Skyscraper (2018) * * *

Directed by:  Rawson Marshall Thurber

Starring:  Dwayne Johnson, Neve Campbell, Pablo Schreiber, Roland Moller, Byron Mann, Chin Han

To say the villains wreak unnecessary havoc in their quest to obtain a flash drive is putting it mildly.    They start a fire on the 96th floor of The Pearl, which is soon to open as the world's tallest skyscraper, and then shut off the fire suppression systems remotely causing the building to burn out of control.    Surely, there must've been easier and less conspicuous ways to achieve their goal, but nevertheless here we are.    With that being said, Skyscraper does its job and makes us care enough about its plot to keep us occupied.    If you're expecting realism, you've come to the wrong action movie.

Skyscraper never pretends to be more than it is.    Its plot is simplistic and its characters are clearly drawn, although it is cool to be Neve Campbell as our hero's wife do some butt kicking of her own.    She is not simply a wife and mother who stands idly by awaiting rescue.    At crucial times, she takes matters into her own hands with help of some foreshadowing we can detect a mile away.    The star, of course, is Dwayne Johnson, who plays Will Sawyer, an ex-FBI hostage rescue agent turned independent safety assessor following an on-the-job massacre which cost him his leg from the knee down.    He wears a prosthetic, which serves as both a help and hindrance at different points, but like every Johnson role, he opens up a can of whoop ass with the best of them and looks convincing doing it.    Oh, and he finds himself dangling from high, high places more often than not.    If you expected anything less, you've come to the wrong action movie.

Sawyer is hired by The Pearl's creator Zhao (Han) to assess its safety and security systems.    Sawyer knows his stuff and it comes in handy when trying to save his family from the raging inferno.    But, before Sawyer can complete the job, the Eurotrash villains led by Botha (Moller) is afoot, and Sawyer and his family (who live on the 98th floor as guests while Sawyer does his thing) finds themselves trapped in the deadly situation.    Sawyer is at first a suspect and wanted by Hong Kong police, but since he actually manages to work his way into the burning building using a crane, the police change their tune.   

A crowd gathers below and cheers Sawyer's every move, although we are puzzled to determine how the crowd can see that high up or witness real-time news footage.    Are there high-definition, giant screens which one would see at a sporting event around?    Skyscraper has been compared to Die Hard, and there are similarities in the plot (although The Pearl is considerably taller than the Nakotomi Building of Die Hard), but Skyscraper stands on its own well enough as a CGI-laden thriller.    Skyscraper isn't Die Hard to be sure, but isn't low-rent either. 

Sorry to Bother You (2018) * *

Directed by:  Boots Riley

Starring:  Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Armie Hammer, Steven Yeun, Danny Glover, Terry Crews, Omari Hardwick, Patton Oswalt (voice), Lily James (voice), David Cross (voice)

In my college years, I was a telemarketer, and not a very good one.   I sold newspaper subscriptions over the phone and then I conducted lengthy, inane telephone surveys.    At least when I tried to sell the newspaper subscriptions, I was peddling a tangible product.    With the surveying job, I was keeping the respondent on the phone with nothing in it for him.   Either way, these were not jobs I was born to do.    The opening salvos of Sorry to Bother You capture the dreadful feeling of being an intrusive telemarketer.   In Boots Riley's film, the caller isn't just figuratively invading the potential customer's privacy, the poor caller is transported right into the person's bedroom, kitchen, or living room and interrupting whatever more important activity was going on at the time.   I am certain every telemarketer has felt that way at one time or another.

Those scenes were funny, but then the movie walks the fine line between satire and absurdity, then blurs it, and then obliterates it in a nonsensical subplot which takes the satire way, way too far.    There is a temptation to commend Riley for having the steely nerve and creativity to go there.   It is a temptation I can resist.   The movie loses control.   Even Get Out, which also was an edgy satire of racism disguised as a horror film, knew to stay within certain boundaries of storytelling.   It had a story to tell first.    Sorry to Bother You transforms into an exercise in pushing the envelope while losing focus on what it wanted to push the envelope about in the first place.

