Any theater currently playing this indie is the happiest place on Earth

Telling a story about the downtrodden peasants who live just outside of the castle walls, whose perspectives get largely ignored when we go back and catalogue the history of humanity, would be an interesting idea for an indie movie on its own. To tell this story, but to set it in modern times, is a super-great A+ idea. By setting his childhood drama The Florida Project in a pair of fleabag hotels that sit right outside of Disney’s giant theme parks in Florida, and by making his subjects the impoverished lower class people who scrounge together enough weekly scratch to semi-legally maintain permanent residence there, writer/director Sean Baker (Tangerine) has managed to shine a spotlight on a group of people who have been left to rot in our modern economy, all while also telling an emotionally affecting story about trashy though relatable characters who are impossible not to sympathize with.

The story here centers on a mouthy, troublemaking, but often charming six-year-old girl named Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) who lives in a shabby motel room with her part-time stripper, part-time hooker, part-time scam artist, young single mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite), the trouble she gets in scuttling around under adults’ feet like cockroaches with her best friends Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), and the real trouble that suddenly appears in her world once her struggling, immature mother’s desperate decisions begin to catch up with her. That’s about it as far as plot goes. This is less a story and more a character piece and a mood piece that anchors you in a setting, let’s you explore, and let’s you get to know the people who live there. Also there’s the B-plot of the hotel manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe), who works in the background trying to control the chaos and keep his erratic tenants’ lives together as much as he can, all while getting no appreciation or recognition from anyone. But we’ll get more into that later.

Baker has shot a beautiful movie here. His debut feature, Tangerine, was famously shot on iPhones using a down and dirty documentary style, and that movie ended up being very enjoyable to look at, despite or maybe because of the self-imposed limits — but none of that is going on here. The Florida Project is shot on 35mm film, it’s way more ambitious in the way that it steps back from its surroundings in order to create almost mock-heroically epic visual imagery, and it’s so saturated with light and color that it would be almost impossible to not enjoy it on an aesthetic level — especially because this new approach hasn’t led to Baker compromising his ability to get on the ground and insert his camera into the lives of authentic-feeling street hustlers whatsoever. The Florida Project represents the best of both worlds when it comes to sweeping cinematic visuals and pseudo-documentary grittiness.

The acting, across the board, is very strong. It’s all quite naturalist, and it comes as no surprise that many of the performers that Baker is working with were amateurs who were doing their first work. The kids aren’t the normal sort of awkward, showy kid performers who are in most movies. They’re real kids just being kids on camera, free to spaz out and run around seemingly at will with Baker’s camera always trailing behind them. You get the sense that they weren’t too strictly scripted, which does a great job of conveying how weird little kids are and how their developing brains are just constantly misfiring random nonsense right and left. Vinaite has the roughest job here, as she’s playing the most complex character, who despite occasional good intentions does some pretty despicable things, but throughout the whole film she’s able to remain so human and vulnerable that you never give up on her or stop relating to her character. Plus, she’s just so unique looking that you can’t imagine another performer who could step into her role and do what she does. She’ll definitely be getting a lot more work coming out of this performance. Heck, even a bit part actress who says, “This is wholesale,” is great. It’s her only line in the movie, but she delivers it so perfectly that I came away from it wondering who she is.

The story of The Florida Project is Dafoe’s performance though. He completely inhabits this sun-leathered Florida stoic, to the point where even though he’s the most polished performer in the cast, he also comes off as being the most authentic. We only get small glimpses of this guy’s struggle, an idea of what he’s dealing with on a daily basis and in a very private way. He’s rarely the focus of the film, and yet his private pain still manages to steal the whole production out from under the big, showy drama of the A-story. Bobby the motel manager is a tragic cinema hero on par with Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca.

The story here is a real simple one, but Baker layers these people’s lives with so many themes and ideas that it’s never anything less than completely engaging. This movie really explores the entitlement of the poor, and how they can often look around, see that they have nothing, and angrily lash out because they’re not just handed the essentials by people who they perceive as having so much more than them. How Baker makes us understand the place their juvenile acting out comes from is by painting a picture of past abuses and neglect, which leads to them starting life steps behind the average person all while trying to navigate the world without the skills that are instilled in those Basic bitches during childhood. They’re blind and mad and stumbling through a hostile society and they don’t know how to deal with that. Setting everything right outside Disney World also adds quite a bit of depth to the film. It’s a destination that middle and upper class kids all over the world dream of going to almost daily, but these lower class kids who live just outside of its gate, in the leftover runoff of its tourist economy, mostly seem oblivious to the fact that it even exists. To them, escapism is stealing away a couple moments to run around in a field, climb a tree, or even rummage around in abandoned condos or spit on cars parked in the vast parking lots that make up most of their environment. There’s a certain kind of beauty in the simplicity of that.

If Tangerine was a bit gimmicky, but overall a good movie that eventually found its heart by the end credits, then The Florida Project is the proof that Baker is a no gimmicks needed filmmaker. This is all heart, all craft, and it’s hopefully the promise of a long career that’s going to bring us all sorts of important work in the future.

‘The Florida Project’ (2017) ****/***** was originally published in Temple of Reviews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

More ‘Blade Runner’ than ‘Blade Runner’ is our motto

Just because something isn’t appreciated in its time doesn’t mean that it isn’t any good. Case in point, Blade Runner didn’t make any money when it was released in theaters, but in the decades since it’s slowly accumulated a legion of fans and there’s been nary a sci-fi film that’s come after that hasn’t been influenced by it. That first Blade Runner was unique in its aesthetic vision of the future, it was moody, it was atmospheric, it asked important questions about what it is that makes us human. It’s a classic — something highly unlikely to be replicated. That’s why nobody has ever asked for a sequel to it. You know how modern Hollywood feels about sequels to past successes though — even if you don’t ask you shall receive — so now we have a 35 years later sequel that nobody has ever wanted and that’s very likely to suck. Have any of these decades later sequels ever worked out?

Yes, one has worked out now, because Blade Runner 2049 is awesome. Blade Runner director Ridley Scott is back on board as producer, original screenwriter Hampton Fancher is back on board to help pen the story, and Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Sicario) has taken over the duties of director. Together they’ve made something that feels very much like more Blade Runner, but that avoids the trap of becoming a pointless retread. As a refresher, the first Blade Runner is about a future world where lifelike androids called Replicants have been invented as a form of more moral slave labor, a police force of “Blade Runners” has been invented to identify and dispose of dangerous Replicants whenever they go rogue, and the whole struggle takes place in a future version of LA that looks like a rain-soaked Film Noir that got thrown into a blender with a Cyberpunk novel. Blade Runner 2049 is more of the same, but it takes place decades after the first, and this time around our Blade Runner is an Uncle Tom Replicant who hunts down his own kind, called K (Ryan Gosling). While hunting down a rogue Replicant played by Dave Bautista he stumbles into a mystery involving a hidden Replicant body that was pregnant with an unprecedented Replicant baby, a coverup that goes back decades, and a potential Replicant uprising that would have to happen if the automatons ever learned that they have the ability to create “life” the same as humans.

Not enough can be said about how nice this movie looks. Any time Villeneuve makes a movie, it’s breathtaking, but whenever he’s working alongside Roger Deakins as his director of photography, as he is here, things get taken to the next level. Deakins is probably the best working DP, Villeneuve makes movies that are dense with production design and very fluent in using visual language to tell stories, and they’re both at the height of their powers while working in this universe. From the actual framing and composition of the shots, to the movements of the camera, to the lighting, to the production design, every aspect of Blade Runner 2049’s visuals are on point and working together to create lush, gorgeous, iconic images. Every frame of this film is closely considered, dense with visual information, and just a delight to study and appreciate. One of the things that the original Blade Runner is best known for is its visual style, and Blade Runner 2049 has possibly bested it on that front. Maybe.

