Movie Reviews - 2016 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

There’s a lot of in-jokes in this thing, winks to the franchise and its fans, that don’t make much sense given its timeline. Right: timeline. There are different timelines to “X-Men” movies now. We should be handed Playbills before entering the theater. Charts should be set up in lobbies. Professors should give lectures.

This is how I believe it goes. The first three “X-Men” movies are on the same timeline, but director Brett Ratner screwed the pooch with the third one by killing nearly everyone: Prof. X, Jean Gray, Cyclops. So the next two movies, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” (2009) and “X-Men: First Class” (2011), were prequels, while the most recent “X-Men” movie, “Days of Future Past” (2014), created an alternative timeline in an attempt to retcon the shit out of Ratner’s shit.

In “Days of Future,” Wolverine goes back to 1973 to stop a minor incident (the hush-hush assassination of an anti-mutant scientist) and unleashes a major one: the outing of all mutants in Paris and the near assassination of Pres. Nixon on live TV by Magneto (Michael Fassbender), who wrecks both RFK Stadium and the White House in the process. But Mystique stops him, showing there are good mutants, and thus humans become less fearful and less likely to create anti-mutant machines in the future.

Right. Because if there’s one “good one” in a group of scary people, everyone automatically trusts all of them. Cf., for counter examples, the whole of human history.

A long time ago
Anyway, we’re now on a timeline in which mutants have been outed in 1973. Here’s the thing: This knowledge doesn’t seem to change much. Ronald Reagan is still elected president in 1980, probably meaning Jimmy Carter in ’76, probably meaning Nixon was still impeached in 1974. A being lifts RFK Stadium and drops it like a ring around the White House, yet the Watergate scandal still tops headlines in the summer of ’73? It’s like a Bizarro version of the Butterfly Effect: Magneto’s shit storm in D.C. doesn’t affect a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia.

Oh, and it doesn’t affect George Lucas’ story ideas, either.

This a petty complaint but hear me out. Before the shit goes down in “Apocalypse,” which is set in 1983, new Xavier Academy students Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan, looking disturbingly like Andy Sandberg), Jean Grey (Sophie Turner of “Game of Thrones,” ubiquitous actors these days), Kurt Wagner (Kodi Smith-McPhee) and Jubilee (Lana Condor) all go to the mall. It’s an odd moment. The introverted Scott suddenly becomes extroverted to get everyone there—to show Kurt this newfangled thing called a “mall.” (Fact-check: they’ve been around since the 1950s.)

The real purpose—for the plot anyway—is to get the kids away from Xavier Academy when it’s attacked, so they won’t be taken hostage like the others. The other purpose is a wink. We see our superteens walking out of a mall theater where “Return of the Jedi” is playing and get the following conversation: 

Jubilee: I’m just saying “Empire” is still the best. It’s the most complex, the most sophisticated. Wasn’t afraid to have a dark ending.
Scott: Yeah, but come on, if it wasn’t for the first one you wouldn’t have any of the rest of the movies.
Jean: Well, at least we can all agree the third one’s always the worst.

Ha ha. Get it? It’s for X-Men fans who hated the Ratner movie (which was truly awful), and maybe a self-effacing acknowledgement that this movie, too, the third of the prequels, will get slammed. Ha ha.

Except it got me thinking. In their world, in 1973, everyone becomes aware that there are creatures so powerful they can control our minds with theirs. And George Lucas still creates a movie with something called “the Force”? And Americans still flock to see it even though it’s no longer wish-fulfillment fantasy but a very scary part of their own reality? Really?

Plus the first “Star Wars” is obviously the best because it actually has an ending. “Empire” is just “to be continued,” and that’s not a movie.

We get another nonsensical, annoying wink after the Wolverine cameo. In one of those super-steel, underground government fortresses, where Mystique and Quicksilver (Evan Peters) are being held captive by Col. Stryker (Josh Helman, who has a powerful screen presence even if his character is so done), our teen sleuths, Scott, Jean and Kurt come across Wolverine, who’s been experimented upon. He now has the adamantine skeletal structure as he did at the beginning of the first “X-Men” movie, so check that box for the alt timeline. By this point, he’s half mad, and kills about two dozen federal agents, so Jean uses her powers to ease his mind by removing memories. Which means he’s got amnesia again, as he did at the beginning of the first “X-Men” movie. So check that box, too. And as he flees into the woods, Scott says the following:

Hope that’s the last we see of that guy.

Ha ha. Get it? Cuz Wolverine will become his future rival for Jean’s affections. But that’s just the first timeline, right? Or does love transcend timelines? And does that mean poor Scott Summers is doomed to play third fiddle throughout eternity while Jean and Logan forever burn for each other? Rough role, dude.

But enough with the timelines. There’s worse stuff.

Walk like an Egyptian
Here’s Jean Gray in “X-Men” from 2000:

Ladies and gentleman, we are now seeing the beginnings of another stage of human evolution.

This movie upends that. Turns out the most powerful mutant of all, Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), who can transfer his being from one body to another, accumulating powers as he goes, was an Egyptian ruler, En Sabah Nur, in ... 3,600 BC. So much for “now.”

In 1983, spy shenanigans by CIA agent Moira Mactaggert (Rose Byrne, last seen in “First Class) wakes up ol’ En Sabah, who recruits, in quick fashion, young versions of Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Angel (Ben Hardy), Psylocke (Olivia Munn), and Magneto, who’s been living for the past 10 years as a Polish steel worker. Prof. X (James McAvoy) uses Cerebro to try to find Apocalypse, but Apocalypse discovers him instead, and kidnaps him, and is going to transfer his essence into Xavier’s body, after which this new Apocalypse will destroy the world in order to see what rises out of its ashes. Because apparently having four billion slaves is a bore. But rubble—that’s entertainment!