Lakeith Stanfield, who also co-starred in Get Out, plays Cassius Green (as in "cash is green"), a chronic unemployable whose career trajectory has stalled.    He lives in his uncle's garage with his artist girlfriend Detroit (Thompson), and privacy issues ensue when the garage door opener is activated.   He applies for a telemarketing job at RegalView, which sells worthless encyclopedia sets.  (The company bigwigs apparently forgot the Internet exists).    He is busted for lying on his resume, but he is hired anyway because the call center needs warm bodies.    At first, Cassius is sinking, but then his co-worker Langston (Glover), encourages him to use his "white voice", which comforts the respondent instead of frightening him.    Once Cassius uses the white voice, he becomes a star and earns a promotion to "power caller", while his friend Squeeze (Yeun) and Detroit hold work stoppages to promote unionization.    Naturally, since Cassius is finally making cash for the first time in his life, he has no qualms about crossing his friends' picket line.

The power callers don't sell encyclopedias, but instead pitch potential investors for the omnipresent  WorryFree, (using the white voice exclusively) which provides three hots and a cot for workers in exchange for fourteen-hour days performing practically slave labor.    If it sounds like a prison, it also looks eerily like one when you see the living arrangements.    Cassius also has no moral compunction in selling investors on WorryFree, because the money is rolling in and he can afford to move out of his uncle's garage.    However, this causes tension between he and Detroit, since he crosses picket lines and she is loyal to the unionization effort.

Once Cassius meets WorryFree CEO Steve Lift (Hammer- in a wild performance further adding to the actor's quality character roles), then the movie devolves into a nightmarish, dark morass from which it never recovers.    The proceedings go way over the top, and turn into an unrestrained mess.   The white voice joke grows stale also, trying to squeeze every laugh it can out of it.    By then, the movie had grown so absurd that the laughs ceased altogether.    Sorry to Bother You starts with identifiable themes and considerable momentum, until it halts itself. 

Stanfield's earlier scenes maintain a hangdog charm.    His body language betrays a total lack of confidence, and we can relate to him.    The actors remain undaunted as they stay likable and believable in the face of mounting insanity and plot developments which might give them whiplash.  This is not to say Riley is an untalented screenwriter and director.    He just didn't know when to rein his material in.

No Way Out (1987) * * * 1/2

Directed by:  Roger Donaldson

Starring:  Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Will Patton, George Dzundza, Sean Young, Iman, Fred Dalton Thompson, Howard Duff, Jason Bernard

Navy Commander Tom Farrell (Costner) finds himself in a labyrinthine pickle in No Way Out.   He is placed in charge of a sham cover-up investigation of his lover's murder, while knowing all along his boss, Secretary of Defense David Brice (Hackman) committed the crime.    Yet, for many reasons, Farrell cannot tell the truth and must appear to go along with the cover-up without implicating himself or revealing what he knows.    You find out why later, and it makes sense.    This duplicity is at the heart of No Way Out, and this elevates the film from a standard thriller to one with big human stakes.  

Farrell first meets Susan Atwell (Young) at a Washington party.   They connect immediately and are soon having sex in the back seat of a limo.    Farrell knows she is Brice's mistress and one night witnesses the jealous Brice entering her apartment.   Farrell learns the next morning Susan is dead.    What to do?   Brice's right-hand man, the slippery and manipulative Scott Pritchard (Patton), has an idea:  Start a sham investigation to sniff out a fictional Soviet agent who has infiltrated the Pentagon and murdered Susan while somehow keeping the CIA, FBI, and Washington, DC police out of it.    Tom while keeping the truth to himself, is put in charge of the "investigation", but for fear of implicating himself, carries out his duties.    But, evidence comes to light such as a Polaroid negative and credit card charges which might indirectly implicate him.    How does he slow the revealing of that evidence while appearing to be complicit with the investigation?  

Costner performs a dicey double act which makes him both sympathetic and an accomplice at the same time.    He is the closest thing to a hero in the film, but is he one?    Costner provides at least something of a moral center, while Hackman drinks heavily and ponders how he got himself into this mess; doing so with great Hackmanesque conviction.    The wild card is Pritchard, who is fiercely loyal to Brice to a fault and perhaps to his own peril.    He is an amoral bureaucrat who only wants to find a "killer" and cement his status in the eyes of his idol Brice.   Or does he have ulterior motives as well?   