The pacing of 2049’s story is calm, cool, deliberate, and very much in line with the original Blade Runner. Despite all of the science fiction naval gazing going on, it tells what’s mostly just a procedural detective story. The filmmakers didn’t give in to the temptation to add in a bunch of action or thrills and make this thing fit in better with all of the big budget superhero movies that are burning up the box office these days, and in the process they’ve managed to make a very authentic-feeling sequel. But, at the same time, it doesn’t feel like they’re being slavish to the first film either. It feels more like this movie was made by people who love Blade Runner, who get why it worked, and who are now having a ton of fun playing around in the Blade Runner sandbox. They’re like adults who have pulled out their childhood toys and are having complex, emotionally mature play sessions with them. They even gave the new Blade Runner a distinctive coat to wear. They get it. The love that went into this movie is always visible up on the screen, and that’s one of the main reasons that such a dark, contemplative story set in such a bleak, ruined world can be such a joy to watch.

One possible problem with the film is that it’s very long. By most accounts it’s too long. There are certainly places I can point out where it’s clear that time could have been shaved off of it. I love movies about giant, sprawling, post-apocalyptic cities so much that I probably would have been content sitting in this world for another five hours though. When you factor in the way that the Blade Runner universe seamlessly integrates the coolest bits of the Noir aesthetic with the coolest bits of a Cyberpunk aesthetic, this is probably my favorite cinematic world that’s ever been created. I’d love to live in it. Even the gross parts.

The world-building here doesn’t just stop at the design though. Blade Runner 2049 also dives deep into the themes of humanity and reality that got introduced in its predecessor. What is real, and what isn’t? How real does an experience have to be before we consider it to be authentic? How much does a being have to think and feel before we can consider it to be human? These sorts of questions get explored from multiple angles over the course of the film. There are several scenes where very human-seeming beings who are either Replicant or holographic begin to glitch out, and it’s very jarring to see something so human begin to act this way. It makes you come face to face with your own imperfection and mortality. There’s a scene where a holographic girl utilizes a street walker so that she can try to have as close a recreation as possible to an authentic sexual experience, and the scene is beautiful, loaded with thematics, and totally rooted in character.

Not only is this a world that’s rich with beauty and design, it’s also rich with ideas, and one gets the sense that an infinite amount of stories could be told here (though I hope that notion doesn’t end up tempting studio executives too much). The beautiful, bleak, noir-appropriate third act of 2049 explores the idea that none of us are important enough in this universe to have any kind of impact on it, so the idea of being “real” is an illusion. There is no self other than the one we hallucinate (hilariously represented here when K takes the generic “Joe” as a name after he decides he’s human, as if one is anymore meaningful as a signifier than the other). That’s clear enough to practitioners of all sorts of Eastern faiths. But the movie is also clever enough to flip the script on these “truths” (the scene where K’s date is interrupted by an incoming call is superb). It’s clear that these digital recreations of social lives we’ve all concocted on Facebook and Twitter in recent years are so much more hollow than the real ones that proceeded them, and that they’ve left us all more isolated, detached, and alone as a result. How “real” does an interaction have to be for it to leave us feeling connected? Could we ever be fulfilled only interacting with beings that aren’t flesh and blood?

To bring this thing to a close, let’s address Blade Runner 2049’s performances. This movie is full of all sorts of interesting character actors. Pretty much every face that shows up in it is an interesting one. That’s another thing it has in common with the original. There are also really strong supporting performances throughout, which was another hallmark of the first film. Bautista only shows up for a few minutes, but he makes an impression. Robin Wright steals the movie as our new Blade Runner’s gruff commander. Ana de Armis is hypnotic to watch as his holographic companion. Harrison Ford is doing some of the most nuanced work of his career while revisiting the character of Deckard. The list goes on. One of the ways that this movie bests the original is that it has a better lead though. Ford had yet to fully mature as a performer when he originally played the Deckard character, who was very reserved in the first place, and the results were a performance that was a little bit bland. Comparatively, Gosling is a much more versatile performer at this stage of his career, and the range of emotions and the tectonic level of life changes K goes through in this movie gives him so much more to do than Ford had to do in the original. If there was one thing that didn’t work about Blade Runner it was the relationships that Deckard developed in the film, but that can absolutely not be said of K. If anything, they’re the biggest strength of 2049. I’m not going on record in saying that Blade Runner 2049 is a better movie than Blade Runner, but there’s definitely a case that could be made that it is.

‘Blade Runner 2049’ (2017) ****/***** was originally published in Temple of Reviews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Another cinematic trauma from the man who brought us ass-to-ass

It was likely the success of Black Swan that led to Paramount thinking that there was money in the movies of Darren Aronofsky. Aronofsky, who made his bones and continues to expand his filmography by making dark, visceral, obsessive, profoundly strange art films. Somebody needs to stop Paramount. Somebody needed to stop them from trying to market the difficult, hallucinatory Noah to mass audiences as some kind of mix between a superhero movie and a fantasy film — and somebody certainly needed to stop them from taking this nightmarish, surreal, expressionist open wound of a movie and selling it to wide audiences as some kind of haunted house movie starring the girl from The Hunger Games, or even as an homage to artier horror fare like Rosemary’s Baby. mother! is neither of those things. And still, one can’t help but sympathize a bit with the studio’s marketing people, because there’s really not any way to explain what this movie is without giving away its secrets, and if you were somehow able to accomplish this feat, all you’d be doing is letting Average Joes know that they aren’t looking to buy what you’re selling. Aronofsky makes heady, challenging movies for niche audiences who appreciate things like theme and craft. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just something that needs to be done on a smaller budget and released on a smaller scale. Paramount continuing to treat his movies like they have been is doing no favors to anyone.

Let’s keep the plot synopsis bare bones. Javier Bardem is playing a respected poet who’s currently suffering from writer’s block. He once lived in an opulent country house, but then it burned to the ground. Jennifer Lawrence is playing his young and devoted wife, who has spent a great deal of time and effort rebuilding his house and furnishing it down to every last detail. They seem to live in solitude, him struggling with his flaccid pen, her rebuilding walls and picking out paint colors, until one night their sanctuary is violated by a knock at the door. Ed Harris shows up playing a physician who has mistakenly been told that their house is a bed and breakfast. Not one to be rude, Bardem invites him to stay the night, seeing as it’s late and he has nowhere else to go. Harris acts strange, and even stranger once his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) shows up unexpectedly the next day. Before you know it, these two have taken over the house, not just making themselves at home, but making messes, breaking things, and prying into the couple who lives there’s personal lives. They’re not just the houseguests from hell, they’re multiples of that, and the situation with them starts getting crazier and more surreal, to the point that Lawrence begins to think that she’s losing her mind, and you begin to think that maybe something supernatural is going on. The film only spins more out of control and gets more insane from there.