This transference is being done within a newly constructed pyramid in the rubble of Cairo, while, outside, for the zillionth time, good mutants battle bad ones. They also try to turn them toward the good side. And this is where we get another goddamned “Return of the Jedi” moment. Rip off or homage, you decide.

Remember how long it took Darth Vader to turn from the dark side and attack the Emperor, and thus save his son, Luke, in “Jedi”? And how boring that was? That’s Magneto here. He even has a long-lost son to save— Quicksilver—but it takes him forever to switch sides. We all know where it’s going but the filmmakers draw it out. As if waiting for the obvious makes the obvious exciting. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

I remember reading “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in about 1990 after a breakup with a girl I loved, and taking some small comfort in the concept of time as perceived by the aliens in the novel:

I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

I was mourning the loss of this girl in my life, but, from the Tralfamadorian POV, she, or us—it, the relationship—would not be lost; it wouldn’t be gone; it would be right there. Dude, why are you heartsick over missing something that’s as clear as Mount Rainier? Just look at it. It’s right there. Look how glorious it is.

I’ve thought about this concept of time—from time to time—ever since.

Ian walks, Louise translates
“Arrival” is another tale of an alien race that has a less linear view of time than we do, but the initial comparison is less with “Slaughterhouse” than with “Contact,” the 1997 Robert Zemeckis film in which Jodie Foster tries to contact an alien race and winds up seeing her long-dead, beloved father.

This one begins (or “begins”) similarly: We get 20 or so years in the life of a mother, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), and her daughter Hannah (various actresses), who, at the end, dies of cancer. The father is never in the picture. The synopsis is so expertly handled by screenwriter Eric Heisserer and director Denis Villenueve (“Sicario,” “Incendies”), that for a moment I flashed on Carl and Ellie’s preamble in “Up”—high praise. I particularly liked the quick cut between the young girl telling her mother “I love you” and the teenage girl saying “I hate you!”

But because it recalled “Contact,” I worried what the connection between Hannah and the aliens would be. I worried that the most momentous event in humankind—contact with an alien species—would once again be reduced to the personal tragedy of the protagonist.

Thankfully, “Arrival” is smarter than that. Dr. Jones, on her way to class, is the last to realize that 12 alien ships, looking like giant versions of the eggs from the “Alien” poster, have touched down, or slightly hovered above, 12 different places on Earth, including Montana. While China and Russia gird for war, we send in a linguist, Dr. Jones, and a scientist, Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner)—along with a few soldiers, of course. We’re not stupid.

There’s great tension, fear and wondrous mystery as they enter the ship for the first time and gravity ceases taking hold of them. I also like the early attempts to communicate—although I probably would’ve begun with “Hello/Hola/Ni hao” rather than “Human.” I also would’ve gone with “Why are you here?” before, for example, “Ian walks.” But then I’m no linguist.

The aliens—and there’s no way to state this without seeming to diminish the movie—are giant squid-like creatures who communicate with Louise from behind a glass partition. Their language is circular rather than linear. They squirt an ink-like cloud in the air that forms versions of circles that clump and form almost artistic ridges at different points. Our heroine’s goal is to figure out this language before the bastards of the Earth—Russia, China, or rogue soldiers within the U.S.—attack. Or, I suppose, before the aliens attack us. But this being an indie movie rather than a summer blockbuster, the likelihood of that is rather small.

We also get some false tension. At one point, Louise translates an alien pictograph as “weapon.” She tries to calm fears by saying that the aliens might not know the difference between “weapon” and, say, “tool.” But this is presupposing that she does, in their language. Meaning she can already parse that difference but can’t even ask them, “Why are you here?”

Seems a stretch.

Bolton/Notlob
And it turns out it’s not just the language of the aliens that’s circular—their concept of time is, too. And the more Louise learns their language, absorbs it, lives it, the more she begins to lose her own (our own) linear sense of time. She keeps flashing to moments with her daughter, and they’re less reveries than fugue states. She seems dazed, unsure where she is.

I’ll cut to the chase.

• Why are they here? They’ll need us in 3,000 years, which, to them, isn’t the future, but, you know, right over there.
• How does Louise save the day? By phoning Gen. Shang (Ma Tzi) and getting him to call off his attack by telling him something only he would know: his wife’s dying words.
• How does she find out Shang’s wife’s dying words? In the future, when the giant-squid aliens are part of a kind of bigger U.N., Gen. Shang will thank her for the phone call, and he will tell her both his personal phone number and his wife’s dying words. So she learns in our future what she’ll need in our present. But to her, of course, it’s all right over there.

Maybe my favorite part: The long-lost daughter is not past but epilogue. She’s the future—the result of Louise’s eventual marriage to Ian. Even her name, Hannah, a palindrome, reflects this origin. In other words, the personal story augments and deepens the story of alien contact, rather than reducing it as with “Contact.”

That said, “Arrival” is a good not a great movie. The ending is Pollyannaish—humans wreck everything, and they would most definitely wreck this. Suspicious masses would rise up and attack. But I liked that it was an effort to keep up intellectually with the movie. That’s rare. It was nice to see something smart in this dumbest month in American history. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

I can get behind bad moms; but “Bad Moms” is just bad.  

It begins with Amy (Mila Kunis), a ridiculously pretty and super harried mom doing everything for everybody. She makes her kids breakfast, drives them to school, hands them their lunch (which she made) and their art projects (which she also made), goes to her part-time job (a kind of coffee company with a tech atmosphere), goes to a PTA meeting, goes grocery shopping, makes dinner, and helps the kids with their homework. The boy is spoiled and shrugging; the girl, 12, is anxiety-ridden about whether she’s going to get into Harvard. The husband is a T-shirt wearing, ruffle-haired doofus who is somehow also a high-paid stock broker. Plus he’s cheating on her. Online. Ironic since, in real life, men cheat online with Mila Kunis.

