Haunted Mansion (2023) * *

 

Directed by:  Justin Simien 

Starring:  LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson, Danny Devito, Tiffany Haddish, Chase Dillon, Winona Ryder, Daniel Levy, Jared Leto, Jamie Lee Curtis

Haunted Mansion feels almost as lifeless as the ghosts who inhabit the New Orleans mansion recently moved into by Gabbie (Dawson) and her son Travis (Dillon).  The cast is full of actors who are more than capable of delivering laughs if any were to be found in the movie, but instead they are forced to put on a smile and try their best not to be upstaged by the visual effects.

The mansion is chock full of spirits wandering its halls which Travis notices right away and soon after his mother follows suit.  They flee as any reasonable people would only to come back because no matter where they go, the ghosts haunt them.   This brings former ghost hunter Ben Matthias (Stanfield), who is grieving the loss of his young wife and is more or less mailing in his job as a tour guide, to the mansion at the behest of exorcist Father Kent (Wilson).  Ben is able to take photos of the estate with his invention, a camera which can detect ghosts.   With further assistance from paranormal professor Bruce (Devito) and psychic Harriet (Haddish), Ben is able to find out who the ghosts are and why they continue to hang around the world of the living.   The villain is a spirit voiced by Jared Leto who looks like Jim Carrey's Grinch, only gray instead of green, and wants to possess 1,000 souls in order to rule the world...I think.  He has 999 souls banked already, so all he needs is one more vulnerable person to give up his soul in exchange for a reunion with a deceased loved one. 

I was reminded of the superior Casper (1995), which had the friendly ghost and his three mischievous cousins haunting a mansion bought by a paranormal scientist who wants to reconnect with his late wife.  Casper had laughs and an emotional center which kept the movie together.   Haunted Mansion, based on the Disney ride of the same name, is almost devoid of joy or laughs while it treks its way through a slog of a plot.  These are actors who could have improvised a better script themselves and injected some fun into the proceedings.  Alas, they spend Haunted Mansion looking adrift and overwhelmed by the deceased that surround them.   I've been on the Haunted Mansion ride and isn't as long as this movie even with the hour wait figured in.  

Far from Heaven (2002) * * * 1/2

 

Directed by:  Todd Haynes

Starring:  Julianne Moore, Dennis Haysbert, Dennis Quaid, Patricia Clarkson, James Rebhorn, Viola Davis, Celia Weston

Writer-director Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven is a movie you would swear was released in 1957 by its look, texture, and atmosphere, but unlike melodramas made at that time, Far from Heaven delves more deeply into the taboos at which the older movies only hinted.   The subjects in question are interracial love and homosexuality, both of which are thrust into the life of well-off suburban wife and mother Cathy Whitaker (Moore).  

As Far from Heaven opens, Cathy's husband Frank (Quaid) leaves the office one night and sneaks into a gay bar.   His body language and behavior are that of a paranoid petty criminal as he seeks out a one-night stand, and for good reason.  Cathy is at their home in their idyllic world tending to their two children with help from their loyal maid Sybil (Davis), with no clue of Frank's tendencies except that he's not as willing or able to make love to her as he used to.  Cathy excuses that as work-related stress until one evening when Frank is at the office late, she brings Frank dinner and witnesses him kissing another man.  Cathy is crushed, naturally, but she and Frank grasp at straws in an attempt to save their marriage and "cure" Frank of his homosexuality through therapy.

However, even the doctor tasked with Frank's conversion tempers the couple's optimism by stating that such measures result in a low success rate.   Frank talks about "wanting to beat this thing" as if it were cancer, but even he knows there is no putting this genie back in the bottle.  Meanwhile, Cathy finds herself drawn to her new gardener Raymond (Haysbert), the son of Cathy's gardener who recently died.  Raymond is a kind, sensitive, handsome man whose only handicap in the eyes of society is that he is black.  Cathy and Raymond become friends and could possibly become more in a different era, but once a friend of Cathy's spots she and Raymond going into a restaurant together, the gossip starts churning and Cathy denies such a meeting when confronted by Frank.  

It isn't just the white people in town who disapprove of Cathy and Raymond's friendship.  The blacks at the restaurant also treat Raymond, a regular, coldly when they see him with Cathy.  As Frank falls in love with another man and Raymond is forced to move to Baltimore after his daughter is attacked by three white boys, we see Cathy alone with her world crumbling around her.   Far from Heaven makes it clear that Cathy's happiness was only on the surface, as the movie makes everything look beautiful and radiant, with the sadness beneath the beauty.   We don't sense Far from Heaven is trying to wedge in contemporary viewpoints on the past, but the movie absorbs us as it's happening, and we sort out the details and emotions later.   