No Way Out is directed by taut efficiency by Roger Donaldson.    He finds ways to keep the tension ratcheted up while keeping the moving parts going even if you wonder if such a charade would even ben possible.    At times, No Way Out becomes ludicrous,  but everything points to a Big Reveal which isn't something concocted out of thin air.  What is first seen as an absurd shot in the dark is closer to the truth than anyone in the movie even realizes.    Except for one character.  

Hereditary (2018) * * *

Directed by:  Ari Aster

Starring:  Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Ann Dowd, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro

Until roughly the final 20 minutes, Hereditary was a slow burn, but an effectively creepy thriller.   We watch in anticipation to what it is building toward, and then are let down by a final act which doesn't live up to the slowly rising crescendo of suspense which led up to it.    For most of the film, Hereditary is an absorbing supernatural thriller in which we know something is wrong, but we aren't sure what, and we are hooked in to find out.    Even in a story laden with terrifying images and bizarre happenings, the ending simply flies off the rails, but Hereditary has enough satisfyingly horrifying images and wonderful performances to pull it through.   

I will tread lightly on the plot details, because part of the initial suspense is watching the story's events unfold and evolve.     The first image we see is of a death notice.    A 78-year-old woman named Eileen Leigh died at age 78.    There is nothing unusual about the death notice itself, but we soon learn of the complicated legacy she left behind.    Her daughter Annie Graham (Collette), an artist who creates miniatures and dollhouses, gives a cold, but honest assessment of her relationship with her mother at the funeral and at a grief therapy group meeting.    They were estranged, and Eileen had a habit of doting on her younger granddaughter Charlie (Shapiro), while ignoring older brother Peter (Wolff).    Why is this?   

Annie is not without her own issues.    She has a history of sleepwalking and perpetuating violent acts while doing so.    A second horrific accident not long after Eileen's death further destabilizes Annie and her long-suffering family, which includes husband Steve (Byrne) who tries to be the family's rock but we see even he has his limits.    The entire house is engulfed in odd ghost sightings, hordes of insects, and other oddities which can't be explained.     A helpful friend, Joan (Dowd) introduces the art of séance to Annie which works so well that Annie probably wishes she never opened the doorway to the great beyond.

Peter is seemingly the victim of the bizarre happenings, but maybe the entire family is targeted.    We don't know for sure, but Hereditary at least keeps us involved.    The quiet dread established here is eerily reminiscent of The Sixth Sense (1999), and both films starred Collette.    Collette does such impressive acting with her facial expressions that dialogue is not needed.     If you recall her key scene in The Sixth Sense, she conveys the emotion of the moment with a quiet cry and looks of total bewilderment over what her son is telling him.    Collette's Annie is consumed by grief, to be sure, but tries doggedly to move forward with her life in the face of two family deaths.    It is an impressive performance.  

The film's trickiest emotional scenes involve what is said and not said by Annie, Steve, and Peter in the event of the second death.    The family walks on eggshells as it tries to hide its resentment, pain, and does its determined best not to blame each other...at least at loud.    I suppose the ending follows a sort of logical conclusion of the events leading to it, but it doesn't quite fit or feel worthy with what transpired before.    Maybe there was no perfect way to wrap things up, but Hereditary was on pace for something extraordinary and instead wound up being suspenseful, ghastly, and wishing it had ended about 15 minutes sooner.  

Grease (1978) * * * 1/2

Directed by:  Randal Kleiser

Starring:  John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Didi Conn, Jeff Conaway, Stockard Channing, Barry Pearl, Dinah Manoff, Michael Tucci, Eve Arden, Sid Caesar, Lorenzo Lamas

What sets Grease apart from other movie musicals is that the songs are mostly very good.   They're catchy and memorable, with a smooth 50's feel as it should be.    This is one of the few musicals in which we don't mind when they stop the dialogue to belt out a number.    John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John are great singers and dancers, complemented by a cast which may be a little long in the tooth to play teenagers, but we buy it anyway.    These teens seem much too sure of themselves to be teens, most likely because most were in their 20's or even early 30's at the time. 