The point is she’s a ridiculous figure: nervous, forever running around in high heels, semi-cowed by the catty PTA moms, particularly the ultra-perfect PTA president Gwendolyn (Christina Applegate). Plus: she doesn’t allow her kids to grow the fuck up. She reminds me of Louis C.K.’s one-time nemesis, Jezandapuss’ “weak piece of shit” mom: “You’re raising Hitler, motherfucker, do your job!”

So what happens? She goes to the opposite extreme, of course. One day, like Popeye, it’s all she can stands. She refuses a task from the ever-demanding Gwendolyn, and she and two other moms go to a bar and get drunk. Then they go to a grocery store and create havoc—chugging a gallon of milk mixed with chocolate syrup, spilling half of it on themselves and the other half on the floor. They make a security guard flee and knock over a display. They abuse and harass minimum wage employees. All in slow-mo and to rock ‘n’ roll. It’s thesis/antithesis.

And in the final act? Right: synthesis. Plus all good things happen to her. She winds up with the hard-bodied Latino widower all the moms are crazy about (Jay Hernandez). She’s fired from her job but without her the company falls apart so she comes back at twice the salary + remote work days. Her daughter is pissed off but comes around; her spoiled son who couldn’t pour cereal makes a frittata; and she takes on and trounces the ultra perfect Gwendolyn for PTA president.

Hooray for synthesis!

There are a few good jokes. But what a waste of opportunity from writer-directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who are best known for writing “The Hangover.” They also gave us “Four Christmases,” “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” and “The Change-Up. I think they owe us an apology. 

Originally, the movie was supposed to be produced by Judd Apatow and star Leslie Mann, which could’ve worked. Leslie Mann would be perfect as the mom—nice looking but obviously a mom. Apparently Mila Kunis really is a mom, but c'mon. So the scene where she goes to a bar for the first time to try to pick up guys, and fails? Well, that ain’t exactly cinema vérité.

“Bad Moms” also does this odd thing of making everyone a cartoon, and then, in defeat, allowing them a sliver of humanity. So hubby Mike (David Walton) is a super-doofus until, post-divorce, Amy needs help and a hug; then he morphs into a regular guy. Gwendolyn is a major bitch—actually planting pot in Amy’s daughter’s locker to get her kicked off the soccer team—but after she loses the PTA-ship to Amy she cries in her car, and the two women bond. Then Gwendolyn takes Amy and her friends on her private plane because Hollywood has no clue what it’s like to be a person in America in 2016.

Five years ago, Kunis blew us all away in “Black Swan.” Since then? “Friends with Benefits,” “Oz the Great and Powerful,” and “Jupiter Ascending. And this. Who is helping her choose her movies—Ashton Kutcher?

WARNING: SPOILERS

“A Bigger Splash” got good notices (90% on Rotten Tomatoes) when it was released (barely: 378 theaters) in the U.S. this spring. It has a dream cast: Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Matthias Schoenaerts; Dakota Johnson impresses. It’s well directed by Luca Guadagnino (“I Am Love”). The movie promises, and delivers, sex—never a bad deal.

The problem? I got bored with the premise. It’s a Garden of Eden story where the snake is too obviously a snake. You watch and think, “You know, you really should get rid of that snake," and they don’t, and bad things happen, and who cares.

With a friend like Harry
Swinton plays Marianne Lane, a rock star temporarily reduced to whispers after a throat operation, and nursed and pampered by her younger husband, Paul De Smedt (Schoenaerts), a hunky documentarian, as they vacation in Pantelleria, a remote Italian island in the Mediterranean. They’re having a post-coital moment on the beach when her phone rings. It’s Harry Hawkes (Fiennes), music producer (Rolling Stones, etc.), and, it turns out, her former lover. He’s talking so much he doesn’t even realize he’s talking to Paul. He’s on a plane. To the island. He’s landing in five minutes “with a surprise.” Then the flight attendant forces him to hang up and the shadow of the plane passes over Paul and Marianne’s idyllic spot. Nice bit.

The surprise is his daughter, Penelope (Johnson), Pen for short, whom he didn’t know he had until a year earlier, and with whom he’s overly affectionate in a creepy, Donald Trumpian kind of way.

Who they are is revealed after a dinner in an absurd outdoor restaurant in the hills/graves of the island. Harry and Pen have no place to stay, so Marianne finally offers their rented villa. This is their reaction. 

Harry: Oh Christ, that took forever.
Pen: Is there a pool?

His reaction made me laugh, hers made me roll my eyes. It gets worse. Harry, with his boundless, narcissistic energy, takes over. He fills their refrigerator with booze—even though Paul is an alcoholic. He tries to get Marianne to sing—even though she’s not supposed to talk. Without asking, he invites over a mother and daughter, who aren’t exactly horrible, but they’re not worth anyone’s time. They’re actually perfectly done. They’re exactly the type of people Harry might invite, and exactly the type you wouldn’t want around. As viewer, too, sadly.

How snakey is Harry? He's trying to break them up. He fixed them up in the first place, six years earlier, but now he wants Marianne back. Is that why Pen? For a time, I wondered if she was a plant, meant to seduce Paul, or if that was her own idea. Mostly she walks ahead of everyone, self-contained, a smirk at the ready. I longed to see her age.

Halfway through the film, our foursome splits into two groups: Marianne and Harry go shopping (he seems to know the island better than she), while Paul and Pen go on a mindless, uninteresting hike. Do they do it? She strips for him and lays down on some rather uncomfortable-looking rocks, but the filmmakers leave it up in the air. Nothing subtle about Marianne and Harry, though, who are doing it standing up in the hallway off the kitchen, until, mid-coital, she tells him she’s not leaving Paul; she’s happy with Paul. Tensions mount at dinner (with all of them), and late that night by the pool (Harry and Paul).