From a production standpoint, Far from Heaven has the look and feel of the period it presents down to Elmer Bernstein's score.  Haynes doesn't present this story as parody, satire, or even with a wink, but almost like a long-lost movie that was made in 1957, but premiered in 2002.  

Minority Report (2002) * * * 1/2

 

Directed by:  Steven Spielberg

Starring:  Tom Cruise, Samantha Morton, Kathryn Morris, Max von Sydow, Neal McDonough, Colin Farrell, Peter Stormare, Mike Binder

Minority Report is dark and troubling sci-fi which is one of Steven Spielberg's most inventive and unheralded films.   One would look at Minority Report and just assume "Tom Cruise action movie" but it's deeper than that, with a vulnerable and pained Tom Cruise in the lead fighting against the tide.  The movie takes place in 2054, with Cruise as John Anderton, a detective who is the leader of the "Precrime" unit in which future murders are predicted by a trio of psychics and the perpetrators arrested before the murder ever takes place.   The program is a success, until government bureaucrat Danny Witwer (Farrell) appears on the scene to try and poke holes in the program.   If the program is found to have flaws, then this will result in the release of hundreds of prisoners convicted of committing murders they haven't actually committed yet. 

Anderton is haunted and troubled by the loss of a son via kidnapping and murder six years ago which ruined his marriage and hooked him on illegal street drugs which can be taken with eye droppers.  He is protected by his boss Lamar Burgess (von Sydow), the inventor of Precrime who loves Anderton like a son.   If Witwer were to find out about Anderton's drug use, would that cause Precrime to be shut down?  Then, the psychics, who are kept hooked up to computers and afloat in a small pool, predict Anderton himself will murder a lowlife named Leo Crow (Binder) in a few days.  Now Anderton is on the run from his own unit looking to arrest him.   Anderton flees and tries to prove his innocence, but the more he tries to run away, the closer he moves towards his fate. 

Spielberg adapts Philip K. Dick's story with unique perspectives.  The action is shot in a discolored haze.  Like A Clockwork Orange, Minority Report will always seem futuristic, but the action never overtakes the characters.   Cruise gives us a flawed, sympathetic hero, while Farrell's Witwer isn't simply a cold-hearted bureaucrat.  Samantha Morton provides another sympathetic character as Agatha, one of the psychics who Anderton kidnaps in an attempt to exonerate himself, but when we see Agatha quivering with fear and cold and unable to walk due to atrophied muscles, we see how she is treated inhumanely and practically held against her will. 

Among the most memorable moments are the robotic spiders which crawl around aiding the detectives in their search for Anderton and Anderton having emergency eye replacement surgery in a grubby hotel room performed by a questionable doctor (Stormare).  (In this future, people are ID'd by cameras everywhere via a retinal scan).  Minority Report has a grungy feel to this version of the future, even though murder has been almost eradicated due to Precrime, the buildings and streets are dingy and dirty.  You would think it would be utopia, but like anything else, there are ways to even screw up preventing murders before they happen.  One of the underlying themes Spielberg and Cruise explore is whether such a program could be a bad thing for individual rights, and it all projects a sense of dread and doom.  

Source Code (2011) * * *

 

Directed by:  Duncan Jones

Starring:  Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright, Michael Arden, Cas Anvar

Source Code is a high-concept thriller with poignant moments that make it special.  The plot:  Helicopter pilot Colter Stevens (Gyllenhaal) serving in Afghanistan finds himself as part of a top-secret government program.  He finds himself on a Chicago commuter train assuming the identity of a passenger eight minutes before a bomb on the train explodes and kills everyone aboard.  The "Source Code" program, the brainchild of cold scientist Dr. Rutledge (Wright), assigns Colter the task of finding the identity of the bomber.  Each time the train blows up, Colter is sent back in again for another eight minutes, and this could happen for eternity, I guess.  

Colter thinks he is still in Afghanistan and has no idea why Captain Goodwin (Farmiga) is giving him orders to continue to try and locate the bomber.   It seems the bomber has a larger target in mind and discovering his identity may prevent the next bombing.  Source Code is kind of, sort time travel, but Dr. Rutledge warns it is not meant to prevent the past, but to save the future.  Naturally, if Colter is able to eventually locate the bomb and bomber and prevent the train from exploding and its passengers perishing, then...  my brain might explode trying to figure out the plot's complications and its twists.     