One of the things that often gets talked about when it comes to Aronofsky’s movies — nearly as much as how intense and trying they can get — is the craftsmanship he brings to the table as a filmmaker. Usually that involves innovative camera work and rhythmic editing that lends his productions a kinetic energy that almost reaches out and grabs you by the throat. There’s not much of that going on here though (until the bonkers third act that looks like an extended version of Ellen Burstyn’s game show freakout from Requiem For a Dream on steroids), as this is a much calmer, icier, slower paced film than what he usually makes, for much of its run time. So much so that it often feels like a throwback to 70s cinema. What is going on here is a lot of intricate sound design. The incidental noises of the house that the entirety of the film takes place in are so pronounced and layered that they become tactile. No glassware is picked up without an audible tink, no item is set down on a table without a robust scrape on wood. The sound work serves to really root you in the moment of what Lawrence’s character is experiencing, and to immerse you in the heightened world she’s inhabiting in this strange house. So much attention is paid to the soundscape of this film that you get the sense Aronofsky wouldn’t have let a cotton swab touch a baby’s butt without it making some kind of distinct noise, and if you’re the sort of person who likes to get lost in the little details of a movie, there’s lots of stuff going on here that you’ll be able to ponder.

Aronofsky also traditionally gets strong performances out of his actors, so seeing as the people he’s cast in this film all came in so talented and experienced already, it’s no surprise that the performances are first rate. Lawrence spends a good deal of the film in closeup and is pretty much the foundation that the entire production rests on, and there isn’t any point where it feels like she’s going to be crushed under that weight. She showed up to the Hollywood scene already a robust, preternaturally talent actor, and after thriving in a demanding role as trying as this, one gets the feeling that she’s just beginning to show us what she can do. Bardem is mostly coasting on his charisma and his established screen persona here, but that’s something that’s very baked into the concept of his tortured pseudo-celebrity character. He works kind of more as a plot device than as a real character, so a larger than life screen presence like his was probably necessary to add weight and authority to the things his character was doing — because it’s his actions that continuously take the audience to the places the storyline needs them to go.

My favorite part of the film was the supporting performances given by Harris and Pfeiffer. They’re both so full of energy here, so manic, and so forceful with their oblivious selfishness that they’re able to make you feel uncomfortable essentially every second one of them is on the screen. They’re hilarious too. There’s a whole lot of strong comedy of manners humor littered throughout this mostly unpleasant movie, and not only does it make you want to claw out of your skin almost constantly, it also makes you consistently laugh despite yourself. Or at least it made me laugh. The rest of my suburban multiplex audience didn’t seem to be as in on the joke. Maybe there was just so much darkness layered into the comedy of manners that they felt too uncomfortable to laugh, or maybe the horror movie/paranoid thriller tone that the film sets early on kept them from thinking about comedy at all, but one thing was clear to me when I came out of the theater — this movie is going to be seen by a lot of people who don’t understand it, and who come away from it feeling like their time has been wasted by something pointedly strange and unpleasant. This can’t be repeated enough: mother! is not a studio horror movie by any standard definition.

mother! is a two hour Agoraphobic panic attack. It’s the worst living nightmare of nesters and introverts. It’s a deep dive into the suffering of man and the hard truth that the origin of our suffering always comes from our inability to admit that nothing will ever be perfect, nothing that’s perfect will ever stay, and that we ultimately have no control over the universe we live in. It’s a frank portrait of our inability to accept our own mortality, and the way that we try to cheat death by creating longer lasting monuments to ourselves in the form of our relationships, our careers, and, yes, our homes. It’s the horrific end result of all of the evil and chaos that springs from our desperate grasping at the impossible concept of perpetual happiness, and how all of that evil and chaos gets perpetually multiplied the more confused, suffering people are thrown together into a mob while desperately trying to grasp in different directions. The film directly addresses the human condition and the flaws inherent in it that keep people stuck in a perpetual loop of pain and dishonesty. Everything you need to know about everything that’s wrong with humanity both on an individual level and on the level of the flawed societies we create is tucked away in this waking nightmare somewhere.

Also, I think mother! is probably a movie about divorce.

‘mother!’ (2017) ****/***** was originally published in Temple of Reviews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Finally a Stephen King adaptation that isn’t clownshoes

Seeing as it’s such a huge horror property, it’s kind of crazy that it has taken Stephen King’s IT this long to become a feature film. IT started off its life as a universally beloved novel that was published in 1986, went on to become a misguidedly loved TV mini-series from 1990, and only now in 2017 has its iconic killer clown Pennywise finally, finally been translated to the big screen — or at least half of his story has. You see, King’s original novel introduced us to a cast of characters who we see both back when they were little kids and also as adults in present day, and both the book and the mini-series switched back and forth between the two timelines. This film, from director Andy Muschietti (Mama), only tells the story that took place during the characters’ childhoods, and it lifts that story out of the 60s and drops it right down in the horror-soaked decade of the 80s, when King ruled over pop culture as its King. The plan is that an IT sequel is going to tell the other half of the story somewhere down the line. Splitting the intertwined stories into two standalones was a ballsy move, but it’s pulled off pretty well here, and it seems like people are pretty stoked to see this movie even without any of the payoff that comes from the other half of the tale.

We’ve said that IT is about a killer clown named Pennywise (played memorably by Bill Skarsgård), but what else is going on in this story, specifically? The first thing to know is that Pennywise isn’t actually a clown. He’s a demonic entity that often appears in the form of a twisted clown, but he has Freddy Krueger-like powers where he can morph his appearance and manipulate his surroundings to create horrific scenarios. He lurks in the sewer system of a small town in Maine, and every 27 years he starts snatching the town’s children and murdering them for nefarious reasons that aren’t entirely clear yet, but clarity doesn’t matter much in this movie anyway. The dude is killing children! That’s enough to be engaging. Our heroes are a group of coming of age dweebs who decide to band together and stop the evil entity, as it seems that the town’s adults are more than willing to ignore his existence completely.

The leader of the group is sensitive stutterer Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), whose little brother gets snatched by the clown in the film’s chilling opening scene. The girl of the group is Bev (Sophia Lillis). She’s been hardened by an abusive home life, so she’s the member of the gang who has by far the most gusto. Everyone is in love with her. Rounding out the crew are the foul-mouthed Richie (Finn Wolfhard, Stranger Things), the neurotic hypochondriac Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), the soulful Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), the cowardly Stanley (Wyatt Oleff), and Mike (Chosen Jacobs), who, uh… is home schooled and forced to kill sheep as his daily chores? We don’t learn much about Mike. Anyway, these kids adventuring around on their bikes and battling evil forces feels very much like something you’d see in an 80s movie, and this movie in general feels very authentically like an 80s throwback, complete with kids who have no parental supervision and filthy mouths, so changing the setting to the 80s was a pretty danged brilliant move by the film’s trio of screenwriters (Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman).

What IT does best is create characters who you like and care about and then throw them into legitimately terrifying situations. This movie is full of mood, and it’s very well shot and edited, resulting in an end product that not only looks gorgeous (some scenes in here flat out look like an art film that would be at home at Sundance), but is also able to adeptly set up scares thanks to where the camera is placed and how it moves. The kids here are often legitimately funny (IT’s comic relief was its biggest surprise for me), and they feel like real friends when they’re together on the screen, so you like spending time with them, and it’s that affection for the characters that makes the scenes where they’re put in clown-based peril effectively tense and thrilling. In most horror movies with youthful casts the characters are annoying little shits, so instead of rooting for them to get away you end up cheering on the monster as it mutilates their tiny bodies. That can be fun, but this approach makes for better movies.

