Tag: Tilda Swinton

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Now Playing in Memphis: Alien Invasions

Asteroid City

Wes Anderson’s highly anticipated new project Asteroid City lands this weekend. The film is a star-studded trip to Arizona desert in 1955, where the Junior Stargazers Convention is gathering for a wholesome weekend. But this cozy scene is shattered when an actual alien arrives in a for-real spaceship. Is the alien good or bad? Will the play based on the low-key alien invasion make it to opening night? Frequent Anderson collaborators Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban, and Jeff Goldblum are joined by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Maya Hawke, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker. 

Jennifer Lawrence returns to the screen in No Hard Feelings as Maddie, an Uber driver whose luck has run out. To stave off bankruptcy, she takes a Craigslist job as a surrogate girlfriend for introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). This sex comedy for people who hate sex and also comedy co-stars Matthew Broderick and Natalie Morales. 

Speaking of alien invasions, the Time Warp Drive-In for June has three of them. First up on Saturday night June 24 throws Tom Cruise into a time loop. Edge of Tomorrow was a minor hit on release in 2014, and gained cult status since then—despite a late-game name change to Live, Die, Repeat. Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton co-star as soldiers fighting alien Mimics, whose time bomb is literal.

The kind of robotic mech suits the soldiers use in Edge of Tomorrow are straight out of Starship Troopers, the Robert A. Heinlein novel from 1959 which pretty much invented the idea. In 1997, director Paul Verhoeven omitted the armored spacesuits when he adapted the novel, focusing instead on subtly lampooning the book’s rah-rah militarism. Most people didn’t get the joke, but Starship Troopers is now regarded as a classic. Would you like to know more?

The Blob is an all-time classic of 1950s sci-fi. The 1988 remake, which provides the third film of the Time Warp, is well known among horror fans as one of the best remakes ever. Check out Kevin Dillon’s magnificent mullet in this trailer.

Pixar’s latest animated feature Elemental explores love in a world of air, fire, water, and earth. Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is a fire elemental who strikes up an unlikely romance with Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a water elemental. Can the two opposites reconcile, or will they vanish in a puff of steam? Longtime Pixar animator Peter Sohn based Elemental on his experiences as a Korean immigrant growing up in New York City.  

On Wednesday, June 28, Indie Memphis presents Lynch/Oz. Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s remarkable video essay explores the ways images and ideas from The Wizard of Oz shaped the radical cinema of David Lynch.

On Thursday, June 29, Paris Is Burning brings the vogue to Crosstown Theater. Director Jeanne Livingston spent seven years filming the Harlem Drag Ball culture, where competing houses competed for drag supremacy. Paris is Burning is a landmark in LBGTQ film, and one of the greatest documentaries of the last 50 years.

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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing: Pinnochio, Iñárritu, and a Dangerous Dish

Alejandro Iñárritu's "Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths"

If you’ve already seen Black Panther: Wakanda Forever three times, there are plenty of other sources for your movie fix this weekend.

Fresh off the success of his Cabinet of Curiosities, Guillermo Del Toro unveils more potentially holiday-related eye candy with his long-awaited adaptation of Pinocchio. Del Toro says the $35 million stop motion film is the project he’s been wanting to do his entire life. Based on a version of the story by Nineteenth Century Italian novelist Carlo Collodi, it’s not the little wooden boy you remember from the Disney vaults. Voice actors include Ewen McGregor as Sebastian J. “Don’t Call Me Jiminy” Cricket, Tilda Swinton as a Wood Sprite who is totally not Tinkerbell, and Cate Blanchett as a monkey.

Ralph Finnes is serving the most dangerous dish in The Menu. Director Mark Mylod, late of HBO’s plute-shaming soap Succession, has gathered an all-star cast of Nicholas Hoult, Anya Taylor-Joy, John Leguizamo, and Hong Chau, for dinner, and class war is what’s for dinner. Yum!

As a journalist, I know that the best films of all time are all about newspaper people. As a filmmaker, I know Harvey Weinstein is a depraved, power-mad rapist who hurt a lot of people and did irreparable damage to the independent film world. She Said is the story of Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Cantor (Zoe Kazan), two New York Times reporters who broke the story of Weinstein’s reign of terror by convincing his victims to go on the record. He’s currently in jail for 23 years in New York, and yesterday the prosecution rested in his California trial, where he is facing 60 more years in the hoosegow.

