Movie Reviews - 2016 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

How often does the hero of the story become the villain of the story?

“The Founder” is the story of Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), a down-on-his-luck, 53-year-old salesman hawking milkshake mixers from the back of his car, who teams up with two California brothers to franchise a new concept, a fast-food restaurant called McDonald’s, and, through pluck, persistence and determination, turns it into a global phenomenon that on any given day feeds one percent of the world’s population.

“The Founder” is also the story of a man who steals someone else’s concept, steals someone else’s wife, breaks rules and contracts and vows and friendships, and because of his ruthless and unethical behavior becomes impossibly successful and an American icon.

Both stories are true.

A rose by any other
Before I get into the turning point of the story—how the hero becomes the villain—I’m curious if this dichotomy was the result of its filmmaking team.

There’s a scene late in “The Founder” when, after all the legal battles, one of the McDonald brothers asks Kroc why he just didn’t reproduce the concept. On the very first day, the brothers showed him everything they knew. He had the template. So why not just reproduce it elsewhere? Why franchise what they started? His answer? Their name: McDonald’s. It spoke of America, he said. It could be anything for anybody. Nobody, he added, is going to buy anything from Kroc.

In a way, I think of the filmmaking team this way, too. The movie’s screenwriter is Robert Siegel, former editor in chief of The Onion, who tends to write about the underside of the American dream (“The Wrestler”), and whose name sounds like the underside of things. Its director is John Lee Hancock, whose movies tend to have a sheen of Americana shellacked over them (“The Alamo,” “The Blind Side,” “Saving Mr. Banks”), and whose name, let’s face it, couldn’t sound more fucking All-American if it had been George Washington Crockett Boone. Hancock’s face fits the bill, too. He could be a movie star himself: jaw out to here. I admit, I’m a total bigot in this area. On some level, I doubt any film directed by someone as handsome as Hancock can be truly exceptional, since the handsome have no clue what life is like.

Anyway, to the turning point of the story.

Kroc starts out a hero because he’s an underdog. He’s going town to town, taking rejection after rejection, and buoying himself with a flask of courage and an LP on success that he listens to in cheap hotels at night. One day, his secretary tells him they received an order of six mixmasters from some outfit in San Bernardino but he figures that can’t be right. That would mean 30 milkshakes a minute. Nobody needs that many. So he calls them and indeed he’s corrected. They need eight.

For years I had a postcard of that original McDonald’s in San Bernardino, and when Ray drives there to see what’s up, and we get it recreated on the big screen, it’s like seeing, I don’t know, Ebbets Field or something: something iconic and American and long gone. But now here again.

Kroc, who is used to drive-ins, which thrived in the years immediately after World War II, and which tended to attracted teenagers generally and juvenile delinquents specifically, is initially confused by the place. By the time he pays, his food is there. In a paper bag rather than a tray. With no silverware. How does he eat? Where does he eat?

It was a system created by Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch) after decades of failures and experimentation. They reduced the menu to its most popular items: burgers, fries, soft drinks, shakes. They set up the kitchen to maximize efficiency. They got rid of waitresses and silverware. They called it the “speed-ee system.” We call it fast food.

Kroc’s brilliant idea, to franchise what they’ve created, was actually attempted by them first. Sadly, the franchisees didn’t keep up the McDonald brothers’ standards and so they decided to abandon it rather than ruin their good name. Their name meant all. But they agree to let Ray have a go in the Midwest.

He runs into the same problems: franchisees, bankrolled by country club types, add items to the menu, don’t keep the place clean, and it becomes a J.D. hangout rather than a family-friendly hangout. So Kroc starts tapping up-and-comers like himself; people with gumption. Things take off. Except the initial contract with the McDonald brothers gives him such a small percentage of the profits (and them even less) that he’s still in danger of falling into bankruptcy. Until he runs into Harry J. Sonneborn (B.J. Novak, doomed to play smart, slick characters), who gives him a way out: buy the property where the restaurant will stand, then lease it to the franchisee. A  different corporation is created for this revenue stream (initially Franchise Realty Corporation, eventually the McDonald’s Corporation), so Kroc doesn’t have to run things by the brothers. Eventually he becomes rich and powerful enough to defy them—at first in small ways, then in bigger ones—and the movie begins to focus on them more.

Which is when our hero, Ray Kroc, becomes the villain.

He is truly awful. He lawyers up—he has the money now—and he buys out their contract for a lump sum of $2.7 million and a handshake promise for one percent of the annual profits, which he reneges on. They get to keep their place but get this: They have to remove the McDonald’s name. Their name. Then, out of spite, Ray opens a McDonald’s right across the street from them and puts the original McDonald’s out of business. He also divorces his long-suffering wife (Laura Dern) and marries Joan Smith (Linda Cardellini), the wife of one of his franchisees (Patrick Wilson). We last see our hero in 1970, practicing a speech he’ll give before Gov. Reagan, in which he extols the virtues of his All-American success story; in which he tells the Hancock side of things.

The ruthless gene
That’s the how. Another question: why did our hero become the villain?

I would argue it’s because Ray Kroc is what all hugely successful businessmen are: ruthless. Kroc was so desperate for so long that once he got his chance he let nothing, particularly ethics and morality, stand in his way. The McDonald brothers, meanwhile, are simply hard-working innovators who don’t carry the ruthless gene. You can see it in Lynch’s eyes in the last third of the movie: He’s amazed and sickened by the way Kroc acts, but helpless. As a result, the innovators get steamrolled by Kroc and by history. Their name goes global but it’s not theirs.

Ironically, “The Founder” itself got steamrolled by its distributors, the Weinstein Company, which initially planned on a Nov. 25 rollout (prime box office real estate) then shifted it to August (so so), before dumping it in the least-fertile box-office month of the year: January. It actually opened on one of our darkest days: January 20, 2017; Donald Trump’s inauguration day.

I assume then Weinsteins dumped it because they felt the movie has too much Siegel and not enough Hancock. It wasn’t feel-good enough. A shame. It may not be the movie America wants, but it’s certainly the movie America needs.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The subtitle of “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” is like a warning to Hollywood execs not to resurrect franchises that did OK at the box office but hardly gangbusters; that were, as a fan might say to friends the morning after watching it on PPV, “not bad.”

Because this? This sequel to the “not bad”? It’s awful.

That doesn’t happen much with Tom Cruise movies. Say what you will about him—and we have—but he usually doesn’t pick lame projects. Usually.

Smuldering
So much in “Never Go Back” depends upon the sexuality of a star who seems to have little of it onscreen, and whose offscreen sexuality has been the subject of decades of rumors.

As the movie opens, Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) is solving cases for Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), then hitchhiking his way to the next town, a classic American drifter-hero in the mold of The Lone Ranger or Kwai Chang Caine. But with each case, and call back to Turner, the flirtation deepens, until he arrives in D.C. ready to take her to dinner and maybe back to her place. Except, darn the luck, she’s been arrested for espionage. It’s cell block as cock block.

(Question: Has Reacher ever seen Maj. Turner or did he just luck out? Did he know, for example, that she wasn’t 54 and dumpy but 34 and so smokin’ hot she should have her own adjective? I’d suggest smuldering, after the actress. You’re welcome.)

Another soupçon of sexuality comes from his classified file. Apparently Reacher is a dad. At least there was a paternity lawsuit a few years back. I assumed this, like the espionage charge against Maj. Turner, was trumped up, since the military never contacted him about it, and because he claims he remembers all the women he’s slept with. (All zero of them?) Even so, he checks out the potential offspring, a bratty 15-year-old named Samantha (Danika Yarosh), and even talks to her outside of a convenience store where she’s been shoplifting. It’s the one time in the movie when Reacher is being followed and doesn’t know he’s being followed. Photos are then taken that will come back to haunt him. Or us.

Because of course Reacher is pulled into the web. He’s accused of murdering Turner’s JAG attorney, which gets him into the same prison as Turner, which allows him to bust her loose. Sadly, when they get more intel, he realizes the bad guys know about Samantha (those photos), and they all have to go on the lam together: the aging drifter-hero, the smuldering Major, and this blonde brat who doesn’t know enough not to use a cellphone or credit card when being tracked by the NSA. Could the movie have worked without her? I don’t know. But with her it was a painful slog. I never cared for the character, the actress, any of it.

There’s a nemesis, of course, another top agent-y guy known only as “The Hunter” (Patrick Huesinger); and while Huesinger is good, the back-and-forth between the two, the taunting on the phone, tries to be McClane/Hans in “Die Hard” and fails. It also tries to be vaguely Batman/Jokerish. Hunter sees himself in Reacher: two hugely effective solo operatives. The movie undercuts this by giving Hunter henchmen: two more guys for Reacher to kill. The odds have to be further stacked against our hero.