Here’s a good little speech Harry gives Paul:

We were friends. Better than brothers. Better than all those shits in their lofts talking about who the fuck cares what, and now you just ... You just tolerate me. Do you know how offensive that is to me? Think what you want, judge the hell out of me, but don't fucking tolerate me.

It's half profound, half bullshit, and unfortunately no one is given rejoinders to Harry’s bullshit: As in: “Well, that’s what happens when you show up unnoticed, don’t give a shit about anyone else, and try to steal my wife.” Nobody says the obvious, but within the movie the obvious keeps happening. As in:

• They’re going to fight here, aren’t they?
• Harry is going to pull him in the pool, right?
• I think one of them is going to die. Probably Harry.
• Yep, Harry.

Is it an epiphany if others realize it first?
For the last half hour the tension in the movie is: “Does Paul get away with it?” but by then I'd stopped caring. Either he gets caught or this thing hangs over them forever. Eden is done; the snake has won. After Paul confesses his crime to Marianne, she frets and struggles and does what she can to protect him, but I kept thinking, “You do realize he’s still a murderer.” She realizes it, too: in the final shot of the film. She goes from the euphoria of Paul’s exoneration to this epiphany. The one I had 15 minutes earlier.

There’s also an 11th-hour reveal that Pen is 17, not 22. Then she cries on the plane home. For Harry? For herself? What a shit she is?

The acting was great, locales beautiful, some subtle Hitchcockian/neo-realism touches throughout. The character of Harry is a nice stretch for Fiennes, who usually plays prim and reserved. But the Garden of Eden needs a subtler snake. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

The point of the Magnificent Seven, and the Seven Samurai before them—you might even say the beauty of these guys—is that they do the deed for the deed. They may have qualms about it, they may not always be the best men, and the villagers they protect aren’t exactly pure; but it’s still a noble, selfless act amid a (for them) pyrrhic victory.

The 2016 update of “The Magnificent Seven” by Antoine Fuqua changes a few things—names, locale, victims, the ethnic makeup of the Seven—but the biggest and most uncommented-upon change is the motivation of team leader Chisolm (Denzel Washington), which isn’t revealed until the final act.

Turns out the villain they’re fighting? The rich, 19th-century industrialist Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard, overacting by underacting), who rules the mining town of Rose Creek with a sadistic, powerful, and blasé finger? Chisolm knows him! In fact, ol’ Bartholomew killed Chisolm’s wife and kids way back when. He tried to kill Chisolm, too (cue: neck scar reveal) but our man didn’t die. Or maybe, a la certain Clint Eastwood heroes, he’s a vengeful ghost or something.

The point is, Chisolm doesn’t do the deed for the deed, as Chris and Shimada did before him. He does it for revenge. For him, it’s personal.

This changes everything about the story. Worse, he doesn’t even tell any of the rest of the Seven that he's got skin in the game. He gathers them, and gets them to do the deed for the deed, even as he’s doing it for the most personal reasons possible. He lies, essentially. Our hero lies.

I gotta ask: Who on the filmmaking team thought this was a good idea? Fuqua? Screenwriters Richard Wenk (“The Expendables 2”) or Nic Pizzolatto (HBO's “True Detective”)? Denzel? Some suit? Has anyone accepted credit? Or blame? 

Chisolm’s motivation also allows for one of the worst tropes in modern action movies: the slow, sadistic death of the villain. For decades now we’ve gone Old Testament; we want our eye for an eye. We want the villain to suffer as he made others suffer. “I seek righteousness, but I’ll take revenge,” says Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett, forever spilling cleavage). That’s us. We want to be both moral and sadistic. We get it here. Slower. Slower. Make it last. We’re sick puppies.

Overall, Denzel is in fine form, the final battle is surprisingly well-orchestrated and well-told, and it’s always nice to see Vincent D’Onofrio. But most of the Seven aren’t interesting. Fuqua gives them race (the Mexican, the Native American, the Asian guy) but no personality. Personality is still for the white dudes (Pratt, Hawke, D'Onofrio).  

Most importantly, Chisolm's motivation fucks up the most beautiful part of the story.

WARNING: SPOILERS

With apologies to my nephew Jordan.

Imagine a dystopian sci-fi flick told by Wes Anderson, with a soundtrack out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, and you have “The Lobster” from writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos (“Dogtooth”).

If that sounds intriguing, hang on.

Junior high mixer
As the movie opens, the recently cuckolded David (a paunchy, moustached Colin Farrell) is checking into The Hotel, an elegant-but-starched residence on the coast, where he has 45 days to find a mate before being turned into the animal of his choice. In an early interview, he opts for lobster. He likes the sea, he says.

He’s so dispirited I assumed he wanted such a fate, even as the others around him desperately search for a partner. But their problem is twofold:

1. They need to find someone with a similar “distinguishing characteristic,” such as nearsightedness, nosebleeds or emotionlessness
2. They’re all inept at socializing. They’re adults but sound like kids at a junior high mixer.

The people in charge are equally inept. The Hotel Manager (Olivia Colman of “Broadchurch”) puts on deadpan playlets that show the benefits of coupling (preventing choking, rape), while, to encourage mingling, maids, or one maid anyway (Ariane Labed, Lanthimos’ wife), goes room-to-room and grinds her buttocks perfunctorily into the laps of heterosexual men. She leaves before they finish and self-finishing isn’t allowed. One guest, Lisping Man (John C. Reilly), is found guilty of this infraction and has his hand burned in a toaster as a result. What encourages the female guests to mingle, and how, and by whom, the movie doesn’t bother to answer.

Other rules: Your stay at the Hotel is extended for every “loner”—single people who live in the woods—you bag during “loner hunts.” A heartless woman, known only as The Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia), is so good at this she’s got 150+ days before transformation. But for the rest, including David, the days wind down.