At Source Code's heart is the Gyllenhaal performance, in which a soldier finds himself as part of a program he didn't sign up for and has as many questions as we do.   What exactly happened to Colter Stevens?  When Colter is aboard the train, he is able to utilize a fellow passenger (Monaghan) to look him up on the Internet and discover his whereabouts.  The results may shock you, or perhaps not.  Monaghan plays Christina Warren, a passenger who seems to like Colter (or Sean as she knows him), and in a different time and place would strike up a romance.   But Colter needs to try and prevent the attack, which is something Dr. Rutledge forbids.  Captain Goodwin (Farmiga) is the one giving the orders to Colter via a monitor in what appears to be a helicopter cabin.  She is somewhat sympathetic to Colter, who is demanding answers for good reason.

When we learn Colter's fate, there is a moving scene in which he speaks to his father via telephone and the mystery itself is revealed in layers, with each trip back for Colter leading to more clues and more answers, only to have the questions changed on him.   Director and co-writer Duncan Jones (David Bowie's son) creates a story we care about with a hero who has to think his way out of an impossible scenario in which a solution appears out of reach.   It's a time travel (or time-bending) whodunit and those are two of my favorite genres. 

Barbie (2023) * *

 

Directed by: Greta Gerwig

Starring:  Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Emma Mackey, Simu Liu, Will Ferrell, America Ferrara, Hari Nef, Michael Cera, Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon, Alexandra Shipp, Helen Mirren (narrator) 

Barbie is an ambitious movie with gender politics played out against the pink background of "Barbieland" and "The Real World", aka Los Angeles.  The results are uneven and occasionally boring.  Children and teens attending the movie expecting a party will be disappointed.  Adults viewing it may wonder why everything got so deep all of a sudden.  Like many forms of entertainment, Barbie has become the latest volleyball in the conservative vs. liberal debate.   This time, toxic masculinity and female empowerment take center stage.   It doesn't matter what side of these "issues" you're on, the vessel in which they're carried is a mostly simple story unlikely to change anyone's mind and any attempts at satire are missed because...how dare they make fun of toxic masculinity?  

Barbie starts off with a perfect day in the life of "Stereotypical Barbie" (Robbie), who awakens to a world of pink, sunshine, and positivity.  She has "breakfast", although when she drinks juice there is nothing in the cup, when she eats she is not actually eating anything, and when she showers there is no water coming from the showerhead.  Barbie jumps in her car and drives around Barbieland as clearly the most popular and beautiful of all the Barbies.  Everyone adores her, especially Ken (Gosling), whose day in complete when Barbie says hello to him.  Just like there are other Barbies, there are other Kens, including one played by Simu Liu who is Gosling's Ken's frenemy.  The Barbies live in harmony, the Kens are forever positioning themselves to be the object of Barbie's affection.  Life is one big party for Barbie, until one evening she starts thinking about death and becomes a party pooper.  The next morning, her feet go flat and thinks just seem out of whack.  

One could ask questions such as:  Do the cars run on gasoline? and How do the Barbies and the Kens know about words and concepts dolls shouldn't know?  But we forgive these lapses for the sake of the story.  The concerned Barbie (we'll just refer to Robbie's Barbie for the sake of sanity) seeks out "Weird Barbie" (McKinnon) to find out why her world is falling apart.  Weird Barbie tells her she must travel to the Real World and seek out her owner, who is likely putting these thoughts in her head when she plays with her as a doll.  Barbie lights out for the Real World, and Ken invites himself along to accompany her.  

The fish-out-of-water aspects of Barbie occur predictably in the Real World, where Barbie and Ken are introduced to new concepts such as laws, different clothes, and the introduction to the corporate world of Mattel, run by a clueless CEO (Ferrell) who doesn't care about politics, just the bottom line.  Ken's impressionable mind is especially warped when he encounters masculinity and patriarchy and takes it back to Barbieland to brainwash the men into become jerks and the women into being submissive to men.  When Barbie returns to Barbieland with her owner (Ferrara) and her daughter (Shipp) in tow, she must win back Barbieland from its now toxic atmosphere run by Ken, who does all this because he loves Barbie and feels rejected. 