The problem with IT is that, at 2 hours and 15 minutes, it’s just too long, and its story is too sprawling (even with half of it excised for a future film), so it’s not able to keep you engaged for its entire run time. The scenes where Pennywise attacks each kid are memorable and scary, but because there are so many kids he has to attack the narrative momentum of the film stops dead for like a whole half hour while you systematically watch him affect each one by exploiting their particular fears, and it starts to feel like you’re on one of those carnival spook rides where a little cart propels you along from ghoulish scenario to ghoulish scenario. It’s repetitive. The problem could easily have been solved by cutting out some of the characters. Stanley and Mike don’t factor into the plot at all and could have been left out with very little being changed. Eddie gets so little focus that he exists pretty solely as a cartoon stereotype. Cut these guys out and maybe the others could have been fleshed out even more, and likely a good 20 minutes or so could have been shaved off of the movie’s run time. This would have the fortunate result of leaving us the film’s strongest actors anyway, as the leads here tended to be very strong, but the kids playing the more ancillary characters were much more touch and go.

Despite the fact that it gets a little long in the tooth, IT is still a rich experience that’s well worth checking out. They really got Pennywise right here (despite a slightly too liberal use of CG effects), and the crowd I saw it with really bit on all of his big scary moments. And aside from the fun horror movie stuff going on in here, this is also a thematically dense story that preserves the heart of what made King’s original novel so memorable and beloved. Sure, there’s a killer clown here, but the real scary monsters of IT are adults and adulthood, and the inevitable pain that comes during the process of becoming one. The characters here are generally terrified of the awful adults in their lives, but they’re also really freaked out because they’re at that age where they’re starting to become adults themselves, and they’re experiencing the first moments of compromise and corruption that adulthood entails. Eventually that makes IT become a tooth and nail fight to preserve the innocence of childhood, which is a pretty damned wholesome thing for a movie with a demonic clown at its center to be about. Audiences will likely yawn and check their watch a few times while watching IT, but also they’ll come away from it having had some fun and feeling a little bit uplifted. I can’t think of a better reason to go to the movies than that.

‘IT’ (2017) ***/***** was originally published in Temple of Reviews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Turns out that kid from the ‘Twilight’ movies is a dy-no-mite actor

I’ve heard it said that a willingness to live a parasitic lifestyle is one of the big red flags that marks you as being a crazy person on the psychopath test. If that’s truly the case and not just something that some jerk somewhere made up, then Robert Pattinson’s dirt ball character in Good Times, Connie, is the very definition of a psychopath. That’s basically what this movie is, this doomed, stupid kid’s attempt at sucking whatever he can get out of whatever naive, overly polite marks he can suck into his gross orbit, and how they all get pulled down into doom and despair right alongside of him thanks to his bad decisions. Connie is a born loser — the kind of thug who immediately jumps on any get rich quick scheme or illegal scam he can come up with, without ever taking the time to think any of it through or consider the consequences. That means that he ends up running from the cops a lot, which is why nearly this entire movie exists as an extended chase scene/game of cat and mouse.

Often times Hollywood movies get described as being “thrill rides” in generic ad copy. If that’s how you want to describe those big, loud summer blockbusters, then the best way to describe this movie would be to compare it to one of those rickety old carnival rides that whips you around in circles until you feel sick — the kind that feel like they could lose a rusty bolt at any minute, leading to a calamity that kills everyone riding and whomever happens to be rubbernecking in the immediate area. In this metaphor we the film audience are the rubberneckers getting crushed by faulty carnival equipment. One of the main reasons this movie works so well is that it’s so consistently tense and engaging. It feels dangerous. Every moment is electric. Most movies have to build up tension so that they can eventually reach a big, boiling-over-tea-kettle climax, but somehow Good Time is able to maintain a tone that’s all climax all the time, and it works. It’s never exhausting, it’s never numbing, it’s always got new tricks up its sleeve to keep you interested and uncomfortable. It pokes at you with a metaphorical stick, dangles you off of a metaphorical building, all while an intense synth score pulsates in the background, and the experience is, sorry, thrilling.

To get more specific about the plot, the film starts off with a bank robbery that goes bad and leads to Connie being on the run from the authorities and his brother Nick (co-director Benny Safdie) getting handcuffed to a hospital bed, in the custody of the police, while nursing a severely smashed up face. Nick is mentally handicapped, and is the first character we meet who gets pulled into Connie’s schemes and has his life become poorer for it. One thing you can say about Pattinson’s character is that he’s loyal though, so the rest of the film deals with him breaking his brother out of the hospital and their complicated attempt at avoiding capture that involves a case of mistaken identity, a sleepover with a teenage girl and her grandma, a scavenger hunt in a closed down carnival, an unlikely friendship with an intimidating guard dog, and an acid deal gone bad. It’s all very strange.

Not enough can be said about how good Pattinson is as the foundation of this movie. He’s in pretty much every scene, the camera is pulled in on a closeup of his face more often than not, and there isn’t a single second where he feels anything other than completely authentic as this complex, vile, unforgettable character. He completely disappears into the role, not only creating a living breathing human who you totally believe in, but erasing from your mind any memory you have of him as a celebrity or any negative associations you saddle him with thanks to his earlier work in super-popular and much-derided films. He’s been doing interesting work in smaller, artier movies for a while now, but it’s this role that’s going to solidify his place as one of the great working actors and earn him a whole lot more interesting work going forward. Any cracks about the inert acting in Twilight are going to start feeling old hat real soon — especially considering the fact that his co-star in those movies, Kristen Stewart, has also proved herself as being an interesting performer when given meatier material to sink her teeth into.

The other story here is Safdie. Not only did he direct this picture with his brother, Josh Safdie, he also seriously impresses in his supporting role. He’s playing a mentally handicapped character, which is no small challenge, and at no point does he ever feel like a performer who’s playing at being disabled. Much like Pattinson, he just is his character, and aside from being believable in this character’s skin while he’s on the screen, he’s also able to reach deep places of real emotion that add an important element of heart to the presentation as a whole. Connie is such a despicable character that he could have been alienating. The audience needs someone to care about, somebody to root for in order to have a way into the story, and Nick’s plight is what provides us with that entry point. Safdie is so impressive here that it wouldn’t be surprising to see him picking up supporting actor statues come awards season. Also notable is the always amazing Jennifer Jason Leigh, who brings an impressive amount of nervous energy to a manic side character who seems to be one of Connie’s regular targets of exploitation. She’s been doing so much good work for so long now that it should be clear to everyone what an invaluable treasure she is.

How is Good Time going to be remembered down through the years? It’s definitely too weird and unpleasant for it to get much mainstream success, but weirdos and film nerds are sure to flock to it until it gains a cult status of some degree. The experience of watching this movie is so visceral and so memorable that it’s definitely going to stick around in certain circles. The good circles. What does that mean for the Safdie brothers going forward? Hopefully that smaller companies keep giving them similar budgets to make similarly strange and experimental films and not that some big studio is trying to scoop them up to make a superhero movie or something as we speak. We’ve been losing too many promising young filmmakers to generic franchise bullshit as of late.

‘Good Time’ (2017) ****/***** was originally published in Temple of Reviews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A very bad day to visit France makes for a very good movie

Things weren’t going well for the Allied Forces in the Spring of 1940. A series of blunders combined with a series of shrewd German maneuvers to end with them flanked on every side and pushed back all the way to the French port town of Dunkirk, which put drowny water on one side of them and the shooty German army on the other. That made evacuation necessary, but necessary was made very difficult thanks to Luftwaffe planes picking off soldiers on the beach with machine gun fire and destroying docks with bombing runs, as well as German U-boats that were loaded up with torpedoes and just waiting to sink any ships that tried to get out. The term “death trap” springs to mind. Christopher Nolan’s new war epic, Dunkirk, throws us right into the middle of the chaos of all this suffering, telling us stories from the perspective of troops on the ground, pilots in the air, and even civilian sailors who answered the call to come on their personal yachts from England in order to help get out whoever they could. It’s a very harrowing movie.

