never sleep over” rule with him.

If this were a traditional Rom-Com, and Amy’s character were male and played by, say, Tim Meadows (who is one of the dozens of comedic talents who have cameos), I would be calling him a ladies man. Schumer is practically daring people to expose the double standard by calling her a slut. Her effortless performance proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that she has chops to carry a feature film. Apatow is savvy enough to give her a long leash, giving her scenes time to breathe, selecting some choice improvs, and letting barrages of comic exchanges live in two-shots. Hadler finds himself in the unfamiliar role of the straight man to Schumer’s cutup, but he acquits himself well in what is essentially the Meg Ryan role from When Harry Met Sally. Practically everyone in the film’s supporting hoard of comics and sports figures also gives a good turn. Tilda Swinton is stiletto sharp as Dianna, Amy’s conscience-free magazine editor boss. Dave Attell is consistently funny as a homeless man who acts as Amy’s Greek chorus. Daniel Radcliffe and Marisa Tomei slay as the leads in a black-and-white art film called The Dogwalker that the film’s characters keep trying to watch. Matthew Broderick, Marv Albert, and tennis superstar Chris Evert share a funny scene. But the biggest surprise is LeBron James, who shines with confidence and humor every time he’s on the screen. For the sections of its 124-minute running time that it focuses on Amy’s romantic foibles, Trainwreck is a good time at the movies.

But that’s the rub for both Ant-Man and Trainwreck. They both spend way too much time straying from what an M.B.A. would call their “core competencies.” In the case of Ant-Man, the distractions are twofold. First is the now-predictable, awkward shoehorning of scenes intended to connect the film to the larger cinematic universe. As his first test, Pym assigns Scott to steal a technological bauble from a S.H.I.E.L.D warehouse, prompting a superclash between Ant-Man and fellow Marvel C-lister Falcon (Anthony Mackie). The allegedly vital piece of equipment is never mentioned again.

Second is the turgid subplot involving Scott’s efforts to reconnect with his daughter Cassie, and her would-be stepfather Paxton’s attempts to put him back in jail. When Scott is having trouble using Pym’s ant-control technology, Hope tells him to concentrate on how much he wants to reunite with his daughter. The moment rings completely false in context: If you’re trying to talk to ants, shouldn’t you be concentrating on ants? The intention seems to be to make Scott a more sympathetic character, but Rudd’s quick-quipping charisma makes that unnecessary. Why spend the time on flimsy sentiment when we can be playing to Ant-Man’s strengths?

Similarly, Trainwreck gets bogged down in a superfluous subplot involving Amy’s sister Kim (Brie Larson) and their father Gordon (Colin Quinn). It starts promisingly enough in the very first scene of the movie when Gordon explains to young Kim and Amy why he and their mother are getting a divorce (“Do you love your doll? How would you like it if you could only play with that one doll for the rest of your life?”). But then, we flash forward to the present day, and Gordon has been admitted to an assisted living facility, which becomes a source of friction between the sisters. Quinn is woefully miscast as a disabled old man, especially when he’s sitting next to veteran actor and actual old man Norman Lloyd. The subplot is seemingly there only for cheap sentiment, and it drags on and on, adding an unacceptable amount of running time to what should be a fleetly paced comedy. As we left the theater, my wife overheard a woman asking her friend how the film was. “I like it okay,” she said. “I thought it was never going to end, though.”

When Ant-Man is kicking pint-sized ass and Amy Schumer is schticking it up, their respective movies crackle with life. Hollywood is filled with smart people, and I can’t believe that an editor didn’t point out that the films could be improved by excising their phony sentimental scenes. So why didn’t these films achieve greatness? I submit it is another symptom of the studio’s increasingly crippling risk aversion. All films must be all things to all audiences to hit the so-called “four quadrants” of old and young, male and female, so raunchy comedies get extraneous schmaltz and lightweight comic book movies get weighed down with irrelevant family drama. Both Ant-Man and Trainwreck end up like rock albums with lackluster songwriting filled with killer guitar solos. They’re entertaining enough but haunted by the greatness that could have been.

Ant-Man
Now showing
Multiple locations

Trainwreck
Now showing
Multiple locations