Why a conservative would feel threatened by an ultimately innocuous movie is beyond my comprehension.   The movie has a point of view and empowerment is by no means a radical or even new concept.  As Roger Ebert used to write: It isn't about what the movie is about, but how it is about it.   Barbie is a slight film which maintains slight interest, but never propels into anything fun.  There is a heaviness to the movie, as if J. Robert Oppenheimer were about to drop an atomic bomb on Barbieland.  

Oppenheimer (2023) * * 1/2

 

Directed by:  Christopher Nolan

Starring:  Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey, Jr., Jack Quaid, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Conti, James Remar, Jason Clarke

Oppenheimer's most powerful and suspenseful moments occur during the testing of the atomic bomb weeks before they were detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  After years of secrecy, in-fighting, and hard work in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which was constructed solely to house and feed those working on the Manhattan Project, the tense hours before dawn were the test of whether such a bomb would work.  It does, the rest is history, and J. Robert Oppenheimer spent the rest of his life trying to dissuade others from ever using such a weapon.  His battle with his conscience led to a hearing years later to have his security clearance revoked.  The hearing was the brainchild of Lewis Strauss (Downey), who had personal and political reasons for despising Oppenheimer.  

Oppenheimer clocks in at three hours, which is becoming the norm rather than the exception for movies these days.   The least interesting portions of Oppenheimer take place in the first hour, which cover Oppenheimer's formative years as a physicist at Oxford and later in Germany.   Oppenheimer isn't told in linear fashion, with the movie jumping back and forth quickly between different periods in Oppenheimer's life.  Editor Jennifer Lame is given a workout and will likely win the Oscar for her work for making Nolan's vision make as much sense as it does.  I'm not sure the story needed to be told in such a fashion because it leads to confusion as to who was doing what to whom, but at least it isn't Tenet.  

Oppenheimer spends a lot of time on the hearing in which witnesses are brought forth to either defend or eviscerate Oppenheimer's character.   Through it all, the physicist maintains a sense of fair play even when others are out for blood.   Cillian Murphy, as Oppenheimer and a veteran of Christopher Nolan films, plays the "father of the atomic bomb" with quiet dignity but who is not a saint and forever at war with himself.  Married to Kitty (Blunt), he nonetheless carries on an affair with the unpredictable and unhinged Jean Tatlock (Pugh), who isn't the marrying type but wants Oppenheimer to be at her beck and call.  Murphy avoids the actor's trap of overemoting and instead internalizes Oppenheimer's pressures which would implode a lesser man.  Downey, Jr. and Damon provide the most memorable support as the vengeful Strauss and General Leslie Groves, who oversaw the Manhattan Project with determination and by being a prick when he needed to be.  

The natural climax of Oppenheimer is the successful Trinity Test of July 1945, but then the hearings in a back office away from public scrutiny occur which hold Oppenheimer's professional fate in the hands of Strauss' hand-picked executioners.  Why does Strauss hate Oppenheimer?  Besides his dislike for the fact that Oppenheimer did not embrace his own Jewish heritage, Oppenheimer unwittingly publicly humiliates Strauss during another hearing.   Once we learn Strauss' motives, we root for Oppenheimer to upend them, although this doesn't engross us as much as it could have.   Oppenheimer itself, while superbly produced on a technical level which is par for the course for Nolan's films, is too uneven to be fully effective.  

Home Alone (1990) * * *

 

Directed by:  Chris Columbus

Starring:  Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, John Heard, Catherine O'Hara, Roberts Blossom, John Candy, Devin Ratray, Kieran Culkin

Home Alone wasn't made as a testament to realism, but as a silly yet sweet Christmas movie with enough laughs to push it over the finish line.  A good number of plot contrivances had to be set into motion for a plot like this one to work.   I'm sure you all know the plot by now, but I'll recap.  Kevin McAllister (Culkin) is a ten-year-old boy accidentally left home alone during Christmas week because his family, in a rush to get to the airport to make their flight to Paris, simply forgot him.   Kevin's mother Kate (O'Hara) is on the plane when she discovers her error and spends the rest of the family using any means of transportation necessary to return home, including hitching a ride in the back of a rental truck with a polka band led by "Polka King of the Midwest" Gus Polinski (Candy).   Kate is unable to reach the police because the telephone service is down in the area due to a storm.  How convenient.  