The maguffin is Parasource, a private military contractor that’s bleeding money, so it’s smuggling opiates into the U.S. with the help of top military brass. That's right: top military brass. The movie is another gung-ho action flick with a decidedly mixed message if moviegoers ever thought about it for two seconds after the popcorn was gone.

Puff Daddy
Cruise is beginning to show his age, by the way, which is mine, 54. He still looks good, but he’s got a new puffiness around the eyes and cheeks. He’s also so slight in those skintight outfits that when he was brought into prison by a burly guard, I flashed on tiny Luke being led before the Emperor by Darth Vader. I’d suggest he try for more adult roles but in today’s Hollywood they’re hard to come by. And maybe he doesn’t want them? Maybe he wants to return to his pre-couch-jumping glory days of movie stardom? Seems so. Here’s what he has lined up for the next few years: another “M:I” sequel, a “Top Gun” sequel, and a reboot of “The Mummy.”

In “Never Go Back,” it all ends on the rooftops of New Orleans. Reacher kills The Hunter, learns the daughter isn’t his, and he and Turner don’t have sex. Then he hits the road again—the last hitchhiker in America. Sexless once more. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Unique concept, poor execution.

The titular Morris (Markees Christmas), a 13-year-old, pudgy African-American kid, lives in Germany with his father, Curtis (Craig Robinson of  “The Office”), a former soccer player turned coach, and navigates adolescence as a stranger in a strange land. He battles racial stereotypes (that he plays basketball well, dances well, has a big ---), pursues Katrin, a cute Geman girl two years his senior (Lina Keller), and tries his hand writing hip-hop. He visits a castle and learns German.

But mostly it’s the girl and hip-hop.

Problems:

• I didn’t buy Robinson as an international soccer player. Maybe former football player or wrestler? I also didn’t buy him as a coach. He didn’t occupy the field the way coaches do. He looked like he was a visitor; like he was trying to be inconspicuous as possible rather than standing and demanding and owning the space.
• I didn’t like our main character at all. There wasn’t enough interesting about him, probably because he wasn’t interested in enough things. Of his two great pursuits, he wasn’t particularly good with hip-hop (until he was), and the girl was both: 1) out of his league (physically), and 2) not worth his time (she’s kind of awful). Dude, you’re in Germany. Learn, absorb, appreciate. Which of course is the lesson of the movie at the end.
• I hated Katrin. Her prank at the party, with the fake kiss and the squirt gun to the crotch, was unforgiveable, and she never really redeemed herself. She got away with too much. What does she believe in? What does she care about? Besides her own looks and the effect it has on men/boys?
• I didn’t like Morris’ German teacher, Inka (Carla Juri), who seems both too close/chummy with him during lessons, then reads his personal notebook and freaks at the misogynistic rap lyrics.
• I didn’t like any of the Germans. How awful is that? Not one character is worth our time in this country? C’mon.
• The Yankee caps don't help. 

When I rented it, I thought it was written and/or directed by Robinson, but it’s actually the work of Chad Hartigan, who was born in Cyprus, and who fetishized Katrin a little too much for my comfort level.

The last 15 minutes almost made up for the first 75, but not enough. If you haven’t bothered, don’t bother. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land” has a romantic view of love and L.A. but not necessarily life. It knows there are barriers between where we are and where we want to be, and to cross those barriers sacrifices have to be made. That’s why the dream sequence. In the end, we get a 10-minute version of the story we’ve just watched in which all the endings are Hollywood endings. Then it cuts back to reality.

Well, “reality.” Both of our protagonists actually get what they want. Mia (Emma Stone) is a barista who wants to become a movie star, and she becomes a movie star. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a struggling jazz musician who wants to open his own jazz club, and he opens his own jazz club. They just don’t get each other.

Here’s a question: Why don’t they get each other? Why do they break up? Beyond the barriers, I mean.

You could say it’s because of a stain on the ceiling. Or because Mia is kind of a jerk.

Mia = My
Am I the only one who feels this way? I love me some Emma Stone but Mia bugged me throughout.

The movie is about the four seasons of a relationship. Our lovers start out cold to each other (winter), then thaw (spring), then it’s hot (summer), then, no, things begin to go cool off, and small things break apart (fall). Then winter again: It’s five years later and she’s married to someone else with a 2-year-old daughter.

It’s a movie steeped in movie lore. Our protagonists can’t walk a block without encountering another giant mural of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean and Charlie Chaplin. Never thought how odd this must be for struggling actors. Everywhere you go is a reminder of what you aren’t. It would be like me living in a city dominated by giant portraits of Hemingway, Mailer and Doctorow. But at least I’d live among people who knew who Hemingway, Mailer and Doctorow were.

The opening number takes place in that most L.A. of locales—a traffic jam on the freeway. We’re subjected to a cacophony of horns, curses, and different radio stations, and then, boom, it’s magical, Hollywood magical, and everyone is singing with and dancing to the same song, “Another Day of Sun.” Then as quickly as it started, it ends, and we’re back to the cacophony, and we meet our future lovers. She’s reading lines and doesn’t notice cars moving forward; he’s behind her and lays on the horn, then peels around and stares at her. She gives him a “God” look and flips him off. That’s our meet cute.

I like that but I didn’t like her. She’s put off that someone expects her to move forward in a traffic jam? How about a mea culpa?

She keeps doing this. She’s open-mouthed astonished that:

• she can’t leave work at a coffeeshop at the drop of a hat
• customers expect her to report complaints
• the world doesn’t recognize her talent
• the seats to her one-woman show aren’t filled

The real world keeps intruding upon the magical one. Just before our lovers are about to kiss for the first time, they’re stopped when: 1) a cellphone rings, and 2) a movie projector breaks down. (Interesting solution to the dramatist’s eternal question: How do you keep the lovers apart? Technology!) The movie they’re watching is “Rebel Without a Cause,” also set in L.A., with a big scene at the Griffith Observatory, which is where they head afterwards. It’s night, the place is closed, but they get in. We don’t even see them breaking in; they simply wander its hallways and exhibits alone, then magically, musically, ascend to the stars and dance there. Great scene.

That leads to summer of happy, bustling activity, during which he teaches her about jazz and encourages her to write her own one-woman play. Then trouble: Sebastian overhears Mia trying to placate her mother about his career. He’s talented but uncompromising, and he stares at the ceiling, at a stain there, and decides to compromise. He signs on to be the keyboardist with the band “The Messengers,” led by his former classmate, Keith (John Legend), whose music he doesn’t like. But it beats the Christmas jingles he’s been playing, right? And A-Ha and Flock of Seagulls? Anyway, the band takes off, they have money, she quits her barista job and gets ready for her one-woman show, and is forever grateful for the sacrifice Sebastian made for her and them.

Kidding. She never acknowledges the sacrifice. She attends one of their concerts and is stunned that he’s happily playing music he knows isn’t great. And when he makes time between tour dates to surprise her with a home-cooked meal, she brings it up—the crap music of The Messengers—and they get into an argument, and he accuses her of being jealous because her own career is going nowhere. And that’s it. She leaves him.

She leaves L.A., too, when her one-woman show tanks, to lick her wounds and think about a new career in her hometown of Boulder City, Nev.

Ah, but he gets a call from a casting director who saw her one-woman show, and wants to talk to her about a part in a major film. So he calls her. Kidding. He drives all the way out to Boulder City—300 miles away—to convince her to come back and read for the part. She does. She gets it. And on a bench overlooking L.A. she tells him how grateful she is. Kidding. She asks, “Where are we?,” meaning in their relationship, and he tells her she needs to concentrate on her career. They say they will always love each other but it already feels over. Because of the argument during the romantic dinner? They can’t get past that? They can’t have a little bit of fall in their summer? Or is it because the movie’s nearly over and we need a resolution?

We need the eggs
I still liked “La La Land.” I like its mix of quotidian and magical—our lovers’ first dance in the Hollywood hills; their dance and first kiss at the Griffith Observatory. I like her and her friends in different, primary-colored dresses strutting down the street on their way to a party. I like Sebastian on the dock with the fedora.

Gosling and Stone aren’t great singers. That’s one of the oddities of the concert scene, which is supposed to be tacky but still includes John Legend’s great voice belting it out. You think, “We could use more of that.” I liked their dancing more, particularly his, and I love how L.A.-drenched it is. It’s a love letter to sunny L.A. with a touch of Woody Allen at the end. Sebastian and Mia wind up like Alvy and Annie: two adults in love who have gone separate ways. It just made more sense in “Annie Hall.”