Based on the Broadway play, Grease takes place in late 1950's California at Rydell High School (likely named for 50's teen idol Bobby Rydell, although I may be mistaken, it's a safe bet).    As the film opens, it is summer and Danny (Travolta) and Sandy (Newton-John) are teenagers in love.   They walk the beach, swim in the surf, and bathe in the glorious sunsets.   But, Sandy is due to return to her native Australia, and they part assuming they will never see each other again.

Fast forward to September, and Sandy indeed stays in California and attends Rydell, unbeknownst at first to Danny.    Danny is the leader of the T-Birds, a school gang with cool leather jackets who fix and ride souped-up hot rods.    Their female counterparts are the Pink Ladies, led by sarcastic Betty Rizzo (Channing), and it seems their group exists simply to provide make-out partners for T-Birds.   Sandy falls in with the Pink Ladies, who at first think of her as square, but soon she endears herself to them, especially when they learn her summer fling was with Danny.  

When Sandy finally reunites with Danny, he treats her coolly in order not to appear like he, gasp, actually digs her.   That is frowned upon in the macho culture of the T-Birds.   The rest of the film involves Danny and Sandy getting together, breaking up, and then getting back together again during the school year.     Somewhere in there, they actually fall in love too.    Travolta, fresh off his triumphant Saturday Night Fever performance, once again exudes cool and charisma which he brings to many of his roles.    Newton-John, already a popular singer at the time, gives us a cute, innocent Sandy whose love for Danny persists despite his attempts to reject her.    "Hopelessly Devoted to You" is her signature song in the film, and pretty much says it all.

Grease is mostly nostalgic fun, made at a time when the 50's weren't that long ago, and the teen idols of the time were still only in their 40's.    Frankie Avalon belts out a stylish number with "Beauty School Dropout", as a guardian angel with tough love advice for Frenchie (Conn), who wants to drop out of high school.    Grease 2 came along four years after this one, and except for a few cast holdovers, starred a whole new cast but mostly covered the same ground.    A third Grease film was proposed to star Travolta and Newton-John to take place during the disco era, but it never got off the ground.    That's kind of a shame.    It would've been interesting to see Travolta and Newton-John, two disco era icons, giving the 1970's a try.  

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) * *

Directed by:  Matthew Vaughn

Starring:  Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Elton John, Pedro Pascal, Mark Strong, Bruce Greenwood

If I had written this review immediately upon viewing this film, I might've given it two and a half stars, but upon reflection two stars is my final rating.    This sequel to the surprise 2014 hit clocks in at a bloated two hours, twenty minutes and doesn't know when to quit.    The original film saved the heads exploding for the final half hour.    This sequel starts off bloody and doesn't stop assaulting us with violence and action strewn out over a soundtrack of pop/rock songs like "Saturday's Night's Alright for Fighting", which is of course sung by Elton John, who appears in an extended cameo and looking like he might kill his agent for getting him into this.

There are clever gadgets and a couple of neat action sequences while the actors give the material a little more heft than it deserves.    The cast, which includes Oscar winners Firth, Bridges, Moore, and Berry are doing their best with what they have.    Elton John is also an Oscar winner (for 1994's Best Original Song for The Lion King).    The rest are capable actors who are at home in the action, although Egerton's Eggsy, who learned to be a secret agent with mad skills in the first film, is a bit dull for a lead.   

The plot involves the Kingsman, whose headquarters are blown up by the diabolical, yet outwardly perky drug queenpin Poppy (Moore), and must team with their American counterparts Statesman, which uses a whiskey distillery as its front (led by Jeff Bridges and featuring Tatum as Agent Tequila, Berry as Ginger Ale, and Pascal as Whiskey--get it?) to stop Poppy.    Poppy taints her drug supply with a virus which eventually kills its users, and Poppy ransoms the President of the United States (Greenwood) for money in exchange for an antidote.    Poppy's lair is way off the grid in a remote jungle in which every building in her compound has a 50's theme to it.    So ruthless is Poppy, she has her henchmen who screw up killed, ground into a meat grinder, and then cooked into a burger.    We then see another would-be henchman eat the burger as a final phase of initiation.    This over-the-top gross out makes me long for exploding heads.

