Kirsten Stewart – Memphis Flyer

Here’s your weekly guide to what’s new and worth your time on the big screen in Memphis.

The movie with the buzz this weekend is Love Lies Bleeding. Kristen Stewart stars in this erotic thriller from director Rose Glass and A24. Stewart is Lou, a gym manager in the steroid jungle of Las Vegas in the 1980s. Her life is upended when Jackie (Katy O’Brian from The Mandalorian) starts training at her gym, and spending the night in her bed. When Lou’s mob boss dad (Ed Harris) gets involved, bodies start to hit the floor.

The second film opening this weekend which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival is The American Society of Magical Negroes from first-time helmer Kobi Libii. The magical negro, a stock Black character who shows up in stories to make white people feel better about themselves, is a long tradition in American fiction. David Alan Grier stars as a trainer for the secret society, designed to keep on a lid on race relations, who bites off more than he can chew with his hapless new recruit Justice Smith.

The Malco Summer Drive-In is reopening for spring, and Time Warp Drive-In is back with Night In The City: The Deadly Urban Worlds of Martin Scorsese. The first of the triple feature is a favorite of Marty heads everywhere. Goodfellas is a flawless film about the lure of the underworld and the consequences of the lifestyle. Early in the film, Scorsese drops one of the all-time great long takes, called a “oner” in movie parlance. Watch as Marty simultaneously introduces Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco’s characters Henry and Karen Hill and paints the world around them in a single tracking shot that lasts a little over three minutes.

Taxi Driver is where the legend of Marty really got rolling. Robert De Niro stars as Travis Bickle, a cabbie with a violent streak who develops a crush on a campaign worker played by Memphian Cybill Shepherd. On set, De Niro served as a mentor to Jodi Foster, who was twelve years old when she was cast as a child prostitute who Bickle tries to rescue from a life on the street.

I’m just going to say it: Oppenheimer was mid. Killers of the Flower Moon should have won the Best Picture Oscar. It’s now my favorite Scorsese joint. Anyway, here’s the trailer to my now second-favorite Scorsese, and the third film on the Time Warps’ killer triple bill, which rolls on Saturday at dusk, After Hours.

Credit where it’s due, Kung Fu Panda, the animated series of furry wuxia parodies is way better than it has any business being. That’s mostly thanks to the flawless voice work of human cartoon character Jack Black, but you gotta give the inventive animators props, too. The fourth one in the series is currently the number one movie at the American box office.

If you haven’t caught Dune: Part Two yet, the sci fi epic is worth seeing on the biggest screen you can find. If you have seen it, maybe go again.

Controversial opinion confession: Kristen Stewart is a great actor.

I admit I haven’t made it through more than 15 minutes of a Twilight movie, but every time I see her on-screen, she’s one of, if not the, best things about the movie. Just look at The Runaways, where she does a dead-on Joan Jett impression. Or Still Alice, where she is the only actor in Julianne Moore’s league. The woman’s got chops, I tell you.

In American Ultra, she plays Phoebe Larson, a working-class girl who lives in nowhere, West Virginia, with her stoner boyfriend Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg). This is the second time Stewart and Eisenberg have been paired up, the first being 2009’s engaging slacker comedy Adventureland, and they have fantastic chemistry. Stewart’s Phoebe knows that Mike is a hopeless ball of neuroses, but she knows he’s the best she’s going to do in this godforsaken small town, and so she loves and takes care of him like a puppy. But Mike’s actually got very good reasons for his panic attacks. He’s a highly trained and brainwashed super-soldier who has had his memory erased and been secreted away in the mountains when the CIA’s cost-benefit analysis tipped over into “bad idea” territory. But now, an interagency rivalry between two operatives, Lasseter (Connie Britton) and Yates (Topher Grace), over whose top-secret, brainwashed super-soldier program is better means that dueling teams of assassins are invading West Virginia’s dollar store parking lots and stoner dens trying to rub out Mike and Phoebe.

Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart in American Ultra

American Ultra is going for the Ghostbusters equation: It wants you to laugh at the absurdity of its premise while also taking it seriously as a threat to the characters, with whom it wants you to sympathize. The screenplay by Max Landis, son of legendary director John, who wrote the hit found-footage superhero movie Chronicle, is a pretty effective spoof of the Bourne movies. As long as American Ultra stays focused on the hapless Mike, the slightly less-hapless Phoebe, and their flights and fights through the rural underworld, it’s the dark-but-fun action comedy its setup promises. When they’re negotiating with conversion-van-loving drug dealer Rose (John Leguizamo) and hiding out in his psychedelic black-light basement, the tone is something like a sillier version of Natural Born Killers. (The underrated Oliver Stone film is also a comedy, but that’s an essay for another time.)

But when director Nima Nourizadeh breaks away from their story to the behind-the-scenes intrigue at the CIA, the wheels come off the wagon. American Ultra‘s biggest problem is that it lacks a good bad guy. Grace is just hopeless as an amoral careerist in the mold of a Silicon Valley brogrammer. He succeeds at being unlikeable, but he’s not remotely believable, and that robs the film of the edge of danger it needs to make the jokes land harder. Nourizadeh, who directed the found-footage teenage-party comedy Project X, has trouble juggling the conflicting tones, and so the whole thing doesn’t quite gel. But Stewart and Eisenberg seem like they’re having a blast, and hanging out with them for 90 minutes makes American Ultra a good time.