Kevin at first thinks it's pretty cool to be home alone.  He can eat what he wants, go where he wants, eat junk food all day, and watch unlimited television.  Two boneheaded thieves named Harry and Marv (Pesci and Stern) canvass the neighborhood in search of homes to rob whose occupants are away.  They mistakenly believe the McAllisters are all gone, but Kevin catches on to their scheme and defends his house by any means necessary when the thieves attempt their break-in on Christmas Eve.  How does he do this?  By rigging devices, contraptions, explosions, and having the wherewithal to know just where the thieves will be to set off Kevin's booby traps.  He has unlimited resources at his disposal, just like Wile E. Coyote did in his failed attempts to take down the Road Runner.

The slapstick is in the Looney Tunes spirit and Harry and Marv take a beating, but it's all in good fun, and the two dopes simply don't know when to cut their losses.   Kevin, of course, grows to miss his family and prays he would see them again on Christmas Day.  He also connects with his elderly neighbor who, rumor has it, may be an axe murderer.  We know he isn't and Kevin has a meaningful conversation with the kindly man (Blossom) all about redemption and second chances.  Pretty deep stuff for a ten-year-old.  Culkin, however, is up to the task of carrying the movie on his shoulders.  For a few years there, Culkin became a huge movie star, until suddenly he wasn't after appearing in some bombs and his cuteness inevitably wore off as he grew into a teenager.  

Home Alone has evolved into an enduring Christmas staple seen more for its spirit than its slapstick.  It is a fantasy film in every fiber of its being, and it's well-made enough with a likable Culkin to make it work despite its issues.  

The Last King of Scotland (2006) * * *

 

Directed by: Kevin MacDonald

Starring:  Forest Whitaker, James McAvoy, Kerry Washington, David Oyelowo, Gillian Anderson, Simon McBurney

The Last King of Scotland gives us a portrait of the infamous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin seen through the eyes of fictional doctor Nicholas Garrigan (McAvoy), who following medical school graduation in 1970's Scotland randomly points to a spot on the globe and chooses that as his next country to live and work.  His finger chooses Uganda and later he wishes it hadn't.  Nicholas arrives at a clinic in rural Uganda soon after Amin has seized power.  After a chance encounter on a roadway with Amin, Nicholas becomes his friend and closest confidant.  This is a blessing at first, with its perks, but soon Nicholas witnesses Amin in his true form, not as the jovial, playful teddy bear of a man he first meets, but the sadistic, paranoid dictator who ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his people during an eight-year reign.

Forest Whitaker won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as Amin.  Whitaker provides a scary presence, not only because we know Amin's history, but because he allows us to see all sides of Amin.  When he first meets Nicholas, he is cordial, funny, and jocular.  Once Nicholas is part of Amin's inner circle, Amin shows his merciless side, a part of him which can rage out of control in a flash.  What is frightening about Amin is what a time bomb he is.  We await the explosion even when he is being generous.  Nicholas moves on from the clinic and becomes Amin's personal physician and soon "head of security," but he finds he's out of his depth.   How can you reason with someone who behaves so erratically, and whose decisions on people's lives depend on his arbitrary whims?  

Lurking in the background are British government officials who see Nicholas' access to Amin as a golden opportunity to keep tabs on him.  Nicholas also falls in love with Kay (Washington), one of Amin's wives and mother to his youngest, but epileptic child.  Life advice to Nicholas:  Don't fall in love with a brutal dictator's wife.   The atmosphere in The Last King of Scotland grows restless and chilling, with Nicholas' world crashing down around him during events such as the crisis at Entebbe which would hasten Amin's downfall.   

The best things about The Last King of Scotland are the Whitaker and McAvoy performances which showcase a friendship which grows deadly for Nicholas and acts as a microcosm for Uganda as a whole during Amin's dictatorship.  Like Hoffa, the story is told through a fictional character.  Why is this device used?  Perhaps as a way to keep such wild-card personalities in perspective.   In both cases, it worked as though the fictional character was real.  

Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) * *

Directed by:  Christopher McQuarrie

Starring:  Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Rebecca Ferguson, Cary Elwes, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Vanessa Kirby, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Henry Czerny

The first two hours of Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning Part One are standard Mission: Impossible fare consisting of endless car chases, fights, and everyone chasing after a key which unlocks the secrets of an AI program called The Entity.  This Entity is the self-aware program the folks in The Terminator series warned us about.   If it falls into the wrong hands, then it will become the biggest threat to humankind since the last item Ethan Hunt or James Bond needed to procure to prevent a similar fate to the planet.