We also find out that Harry Hart (Firth), Eggsy's mentor who was presumed dead in the first film after being shot in the head, is very much alive, but has amnesia and has no knowledge of his past.   The Statesman invented a method for preserving the brain after head shots which allowed Harry to survive, and although I doubt the science behind it, it is amusing to see in practice.    We know just as night follows day that Harry will regain his memory and soon after his form as a mannered killing machine. 

I'm sure there will be more Kingsman films to come.    I don't know what else can be done with the concept.    We've seen our share of Bond parodies and lately the parodies have been better than the Bond films themselves.    Matthew Vaughn's ultra violent series ups the ante on bloodshed and body parts flying around, but do we really need to see more? 

Ragtime (1981) * * * 1/2

Directed by:  Milos Forman

Starring:  Howard E. Rollins, Jr., Mary Steenburgen, James Olson, Brad Dourif, Elizabeth McGovern, Kenneth McMillan, Debbie Allen, James Cagney, Mandy Patinkin

I will get my complaint out of the way first.    Major characters in films should have names.   First, last, or even nicknames.    Call them something.    Three of the major characters in Ragtime are called Father, Mother, and Younger Brother.    This was the case in E.L. Doctorow's book on which this film is based, but what's wrong with naming them, I don't know... John, Mary, and Clyde?    There you go.    Problem solved.

My pet peeve notwithstanding, Ragtime is a beautiful, sometimes haunting, and sometimes brutal film.    Beautiful in the way it captures its time period (early 20th century America), haunting in how it ultimately deals with who turns out to be the main character, Coalhouse Walker, Jr. (Rollins), and brutal in its depiction of the overt racism towards him.     Ragtime is full of parties, dancing, fun, smoking, and drinking, but even the costumes can't hide the ugliness of a society barely forty years removed from the Civil War.

We meet the characters and all paths eventually lead to Coalhouse, who is a successful pianist who only wants to marry his pregnant sweetheart Sarah (Allen) and have a family.    He makes enough money to buy his own Model T, which stirs enough envy and hatred within a group of gruff local firemen to harass Coalhouse and place horse manure on his front seat.   In the ensuing argument, Coalhouse is arrested instead of the men who actually vandalized his car.    Coalhouse searches in vain through legal channels for justice, and finds none.    He then takes matters into his own hands by teaming with a group of black men to blow up firehouses and kill firemen.    The ransom to make all of this stop?   Restore his car to its original condition.    

Before the tragic events unfold, Coalhouse is a happy man who, because he makes money, deludes himself into thinking racism would not touch him.    It does, because even though he is successful, to many whites he is still beneath them.    The Model T episode lets loose a rage in Coalhouse he didn't know he possessed; one which may never be squelched once it starts.     Rollins, who received an Oscar nomination for his role, provides Coalhouse with the right amount of intensity and evokes a fair amount of sympathy even though he is committing horrific acts.   His change from happy-go-lucky to resentful anger is always convincing.    To him, the use of terrorism is justifiable to right this wrong.    Many, including police commissioner Rhinelander Waldo (Cagney), may agree, but still must stop him.  

Coalhouse's situation touches the lives of Father (Olson), Mother (Steenburgen), and Younger Brother (Dourif) in unexpected ways.    Their life of privilege and wealth in upstate New York is now
irretrievably upended due to their friendship with Coalhouse, Sarah, and their child whom Mother wants to take care of after the tragedies involving Sarah and Coalhouse.    They were not prepared for the upheaval and it shakes what seemed to be a strong familial bond to the core.  

There are other subplots, one based on fact involving dancer/actress Evelyn Nesbit (McGovern), who was involved in a deadly love triangle which caused irreparable scandal and harm to Nesbit's career.   All of these in one way or another lead back to Coalhouse.    Forman, like he did in Hair and later in Amadeus, pools his considerable talent and resources to present us with an authentic glimpse into a historical period in which things looked gorgeous on the outside, but couldn't hide the terrible natures of some of its people from emerging in sad and tragic ways.