The cast of characters is too expansive and the list of actors put together to play them too long to get into all of those particulars here. I can say that everyone is pretty good though. There aren’t really any standout performances or hugely memorable acting moments, but neither are there any weak links in the cast who sink the film or ill-advised characters who get in the way of the storytelling. Who all shows up? People like Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Fionn Whitehead, Damien Bonnard, Aneurin Barnard, Harry Styles, and about a million other handsome British boys who I didn’t recognize but who all did fine jobs with what they were given. They were believable when they were running for their lives during the loud moments, they were believable when they were sipping tea during the rare quiet moments, and they were able to tell you a little something about their characters, even though the script they were working with was fairly sparse and dialogue-light.

The storytelling is really simple here. Really, we’re just being shown a handful of very basic, very visceral survival scenarios, which work as little vignettes that get edited together to give you a big picture idea of all the terrible things that happened during the battle. That might sound like a questionable approach to feature filmmaking, but each little subplot is edited together well enough that they color and comment on each other as they cut back and forth. The stories hit their emotional peaks at the same time, there are dueling suspense scenes where different people are in danger of drowning at the same time, and there’s even a time or two where the events of one of the ongoing stories affects what’s happening in another. Too often in movies like this that follow completely different plotlines the tone of one story will be at odds with the other, or there are one or two that work much better than the others, so it becomes a bummer whenever your favorite gets cut away from and you’ve got to spend the next few minutes watching the lame one, but here Nolan has done a great job of making a handful of concurrently occurring stories come together as a coherent whole that feels like a real feature film and not just a series of shorts.

What’s maybe most impressive about this epic in scope war tale is that, despite the multiple plotlines, and despite the sprawling ensemble cast, this is still the most focused and simple movie that Nolan has made in quite a while. We’re dealing with life and death. Men staring their ultimate fates in the face and trying to find a miracle way out of them. It’s just that and no fat — no wasted moments. Even the character work is built so well into the action and is so subtle that you adequately care about the characters and their fates without having to sit through a bunch of dialogue that clues you in on the particulars of exactly everything that’s happening. As far as the storytelling of Dunkirk goes, Nolan is all business, and that makes for a movie with a 107 minute run time that looks very refreshing when compared with the long in the tooth durations of his last few films.

The crafting of the film is where he gets showy. Dunkirk was shot with IMAX cameras, so it’s vast and rich and lush with visual information. If you can see it projected in one of the larger formats it’s being presented in, the immersive experience of getting thrown into this chaotic battle is definitely worth the extra couple of bucks. What’s maybe even more impressive than the work that went into Dunkirk’s awe-filled IMAX cinematography is the work that clearly went into its sound design though. Nolan makes sure that the sounds of war are jarring enough to always keep you at the edge of your seat. Any time a gunshot rings out it plays so sudden and loud over everything else that’s on the soundtrack, you jump. Any time a bomb is dropped you can hear the vibration of the entire landscape around you shaking. Bombers shriek into the film sounding more like terrifying wraiths than they do any plane you’ve heard in a movie before, and even better is that by the time the third act is going strong you can clearly identify the different sounds of the engines of approaching English planes and approaching German planes, which becomes an important tool Nolan uses to keep you engaged in the development of his plot. The little details got paid attention to when this movie was being put together, for sure. Hans Zimmer’s score should probably be mentioned as well. Not only is it memorable, it’s absolutely dripping with tension and dread, so much so that it can make a scene where a couple of young boys load a bunch of life vests onto a boat seem like a life and death situation. It’s the best work I’ve heard from Zimmer in quite a long time.

Does Dunkirk reinvent the war movie or do anything that’s going to see it get remembered as an important work going forward? No. It performs all of the essentials of the genre well enough that it’s still really engaging and emotionally rewarding though. Without ever getting dumbed down enough to create a villain out of the Germans, it’s still able to instill a pride in you for the stiff upper lip stoicism of British culture, which makes you want to immediately go out and buy a fine suit. It’s able to provide for you a moment of empathic clarity where you fully understand and appreciate how awful it is to be a pawn in a giant war between nations that has no regard for individual human life. There’s a despair in that, for sure, but there’s also something really uplifting in the moments where men are able to look certain doom in the face and still refuse to give into that despair. Dunkirk is a thrilling movie watching experience that will have you coming out of the theater craving a cup of tea, craving jam and toast, and dreaming about another life where you became a hero fighter pilot as handsome as Tom Hardy. I can see why they released it during the summer.

‘Dunkirk’ (2017) ****/***** was originally published in Temple of Reviews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Spider-Man Once More!

One of the greatest things about all of these Marvel movies coming out is watching the mainstream get to know and love these characters for the first time, which leads to them finally understanding why geeks have been so obsessed with them for so many years. It’s like, if you take what exists on those old comic pages and transfer it up onto the big screen, preserving the tone of the adventures and the hearts of the characters, a light goes off in people’s heads and suddenly their urge to give indoor kids wedgies dissipates. The problem with comic book movies for the longest time was that filmmakers tried too hard to change what worked on the page in order to make it better fit their idea of what a movie should be. They had a formula that worked great already, they just didn’t realize it, and it took Marvel stepping up and controlling their own movies for someone to consistently get the comic adaption right. Now, even when Marvel makes one of their lesser movies, it still ends up being pretty entertaining, because they know the tone of the Marvel adventure tale, they understand the hearts of their characters, and they stick as closely as possible to the things that have been making nerdy kids into Marvel fanboys for decades.

That’s why it was such good news that they were taking the creative reigns of Spider-Man back over from Sony, who never quite got what made Spidey tick. Sam Raimi’s movies had their moments, but their lead roles were terribly miscast, and he got things reversed when he made the day-to-day life of Peter Parker cartoony and weird and the web-slinging adventures of Spider-Man gritty and grim. For Peter, the drama always comes from his personal relationships. Being the hero is the release. Marc Webb’s movies cast the principals almost perfectly, and they got that Peter’s relationships should be dramatic and his superheroing should be silly, but they were drowned in so many lazy plot holes, wrong-headed studio notes, ill-advised attempts at franchise-building, and whatever the hell Jaimie Foxx was doing as Electro that they ended up being way worse than what Raimi came up with anyway. Now, with Marvel in control, with Jon Watts (Cop Car) in the director’s chair, with Tom Holland playing Peter, and with a focused script that nails the tone and character of classic ‘Spider-Man’ stories, finally someone has made a Spider-Man movie that feels right — the kind that you could show to a non-nerd friend in order for them to get the character.

Up to this point I’ve been writing as if everyone reading understands that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, and that he got his special abilities by being bitten by a radioactive spider. Homecoming takes the same approach, and it’s a smart one. This character is such a pop culture icon, such a part of our cultural conversation, that everyone knows the basic beats of his origin. Best to dig right down into character and have fun with what makes him enduring. The first step toward getting that right was getting the right performer, and with Holland we finally have an actor who just feels like Peter Parker. He’s got a real Anton Yelchin quality to him, where he passes as an everyman who’s easy to relate to, but he’s also got a little hint of extra charm that makes him pop when he’s on the screen, which helps him pull off that classic Spidey dynamic where he can be a nerd but still garner interest from the girls. He’s smart-mouthed enough to get Spidey’s youthful cockiness right, expressive enough to hit on the adrenaline-junkie escapist nature of superheroing, but he also has enough pain bubbling underneath his surface to nail the aspect of Peter’s personality that’s angry and frustrated at always getting the short stick — at always ending up as the guy who’s on the outside looking in. Past Spider-Men have been too passive, or too smarmy, and always too old, but Holland balances everything out just right.