Alejandro Iñárritu is no stranger to Memphis. He shot 21 Grams, his second feature film here. Since then, he’s won nine Academy Awards. He’s back with Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, a satirical look at Iñárritu’s native Mexico through the magical realist filter of his mind.

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Film Features Film/TV

Three Thousand Years of Longing

Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba star in this mumble of a movie.

George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing attempts to be a master class in the art of film narrative at the end of Miller’s long career, a reflection on his work. Instead, like most movies and human endeavors, it is an exercise in what not to do and shaggy-dog in nature. The story has all the weight of a hummingbird. There are pleasures to be had in its misshapen structure, but they are fleeting.

Lonely asthmatic narratologist (a professor of stories and legends) Alithea (Tilda Swinton) goes to a mythology conference in Istanbul, where she buys a bottle containing a genie, or djinn, in a thrift store. She opens it and discovers Djinn (Idris Elba), who grants her three wishes and heavily pressures her to make them now. Having read every story about djinns, Alithea is suspicious and notes the ill fate of most magic lamp users: “There’s no story about wishing that isn’t a cautionary tale.” The pair hang out in her hotel room and trade tales about their lives, Scheherazade-style. Elba is composed of magical CGI dust ­— he notes accurately that djinns are not powder but “subtle fire.” The plot is based on the much better The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by A.S. Byatt.

Stories about storytelling put the audience at a precious remove. Everything is in quotes to serve as examples of frequently expounded precepts. (“Mythology is what we knew back then. Science is what we know so far.”) Even the sensory details (the djinn’s bottle pulled out of fish guts, a spear stuck in a horse’s haunch clotheslining a soldier on a battlefield) feel a bit too considered. The stage-bound nature of the sets and CGI add to this, as does the retro fairy-tale treatment given to the medieval Middle East.

Alithea’s love of stories is born of childhood isolation. Her overcompensation then led to her job now, but the problem remains: loneliness. Djinn is a dignified ancient creature who speaks with new-to-English pauses and has red palms and a vermillion dot at the center of his chin. The tension should come from Alithea’s unique preparedness for Djinn’s possible traps, but instead we get some sad tales of random hereditary monarchy succession drama seen from his perspective. The movie is about stories yet does not succeed at that part of them that edges butts on seats.

The real oddity begins when it winds down and seems to be about to end about a half hour before it does. It posits that the march of science, from Einstein to the ubiquity of media and communication, now is at odds with myth-making and therefore storytelling, as myths were ways to explain the world, giving gods quarrelsome attributes as placeholder explanations for what science lacked. There’s a whole scene devoted to the djinn’s bottle being X-rayed by airport security and fear over the damage.

Myth and science can coexist. The universe is unexplored. You and I will rot beneath the ground before humans know half of what there is to know. Our opposing capacity for irrationality is boundless. The film’s suggestion (via Djinn’s allergy to contemporary Britain with its “raucous air” filled with wireless signals) that modern tech is killing our imagination makes sense insofar as social-media manipulation might have added to the xenophobia of Alithea’s racist neighbors, but only there.

Wonder positioned against science as something to be traded off in return for learning about how the world works is always silly. (The Sandman’s recent adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s Hob Gadling and “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” stories are much better intersections of the mythological and modern.)

Life is more unpredictable than stories, and it’s a Luddite impulse that shuts out advances, rather than addressing their positives and negatives. The film does have Djinn witness brain surgery and the Large Hadron Collider, and it does compromise in a realistic way with Alithea’s intense need for love, extending via a series of fade-outs past a fairy-tale ending into a more regular one, a romantic compromise emphasizing consent. It’s just that those fade-out segments have the narrative consistency of melted butter, the coherency of a mumble, and are gone from the mind as soon as seen.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

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The Dead Don’t Die

The town of Centerville’s welcome sign says it all: “A Real Nice Place.” Police chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) don’t have to work too hard to keep the peace. When The Dead Don’t Die opens, they’re checking out a report by Farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi) that old Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) has been stealing his chickens. The investigation goes pretty much nowhere, because Chief Robertson thinks Farmer Miller’s an asshole, and all Hermit Bob will say is “fuck you.”

As they head back to the station, Cliff and Ronnie notice that there’s something weird going on. This is, of course, the set up to nearly every zombie film ever made: Two people, their heads buried in the daily minutiae, slowly come to realize that their world is being overrun by the unquiet dead.