The bureaucracy is inept, too. The Limping Man (Ben Whishaw) pretends to get nosebleeds to win over the Nosebleed Woman (Jessica Barden), and somehow gets away with it. Eventually, David follows his example: he pretends to be as heartless as The Heartless Woman. It works, for a time, until she kills his dog, Bob (his brother transformed), and he cries. But with the help of the Maid, he escapes, and runs off to join the Loners.

Unfortunately, their rules are just as absurd and draconian. No coupling. No flirting even. Punishment for kissing is Ellen Jamesian. Of course it’s here, where coupling is discouraged, that a real romance blossoms between David and Short Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz), who is also our narrator.

Long story short, the Loner Leader (Lea Seydoux) blinds Short Sighted Woman, making her an inappropriate mate for David. The movie ends at a diner in the City, where Short Sighted (now Blind) Woman sits waiting for David, who is attempting to blind himself in the bathroom. Does he? Will he? The camera holds on her, waiting, waiting, waiting, then blinks out. 

Love is blind
“The Lobster” is beloved by critics. It was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and won its Jury Prize. It’s got a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Critic Guy Lodge calls is “a brilliant allegory for the increasingly superficial systems of contemporary courtship, including the like-for-like algorithms of online dating sites and the hot-or-not snap judgments of Tinder.”

Me, I barely got through it.

It could be that I haven’t been on the dating scene for 16 years. It could be that I’m in my 50s and want energy rather than enervation from my art. It could be more.

It’s absurdist but I didn’t laugh. I also didn’t find much meaning in it. If you extend Lodge’s allegory, what is the point of the animal transformation? What is the point of the title? I do like this aspect of the ending: Our lovers are now outside the realm of society, but continue to play by its rules. Rather than just pretending to be blind (as he pretended to be cold-hearted), David physically tries to blind himself. We’re always trying to fit in.

It’s a unique movie, certainly. But overall my reaction mirrored the expression of most of the movie’s characters: deadpan.

WARNING: SPOILERS

There are actually three girls, but only one of them is on a train. None of them are likeable.

Count ‘em:

• Rachel (Emily Blunt), the lonely alcoholic, is obsessed with Megan (Haley Bennett), the aloof sexpot, whom she watches from the titular train. She spies on Megan; she all but stalks her.
• Rachel is lonely because Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), the condescending former real estate agent, stole Rachel’s husband, Tom (Justin Theroux), with whom she now has a baby.
• Megan nannies this baby, but she is also having an affair with Tom.
• Because Rachel idealizes Megan’s marriage to Scott (Luke Evans) from the train, she becomes enraged when she thinks Megan is having an affair—not with Tom, which she doesn’t know about, but with a third man, Dr. Kamal Abdic (Edgar Ramirez).
• When Megan goes missing, Rachel gives false information to Scott about Megan’s affairs.
• After Megan is murdered, Anna finds evidence implicating Tom but does nothing about it until Rachel forces her hand.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the final theme of the movie:

• Sisterhood.

I shit you not.

After all that careless, bitchy, tabloid behavior, the movie has the nerve to get Feminist 101 on us. As the camera swirls around the statue of the three dancing maidens at the Untermyer Fountain in Central Park, it talks about how united they are, how right and righteous. Even though Tom made Rachel think she was bad and mean, he was the bad, mean one. She had been right all along. Someone even says that. “Rachel had been right all along. About everything.”

Right. Except for the drinking.

And the obsessive stalking.

And implicating Dr. Abdic.

And insinuating herself into the crime narrative.

And choosing Tom in the first place.

Seriously, is New York so bereft of options that each of these women choose/sleep with the abusive Tom, who—sorry, Justin—is no Brad Pitt?

“The Girl on the Train,” directed by Tate Taylor (“The Help”), and written by Erin Cressida Wilson (“Secretary”), from the novel by Paula Hawkins, has a chance at the beginning. When we first see Rachel commuting, forever commuting, neither leaving nor arriving, I was somewhat intrigued. It felt like limbo. I also liked it when she starts drunk-talking to the stranger’s baby. I’m a fan of the unreliable narrator.

Then it swirls away into a putrid vision of the worst tabloid fantasies of bored, privileged white girls. And a train runs through it.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I’ll give Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” this: It made me paranoid in a way that Laura Poitras’ documentary about Edward Snowden, “CitizenFour,” did not. Afterwards, I wanted to go home and cover up my computer camera.

A few things I learned from this biopic:

1. Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was initially conservative. He was a gungho Bush-era patriot who dismissed the press as “the liberal media” as late as 2006.
2. Far from being a low-level, temp tech, he was a boy genius, coveted in the halls of the NSA and CIA, who helped create entire backup programs in our cyber-security apparatus, even as he was questioning the morality and legality of that apparatus.
3. The programs our intelligence agencies use to spy on us have really good interfaces.

We know 3) is bullshit. An anonymous Snowden colleague confirms 2) in this 2015 Forbes article. As for 1)? I haven’t found much on Snowden’s early political leanings, but aligns the character with classic Stone heroes: Charlie Sheen in “Platoon,” Tom Cruise in “Born on the Fourth of July” and Kevin Costner in “JFK.” Each is a patriot who believes he’s protecting his country; each discovers the immorality of that country and winds up believing the exact opposite of what he believed at the outset. Each is a true believer, but for both sides of the equation.

Big Bro
Stone isn’t big on the gray areas. His Snowden is such an innocent he’s nicknamed “Snow White” by a fellow cyber geek in Geneva, while Snowden’s CIA mentor, Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), is so obviously sinister he comes off at times like a “Scooby-Doo” villain—all but rubbing his hands together. At one point, he and Snowden walk through a DC park: Snowden in casual gray hoodie, O’Brian in dark overcoat and dark fedora pulled low. At another point, in the NSA facilities in Hawaii, O’Brian chastises Snowden via video feed; but the feed is the entire wall, and O’Brian is in close-up, making him appear like Big Brother in George Orwell’s “1984.” (Apparently it’s no accident that O’Brian is named after Winston Smith’s antagonist.)