On the other side of the fight card you have Michael Keaton playing Adrian Toomes, AKA The Vulture, AKA the bad guy in this movie, and the thing about him that’s great is that he really isn’t that bad a guy. He’s complex, and he’s driven, and that goes a long way to fix the problem Marvel has with making their villains interesting. Keaton’s performance is grounded and real. He’s playing the man and not the super villain. His motivations here are all rooted in very relatable economic concerns, where he’s tired of struggling against a rigged system, and he’s tired of having to worry about the safety and stability of his family, so one day he has enough of getting jerked around by the ruling class and decides to break bad. He’s one part Progressive revolutionary, one part Libertarian boot-strapper, and you probably wouldn’t even dislike him if he wasn’t taking things as far as killing people. If Parker is trying to find his place in the world, then Toomes is trying to solidify his, and their goals come into conflict with one another in ways that make for a much more personal super-powered smackdown than you might be expecting, which is very welcome.

That’s the other thing that Homecoming offers up that many Marvel movies get criticized for not delivering on — a satisfying third act. Sure, the actual action that’s being staged here isn’t all that thrilling in its execution, and it looks as much like cartoony CG nonsense as anything else you’ll find in the superhero genre, but as Parker and Toomes continue to interact over the film, as they learn more about each other and their connection becomes more intimate, their rivalry builds up the sort of personal stakes that these movies tend to lack. The story builds to a big confrontation where Spider-Man has to stop a robbery. That’s it. It’s basically a superhero movie update of a classic train robbery sequence, but because we care about where each character ends up at the end of the film, there’s weight to the outcome, and there’s dread whenever someone is put in danger. This is such a welcome stepping back of scale for Marvel. They should be saving the finales where the heroes have to stop some kind of giant glowy thing that’s going to eat the entire universe for the big team-up Avengers movies, but they tend to make every little story they tell go in that direction. These individual hero stories should be much more about how the protagonists lives could be ruined, and much less about how their entire universe could be disintegrated.

What’s most important though, and what Marvel always gets right, is that these movies introduce us to people we want to spend more time with. Again, Homecoming just gets Spider-Man. It gets the frustration of his personal life, the thrill of his superhero life, the way that he compartmentalizes it all with detached humor. It understands the great relatable tragedy of the character that even though he always tries to do the right thing, he’s always going to end up hurting the people he loves. It gets him at his core, and it surrounds him with a remarkable supporting cast to bounce off of. Marisa Tomei is so warm, and nurturing, and tragically wounded as Aunt May that you forget how annoying and typically Hollywood it is that they had to make the character sexy. Jacob Batalon is so much fun as Peter’s excitable best friend Ned, and he makes so much more sense as the character’s best friend than polar opposite Harry Osborn, who’s a character that’s always felt shoe-horned into Peter’s world in order to manufacture cheap drama. Laura Harrier is sweet and kind, and most importantly believable as the popular girl who still gives nerdy Peter Parker the time of day. Her character is smartly written too. There’s no escapist fantasy nonsense here where the dweeb earns the love of the beauty even after acting horribly just because the story needs him too. The place their relationship is left is very smart, and very honest. It’s great writing for a superhero movie. Also worth mentioning is the singularly-named Zendaya, who steals every scene she’s in as Peter’s angsty and talented classmate Michelle. We’ll hopefully be getting way more of her in the future.

And that right there is how I know that Homecoming is going to be a huge success — that I’m more excited about seeing more of Peter Parker hanging out at school than I am about seeing more of Spider-Man kicking bad guy butt. The kids who fill Peter’s daily life are all great, and there’s more of them than can be mentioned. They’re instantly recognizable, their personalities are quickly defined and diverse, and they’ve got great chemistry together. This film would have been just fine being a teen comedy ensemble about an Academic Decathlon team, but instead it gets the benefit of being attached to one of the most recognizable and beloved intellectual properties of the last century. Past Spider-Man movies have created thrilling action scenarios, or recreated iconic images, but they never did the job of making you want to spend as much time as possible living in the world of the characters, and that’s the secret ingredient responsible for the obsessive nature of comic book fandom. When it comes to the future of live action Spider-Man movies, Make Mine Marvel.

‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ (2017) ****/***** was originally published in Temple of Reviews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Youth smiles without any reason

The Beguiled began its life as a 1966 novel by Thomas Cullinan, went on to become one of the bleak 70s films directed by Don Siegel, and now finds new life as the first remake from modern directing titan Sofia Coppola. It’s a story about a small boarding school for girls in the Civil War South, and the process by which their simple and isolated way of life gets torn asunder once one of the young students finds a wounded Union soldier out in the woods and brings him back home so he can be nursed back to health, rather than die out in the elements or in the harsh conditions experienced by prisoners of war. Much better to be a prisoner of a girls’ school, you see. The man, Corporal McBurney (Colin Farrell), is certainly a charmer, and maybe a rogue, and the girls of the school are the coddled sorts of naives who are bursting at the seams with repressed desires, which is a recipe for disaster. Basically, this is one of the horniest movie that I’ve ever seen.

If one was pressed to describe The Beguiled in a condensed sound bite, they might call it a slow burn thriller that’s heavily rooted in character. This is a beautifully shot, moody little piece of work, aesthetically, but most of its intrigue comes from the strained interactions of its characters. As Farrell’s McBurney regains his bearings after his critical battlefield injury and starts to get the lay of his new land, he begins to test the boundaries of his cage by getting the number of each of his female captors, perhaps to figure out how they can best be manipulated. Not only does this conceit introduce a fun little guessing game into the film as to McBurney’s intentions, it also works as a great device to let us get to know each of the characters. Despite the fact that everyone he meets is a waifish white girl buried under plain period garb, it isn’t long before we can tell each lady apart, and can say a little something about who they are and where they’re coming from.

Nicole Kidman plays Miss Martha, the headmistress of the school, and she’s very clearly a woman with pain in her past who handles it by projecting an image of strength and maintaining as much strict control over her environment as possible. Because of this, she’s the slowest to warm to the chaotic presence that’s suddenly invaded her sanctuary, but she gets there. Kidman’s bread and butter at this point is playing icy and restrained characters, so she was a great choice for the role. Kirsten Dunst’s Edwina is Martha’s second in command, and she seems to be a woman who has resigned herself to living a disappointing life of simplicity and even-keeled stability, right up until the moment that this charming foreigner comes into her life and reintroduces her to the hopes and possibilities that she’d given up on. They’re the fully grown women who realistically could have a chance at maybe building a relationship with McBurney. Then you have the children.

Elle Fanning’s Alicia can’t seem to perform the simplest of tasks without turning them into a body language foghorn of flirtation that announces to everyone around her that she’s open and available. She’s electric on the screen, which should be an asset that she’s able to tap into even more as she gets a bit older. Oona Laurence’s Amy is the moral center of the film, the only one whose interest in McBurney comes from pure intentions, which seems like it should be a heavy load for an actress of her age to shoulder, but she makes it all look effortless. She feels natural on the screen and she has a great face for emoting. This is basically her movie, and she’s going to get a lot more work because of the way she steals it.