WARNING: SPOILERS

Early in the movie, Bob Stone, nee Robbie Wheirdicht (Dwayne Johnson), the former fat kid turned CIA agent, and Calvin “The Jet” Joyner (Kevin Hart), the former BMOC turned accountant, return to their old high school, which, for Bob, was the scene of countless humiliations. The deepest was probably the one that opened the movie—when bullies toss Robbie stark naked into the middle of a school assembly. Everyone laughs. Except Calvin. He’s sympathetic and gives him his letterman’s jacket to cover himself up. Robbie/Bob never forgot that small act of kindness. He also never gave the jacket back.

Anyway, back in the old hallways, Calvin tries to bring this up—the humiliations—but Bob dismisses them, saying he doesn’t even think about them anymore. 

Bob: Here’s the secret. You know what I did, Jet? I took all that stuff and I balled it up real tight and then I shoved it way down deep. And I just pretty much ignore it.
Calvin: That sounds ... really unhealthy, Bob.

The movie has a few such laugh-out-loud moments, and this was my favorite. I’ve loved The Rock since late ’90s WWF (I actually watched that shit for awhile), and Hart since seeing “The Z Shirt” sketch on SNL, and the two have great chemistry together. They’re the reason the movie works as well as it does. Plus we get a few choice cameos—particularly Jason Bateman as the former high school bully who may or may not have found religion.

But overall? Meh.

It’s another opposites-attract buddy action-comedy, with Hart playing the staid guy and Johnson the well-meaning but potential crazy CIA agent who may have gone rogue. This last bit is supposed to provide tension throughout—is Bob really a traitor?—when it does no such thing. Might as well ask: Is The Rock a traitor? No. So why bother? Because it gives Calvin no way out since even the CIA is after their asses? I guess. But the way the filmmakers prolonged the tension into the last reel was insulting.

Not to mention this: In the end, Bob gets his redemption at the high school reunion while Calvin gives up his staid job for a life of action in the CIA. I.e., he leaves behind the job most of us have (if we're lucky) for something that, when I was growing up, was morally suspect. Cf., Col. Flagg. Of course, since 1995, the CIA has had liaisons in Hollywood and have looked better as a result. Maybe accountants need a liaison. 

The screenplay was written by two “Mindy Project” dudes, Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen, with an assist from director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who also wrote-directed “Dodgeball” and “We’re the Millers.” His next project is “We’re the Millers 2.” Yes. Sadly, we are.

WARNING: SPOILERS

“20th Century Women” is a coming-of-age movie set in 1979—the year before we elected Reagan and everything began to go to hell.

It’s bittersweet, as all true coming-of-age movies are. The sweet is youth and discovery; the bitter is all that’s left unsaid and undone. It’s about the moment that’s gone forever and can never be reclaimed except through art.

I’d call the movie a character study but it’s really a characters study. The 15-year-old protagonist, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), lives with his iconoclastic mother, Dorothea (Annette Bening), in a big, drafty, fixer-upper in Santa Barbara populated by two renters: the mellow, ex-hippie handyman William (Billy Crudup), and the 25-year-old cancer survivor/photographer Abbie (Greta Gerwig), who teaches Jamie about punk rock and encourages him to get out. Meanwhile, his best friend, Julie (Elle Fanning), two years older, is half an adolescent boy’s wet dream. She’s the pretty girl who climbs through his bedroom window to sleep with him. Except it’s just that: sleep. No fooling around. She fools around with other guys, but with him it’s “just friends.” He handles this with more equanimity than I would have.

Still, his mother is worried. She was born in 1924 (I love that the movie tells us when every character was born), came of age during the Depression and World War II, and, while generally liberal in outlook, doesn’t get what the world is coming to. She doesn’t get punk music and its fashions, and can’t understand why teenage boys would engage in something as stupid as “the fainting game,” in which another kid pushes on your diaphragm and you keep breathing out until you faint. Jamie’s faint lasts a half hour and includes a trip to the hospital. After that, Dorothea decides she needs help raising him. She turns to Abbie and Julie, who question her choice. “What about William?” they ask. But Jamie doesn’t connect to men, says the mother; he connects with women.

It takes a village
Let me add: I love this movie. It’s almost tailor-made for me.

In 1979, I was about Jamie’s age, 16, and the product of divorce, as he was. Except my family split up along gender lines. I stayed with my father and older brother in south Minneapolis, while my mother and younger sister moved to Timonium, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore. We saw each other twice a year. Our side was all testosterone: the liberal, bookish, short-tempered version.

You know what I needed back then? This movie. Its matter-of-fact sexual lessons. Mine came from the usual wrong sources—Hugh Hefner, Hollywood, the shadowy intel of peers—while Jamie is helped out by a houseful of women. Abbie gives him two books, “Our Bodies, Our Selves” and “Sisterhood is Powerful,” a 1970 collection of feminist essays. There’s a great scene at the skate park when another kid brags about his sexual prowess and Jamie attempts to educate him about how women have orgasms. That, and the Talking Heads shirt Jamie is wearing (instead of true punk like Black Flag), leads to a fight, and a great moment when Dorothea is doctoring Jamie’s wounds back home:

Dorothea: What was the fight about?
Jamie [after a pause]: Clitoral stimulation.

It’s a crime Bening didn’t get an Oscar nomination for lead actress. Dorothea has this piercing look as she tries to fathom the world, and even though she comes away dumbfounded she keeps doing it. She keeps trying. But at 55, the world keeps getting away from her.

She’s there, all the time, whether inviting the fire chief to her house for dinner without a hint of flirtation, or with face scrunched as she tries to figure out what Black Flag is singing about. It’s a great homage to that generation of women—the ones who went to work during World War II and never lost the taste for it; who didn’t go quietly back into the home. Apparently it’s an homage to writer-director Mike Mills' own mother, just as his previous work, “Beginners,” from 2011, with Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer, was an homage to his father. I think this movie is better. A lot better. There’s more life in it. There’s wisdom.

Here’s Abbie to Jamie:

Whatever you think your life is going to be like, just know it’s not going to be anything like that.

Here’s Jamie and Julie discussing women’s orgasms. She admits neither she nor her friends have them. So why have sex? he asks.

There’s other reasons. The way they look at me, the way they all get a little desperate at some point. The little sounds they make. [She imitates.] And their bodies. You don’t know exactly how they’re gonna look or smell or feel or whatever until you do it.

Julie, at this point, is worried she’s pregnant but she isn’t. Abbie is worried that the cancer will prevent her from having kids, but she has them. We keep finding out where our characters will wind up, and it helps heighten the current moment. Seeing Abbie in her early 30s, with her husband, house and two kids, which is everything she wanted in 1979, it’s nice but melancholy. We’re happy for her but she’s become someone else. Who is this guy she's with? Where’s the girl we knew?

I’ve always had a problem with Greta Gerwig but I love her here. Crudup gives one of his best performances, as does Bening in a career of great performances. Is Mills some kind of genius? It’s beyond the dialogue. If you take the original meaning of director—one who directs actors—who was better in 2016?

Longing for meaning
Some of the movie’s wisdom is even presidential. There’s a scene at one of Dorothea’s dinner parties where everyone gathers around the TV to watch Jimmy Carter giving his infamous “malaise” speech. Afterwards, the men in the room all declare him dead in the water, while Dorothea calls the speech beautiful. Both are right. Telling people they have no confidence isn’t a great way to give people confidence. At the same time, Carter nails what’s wrong with us:

There is a growing disrespect for government, the schools, the news media, and other institutions. ... Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself, involved in the search for freedom. We are at a turning point in our history. The path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest, down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom. It is a certain route to failure.

And we went that route. It’s kind of astonishing to listen to today. Carter was treating us as adults but we weren’t. “20th Century Women” is about a boy progressing just as the country was regressing. That second part isn’t bittersweet; these days, it's just bitter.

WARNING: SPOILERS

A British girl, born to a Danish and Irish couple, and raised by an African-American man, teams up with a cute Mexican dude, two Chinese guys, and a Brit-Pakistani, not to mention a straightforwardly rude American droid, to steal the Death Star plans that wind up in R2-D2 in “Stars Wars IV: A New Hope.” You’d think with this kind of casting, which is so international it makes the U.N. seem monochromatic, that the movie would’ve done better abroad. It did fine: $500 mil and counting. But “Star Wars” movies tend to make 52%-56% of their gross overseas, while “Rogue One,” despite the cast, has managed just 49 percent.