The movie is structured in flashback. As in “CitizenFour,” we’re once again stuck in the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong with Snowden, Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo), and Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto), as they try to tell Snowden’s story before it’s snuffed out by U.S. intelligence. The room is claustrophobic, the atmosphere paranoid. Once again, Snowden’s clothes go from white to gray to dark.

So how did Snowden reach a point where he decides to blow the whistle? Several steps.

First he witnesses the spy apparatus in Geneva—the way we’re able to see into almost anyone’s home and watch pretty girls undress. Then there’s the mess with the Swiss banker—the CIA besmirching him to turn him informant. Then there’s Stone’s realization in Tokyo that the CIA and NSA are actually more interested in promoting American business interests abroad. “Terrorism is just an excuse,” Snowden says.

But the final straw may be that “1984” moment with O’Brian. Snowden is having troubles again with his girlfriend, Lindsay (Shailene Woodley), and so O’Brian assures him, in a way that feels both paternal and sleazy, that he doesn’t have to worry; that she’s not sleeping around on him. The assuredness with which he says this makes the other shoe drop. The scales fall from Snowden’s eyes.

In other words, the final straw is less the collection of meta-data than the fact that he and his girlfriend are being watched. Does this do a disservice to Snowden? Personalizing it this way? In “CitizenFour,” he feared the way the modern media would make it all about the personalities. “I’m not the story here,” he said.

Standing o
Despite a 134-minute runtime, “Snowden” moves quickly. We also get a stand-out performance from Gordon-Levitt. It just didn’t quite work for me. There’s too much on the girlfriend—he can’t tell her what he does, so he can’t explain what’s bothering him, so she gets upset, etc.—and not enough on the “Terrorism is just an excuse” angle. I wanted a more nuanced portrait of Snowden or a stronger argument for what he did.

Then there’s the end. Snowden, of course, winds up in Russia, where he’s giving a talk via web about privacy rights and civil liberties. And as we pan around his laptop, it’s suddenly him, the real Edward Snowden, not the actor Gordon-Levitt. And at the end of his talk, the audience stands and applauds. To thank him for his sacrifice.

And as signal to us? If so, we missed our cue.

I was at the opening night show at the SIFF Egyptian theater in Seattle, which is Liberal Central, and yet the crowd was sparse, and there was no applause. I may have heard one clap but that was it. More, I juxtaposed Stone’s ending with something that happened outside the theater before the movie started—something that to me feels more indicative of the American people for whom Edward Snowden sacrificed so much. I was standing there, waiting for Patricia, when two couples, 20s-ish, white, walked by, and one guy noticed what was playing. “The dude that revealed all those secrets?” he said in a sardonic voice. “Yeah, let’s make a movie of that.” Everyone laughed.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I get it. Director Clint Eastwood needs to frame the drama of US Airways Flight 1549’s emergency landing on the Hudson River on Jan. 15, 2009—the so-called “Miracle on the Hudson”—around a larger drama in order to keep us riveted. And he chose well. We are riveted. But throughout we suspect the framing device is a lie.

“Wait, so government officials immediately attacked the actions of Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (Tom Hanks), the veteran pilot who managed to land the Airbus A320 onto the Hudson without making it: 1) break apart, and 2) sink? The world saw him as a hero who saved 155 lives but regulators at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) were giving him the stink eye? Causing him to wander around New York City full of doubt? Making him feel bad about himself?

“Really?”

No, not really.

Here’s a question: Is it a framing device in service to Clint Eastwood’s libertarian, small government point of view?  

Sullying Sully
In the movie, the NTSB argument against Capt. Sullenberger is this: Computer simulations, given the circumstances of Flight 1549—geese flying into both engines, knocking them out, as it was ascending after takeoff—were able to make it back to LaGuardia. Oh, and one of the engines wasn’t out anyway. Nice going, jerkface. 

The NTSB argument in real life is: That’s bullshit.

Yes, there was an NTSB inquiry into the forced landing but it occurred six months later, and they came to praise Sully not sully him. In fact, according to William Langewiesche’s book “Fly By Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson,” the hearing was rather dull business. What tensions there were, were mostly buried. The movie makes a passing reference to Sully’s website to drum up business but not really why he has to do that. It doesn’t mention that his salary had been cut drastically in the years before 2009. Nor does it mention that the salary of his co-pilot, Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), had been cut so much—by 50 percent!—that he'd had to take a weekend job in Wisconsin.

Engineering vs. pilot experience was another buried issue at the actual hearing:

[The Airbus engineers] knew that the airplane’s flight-control computers had performed remarkably well, seamlessly integrating themselves into Sullenberger's solutions and intervening assertively at the very end to guarantee a survivable touchdown. The test pilots believed that the airplane's functioning was a vindication of its visionary design. But they were not going to bring it up. They were going to get through this hearing and be done.  

In the hearing, Sully did say the following: “No matter how much technology is available, an airplane is still ultimately an airplane. The physics are the same. And basic skills may ultimately be required when either the automation fails or it’s no longer appropriate to use it.” Some aspect of this is preserved in the movie. But in the movie it’s more of a knock against the computer simulators, and the government officials who expect pilots to act with computer precision. In the movie, it’s about adding the human element to allow for error, or delay, which is an interesting argument when you think about it.

I.e., You don’t get hit by birds and immediately head back to base. You assess. Then skills and experience come into play. And once the simulations are recalibrated to into account the human factor, everyone realizes that Sully’s instincts were right after all. The prosecutors become fans. Like the rest of us.

The movie ends oddly on a joke by Skiles. He's asked if, knowing what he now knows, would he would do any of it differently? Yes, he says; I’d do it in July. People laugh. Sullenberger laughs. You could freeze-frame on that shot and it would seem like the ending of a 1980s sitcom. Like “Bosom Buddies,” maybe.   