The key itself is actually in two pieces, with various parties obtaining custody of them at different points in the movie, similar to the plot of the lackluster Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.  We have the key halves switching from person to person, or are they counterfeit, and where is the lock which the key must unlock?  No matter, it's the item everyone chases from Abu Dhabi to Venice to the Austrian Alps.   Aside from Mission: Impossible III (featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman as the series' most memorable villain to date), Mission: Impossible movies are stylishly produced but mostly disposable entertainments.  Aside from Tom Cruise in the lead role in this now seventh installment of the long-running series, I have long forgotten most of the movies in the series.

Two constants in the movies are Ethan's sidekicks Luther (Rhames) and Benji (Pegg), who provide humorous byplay and computer wizardry.  They are the closest thing Ethan has to family.  Also along is Ilsa Faust (Ferguson), who somehow found half of the key and was soon descended upon by hired assassins in a Middle Eastern desert sandstorm.  The main villain, besides The Entity, is Gabriel (Morales), a shadowy person from Hunt's past and one of the reasons Hunt became a disavowed super agent in the first place.   New to the franchise is Grace (Atwell), a pickpocket who picked the wrong pocket of the wrong man at the wrong time and finds herself thrown headlong into this adventure.

Mission: Impossible is more known for its stunts and action.  At two hours, forty-five minutes, the fights, chases, and time explaining what exactly The Entity is take up a significant amount of the running time.  The final forty-five minutes, however, perks up the interest as all interested parties in The Entity are gathered on a train traveling through the Austrian Alps.  The creativity in the action sequences and the energy are jolting, causing excitement that was frankly missing in the first two hours.  I may have just enough interest to watch Part Two, but if Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning, Part One were a short film, it would win an Oscar in that category. 

Fatal Attraction (1987) * * *

 

Directed by:  Adrian Lyne

Starring:  Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, Anne Archer, Stuart Pankin, Ellen Foley, Fred Gwynne, Ellen Hamilton Latzen

Fatal Attraction likely caused a temporary decrease in marital infidelity at the time of its release.  I am quite certain Fatal Attraction's "hero" Dan Gallagher (Douglas) would be one who swore off cheating on his spouse, especially after being terrorized and traumatized by Alex Forrest (Close), the jilted woman who had a one-night stand with Dan and wasn't content with that arrangement.   Alex spends the rest of Fatal Attraction dropping in unexpectedly on Dan at his office, calling him late at night, stalking him, turning up at his apartment under the pretense of being a prospective buyer, pouring acid on his car, kidnapping his daughter, and soon the family's new pet rabbit meets a sad fate.   Fatal Attraction is slick filmmaking which makes us feel the noose tightening around Dan's neck and his world crumbling around him as he attempts to keep his affair a secret from his loving wife Beth (Archer) and daughter Ellen (Latzen).  

Dan is a happily married New York attorney with a five-year-old daughter who decides to walk on the wild side one weekend while his wife and daughter are visiting her parents.  Dan meets book editor Alex at a work meeting, sparks flew, and following dinner they are having sex on the kitchen counter, in an elevator, and anywhere but a bed.  They spend a happy weekend together, but when Dan tells Alex this is one-time fling, Alex slices her wrists in despair, which only temporarily prevents Dan from leaving.   

Dan seemingly returns to his life, but Alex soon besieges his office with calls and unexpected visits.  Dan politely tells Alex to get lost, but Alex soon is calling Dan at home and later escalates her obsession to dangerous levels.   Oh, and Alex also breaks the news to Dan that she's pregnant.  Is this true or is it part of her plan to trap Dan?  This is never fully established, although the doubts are planted early when Alex lies about her father during a day in the park.  

Fatal Attraction is, at its heart, a thriller with an ending which rivals that of Halloween and Friday the 13th in which the villain is seemingly killed, but comes back again and again.   The final act doesn't provide as much satisfaction as the first two-thirds, but Fatal Attraction is held together with striking performances, especially by Close, whose Alex absolutely believes she is justified in her actions because, hey, Dan doesn't want her and that's reason enough for her.   

There has been debate over the years as to whether Alex is a diabolical villain or in the grips of mental illness.   The answer to both is yes.   Dan was surely in the wrong by cheating on his wife, but Alex also knew the score going in and realistically has no cause to feel wronged.  But emotions get in the way of logic, and without them, Fatal Attraction has no story or forward thrust.   Alex's actions cement her as the antagonist and that's that, and Fatal Attraction works on that level.  