If this doesn’t change, what does that say about all of the carefully constructed international casts Hollywood keeps putting together?

It's almost enough to make you want to go back to just white dudes.

Y Tu Rebellion Tambien
The one intriguing aspect of “Rogue One” for me is that instead of thinking, “OK, how are they going to get out of this one?”—as we normally do—here, if you know the backstory, if you know this is essentially “Star Wars 3.5,” you’re thinking: “OK, how are they going to die?”

None of these rebels are going to make it into other stories. We know that. Wasn’t there even a line in “Star Wars” about the rebels who sacrificed for the Death Star plans? So that’s what we anticipate: sacrifice rather than triumph. Which I found mildly interesting. For a few minutes. 

But director Gareth Edwards (“Godzilla”), and screenwriters Chris Weitz (“About a Boy”) and Tony Gilroy (Bourne movies), still blow it. For the sacrifice of Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) to have meaning, you have to care about them, and I didn’t. Not the way I cared about Obi-wan Kenobi in 1977. Not the way I cared about Rey and Finn last year. I’m not sure why this is. Because I like Daisy Ridley and Felicity Jones leaves me cold? Because Rey’s background is mysterious and Jyn’s is not? Because Jyn seems petulant throughout and Rey is determined? All of the above?

As for Cassian, well, it’s nice that Luna finally gets his blockbuster close-up nearly 15 years after “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” but ... a rebel leader? I didn’t buy it. He’s too pretty, too slight. His backstory is opaque—he lets Jyn know that he lost family, too, so she’ll stop thinking the galaxy revolves around her—but it’s not intriguing. His great dilemma is whether or not to assassinate Jyn’s father. We know which way he’ll go. His morality is our universe’s rather than his.

The filmmakers want to give us a slightly more complex world but within the same whooshy roller-coaster ride, and the combo isn’t great. Just once I’d like to see the heroes get out of a scrape by a mile rather than inches. I’d like them to look at their watches and go, “Oh yeah, we’ve got plenty of time.”

The entire movie is an attempt to explain away a “Star Wars” plot hole: Why did the Empire design a Death Star with such an obvious flaw as this exhaust port? Turns out it’s a feature not a bug. The architect, Jyn’s father, Galen (Mads Mikkelsen), designed the flaw so the weapon could be destroyed. Except ... if that's the case, couldn’t he have made it more accessible? You need the Force to make it work. You need a young Jedi making a million-to-one shot. Plus it raises more plot holes. Why didn’t Galen talk about the design flaw in the message he leaked out? Or why didn’t he simply leak the Death Star schematics? In some ways, the attempted correction is worse than the plot hole—particularly if, per this video, you didn’t think it was much of a plot hole.

We get to visit three new “Star Wars” planets in the sand/ice/swamp mode:

• The Tibet one
• The rainy one
• Palm Beach

The Tibet one is where they receive the message from Galen. The rainy one is where Galen isn’t assassinated by Cassian (but dies anyway). The Palm Beach one is where the Empire’s records, including the Death Star plans, are stored. The Empire blows it up anyway. Records, schmecords. It blows up Tibet, too. It keeps testing the Death Star on a city-wide scale. Alderaan was never the first. Once again, each new “Star Wars” movie adds incongruity to the original.

The Jedi's anger translator
I like Mads but he bored me here. Forest Whitaker’s Saw Gerrera with his respirator comes off as either C-grade Darth or Frank Booth in the making. I was happy to see a real martial artist (Donnie Yen) playing a Jedi, Chirrit Imwe, and he gets off the best line in the film (“Are you kidding me? I’m blind.”); and I liked the Buddhist mantra he chants, a variation of “Star Wars”’ most famous line (“I am one with the Force, the Force is with me”); but having the gun-toting Baze Malbus (Wen Jiang) behind him is a little like having Obama’s anger translator along for the ride.

The parallels to our world used to be vague but now they’re more explicit, and I don’t think that’s a good thing. Chirrit is too much Tibetan Buddhist; the rebels on the final assault are too much like U.S. troops before Normandy. The fanboys’ love for Darth Vader is also made more explicit—disturbingly so. In the end, when he takes on all the pasty-faced rebel forces, tossing them around like so many rag dolls, the film revels in it. It thrills at it. It’s saying: “We know this is what you really want. And so do we.”

Two dead actors make appearances: Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher. Both look fake and video-gamey. CG hasn’t been able to recreate the life in the eye yet, so we’re safe for the moment. I think of John Ford’s line about what to shoot on a rainy day in Monument Valley: “The most interesting and exciting thing in the whole world: the human face.” That’s still there, if enough of us are interested; if too many of us haven’t already gone over to the dark side. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Why does Hollywood keep trying to put a modern spin on classic stories (“Lone Ranger,” “Green Hornet”) from a more racist, patriarchal time? It never works. As in “Lone Ranger,” the hero here gets short shrift. We don’t get to see Tarzan being Tarzan until about 40 minutes in. And even then, it’s a little too CGI. Give me Johnny Weissmuller any day.

No one even falls into quicksand. What a rook. 

Tarzan, Lord of Greystoke Manor
“The Legend of Tarzan” doesn’t begin badly. An opening title card tells us European powers have divvied up the African Congo at the 1884 Berlin Conference, but King Leopold of Belgium has run up massive debt trying to exploit his portion’s ivory and mineral riches. So he sends his trusted assistant Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz) to discover “the legendary diamonds of Opar.”

That’s a nice mix of real history (Berlin conference) and 1920s-era adventure stories for boys (diamonds of Opar). Rom’s party winds up massacred by the natives, and it’s just him versus this huge warrior. Rom improbably wins. The tribal chief (Djimon Hounsou) then cuts a deal: the diamonds in exchange for ... Tarzan.

CUT TO: London, where John Clayton/Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgaard) now lives with his wife, Jane (Margot Robbie), as the stately Earl of Greystoke.

Wait, what? No discovery of Tarzan? He’s already been discovered? And civilized?

Sigh.

He also doesn’t want to go back to Africa. He’s invited by Leopold, through the British P.M. (Jim Broadbent, wasted), but declines. Because he senses it’s a trap? Either way, it’s up to George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson), the highly improbable (OK, impossible), trash-talking, 19th-century, African-American envoy, to tell him Leopold is enslaving the Africans again, so they should return to free them. Even that doesn’t work. But Jane wants to go, so sure.

In Africa, they stay with a tribe they know, and we get some backstory: how Tarzan used his body to shield Jane from a crazed Mangani ape; how she cared for him after that. Then, at night, Rom arrives to kidnap both Tarzan and Jane. Why Jane? As a control? Seems like extra work. No matter. Williams manages to free Tarzan before they get on the boat, but Rom keeps going because he knows Tarzan will follow to rescue Jane.

Get that? The biggest problem with Tarzan in 2016 is the racist aspect of it, the “white god” aspect of it, and Tarzan’s early fumblings here, and Williams rescue of him, help alleviate that for modern audiences. But it also lessens the legend. What good is Tarzan if he needs rescue by a 60-year-old dude, who, as they go in pursuit of Rom, can hardly keep up? The members of the tribe can, and they can swing from vines, too, with Tarzan, and this is also supposed to alleviate some of the racism. It actually does the opposite. You wonder:

1. How much stronger/faster is Tarzan than these guys? If he is, why? If he isn’t, why is he a legend? Just because he’s white?
2. No, it’s because he was raised by apes. But why did the ape mother decide to rescue the baby Tarzan and raise him as her own? Did she never come across black babies? Does she do it just because he’s white?
3. Wait, isn’t this just a white man’s fantasy that if one of ours was raised in the jungle we would be so much stronger/faster/smarter than the Africans that we would be lords of the jungle?

Yeah, that’s not good.

Hug it out, bra
Tarzan movies tend to be damsel-in-distress movies, too, and “The Legend of Tarzan” is no different, even if it tries to fudge things by making Robbie’s Jane “feisty.” But she’s still the damsel in need of rescuing. She’s still forced to endure meals and insinuating conversation with Christoph Waltz.

In the last half hour, screenwriters Craig Brewer and Adam Cozad (“Hustle & Flow” and “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” respectively), and director David Yates (four Harry Potter movies), finally let Tarzan be Tarzan, but by then you’re bored to death, and the phony CG doesn’t help. There’s also reconciliation and understanding with the tribal chief, who wanted to kill Tarzan because Tarzan killed his son (because his son killed Tarzan’s mom), but Tarzan cries, and admits his mistake, and ... Jesus. Rom gets his via crocodiles. Tarzan and Williams get bromance jokey. Tarzan and Jane stay in Africa.