The rest of the younger girls don’t quite get as much to do as the older and Laurence, but they still get important moments where they contribute to the goings on. Addison Riecke’s Marie embodies innocence, which the film takes great interest in meticulously subverting, and her sweet face makes her perfect for that role. Angourie Rice plays Jane, the skeptic who’s quick to judge and quick to label someone as an other, and there’s something wonderful about her delivery that hints at a childhood growing up in a house of privilege and prejudice. Her character is really the only place where the film addresses the issues of race that fueled much of the Civil War. Emma Howard rounds out the cast as Emily, and, okay, maybe I exaggerated when I said that the film establishes each of the girls well, because I can’t recall anything about her.

The Beguiled is very good about hinting at where it’s going, without giving anything important away. A graphic depiction of a wound being treated early on let’s you know that it’s not going to shy away from dealing in gore. The introduction of a gun in the first act is basically Chekhov tapping you on the shoulder and letting you know that things are going to get violent. In tone and intention, the film never plays its hand though. Everyone is polite. Their interactions are gentile. Things don’t get crazy until they suddenly get very insane. What the movie does do is let you in on the fact that every word every character is saying is loaded, and that everyone has selfish intentions that they’re playing close to the vest. These girls are too Southern Polite to come right out and enter into open competition with one another, but it’s very clear that they’re going to do whatever it takes to promote their position with the new man in their lives and to diminish the positions of everyone else.

These girls are sheltered, and repressed, and putting a man in the center of their very closed off world is the equivalent of the Coke bottle dropping into the middle of the isolated tribe in The Gods Must Be Crazy. There’s a lot of lurking and scowling going on. As competition elevates to see who’s going to win the favor of this Northern gentlemen, the veneer of politeness fades away, interactions gradually get more openly contentious, and a good deal of tension starts to be built. The slow burn buildup is what’s good about The Beguiled. What’s great about it is that the exact moment where you’ve had enough of the build and you start to think that you’re watching a movie where nothing is going to happen, things go off the rails in the most sudden and shocking way imaginable.

The Beguiled is gorgeous to look at, it’s well-acted, it grabs you emotionally and takes you on a ride from its first frame to its last. Coppola knocked it out of the park. She’s managed to infuse a period piece with personality, without resorting to any of the gimmicks that made Marie Antoinette divisive. She’s told a dark story about flawed characters without getting sunk in the nihilism that made The Bling Ring unpleasant to watch. She’s recaptured the melancholy vibe and bittersweet tone of The Virgin Suicides that everyone responded so well to without feeling like she’s repeated herself. She’s layered quite a bit of dark humor into her storytelling, but not so much that the weight of what’s happening gets subverted. She’s soaked every one of these characters’ interactions in dread, but she never milks the situation of so much tension that it turns into generic horror, allowing you to predict where the story is moving. This movie is a delicate balancing act that’s constantly threatening to topple into chaos, which eventually happens in the most sudden and satisfying possible way. It’s the best and most entertaining thing she’s done since Lost in Translation.

‘The Beguiled’ (2017) ****/***** was originally published in Temple of Reviews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve found a driver, and that’s a start

Whenever a new Edgar Wright movie is released, it’s a big event for cinema freaks and genre geeks. Not only are his movies always well-made, and always fun, and always funny, but they also always serve as love letters to past movies from whatever genre he’s currently working in. Shaun of the Dead was dripping with love for zombie movies, Hot Fuzz was soaked in appreciation for cheesy action movies, and so on and so forth. It’s not hard to see that Wright has a serious appreciation of movies, and that not only informs his craft, it infuses his work with a sense of joyous love. Geek recognize geek.

Baby Driver is Wright’s take on the sub-genre of action films that we’ll call getaway driver movies. You know, like Walter Hill’s The Driver from 1978, or Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive from 2011. Less specifically, it’s a car chase movie, and I’m sure everybody can name plenty of those. Baby (Ansel Elgort) is our titular driver, a sweetheart of a babyfaced kid who made some mistakes early in his troubled life and now finds himself paying off a debt to a crime boss played by Kevin Spacey. He seems pretty content living a quiet life of automotive crime until he meets a pretty waitress named Debora (Lily James), who also seems to like music as much as he does, but mostly is very pretty. Suddenly, the things he’s doing seem pretty immoral, the life he’s living seems pretty unsustainable, and before he knows it, Baby finds himself on the run from not only his former colleagues, but also police officers both dirty and straight. It’s all a really good excuse to fill a movie with a bunch of car chases.

Interestingly enough, it’s not entirely the car chase movie that Wright is drowning in love for this time around. Even though Baby Driver is full of spectacular chase scenes that are high energy, intricately staged, and impeccably executed, the heart of this film is very much rooted in old school studio musicals and their enhanced realities, vivid colors, big emotions, and optimistic, idealistic romance. I’m not just saying that to be cute, either. This movie is a musical. The actual music comes from a pop music soundtrack, but the songs are built into the DNA of what you’re seeing on the screen — so much so that the scenes are blocked according to the beats of the songs chosen. It’s like what Wes Anderson does — writing scenes around the soundtrack he’s chosen rather than the other way around — but kicked up a hundred notches. Visual flourishes that appear on the screen reflect the lyrics that are being crooned on whatever jam we happen to be listening to. When there’s a shootout, the guns fire in sync with the drum solo in the iconic party song ‘Tequila.’ The music in this film doesn’t just color the action that’s happening on the screen, it dictates it, which is the difference between it being a car chase movie with a good soundtrack and being an actual musical.

Wright has always distinguished his movies, stylistically, through the rhythm of his editing — by crafting kinetic sequences of repetitive images that you can almost tap your toe to. He really brings that up to a new level here, to where we’re not just presenting montage sequences or flashy action scenarios in this style, but we’re using it throughout the entire movie. In many ways, it feels like this is the film he’s been building up to over the course of his entire career so far. If you’re the sort of person who cringes whenever the heavy hand of a film’s direction becomes apparent while you’re watching it, then Baby Driver could very well be the most annoying thing that you ever sit through, however, if you like stylish filmmaking that has its own voice and that sets itself apart from everything else around it, you’re not likely to see a more satisfying movie this year.

The biggest focus of this film aside from its music and chases is its romance, so you need a pair of great actors with great chemistry to make that work. Elgort and James deliver. This is the first time I’ve seen an Ansel Elgort film. He’s interesting. He’s very unassuming-looking, and he’s not doing much, performance-wise, but he’s able to broadcast the notion that there’s a deep well of soul inside him, nonetheless. I’d like to see what he does when he’s playing a character who isn’t so restrained. Lily James is such a likable screen presence that she can even go through this whole movie putting a honey-touched Georgia accent on everything she says and not come off as being cloying. She turned heads as the girl who’s bad news on Downton Abbey, she proved that she could shoulder a big budget movie with Cinderella, and she proves that she can hold her own in a stylish, aimed-toward-movie-dorks movie like this. As far as I can tell, the girl can do it all. And she certainly looks the part. There should be nothing but big things ahead of her.

The supporting performances are all pretty strong, but one of the most satisfying things about Baby Driver is seeing Jon Hamm get something great to do. His lead performance in Mad Men was so iconic, and ever since that show ended he’s pretty much been relegated to acting silly doing Meta stuff in comedies. It’s fun that he’s good at stuff like that, and that he’s not afraid to engage with his public persona, but the dude is much too handsome and much too good at selling internal conflict to be relegated to silliness. Here he really gets to sink his teeth into some meaty material, and the charisma comes out. Jamie Foxx plays one of the criminals, and he doesn’t get a whole ton to do, but he’s playing the wild card of the film and he brings a real dangerous energy to everything he does. Pretty much every time he’s on screen he makes you uncomfortable in some way. Spacey, Jon Bernthal, and Eiza González round out the crew, and they’re welcome additions to the cast, but they’re basically playing to type, so there’s not much to be said about them. To be fair, this is the first time I’ve seen Eiza in anything, so I can’t comment on what she might be capable of, but she’s mostly just being fiery, young, and sexy here, which wouldn’t surprise me if it was her type — the casting process in Hollywood being so predictable and whatnot.