Joy Ride (2023) * 1/2

 

Directed by:  Adele Lim

Starring:  Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu, Sherry Cola, Sabrina Wu, Desmond Chiam, David Denman, Chris Pang

Joy Ride is a road buddy comedy which is eager to please and even more eager to display its raunchy side.  The result, even with a game cast, is an uneven comedy straining for laughs and not finding many.  The joy ride in question takes four Asian-American friends on a road trip through China, where attorney Audrey (Park) and her lifelong best friend Lolo (Cola) travel so Audrey can close a lucrative business deal for her firm and locate her biological mother who gave her up for adoption.   Tagging along are Deadeye (Wu) and American actress Kat (Hsu), who works on a Chinese soap opera and is engaged to her religious co-star (Chiam), who thinks Kat is also a virgin.  We know otherwise.

In storylines which are more difficult to recall one week after viewing, Audrey has trouble closing her deal because her potential client invites her and her mother to a party which Lolo agrees to on Audrey's behalf.   Audrey is now in a race against time to locate her birth mother, but this isn't a pressing concern when they encounter a basketball team and do the rumpy-pumpy with some of its members.  When trying to charter a private plane to visit another city in China, they are forced to pose as a K-pop group with one of Lolo's Instagram friends posing as their manager.   Audrey then discovers she is not Chinese at all, but Korean by birth.   When she locates her birth mother, the scene is handled with such tenderness that it seems dropped in from another movie.  A better one.

Joy Ride then morphs into a tale of the power of friendship and female camaraderie in the final act with obligatory fallings-out followed by tearful reunions played out predictably.   Joy Ride tries to supply the energy to situations we've seen numerous times over the years, but it all feels like same old, same old.  The only thing missing is the bonding scene where everyone smokes weed, but for all I remember, there is a scene like that. 

Asteroid City (2023) *

Directed by: Wes Anderson

Starring:  Jason Schwartman, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johannson, Liev Schreiber, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Jeffrey Wright, Jake Ryan, Margot Robbie, Matt Dillon, Steve Carell

Wes Anderson movies have become as prestigious as Woody Allen's in their abilities to feature large A-List casts.  Both Anderson and Allen are self-contained and create unique worlds in which to feature their characters, but Allen hit with more consistency than Anderson and to my knowledge has never made a movie as listless as Asteroid City.   And I've seen A Rainy Day in New York. 

Where do I start?  A well-tailored narrator (Cranston) tells us of a playwright named Conrad Earp (Norton) who wrote a play titled Asteroid City.  The "action" we see takes place in a tiny Southwestern desert town (population 67) which hosts an annual science fair featuring the top science students in the country with a scholarship as a top prize.   This is actually the play itself as it is staged, and Cranston's narrator interrupts occasionally to give us behind the scenes tidbits on the play itself and its playwright.  The lead character in the play is Augie Steenback, a widowed father of three children all of which are participating in the competition.  Augie has yet to tell his children that their mother passed three weeks ago, and calls on his wealthy father-in-law Stanley (Hanks) to come to Asteroid City to pick them up when Augie's car breaks down and the family has to wait weeks for a part. 

Another key character is actress Midge Campbell (Johannson) who arrives in Asteroid City with her daughter Dinah, who acts as a possible romantic interest for Augie's oldest son Woodrow (Ryan) while Midge serves as one for the grieving Augie.  There are other storylines and characters populating Asteroid City, all of which are as muddled as the rest of the movie.   An alien spacecraft soon descends upon the town with the alien stealing the asteroid which created the enormous crater for which the town is famous.   The alien craft later reappears to return the asteroid, and in the meantime the visitors are quarantined there by the government in order to hush up the alien visit.  

I'm sure there are plot points and characters I'm overlooking, but I'm at a loss to remember those.  What I haven't overlooked is how the characters behave as if they were aliens who have inhabited these human beings and turned them into pod people.  I started to think maybe that was the twist, but I was dismayed to find Asteroid City has no reveals up its sleeve.   The screenplay contains a lot of words, but very little coherence.  The actors recite them in clipped speech patterns which are clearly upstaged by the colorful set designs.   Anderson is known for creating oddball movies overpowered by their production values, but rarely have I seen one like this in which I'm not entirely sure where all of this is going, nor did I particularly care.  I'm not certain the actors knew either, but they got to appear in a Wes Anderson movie and like the Woody Allen of old, that is an actor's rite of passage.  