You probably don’t associate director Jim Jarmusch with the genre, but he has obviously seen a few zombie movies in his time. Jarmusch’s primary directing mode has always been that of the observer. He favors letting things play out in long takes, the better to get to know his characters, warts and all. His 1989 masterpiece Mystery Train, which immortalized the down-and-out Memphis of the era, lingered on the bewildered faces of Jun and Mitsuko, the Japanese tourists who were discovering the real America. In Night on Earth, he got a career best performance from Winona Ryder by simply riding around in a cab with her.

(l to r) Bill Murray, Chloë Sevigny, and Adam Driver star in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die.

But he’s also always had a taste for genre pictures, such as his 1995 Western Dead Man, where he shot Johnny Depp in creamy duotone while demolishing the genre’s black and white morality plays. His last foray into supernatural horror was 2014’s transcendent Only Lovers Left Alive, where Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston played centuries-old vampires feeling the weight of immortality.

As one of the godfathers of independent film, Jarmusch knows how to get a project done by rounding up all of your friends and showing them a good time while they work. The difference with Jarmusch is the quality of the friends’ talents. Sara Driver, who became his partner while he was making his first film Stranger Than Paradise, appears as a zombie. Steve Buscemi, who here sports a “Keep America White Again” hat, rode with Joe Strummer in Mystery Train. Tom Waits spouted gruff wisdom in Coffee and Cigarettes. Bill Murray was the lead of Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers. The director worked with Iggy Pop for years to make a documentary on The Stooges. Tilda Swinton, so chillingly elegant in Only Lovers Left Alive, appears in The Dead Don’t Die as an eccentric coroner who is aces with a samurai sword. Adam Driver was magnificent in Paterson, Jarmusch’s last film. The list goes on.

Murray and Driver, joined by Chloë Sevigny as Officer Mindy, first try to make sense out of the dead rising from the grave with a hunger for human flesh, then try to contain the zombie contagion. They also serve as their own Greek chorus, commenting on the action as it happens around and to them, delivering sly in-jokes, and making the occasional meta foray. There are references to earlier Jarmusch films, such as the road-tripping tourists, played by Selena Gomez, Luka Sabbat, and Austin Butler (slicked up like Strummer), who pick the wrong time to hole up in a seedy room at the Moonlight Motel. Jarmusch, the consummate indie film hipster, gets a laugh at their — and his own — expense with the line “Infernal hipsters and their irony!”

In the tradition of George Romero, who invented and perfected the modern zombie picture, Jarmusch uses the walking dead as satirical mirrors of society. Like the ghouls in Dawn of the Dead, they are drawn to the things they coveted in life, only in this case it’s wifi and chardonnay.

As a zombie comedy, The Dead Don’t Die never reaches the manic heights of Shaun of the Dead; but then again, it never tries that approach. Jarmuch’s sense of humor is dry as a bone, and his pacing deliberate. Hermit Bob, who watches the zombie apocalypse gather strength through cracked binoculars, serves as the director’s alter ego. He can’t fully participate in the rapidly decaying human society, but he can’t look away, either. One line in particular from The Dead Don’t Die seems designed to resonate through Jarmusch’s entire filmmaking career: “The world is perfect. Appreciate the details.”

The Dead Don’t Die

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Avengers: Endgame

J.K. Rowling was a godsend for the publishing industry. Her seven Harry Potter books, published from 1997 to 2007, shifted more than 500 million units worldwide for Scholastic, and taught a generation to love reading.

But in recent years, a question has arisen: Did Harry Potter really teach a generation to love reading, or did it just teach them to love Harry Potter?

When Warner Bros. came calling to J.K. Rowling in 2001, it would prove to be a fateful moment in film history. Film franchises were nothing new, but movie audiences were not expected to keep track of plots longer than a trilogy. Rowling’s dense plotting and expansive dramatis personae made Star Wars look like a family squabble. Like publishers before them, producers tried to reverse engineer the Potter magic. The only person to crack the problem was Kevin Feige, an associate producer on 2000’s X-Men who was hired to wring maximum value from Marvel Comics.

Robert Downey Jr. (above) faces his fate as Avengers: Endgame closes out the Marvel Decade.