What a failure. I don’t know who thought this story structure was a good idea—that the discovery of Tarzan was the boring part. I don’t know who thought making the tribesmen mini-Tarzans and bringing Sam Jackson along for the ride would alleviate the racism. 

To me, if you’re going to do Tarzan in the 21st century, you need to give the ape mother a reason to raise Tarzan besides the fact that he’s white. (In “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes” (1985), it’s because she recently lost her own baby.) It would also help to clarify why a human raised by apes would become so much stronger and faster than other humans.

Another way to alleviate the racism: You could make Tarzan black.

Scott Rudin: Call me.

WARNING: SPOILERS

It felt too much like a play.

I know: It was a play—a Pulitzer-Prize-winner by August Wilson, part of his “Pittsburgh Cycle” which documented the African-American experience every decade in the 20th century. This was the 1950s one. Even so, adapting for the screen, I wanted it a little more cinematic. We don’t get out of that backyard much. Plus we get great heaps of monologue the way you do in plays rather than movies. The movies would show rather than tell but this movie keeps telling and telling and telling.  

Of course, that’s part of the point, isn’t it? You could say that Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington), the 53-year-old garbage man/patriarch of the Maxson clan, hides his volatility with volubility. Or maybe his volubility is a symptom of his volatility. He keeps talking so he doesn’t do something worse. And in that talk, in his constant myth-making and challenges to others—which only his wife, Rose (Viola Davis), seems to stand up to—he creates more tension. By having him talk less, you remove that tension.

Even so, I could’ve used less talk. Or maybe I wanted the tension to lead elsewhere? Explode in a different way? I wanted to care more about Troy than I did. He doesn’t let you care about him, then wonders where you went. That’s the point of him, too. He's a man who builds fences. 

Death of a Garbageman
It’s similar to “Death of a Salesman,” isn’t it? Both Troy Maxson and Willy Loman are denied career advancement. In Troy’s case, it’s obviously racism (he was a great baseball player before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier), and in Willy’s it’s, what, simply the underside of the American dream? Or, as some have suggested, it could be a veiled anti-Semitism.

Both men have loyal wives whom they cheat on. Both have two boys with problems of their own and a neighbor/friend with whom they drink/play cards. There’s even the brother that’s there but not. Willy’s brother is Ben, the embodiment of the American dream, who walked into the jungle when he was 17 and walked out at 21—and by God he was rich! He’s dead now, but he continues to haunt Willy. Troy’s brother is the not-subtly-named Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson, Bubba of “Forrest Gump”), who is physically there but mentally not. He was shot during World War II and now has a metal plate in his head. He goes around selling fruit on the streets of Pittsburgh, with a toy trumpet strung to him, claiming to have been to St. Peter’s gate. For his injury in service to his country, Gabriel got $3,000 from the feds that Troy used to buy the house they live in. Gabriel used to live there, too; now he’s homeless. Troy feels guilty about all of this. He’s haunted by his brother as much as Willy is.

In the end, both men die. In the end, the wives give speeches defending them. In the end, attention must be paid.

As the movie opens, Troy is making the rounds in Pittsburgh clinging to the back of a truck and jawing with his friend, Bono (an excellent Stephen Henderson). He’s got complaints. Number one is that only whites drive the trucks. He’s officially complained about this, and now he’s worried because the deputy commissioner wants to see him. But it’s Friday, he’s got a pint of gin, and he and Bono drink it in his backyard and swap stories. Well, Troy does most of the swapping.  

Let’s ask the screenwriting 101 question: What does the guy want?

He wants his oldest son from another marriage, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), to be more responsible. Lyons plays jazz at a club, he’s got sketchy friends, he keeps borrowing hard-earned money from Troy. We get 10 minutes of arguing over 10 dollars before Rose (rather than Troy) relents. The money exchanges hands but there are no good feelings about it.

He wants his youngest son, Cory (Jovan Adepo), to not make the same mistakes he made. Troy was a great baseball player, he was denied opportunity because of the color line, and he doesn’t want it to happen to Cory. Except that’s the last war; the color line is, if not gone, at least traversable. Besides, the boy is getting college scholarship offers to play football, and Troy wants him to learn a trade? It’s college! That’s how you get ahead in America. Everybody knows that. It annoyed me that no one could make this argument stick. But then, there’s a sense that Troy doesn’t want his son to succeed. Troy wants to remain rooster in his own henhouse, and that stops if Cory gets educated.

What else does Troy want? He wants gin on Friday, an audience for his stories. He wants his son to help him build the titular fence in the backyard. His biggest want takes place off-screen: He has an affair with a younger woman at work that leads to a child. The affair was a place where he didn’t have to be responsible, but this irresponsibility simply creates more responsibility—for Rose, in particular, who has to raise the child, a girl, when the mother dies giving birth. It also leads to Troy’s estrangement from both Rose and Bono. The final estrangement is with Cory, who, afraid of his father, and unable to physically beat his father, joins the U.S. Marines.

One of the few things Troy wants and gets? His meeting with the deputy commissioner goes well, and he becomes the man driving the truck rather than hauling the trash. He breaks the color barrier! He’s Jackie Robinson! Except it’s not what he wants. Instead of being on the back of the truck, jawing, he’s up front, alone, with no one to talk to. A Troy without an audience is a Troy who can’t mythologize himself, and he shrinks. By the end of the movie, his main conversation is with death.

A rose is a rose
This is the third movie that Denzel has directed and he doesn’t do a poor job of it, but I’m not a fan of underlining points and Denzel is: the rose falling from Rose’s hands; the portraits of MLK and JFK on the wall. I already see it; I don’t need Denzel to then tap me on the shoulder and say, “You see that? Right there? That. You see? That.”

As an actor, though, I could watch him all day. Someone wrote recently that Denzel is the best over-actor in the world and there’s something there. The actor playing Cory is fine but too small in stature for the role; I want him to at least look like he could challenge his father. Viola Davis is a national treasure. 

The coda at the end, on the day of Troy’s funeral, is one of the more interesting scenes in the movie. Maybe because you have that sweet interplay between Cory, returning home in uniform, and his new half-sister, Raynell (Saniyya Sidney), who’s adorable, and who, if you forward-date (she turns 18 in ... 1975 or so), has a chance in life. Or maybe because Troy’s voice is finally silent. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Hollywood has done up the JFK assassination every which way. We’ve seen it from the perspective of the president (many), conspirators to kill the president (“Executive Action”), and the doctors, nurses and FBI men in Dallas the day the president was killed (“Parkland”). We’ve seen movies about men who doubted the official version of the assassination (“JFK”), about the man who killed the assassin (“Ruby”), and about a man who travels back in time to kill the assassin before he can kill the president (“11/22/63”).

Here, Hollywood finally gets around to telling the story from the perspective of the woman sitting next to him in the car.

Myth > History
“Jackie” is an atmospheric movie—a powerful rendering of one of the saddest weekends in American history—but it’s also interested in story. More, it’s interested in story-making and mythmaking, and the difference between the two.

It’s really a tale of post-traumatic stress disorder. Our perspective is Jackie’s (Natalie Portman) throughout. The camera stays close to her face, and we feel her horror, her attempt to process what can’t be processed: wiping her husband’s blood off her face in the Air Force One bathroom; standing stunned as LBJ takes the oath of office; refusing Linda Bird’s entreaties to change out of the blood-splattered pink Chanel suit she was wearing that day. “Let them see what they’ve done,” she says, eyes flashing. She doesn’t remove it until she’s back in the White House, where she showers the blood and viscera of her husband out of her hair. There’s that sad moment telling Caroline and John-John that daddy won’t be coming home. It’s extra sad because we never imagined the scene before, but yes, somebody had to tell them and apparently it was her. One of the many awful tasks she assigned herself that weekend.

The key moment, for both the movie and history, occurs as she rides with Bobby (Peter Sarsgaard) in the ambulance taking JFK to the D.C. hospital. She asks the driver and passenger-seat nurse if they know who James Garfield was. They don’t. Then she asks about Abraham Lincoln. Of course they know him.

The rest is her fight to make sure her husband isn’t forgotten like Garfield but remembered like Lincoln.

The movie comes in four parts:

1. Jackie being interviewed at Hyannis Port by a journalist (Billy Cruddup), the weekend after the funeral weekend
2. Long flashbacks to the assassination and its aftermath—particularly the logistics of the burial and the funeral
3. Short flashbacks to the 1962 TV special, “A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy”
4. Jackie’s talks with an Irish priest (John Hurt), as her stillborn babies are reinterred next to their father in Arlington National Cemetery the week after she talks to the journalist.