Thanking Hanks
Tom Hanks is great, by the way. He’s the show. He has to be both emotionless (cool under pressure) and full of emotion (caring about the passengers), and he pulls this off like the pro he is. He’s the man to play our complicated heroes.

Except this Sully isn’t that complicated. There’s doubt in his eyes, sure, but about what? That he did screw up? Or that they’ll try to pin something on him? It seems the latter. Once he gets in front of the NTSB he’s as cool as a cucumber. Doubt? Gone. Which is a shame. I liked the doubt.

We never see him truly interact with his wife, Lorraine (Laura Linney, in her third Clint Eastwood movie), who remains stuck to a wall phone in California while he is feted in NYC. Isn’t she younger than him? Isn’t he a bit old to have pre-teen kids? What’s the story there? There’s no story there. Not here.

One of my favorite bits is when the crew winds up on “Letterman,” and Hanks, who has obviously been on “Letterman” and television forever, makes Sully seem more awkward on camera than the real Sully actually was. Good acting by both men.

That’s the kind of hero we want to believe in: the one who does the job but isn’t comfortable in the spotlight. And that’s the hero that Eastwood gives us. The real Capt. Sullenberger is apparently comfortable in both arenas. Good for him. The airlines cut his pay but he got a $3 million advance from HarperCollins for his story. Good for him. But you can’t frame a movie around a man hiring a powerful west-coast publicity firm. Someone has to be the villain. Eastwood made it government regulators. Which, yes, suits his libertarian, small government point of view. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Imagine if after the boy shouted “The emperor has no clothes!” he’d been smacked by his mom and booed by the crowd, and the naked emperor was allowed to continue his promenade to cheers, safely within the delusion that he was wearing resplendent clothes.

That’s the obvious metaphor for “Florence Foster Jenkins.” Here’s the less-obvious one.

There’s a 1989 Jackie Chan movie called “Miracles—Mr. Canton and Lady Rose,” in which several friendly gangsters spend most of the movie in an elaborate scheme to pass off a poor flower lady as a rich Cantonese woman for the benefit of her daughter's rich, prospective in-laws. In the end her true identity is nearly revealed, and in a Hollywood picture it would have been revealed, and revealed to be meaningless, because aren’t we all the same, blah blah. That’s our kind of requisite happy ending. Not in China. There, the flower lady's disguise remained intact. The in-laws never know.

I.e., in the east: FACE > TRUTH. In the west, TRUTH > FACE. Within the requisite lies of cinema, that is.

I mention all this because for a moment in “Florence Foster Jenkins” I wondered if we weren’t becoming a little eastern in our sensibilities.

The three secrets of St. Clair Bayfield
Meryl Streep plays the title character, a real-life society matron and patron of the arts, circa 1944, who believes she has a splendid voice. She doesn’t. She has a horrible voice, a comically awful voice.

She also has a younger husband, St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant), with secrets. Three to be precise:

1. He has his own village apartment, paid for by the Mrs., which he shares with his younger girlfriend Kathleen (Rebecca Ferguson) and her artsy friends. So a cad, right? Well....
2. He’s spent the last 25 years keeping from Florence the knowledge that she can’t sing. As the movie progresses he pulls more and more people into this illusion to maintain it.
3. The third secret is the one the movie keeps from us: he truly loves Florence.

Some portion of the movie is about maintaining the first secret. At one point, for example, Florence arrives in the morning to see party detritus on the floor—just missing the naked girl in the bed and the near-naked one in the bathroom.

But the movie is mostly about maintaining the second illusion, particularly as Florence, buoyed by applause and (paid-for) good reviews, takes her talents into 1) the recording studio; and 2) Carnegie Hall.

You’d think such a role would be perfect for Grant’s overly polite, befuddled comic sensibilities, but he’s not the one in the movie who makes us laugh; he’s actually the one who makes us cry. That death bed scene in the end? The depths of his affection for her? If Hugh Grant gets an Oscar nomination, it’ll be because of that scene. His eyes—cut more and more like Jack Kennedy’s as he ages—revealed worlds: the lies he keeps telling her (she can sing); the truth he can’t hide (he loves her).  

No, it’s Meryl, blissfully unaware and marvelously off-key, who makes us laugh. But I would add that even greater laughs are provided by Simon Helberg (“The Big Bang Theory”), who plays Cosmé McMoon, her soft-spoken accompanist, and who acts as our eyes and (mostly) ears throughout the movie. He first hears her voice when we first hear it, and some of his subtle reaction shots and line readings are close to comic perfection. With a glance, the kid upstages Streep.

The killing review
“Florence” is a movie about the worst kind of privilege—the illusions that the rich construct for themselves—so thumbs up to director Stephen Frears (“Philomena,” “The Queen,” “High Fidelity,” “Dangerous Liaisons”) and screenwriter Nicholas Martin (British TV), and, of course, the cast, for making us care. Occasionally my attention flagged, but then the movie would suck me back in—as when Florence, lonely with St. Clair on a “golfing excursion,” visits Cosmé in his small walk-up and does the dishes while he plays one of his own compositions. This inspires her to come up with lyrics on the spot, mumbled meaninglessly off-key, to his polite pain.

We also wonder how they’re going to make Carnegie Hall work. It’s one thing to fill a salon with the deaf and the bribed; how do you maintain the illusion when the place is filled with half-drunk soldiers who wolf-whistle Agnes, a brassy blonde trophy wife (Nina Arianda)? You don’t. The illusion crumbles. For a minute. Then the blonde stands up, tells the boys to show some respect, and everyone joins the fantasy. FACE > TRUTH.