Feige looked at an audience raised on Rowling’s serialized storytelling, and saw that Marvel’s rotating staff of underpaid fabulists had produced ample material to feed the formula. With Marvel’s most popular characters under the control of Sony, he turned to the Avengers to provide the spine of the 22-film story. The Marvel movies are literary adaptations, but they’re not high fantasy. A cool character on the cover is what moves comic book units. So is it with the Marvel films, which always choose character moments over coherent plotting. Crossovers are good cross marketing, which is why She-Hulk was briefly a member of the Fantastic Four, and why the Hulk is the co-star of Thor: Ragnarok.

Like Potter, the Marvel series milked the ending by splitting the finale into two movies. Deathly Hallows put most of its sentimental character beats in part one, then loaded on the action in part two. The final two Avengers attempted the reverse: Infinity War hewed to the model Joss Whedon had laid down, until the good guys lost. Endgame‘s first hour is about dealing with loss. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) throws himself into service. Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) numbly keeps trying to superhero in a world beyond saving. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has hung up his super suit and had a baby with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) has made peace with his Hulk-nature and gone green full time. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) gets drunk. Then, five years after Thanos’ (Josh Brolin) snap heard ’round the universe, Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) escapes from the Quantum Realm with an idea. If you had “time travel” in the “How are they going to write their way out of THIS one?” pool, please collect your winnings.

Star Wars taught Generation X to love movies. Since the films were spaced three years apart, kids had to try other genres to find a fix to tide them over, thus expanding their tastes. But the average moviegoer sees four films in a theater annually, and Marvel has been averaging 2.5 movies per year for the last decade. There was no need to try other genres, because Marvel simply subsumed them. You want a paranoid thriller? Here’s Captain America: Civil War. Space opera? Guardians of the Galaxy. Endgame shuffles through genres in its three hour running time. It’s a Steven Soderberg heist film. It disses Back to the Future, then lifts the structure of Back to the Future Part II to create a kind of clip show of the Marvel Decade. And just when you thought we’d escape without a Marvel Third Act, everybody you’ve ever met fights everybody else. Surprise!

The real meat of the Marvel films is not the wham-bam, but the little character moments. Endgame delivers those by splitting its gargantuan cast into unexpected pairs. Hulk finds himself negotiating with The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) in the middle of a raging battle. As the time war escalates and cause and effect starts to go all loosey-goosey, secret acting weapon Karen Gillan as Nebula pairs off against her past self, and Tony Stark makes peace with his dead father.

To say Feige succeeded in his decadal quest to perfect the formula is like saying “the atomic bomb exploded.” It’s true, but it fails to convey the scale. Endgame‘s $350 million opening weekend is the most profitable three days in the 120-year history of the American movie theater industry. Is it actually good? Not as a movie — but it’s not designed to be a movie. It’s a series finale. It’s a last chance to hang out with your super friends. Its bladder-busting length will be much more digestible when consumed on the new Disney+ streaming service.

As the dust clears, Disney stands like Thanos astride Earth-616. They have won, but what kind of world is left behind? The House of Mouse’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox has led to 4,000 layoffs and dozens of projects which can’t be Potter-fied have been cancelled. For all intents and purposes, the theatrical film industry is now Disney and a few minor players. We will soon discover whether Marvel taught a generation to love movies, or just taught a generation to love Marvel.

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Doctor Strange

I sometimes think it’s strange when people talk about a comic book character’s “true” identity. These characters were, and are, always changing to meet the commercial needs of the publishers. I mean, She-Hulk was briefly a member of the Fantastic Four! The only rules are a complete lack of rules.

Benedict Cumberbatch is Doctor Strange

And yet, there is something about the way Doctor Strange is drawn in the latest Marvel blockbuster that bugs me. I’m not a deep expert on comics. The number of comic book superheroes I have an emotional attachment to is not very large: Spider Man, Batman (90s animated series version), Rom The Spaceknight (that one’s never getting a $100 million movie), Dr. Manhattan, The Tick, and Doctor Strange.

Hiring Benedict Cumberbatch to play the Sorcerer Supreme was the perfect casting choice, which is keeping with the generally good decisions Marvel Studios has made under Producer Supreme Kevin Feige. And, as I’ll get to in a minute, Doctor Strange delivers big time on the visual front, and holds together reasonably well on the writing front. It’s the characterization that left me cold, which is surprising, because the promise of getting the characterization exactly right is what mustered the tiny bit of excitement I have left for Marvel-branded, extruded movie-type product.