Wright’s script is near-perfect action writing. The characters are generally tight-lipped, so we learn about them through their actions, as they move through the story. The danger and difficulty of the situations Baby finds himself in continually escalate, so it always feels like the film is building toward something. The romantic subplot isn’t kept separate from the getaway driver plot, but is instead tied directly into it, at least as far as the protagonist’s emotional state is concerned, which helps make everything matter. The more his new relationship looks like it has the legit possibility of improving his life, the more dire his situation of being trapped in a criminal life becomes. His desperation to find a way out grows, the safety of the situations he finds himself in lessens, and the interpersonal cracks that have appeared between him and the eccentric group of psychopaths he’s working with widen. That provides the film with a building tension that eventually boils over when the final heist is about to take place — a job that’s been so snake-bitten from the start that you know it’s going to dissolve into deadly chaos. The big action finale is spectacular. The emotional stakes are there, the life and death stakes are there, and everything happening on the screen spins out of control into complete, glorious chaos. Well-orchestrated chaos, of course. This is an Edgar Wright film, after all, and he’s a meticulous craftsman, so his third act becomes an almost literal symphony of tire squeals, gunfire, explosions, and toe-tapping favorites. It’s hard to imagine coming out of the other side of all that unsatisfied.

‘Baby Driver’ (2017) ****/***** was originally published in Temple of Reviews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why do people keep thinking it’s safe to go back in the water?

Here’s the situation with 47 Meters Down, the new thriller from The Other Side of the Door director Johannes Roberts. It’s about a pair of sisters who have taken a vacation to Mexico in order to cut loose a little bit and get away from their problems, and the new problems they find theirselves facing when they fail to heed the warnings that every Mexican beach resort gives you to not book independent tours or activities that don’t go through their people. The girls are specifically older sister Lisa (Mandy Moore) and younger sister Kate (Claire Holt), and their new set of problems are specifically that a couple of locals have charmed them into going on their friend’s janky boat, to get into an even jankier shark cage, in order to swim with great whites. This is a horror movie, so things don’t go well. The winch holding the cage breaks, the girls sink all the way to the ocean floor, and the freshly chummed waters have put the monstrous and toothy sharks into a feeding frenzy that makes it pretty impossible for anyone to do anything about it. What will kill the girls first, the deadly sharks, the limited amount of air in their tanks, or the effects of the pressure of deep waters? Any way you look at it, it’s pretty clear that they’re screwed.

This is a very simple story of survival, which allows the script to stick to a very simple structure. There’s effectiveness in that simplicity. Two girls are stuck in a deadly situation, and they intend to get out of it. You know what their goal is, you know what the hurdles are in between them and that goal, and therefore it’s very easy to get emotionally invested in their struggle. The place where the storytellers can have fun is in those obstacles. Each time the protagonists solve one problem, their efforts tend to cause an even bigger problem, and great pain is taken to milk the maximum amount of stress and tension out of each little survival vignette, which not only keeps the audience at the edge of their seat throughout the whole movie, but also has the effect of making it feel like the film is always building up to something bigger. Clear end goals, escalating action — this sort of basic structure stuff is very simple and easy to do, but not enough storytellers pay attention to it these days, and whenever somebody does, it always makes their movies feel a cut above everything else around them. Especially in the horror genre.

47 Meters Down sells itself as a shark attack movie, but that’s just one aspect of the horror it brings to the table. What was much more effective for me was the way it also exploits just how deeply dark, vastly immense, and panic-inducingly overbearing the ocean is. To be trapped somewhere in it, without much idea of how far you are from the bottom, how far you are from the surface, or which direction you need to swim in to get back to where you need to go — the utter helplessness of that is terrifying. Factor in that any number of immense and deadly creatures could be circling you without you even knowing it, and you have a very powerful fear cocktail that can be very effectively mined for horror. Thanks to some strong underwater cinematography and a thumping, dread-filled score that owes more than a little bit to the music from Jaws, 47 Meters Down is pretty effective at mining that horror and turning it into good times at the cinema.

Moore is playing the less composed character here — the one who panics at their shadow in everyday life so they absolutely lose it whenever something legitimately dangerous actually does happen. That can be an effective character to put in a horror movie, because their reactions work to underline all of the scares and to hammer home to the audience just how dire things are, but man does she take things too far. Every second of this movie is full of her whimpering, whining, moaning and shrieking, to the point where she gets on your nerves and you start to want the sharks to just get it over with and bite her head off already. Holt is much better as the little sister who goads her elder sibling into getting into the shady sort of situations that she’s painfully uncomfortable with. Too often these instigator sort of characters can be loud, obnoxious blowhards, or completely oblivious morons who stumble into obvious danger only to get what’s clearly coming to them. That isn’t the case here. She’s fun and she’s reckless, but she doesn’t come off as being stupid, and when things need to get serious, she matches the tone of the situation. If there’s one big asset that this movie has that makes it effective horror, it’s that you like Holt’s character, so you actually get invested in what happens to her.

Where this movie stumbles is character arcs and dialogue. Structurally, the script is very good, but when it comes to the smaller details of crafting engaging and natural-sounding dialogue and fleshing out the two protagonists into being something more than a couple of anonymous damsels in distress, it doesn’t do so well. The dialogue is clunky and obvious. This is pretty apparent when the two girls stop everything they’re doing while trapped in a shark cage at the bottom of the ocean — with their air tanks running out — in order to have a melodramatic talk about their stupid relationship histories, but it’s never more apparent than it is every time Matthew Modine’s boat captain character opens his mouth. Everything he says is exposition. It sounds like he was recording soundbite snippets of dialogue to be inserted into a video game or something. Granted, the heavy lifting he does verbally makes sure that you fully understand how much danger the girls are in, and why some things they might do to get out of the danger could work and some absolutely won’t, but what a thankless job. He’s given absolutely nothing to do but make sure the audience knows what the Bends is, and how to use scuba equipment. He does look hilariously sun-bleached though, which is very appropriate for his ex-pat living in Mexico character, so there’s that to have fun with.

47 Meters Down gets the basics of storytelling right, which makes it effective horror, but it doesn’t quite nail the little details that can elevate an effective horror flick into being a good movie in general. One additional and extra-important thing it has going for it is that the sharks look really good though. The last big shark horror we got, The Shallows, also had good things to offer, but the big problem with it was that its shark was a dumb, fake-looking, CG piece of crap, which made it difficult to take the threat it posed seriously. It’s refreshing to see a smaller movie like this be able to bring a real-looking horror movie monster to life without breaking the bank. There used to be a much bigger middle ground between small independent pictures that can do whatever they want and big budget studio pictures that have to pander to mainstream audiences than there seems to be today. We need more of these mid-budget movies than can enjoy the freedom of taking a few risks while still being able to splurge financially here and there to make itself look legit. Creature features, if they’re made by talented people and they get a little bit of money to play around with, can be so much better than the SyFy channel schlock that they’ve been pigeonholed into being since dreck like Sharknado started going viral. 47 Meters Down isn’t doing anything revolutionary, but if it could be successful without having to stoop to intentionally “so bad it’s good” levels, it could start a revolution anyway.

‘47 Meters Down’ (2017) ***/***** was originally published in Temple of Reviews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.