The parts are at odds with each other: 1) and 2) are about myth-making. Jackie knew people forgot men but remembered myths, so she made JFK’s funeral, his final burial place at Arlington, and his short presidency—comparing it to the big Broadway hit of the day, “Camelot”—mythic. The point of the ’62 White House special was the opposite: It was about bringing history to life. Bill Walton (Richard E. Grant), who helped her redecorate the White House and show it off in that TV special, tells her how important it all was. “They need to know that real men actually lived here,” he says. “Not ghosts and storybook legends. People who faced adversity and overcame it.” But she doesn’t want Kennedy to become Garfield, a forgotten relic of history, so she makes him mythic. She fights everyone in this endeavor.

The Kennedy family originally want a burial site in Massachusetts, but Jackie nixes it (“I don’t mean to upset your mother,” she tells Bobby, “but Brookline is no place to bury a president.”); then she personally chooses the spot at Arlington so many of us have since visited.

LBJ and his team are wary of her funeral plans that mimic Lincoln’s—particularly the dignitaries walking out in the open behind Jack’s casket. At this point they don’t know if Oswald was a lone nut or if there are others out there. For example, there are death threats against visiting French president Charles De Gaulle—and so they suggest bullet-proof cars. They keep going back and forth on this. There’s a great scene between Jackie and LBJ aide Jack Valenti (Max Casella), where, amid the stifled politeness, he seems to get his way. Then just before leaving she says this:

Inform them that I will walk with Jack tomorrow. Alone if necessary. And tell General De Gaulle, if he wishes to ride in an armored car—or in a tank for that matter—I won’t blame him. And I’m sure the tens of millions of people watching won’t either.

Boom.

She battles the journalist, too. This was the part of the movie I bought into the least, to be honest, even before I knew Cruddup was Teddy White, a Kennedy family friend. Here’s a guy who has access to the most sympathetic woman in the world two weeks after the assassination, and though that access obviously comes with strings attached—she gets to dictate what does or does not wind up in the article—it’s still one of the biggest scoops of the decade. Yet Cruddup seems to shrug his way through the interview. He seems exasperated. There’s an exchange later with the priest, where Jackie asks him what men see in her now:

Priest: Sadness. Compassion. [pause] Desire, maybe. You’re still a young woman, Mrs. Kennedy.
Jackie (wistful): I used to make them smile.

Cruddup's journalist displays little of these feelings. He seems to be rolling his eyes through the endeavor.

Myth relies on history
The casting is a mixed bag. Loved Portman. Caspar Philipson, the Danish actor they got for JFK, is an astonishing look-alike—particularly the eyes—but also a teeny man. Bobby towers over him when it was the opposite in real life. I didn’t buy Cruddup as the journalist, and I didn’t buy Sarsgaard as Bobby—he wasn’t forceful enough or crisp enough. I loved John Hurt as the priest, but even he seemed to have too little sympathy for the most sympathetic woman in the world. At the same time, their scenes together are the best in the movie. Maybe because all the bullshit has receded? It’s Truth with a capital “T”: life, death, confession.

Indeed, my favorite exchange, not just in this movie but for most 2016 movies, is the priest’s recounting of the parable of the blind man. Jackie is wondering what kind of God would allow not only the assassination but also the loss of her two babies, including one in August, and he says the following as they walk in Arlington National Cemetery:

Let me share with you a parable. [pause] Jesus once passed a blind beggar on the road, and his disciples asked: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned. He was made blind so that the works of God could be revealed in him.” ...

Right now you are blind. Not because you’ve sinned. But because you’ve been chosen—so that the works of God may be revealed in you.

I’m an agnostic—in almost everything, really—but if you’re going to reconcile the horrors of the world with a personal, omnipotent God, this is a beautiful way.

“Jackie” was written by Noah Oppenheim, a producer of the “Today” show (of all things), and directed by Chilean director Pablo Larraín (“No”), and it's a deeply felt movie and much recommended. Uncommented upon? Jackie created the myth of Camelot, but it was subsequent history that made that myth resonate. This is the myth:

Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot

Yet if LBJ hadn’t led to Nixon who led to Reagan; if the Gulf of Tonkin resolution hadn’t gotten us into a full-scale war in Vietnam; if the civil rights movement hadn’t led to the Black Power movement, and if the rich hadn’t kept getting richer and the poor kept getting screwed, it might not have felt like a brief, shining moment. Her metaphor would’ve been an addled thought from a distraught woman. Instead, it feels like the truth.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I’ve been hearing end-of-the-year buzz that “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” is  a way underrated movie; that it’s actually, you know, good. Some go further: Some suggest it’s this generation’s “This Is Spinal Tap.”

If so, pity this generation.

I know it’s unfair to compare a contemporary with a classic. But since others raised the issue...

Why ‘joke’ is less funny
“Spinal Tap”’s humor grew out of the conventions of real music documentaries, while “Pop” feels as if it’s riffing on copies of copies of copies of copies. “Tap” is grounded. Its cities on the tour are real. Its main characters may be idiots but there’s something human about them. They’re half caricature/half character, while “Pop”’s Conner4Real (Andy Samberg) is all caricature. There’s no there there. Conner is just a joke, and the movie treats him as a joke. When you do this, ironically, you remove a lot of the funny.

There’s a trajectory to Tap’s downfall, and it follows their American concert tour—east coast to west coast. Their humiliations start small but grow: a canceled date in Boston (“I wouldn’t worry about it, though, it’s not a big college town”), a misplaced hotel reservation in Memphis, flak over the album cover. For a time, Tap seems oblivious to it all; they still think they’re on top of the world. Then the humilations deepen: second billing at a Holiday Inn, a no-show album signing, playing an Air Force Base. Their onstage humiliations are human-sized and serve to prick their pomposity: Nigel can’t stand back up again after bending back in classic rock-out pose; Derek’s “pod” doesn’t open; they get lost beneath the arena in Cleveland and the Stonehenge props are tiny rather than towering.

Conner’s humiliations are outsized and less funny. To jazz up his act, he goes for a quick-change bit, but has to hide his junk to make it work, and a wardrobe malfunction reveals him to be seemingly dickless. (I like that, backstage, his handlers try to assure him that no one noticed.) To bury that story—as if it wouldn’t be a meme forever—his publicist (Sarah Silverman) suggests he propose to his girlfriend (Imogen Poots), which he does, with Seal singing her favorite song and her favorite animals (wolves) nearby. But the singing upsets the wolves, who attack the guests and turn the garden party into bloody chaos.

Meanwhile, his opening act, Hunter (Chris Redd), eclipses him in popularity, not to mention vindictiveness. But when Conner asks his manager, Harry (Tim Meadows), to kick him off the tour, he discovers Hunter is Harry’s client, too. It’s Conner who goes back home, the tour a failure, his career seemingly over.

So what happens? He becomes a better person, of course. He once fronted a boy band, The Style Boyz, and he reconciles with the estranged members he screwed over: DJ Owen (Jorma Taccone), and lyricist Lawrence (Akiva Schaffer). All along, we’ve been following the latter, who, after a stab at a solo career, has been farming and woodcarving in Colorado. Both are treated as jokes—as if anyone could enjoy such things, so far away from the limelight—with the former having a typical comedy punchline: he’s been farming weed, yo. All three reunite on the “Poppy” awards, and are back on top. Added bonus: Hunter is a dick to Mariah Carey onstage, so no one likes him anymore. Because it’s never enough for you to succeed; your enemies have to fail.

‘I feel young again! I feel ... 38!’
It’s interesting to note the need for a villain. Does “Tap” have a villain? You could argue the Yoko-Ono-ish Jeanine Pettibone (June Chadwick), who controls David, and causes the riff with Nigel, and who takes over from their seemingly incompetent manager, Ian Faith. She has a bit of a comeuppance as well: Ian returns, and in Japan, where Spinal Tap is resurrected, the two eye each other warily. But all of it is much subtler than “Popstar”'s disimissal of Hunter.

You know what’s amazing to me? Andy Samberg is actually older in “Popstar” than Michael McKean and Christopher Guest were in “Spinal Tap”: 38 years vs. 37 and 36. I still think of Samberg as the next generation but “Lazy Sunday” was more than 10 years ago.