Watching Asteroid City, I realized a movie exists now that made me long for Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and that's saying something.   Maybe I'm exaggerating, but if I had to choose between Asteroid City and last year's Best Picture Oscar winner, I'd have to think long and hard about it and not in a good way. 

No Hard Feelings (2023) * *

Directed by:  Gene Stupnitsky

Starring:  Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Matthew Broderick, Laura Benanti, Ebon Moss-Bachrach

Like director Gene Stupnitsky's Good Boys, No Hard Feelings takes its premise only so far before going sweet and gooey on us.  It is as if we are watching two different movies with the same cast and they don't gel.  Jennifer Lawrence remains a superior actress who can elevate even uneven material as this, and she carries No Hard Feelings for decent stretches of the movie's running time.  

Lawrence is Maddie, a Montauk, Long Island Uber driver and bartender whose car was repossessed and owes back taxes on her home bequeathed by her late mother.   A desperate Maddie locates a cryptic ad in the paper placed by a rich couple (Broderick and Benanti) offering a Buick Regal to the person who dates their socially inept son Percy (Feldman).  By "dates", they mean take him out and screw his brains out so he can go off to Princeton in the fall a more experienced young man.  Oh, and don't tell Percy this is his parents' plan.  Maddie finds she can abide these reasonable requests.  

She finds Percy is no pushover.  He clings to his virginity with a death grip, unwittingly thwarting Maddie at every turn.  This leads to slapstick and even a scene in which a buck-naked Maddie beats up three people on a beach trying to steal her clothes while she's skinnydipping with Percy.   We think we know where this is all going, and it works out that way, to a point.  There is a vague payoff to this romantic comedy setup.  Are Maddie and Percy friends, lovers, friends with benefits?  We don't know and after No Hard Feelings wheezes to its conclusion, we don't much care either. 

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) * *

Directed by:  James Mangold

Starring:  Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Toby Jones, Mads Mikkelsen, Antonio Banderas, Thomas Kretschmann, Ethann Isidore, Karen Allen, John Rhys-Davies

The long-awaited and long-gestating fifth installment of the Indiana Jones series is here and while it expends sufficient effort, it feels retreaded and old hat, no pun intended.  As each chase progresses and each action scene creeps along, there isn't much in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny we haven't seen before or done better in the previous four installments.   It's nearly three hours and runs out of gas long before the final credits. 

The first thirty minutes or so shows a convincingly de-aged Ford as Dr. Jones at the tail end of World War II captured by Nazis for trying to steal an ancient knife which turns out to be a fake.  After escaping in the most Indiana Jones way possible, Dr. Jones then steals half of the Antikythera, a dial Archimedes created to locate fissures in time, from under the nose of Dr. Jurgen Voller (Mikkelsen).  Well, after knocking him cold anyway.   The issue with the opening sequences is not just that they're on CGI overload, but because the action is shot in almost impenetrable darkness.    

Indy leaves the dial in the hands of his partner Basil Shaw (Jones) and the film skips ahead to August 1969. Indy is separated from his wife Marion (Allen), lost his son during the Vietnam War, and retires from his professorship at Hunter College with little fanfare.   As Indy drowns his sorrows at the local bar, his goddaughter Helena Shaw (Waller-Bridge), Basil's daughter, reunites with him for the first time in years to draw him into helping her locate the missing half of the Antikythera.  Indy finds himself evading FBI agents and employees of embittered Dr. Voller, who has spent his years since the end of the war looking for what Helena wants to find as well as helping NASA send astronauts to the moon.  This takes Indy to Morocco and then somewhere near Greece to deep-sea dive for the item while Dr. Voller follows only a few steps behind. 

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny takes us through the paces we've seen previously.   Despite some nostalgia, this movie never takes off, leaving Ford and the cast languishing.   I must admit when Dr. Voller reveals his plans for the Antikythera once he procures the missing half is intriguing:  He wants to travel back to August 1939 and usurp Hitler as the Fuhrer of Nazi Germany and win the war.   This would present Indy with a quandary:  Should he save Hitler in order to defeat Voller's plan?   Sadly, the movie doesn't follow through with the premise and takes a safer way out.   Add this to the stockpile of missed opportunities featured in this fifth and likely final installment featuring Harrison Ford in the iconic title role.   He deserved better.