After a perfunctory, McGuffin-establishing battle between reality bending mystics, we meet Dr. Stephen Strange, a brilliant neurosurgeon whose massive intellect is outstripped only by his outsized self-regard. And how do the trio of screenwriters and director Scott Derrickson choose to demonstrate his extraordinary brainpower? Turns out he’s a master of 70s pop music trivia. Sure, they reveal this character beat while Strange is in the midst of delicate brain surgery, but wouldn’t a complete mastery of classical music history be more consistent with the character than a fondness for Chuck Mangionie? From the first introduction, they have changed Doctor Strange into Buckaroo Banzai.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Buckaroo Banzai! Far from it. (Where’s my $100 million version of Buckaroo Banzai Against The World Crime League, Hollywood?) But I can’t help but get the feeling that the real reason Doctor Strange listens to dad rock is because everybody loved Starlord’s mom’s mix tape in Guardians Of The Galaxy. Just as Batman and Superman are essentially the same character in Batman vs Superman, so too are members of Marvel’s much more varied hero stable morphing into marketing driven sameness.

Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One shows Stephen Strange what’s up.

But at least Cumberbatch looks the part, and, as appropriate for an origin story, he gains gravitas as the story proceeds. Strange injures his hands in a car accident (don’t text and drive your Lamborghini, people!), ending his neurosurgery career. Medicine fails, so he heads of to Nepal (don’t want to piss off the Chinese market by using the original Tibet) in search of a magical way to restore the full use of his hands. Once there he finds Kamar-Taj, a monastery full of sorcerers led by The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton, hitting her marks with crisp perfection), who teaches Strange the arts of conjuring and inter-dimensional travel. When the magic starts flying, Doctor Strange’s real strength is revealed. There are clear visual references, like the wall- and ceiling-walking martial arts moves taken from The Matrix and the recursive, bending cityscapes from Inception. But like an original beat built out of samples, the visual synthesis feels fresh, even while it pays tribute to artist Steve Ditko’s psychedelic 60s phantasmagoria.

Strange’s journey from adept to master is hastened by the attack of Kaecillius (Mads Mikkelsen), a rogue student of the Ancient One who wants to summon a god of the Dark Dimension to Earth, offering the planet in exchange for everlasting life. Pretty standard stuff for a superhero flick, really, but at least it’s a coherent vehicle to keep the eye-popping visuals flowing.

Doctor Strange is the best superhero movie of the year, but it doesn’t do much to change my hypothesis that we reached Peak Comics with The Avengers: Age Of Ultron. The film’s sturdy competence offers a sharp contrast with the flailing nonsense of the DC filmic universe, which says to me that Disney and Marvel are the only studio today that has an actual good creative process in place. But there’s a thin line between “process” and “formula”, and despite all of its visual bravado, Doctor Strange’s reality bends too strongly towards formula.

Doctor Strange

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A Bigger Splash

I think A Bigger Splash could represent a turning point for my career as a critic: It’s the moment when I get to identify, and hopefully lend a name to, an emerging genre.

Hear me out: The last few years have seen a slow trickle of films produced in Europe that, despite their outward differences, share certain structural similarities. A group of people, usually white but always unusually rich and privileged, travel to an exotic destination for fun and relaxation. Fine wines are consumed, and lots of sex is had. But their attempt to outrun their personal demons is short-circuited by an unexpected visitor, and soon paradise comes to seem like an expensive prison. Call them First World Problems (FWP) films. Last year’s Youth, an Italian film starring Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, sequestered the aging actors in a resort in the Swiss Alps where they are driven to despair and then rediscover the joys of life while looking at a nude Miss Universe. It was one example of the genre, which seems to be driven financially by Italian tourism department tax credits.

Matthias Schoenaerts (left) and Tilda Swinton have first world problems in A Bigger Splash.

Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash follows the FWP template by sending Tilda Swinton to the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria. Swinton plays Marianne Lane, a Bowie-esque rock star who has retreated to the sunny little island to recover after surgery to remove vocal cord polyps. She’s happily napping in the sunshine with her boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), a filmmaker trying to stay sober after a drug-induced suicide attempt a couple of years ago, when trouble arrives in the person of Harry (Ralph Fiennes) and his daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson). Harry is a freewheeling rock producer who has only recently acknowledged that Penelope is his daughter. The reason for his Mediterranean sojourn is ostensibly to get to know his progeny, but since his chosen itinerary is a visit with his ex-girlfriend, Marianne, it soon becomes obvious that his real motives are different from his stated mission. Penelope is initially starstruck, but that doesn’t last long as she sees that the glamorous folks her dad keeps company with are just flawed human beings like the rest of us.

Dakota Johnson dons Lolita sunglasses in A Bigger Splash.

When Swinton rolls out of bed, she already has the gravitas to play a rock star trying to do the right thing, so for an added degree of difficulty, she plays Marianne as practically mute. If she speaks, she risks undoing the healing her voice sorely needs, so when she does get worked up enough to speak, her words come out as a feeble croak. Swinton is able to conjure more emotion with simple and subtle pantomime than most actors can manage with a full script. Fiennes gets to play essentially the opposite of his fastidious Gustave from The Grand Budapest Hotel. Unlike Marianne, Harry hasn’t accepted any of the responsibility that’s supposed to come with age, but where he and his ex once had wild partying in common, now he’s trying to keep the party going on his own, and it’s getting a little pathetic. Their slowly building emotional tug of war is the film’s heart and soul.

Just as all four main characters have backed themselves into a corner and things are about to get really interesting, Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich cop out. Instead of resolving the converging tensions, they try to raise the stakes, but succeed only in breaking the spell of fermenting decadence. A Bigger Splash is not a bad film, per se, it just never lives up to the early promise of its crackerjack cast. But since these FWP films are financed by tourism-promoting tax credits, it did succeed in one respect: I really want to go to Italy now.

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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

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Only Lovers Left Alive

Tilda Swinton’s vampire movie is worth seeing.

“Self-obsession is a waste of living,” says the suicidally beautiful vampire wife to her suicidally beautiful vampire husband. She knows what she’s talking about; she’s obviously seen her man this way before. She’s come to his house to rescue him. He has crawled too far into his own head for his own good, and he’s even gotten someone to make him a wooden bullet for those dark nights of the soulless when he can’t take it any more. But she won’t let him pull the trigger. She loves him. And she’s going to try to revive him by reintroducing him to the manifold miracles of the cosmos he may have forgotten: classic soul songs, mushrooms growing in mysterious places, diamonds as big as planets.

Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive is the best film of the year so far in part because it is so wondrously strange. How odd that something from the horror genre says more about everlasting love than most romances. How odd that a film about the undead has so much to say about what it means to be alive.

The film begins dizzyingly, as vampire couple Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are introduced and linked through a series of slowly rotating overhead shots that resemble the movement of a 45 spinning around on a turntable platter. This lovely, disorienting opening also foreshadows the characters’ interests in ritual and transcendence. But something has gone wrong along the way; the old repetitions don’t pack the same punch. As a result, Adam spends his long, long and lonely nights in beaten-down Detroit. Halfway across the globe, Eve and her friend Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), who hid behind the name “Shakespeare” to get his writing out into the open, lurk in the streets of Tangier.

Adam and Eve are linked by their deep affection for the arts. You can’t blame them: After centuries on earth, wouldn’t you turn to aesthetic appreciation, too? There’s a rapturous montage of Eve packing books for her trip and stopping frequently, hands gliding up and down pages written in every language, to speed-reread the ones that interest her. Adam prefers to stay indoors, crafting guitar-heavy drones that combine Tuareg desert blues with late-psychedelic noise-rock. Music fascinates them both because they’ve been alive forever, and as Robert Christgau once wrote, the illusion of eternity has been music’s sacred mission for a good long time.

Into their relatively tranquil lives comes Ava (Mia Wasikowska), Eve’s self-destructive sister. Ava is a badly scratched-up vintage single of a girl who’s always playing at the wrong speed. Her impulse control is poor, her love of blood is strong, and her talent for irritating Adam is limitless. She causes problems.

That’s the plot. There’s more in the margins, of course, about American ruins and the sacrament of blood and the reinvigorating powers of culture. Trust me, the movie is a masterpiece. Yet these days, Jarmusch is not as famous as indie heroes like Wes Anderson or the Coens. Which is fine; he’s too good for that.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Opens Friday, May 16th

Studio on the Square