The Lonely Island guys give us a few good parody songs: “Finest Girl (Bin Laden Song),” along with Conner’s would-be testimonial to gay marriage, “Equal Rights,” in which he continually insists, “I’m not gay.” But there’s nothing as clever as marrying the bombast of gangster rap with a very ordinary, very white Sunday afternoon.

One of the biggest problems for me is that “Popstar” doubles down on the very thing it should be satirizing: celebrity culture. 50 Cent, Carrie Underwood and Simon Cowell, as the mockumentary’s talking heads, act like they’re in the on the joke, when, to me, they’re part of the problem. But the movie sees them as part of the solution. 

A few years ago, Samberg co-starred as the son of Adam Sandler in the dreary comedy, “That’s My Boy.” Not yet, but he’s becoming dangerously close. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Am I the only one who sees a metaphor for the 2016 election in this movie? Hear me out.

Dr. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch, doomed to play brilliant but pompous) plays a brilliant but pompous neurosurgeon who gets into a car accident and damages the nerves of his steady hands, rendering him useless and purposeless. But after hearing of a paraplegic who learned to walk again, he travels to Katmandu and trains at Kamar-Taj under the Ancient One (a bald Tilda Swinton), with the idea of eventually curing himself and returning to practice. Instead, he becomes “Master of the Mystic Arts”; and instead of saving one person, or several people, he saves the whole damn universe.

But he makes an enemy in the process: his friend, and one-time mentor, Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Why?

OK, back up a bit, because it’s actually fairly clever what Strange does.

The movie opens with Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) and his team of bad guys/one hot girl stealing pages from an ancient book that allow them to tap into the power of Dormammu, the dark dimension. For some reason, these guys also invite Dormammu into our universe, and that’s destroying everything, particularly Hong Kong. So Strange uses the Eye of Agamotto (don’t ask) to turn back time; then he travels to the dark dimension, where he creates an infinite time loop so that every time Dormammu kills him, he returns to battle again. It’s sort of like “Groundhog Day” or “End of Tomorrow” but in miniature. I like this bit. He knows he can’t beat Dormammu so he lets it get bored until it agrees to leave the Earth alone. He outsmarts it.

So why does Mordo have a problem with this? Because bending time is forbidden.

Mordo, you see, is a stickler, a puritan. He’d rather have the world end than break the rules to save it. He was earlier incensed that the Ancient One tapped into Dormammu’s dark power to keep living, even though, in the long run, she was doing good.

And that’s the metaphor:

• Ancient One = Hillary
• Dormammu = Trump
• Tapping into Dormammu's power = Paid speech to Goldman Sachs
• Mordo = Bernie, or a Bernie Bro

Things worked out better in their universe.

Overall, “Doctor Strange” is efficient and fun but it’s hardly breaking new ground. On the contrary, it’s going over much of the same ground that “Iron Man” did eight years ago: The vainglorious man with Ronald Colman moustache (now goatee) brought low, then raised higher with greater powers and greater purpose. I guess Stan and Jack liked that storyline.

Once Strange arrives in Katmandu, the various concerns/tensions are all resolved with such facility as to seem facile:

• Will the Ancient One accept him? Yes.
• Is he too egotistical to learn the mystic arts? He is ... but he does anyway.
• Will he just cure himself and go back to his pompous ways, lording it over second-raters like Michael Stuhlbarg? Nope.
• Will he be seduced by “the Dark Side” like Kaecilius? Nope.

Oddly, once the battles begin, Mordo begins to worry not that Strange will be seduced by the dark side but that he doesn’t have the will to fight the dark side. It’s a concern introduced at the 11th hour and dismissed at 11: 10, and was never a concern of ours. If there’s one thing Strange isn’t, it’s a quitter.

Collecting comics in the 1970s, Doctor Strange was never one of my favorite superheroes. I didn’t understand his powers, I don’t like alternative dimensions that look like a sketchy part of outer space, and I’m generally not a fan of vainglorious men with Ronald Colman moustaches. But somehow Marvel Entertainment makes this movie work.

Think of that. Marvel can take one of its lamest characters, run him through three screenwriters, hand him off to a director mostly known for shitty horror flicks (“Devil’s Knot,” “Sinister 2”), and wah-lah: a fun flick that mixes elements of “Kung Fu,” “Groundhog Day,” and the mindbending landscapes of MC Escher. Hell, they even throw in a bit of “The Greatest American Hero”: a man doing comic battle with his superpowered clothes.

Cf., DC, which can’t even put the two most popular superheroes in the world together without making a crap salad.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester By the Sea” unfolds slowly and naturally. It’s like life in that we make assumptions about the people we’re watching. It’s not like life in that we get to stick around to see how our assumptions are wrong.

Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is a handyman/super for four apartment buildings in Quincy, Mass., near Boston. He does his work calmly, competently, but with something missing, some spark. Early on, he seems to have the patience of Job. He shovels the sidewalks, fixes the drips, unclogs the toilets without complaint. At one point he overhears a tenant say she’s attracted to him, and she gives him a tip, but he doesn’t respond. Because he just unclogged her toilet and that’s no way to begin a relationship? Later, at a bar with a beer, he doesn’t respond to another woman’s flirtations. Then it’s near closing, he eyes two guys across the bar, and you think: Of course. He’s gay.

Then he picks a fight with the two guys. Turns out he’s not gay, not calm, doesn’t have the patience of Job.

Slowly, as he heads north to the titular town to deal with the sudden heart attack/death of his older brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), we find out how he got this way.

At the local high school, he’s twice referred to as the Lee Chandler, and we wonder if he was a star athlete. Nope. When his brother’s will is read and he discovers he’s the guardian of 15-year-old Patrick (Lucas Hedges), he almost flips out. “I’m just a backup,” he says. Later, in flashback, we see him with a wife, Randi (Michelle Williams), and one ... two ... three kids? Really? So he doesn’t seem like a backup there. And hey, what happened to those kids anyway?

That, of course, turns out to be the answer to everything: Why Lee is living in a small, cramped basement apartment in Quincy, why he’s full of rage, why something is missing from him, why he can’t return to Manchester-By-the-Sea.

A few years ago I read a great piece by David Grann in The New Yorker about Cameron Todd Williams, a Texas man who was put to death for setting a fire that killed his wife and three girls—except he probably didn’t set that fire. The state of Texas probably executed an innocent man. I kept flashing to it, watching this movie, since Lee’s tragedy is similar. Drunk one night in a cold house, Lee starts a fire in the fireplace to warm up his girls, then walks down to the nearest convenience store to get more beer. When he returns his house is ablaze. His wife makes it out, his kids don’t.

The difference is that Lee isn’t charged with murder but wants to be. When the cops tell him he’s free to go, he tries to blow his brains out in the station. That’s why the basement apartment in Quincy. It’s his punishment, his prison. He’s doing life without parole. It’s also why he doesn’t want to leave—particularly for Manchester By the Sea, which just dredges everything up.

Thus the movie’s main conflict is set up: Lee, the new guardian, doesn’t want to stay in Manchester, but Patrick, with friends and girlfriends and school, and a father’s boat he wants to return to, doesn’t want to leave. Patrick has the better up-front argument, Lee the better buried argument. But even as this argument gets unburied, we see Lee making a go at it. We see him asking for work. We see him running into his ex. This is a powerful scene, and it also upends our assumptions. We expect that he’ll want forgiveness from Randi and she won’t give it. Instead, she has more than forgiveness; she has love. And he finds this unbearable. “No, you don’t understand,” he says, breaking away from her. “There’s nothing there.” Williams is so good in this one scene she might win an Oscar for it.

I still remember Roger Ebert’s review of “The World According to Garp.” Watching, he kept thinking, “This is nice ... this is nice  ... this is nice,” but for all of those nice scenes the movie never added up to anything meaningful. I think a lot of indie movies are like that. “Manchester” isn’t. All of its small scenes add up. The movie doesn’t give us a happy ending (as with studio films) or tragic ending (as with indies), but balances on that razor-thin line of honesty and understanding; of things that aren’t said and things that don’t need to be said. Its redemption is small, but more poignant for its smallness. For Christ’s sake, go see it. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

The older I get, the less I want to see this kind of shit.

“Nocturnal Animals,” written and directed by Tom Ford, from a novel by Austin Wright, spends two hours veering between the dull and horrific.

On the dull side, we watch Susan Morrow, a beautiful modern-art gallery director, with long red hair forever cascading down one side of her face, trapped inside her beautiful glass house. Her marriage to her beautiful husband, Hutton (Armie Hammer), is falling apart and the girl just doesn’t know what to do with herself. So she reads an early galley of a novel, “Nocturnal Animals,” that her first husband, Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal), not only sent to her but dedicated to her.

The novel is the horrific part. In it, a husband and father, Tony (whom Susan imagines as Edward), and his attractive red-haired wife and daughter (whom Susan imagines as Isla Fisher and Ellie Bamber), are run off the road in the middle of the night in Bumfuck, West Texas by three yahoos, led by Ray Marcus (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Feigning to help, the yahoos slowly terrorize the family until two of them kidnap the wife and daughter in Tony’s car. The third drives Tony into the middle of the West Texas desert and dumps him. Near death, Tony makes his way back to the road and gets a ride to the police station, where he meets the local sheriff, Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon), who investigates. And outside of an abandoned shack in the middle of the desert, they find the wife and daughter: naked, raped, murdered, and provocatively (one might say artistically) posed.

For some reason, Susan keeps reading.

Me, I would’ve thrown the book across the room. I would’ve walked out of the movie but I was at the theater with a friend. The movie plays off my worst fears—not being strong enough to protect those who need protecting—and gives nothing back for the trauma: no art, no insight. The Sheriff eventually tracks the yahoos but Ray is released for ... lack of evidence? Or does he make a plea deal? Either way, Andes, who’s dying of cancer, and Tony plot to kidnap and kill him but he gets away. Then Tony tracks him to the abandoned shack, has a gun on him, lets him yap. About raping and murdering his wife and daughter. And still Tony doesn’t act. He actually waits until Ray attacks him with a poker before shooting. Both men die. The end.

Well, the end of the novel anyway. The movie keeps going. Back to the boring part.

To be honest, it ends OK. After reading this awfulness, Susan gets it in her head to meet up with Tony at a romantic restaurant. She’s obviously thinking that she shouldn’t have left him in the first place—that her rich, bitchy mother (Laura Linney), seen in flashback, got into her head, and Susan began to see Edward through her mother’s eyes as a failure. Oh right: the abortion, too. Back in the day, just as she began a fling with Hutton, she finds she’s pregnant with Edward’s child but decides to abort the baby. Afterwards, she’s crying in a car in Hutton’s big consoling arms when she spots Edward watching them with cold, betrayed eyes.

So is the novel revenge of a kind? For the abortion or the affair? And if she had the abortion, who’s the red-headed, college-age daughter she rings up shortly after starting the novel? Hutton’s? How old is Amy Adams supposed to be here?

Regardless, she gets dolled up to meet Edward at a swanky restaurant, arrives first, has a drink, and slowly realizes that he’s not coming; he’s standing her up. That’s the end of the movie.

And is that Edward’s final revenge? If so, how does he know she’d react the way she reacted to the novel? Here’s a story about a woman similar to you being raped and murdered; I totally know you’ll fall for me again after reading it. And THEN I’ll stand you up. Ha ha.

Me, I’m done with this kind of thing. I can’t imagine why Tom Ford of all people chose something so pointless and depraved for his second feature.

WARNING: SPOILERS

What are the odds that in the federal case striking down state laws banning interracial marriage, the plaintiff’s name would be “Loving”?

I thought about that a lot as the Obergefell case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015. I mean, no offense James Obergefell, but Loving v. Virginia? That’s stark. It’s as if the case were called Love v. Racism. One wonders if that wasn’t part of the appeal for U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the ACLU. They had the right name.

“Loving,” written and directed by Jeff Nichols (“Mud,” “Midnight Special”), is good history but so-so drama. It’s as spare and quiet as its protagonists. Too much so.

The first half works. We watch as the day-to-day love, and then pregnancy, and then marriage, between Richard and Mildred Loving (James Edgerton and Ruth Negga) of Caroline County Virginia, comes to the attention of the authorities. One of the most powerful scenes is when they plead guilty to, you know, marriage, and bend to the weight of an oppressive system. Standing in U.S. District Court before Judge Bazile (David Jensen), you see Richard’s eyes searching for an answer and not finding it. Some part of him knows he’s right to love as he loves. But he also knows he’s not smart—not book smart, like his lawyer Frank Beazly (Bill Camp, always a pleasure)—and he can’t find a way out. There’s almost something like Huck Finn in this scene. Huck acted on a greater inner morality to help free Nigger Jim, but felt immoral doing so because he was going against society’s norms. Richard is a step up. He knows society is wrong; he just can’t articulate it.

White, black, yellow, malay and red
He can’t articulate much. He does his talking with his hands—building rather than fighting. He works construction during the week and tinkers with cars on the weekend. He’s a maestro with both. Otherwise, he’s quiet, simple. At her family’s dinner table in 1958, one of her brothers, whom Richard helps with drag racing, asks him how many races he’s won over the years, and you see Richard tabulating in his mind. Then he comes back with: “A lot.” To dinner-table laughter, including his own. Another nice scene.

Richard is actually one of my favorite kinds of people—the quietly efficient man—and Edgerton, in an Oscar-nomination-worth performance, embodies him. He’s a man caught between love of wife and love of home, and he does what he can to try to make it work.

As a character, though, Richard disappoints in the second half, which is maybe why I found the second half disappointing. Inspired by the March on Washington, Ruth writes U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who forwards her letter to the ACLU, whose representative, a young lawyer named Bernard Cohen (Nick Kroll), contacts her at their home in D.C. He’ll take the case, no charge, but Richard is suspicious from the get-go. He never gets behind, never trusts, his legal team—which eventually includes Phil Hirschkop (Jon Bass)—and one wonders if it’s because they’re both Jewish, educated, or because he’s had enough of the criminal justice system. Or is it because they’re outsiders? Different? From Brooklyn? Richard still trusts the local. He thinks it’s enough to go before Judge Bazile again. He trusts Bazile more than he trusts the federal government. Plus ca change.

He shouldn’t. This is Bazile’s judgment on interracial marriage once the ACLU gets involved:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

(One wonders about that “Malay”; what color was “Malay”? Answer here. Not pretty. )

I could’ve used more of the legal arguments and precedents, to be honest. That’s a lot to ask from a movie, I know, but its point of view is ours: that the anti-miscegenation law is immoral. Yet it was still law for decades, and it still used the U.S. Constitution as a rationale for its injustice.

What was that rationale? It actually came up in this case. In 1965, Cohen and Hirschkop appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court, where the Virginia law was upheld, and among its arguments was one first put forth in 1883 in Pace v. Alabama: that what the state did to the Lovings was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment “because both the white and the non-white spouse were punished equally for the crime of miscegenation.” That’s some twisted logic right there; yet that logic stayed on the books for nearly a century. We need that reminder; we need to know the future isn’t secure.

Nor did the Loving case even end it. The South, being the South, kept rising up. From Wikipedia:

Local judges in Alabama continued to enforce that state's anti-miscegenation statute until the Nixon administration obtained a ruling from a U.S. District Court in United States v. Brittain in 1970. In 2000, Alabama became the last state to adapt its laws to the Supreme Court's decision, when 60% of voters endorsed a ballot initiative that removed anti-miscegenation language from the state constitution.

Yes. 2000.

Sparrows and robins
Watching “Loving,” I kept thinking of my grandmother, who grew up in Carroll County, Maryland, about 150 miles from Caroline County, Virginia.

I remember visiting her in 1989 after I’d been away in Taiwan for a year, and at one point she asked me if I’d had a Chinese girlfriend. I said yes. She absorbed this, and then with a head nod, added, “They make good wives: meet at the door, take off your shoes, rub your feet.” This devolved into a conversation about interracial relationships. She was still against the black/white variety, and, more, still made the same 1950s arguments they make in this movie. Sheriff Brooks (Marton Csokas), trying to be kind, tells Richard about God’s law, “sparrow with a sparrow, robin with a robin,” and my grandmother, in 1989, said something similar: “A big black bird don’t mate with a little yella sparrow,” she said. Then she smiled as if she were playing the trump card; as if that argument ended it.

The outrage of the first half of the movie almost demands something like the Ron Motley deposition scene in “The Insider” (“You do not get to instruct anything around here!”), but Nichols withholds it. Maybe it was undramatic but he certainly under-dramatizes it. Ruth stays quiet but polite but interested in the case; Richard stays reticent and distant and wary. The lawyers never really connect with him (nor Nichols with the lawyers), and neither Ruth nor Richard show up at the U.S. Supreme Court when their case is argued. The argument before the court isn’t fiery. Maybe it wasn’t. The best line is Richard’s, spoken on his front porch, after Cohen asks him if there’s anything he’d like to say to the justices. His response comes out more confused than determined: “Tell them I love my wife,” he says.