The only one not joining the fantasy is Earl Wilson (Christian McKay of “Me and Orson Welles”), columnist for the Post, who can’t be bought. Florence eventually sees his scathing review, collapses, and, already sick (50 years of syphilis), lingers near death. Truth wins out, and it kills. A review kills. Man, those were the days.

Except truth doesn’t quite win out. Streep’s performance is both broadly comic and emotionally subtle, and in her eyes you see glimpses of the truth she knows is out there: that St. Clair cheats on her; that she can’t sing; that everyone is indulging her. But on her deathbed she again succumbs to the illusion; and her soul rises to the glorious aria she sees herself—that she remembers herself—singing.

Wonder how the movie will play in China? 

WARNING: SPOILERS

The poster below is a hot pastel mess. Metaphor?

Here’s what I kept thinking throughout “Suicide Squad”: Some men aren’t looking for anything logical ... some men just want to watch the world burn.

The men in question are writer-writer David Ayer (normally good: “The Fury,” “End of Watch”), Warner Bros.’ CEO Kevin Tsujihara (lambasted in an open letter here), and Zack Snyder, the arrested adolescent behind the DC extended universe. Also anyone who’s a fan of this shit.

It’s as if the filmmakers took chunks of story and lined them up without concern for what came before or after, and without the necessary connective tissue. Marvel gives us continuity between movies but DC can’t manage it between scenes.

We also keep getting the reason for the thing after the thing. What’s keeping the Suicide Squad in line? I guess they’ve got explosive implants in their necks and their handler, Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman, tiresome), can blow them up with a phone app, but it takes a while for the filmmakers to tell us (and the Squad) this. And even so, what’s to prevent the Squad, career criminals all, from destroying the phone and/or Flag? No answer on that one. I assume it’s because Flag’s boss, hard-ass government official Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), is watching via whatever. Or maybe Katana (Karen Fukuhara), a onna bugeisha warrior, whose husband’s soul is trapped in her vengeful sword (yes), is there to keep them in line. But then why does she show up late on the airport tarmac? And why does she hang out with the supervillains in the abandoned hotel bar? And can’t Deadshot (Will Smith) just shoot her anyway? Guns > swords. Cf., “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Pull back and the movie gets way stupider.

Gahhhhhh!
OK, so Waller puts together this team of supercriminals in case the next metahuman (Superman, temporarily dead in “BvS”) isn’t such a boy scout. Most people think it’s a crazy idea but she manages to convince everyone, or at least one guy. A general, I think. She gets him top secret Iranian files, which have nothing to do with metahumans (just the usual sad humans), but he’s all-in now, and that’s all the go-ahead she apparently needs.

That’s not the way stupider part, by the way. Here’s the way stupider part. The team she assembles? Suicide Squad? A malicious Superman could take them out in a second. It wouldn’t even be a battle. So their whole raison d’été is meaningless. No one bothers to mention any of this.

And the reason they’re finally called to action in this movie? One of their number, Enchantress (Cara Delevingne), a 6,000-year-old witch trapped in the body of a beautiful archeologist, goes rogue, teams with her brother, and turns Midway City into a swirling, black-magical chaos of death (funnel cloud into the sky, lightning, etc.). So Waller actually creates the crisis for her team to fix. And not on purpose, per 9/11 truthers, but by accident. No one in the movie mentions this, either.

Wait, someone does mention it. In a mid-credits scene between Waller and Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), we get the following exchange:

Waller: People are asking questions about Midway City. The kind of people that can get answers, and if they get those answers my head will be on a pike.
Bruce Wayne: Consider yourself under my protection. If you deliver.

Did you get that? Waller is responsible for the death of tens of thousands of innocent people and Bruce Wayne helps her cover it up? Batman??? The hell??? Plus the files he wants that she has—details of metahumans like the Flash and Aquaman—give lie to the whole point of the movie. If she has this intel, why doesn’t she put together a team of superheroes as Bruce Wayne is doing, rather than going the supervillain route?

GAHHHHHHHH!!!!!! It’s all so stupid it makes my head hurt.

And I didn’t even mention the route they take into Midway City.

Enchantress and her brother are wreaking havoc of some kind, right? So the S.S. (unfortunate initials, btw) chopper in, the chopper gets shot down, then they battle these demon-soldiers that have seemingly come from nowhere. I mean, I figured Enchantress created them, and we find out later that she did—from civilians—but at this point our team doesn’t even know it’s fighting Enchantress. It probably would’ve made more dramatic sense if we were in the dark with the Squad, and then when the demon-soldiers arrived we would’ve thought, with them, “Oh, this is the threat”; and then, with them, we would’ve discovered, “Oh no, it’s Enchantress!” Instead, we just wait for them to get up-to-speed. Which is no fun at all.

But that’s not the point I wanted to make. Here’s the point I wanted to make: Why aren’t they sent toward the Enchantress? Why are they sent toward Waller?

Isn’t Waller in charge? And if you’re arresting her, as I think Flag is, why allow her to kill her own subordinates, who “know too much”? And isn’t it a bit of a coincidence that when you take her to the rooftop “for extraction,” at that very moment the Joker (Jared Leto, awful in a good role) arrives in a helicopter to get his gal pal, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, good in an awful role)? And why force us through the whole “Will Deadshot kill Harley before she boards the Joker’s copter” question? We know he won’t. He aims... and aims... and aims... There’s some subterfuge but we know. Seriously, Warner Bros., it was painful to watch.

I haven’t even mentioned the overt misogyny, the love of violence, the sad love of hard-ass cool. It's so awful it makes you want to reboot western civilization.

Undignified in August
“Suicide Squad” is supposed to be DC’s answer to Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy”—an early August release in which a team of alliterative criminals, led by a charismatic ne’er-do-well, saves the day to a soundtrack of kick-ass songs—but it’s so not.

“Guardians” found its charismatic lead in the bargain bin of TV sitcoms; “Suicide” bought the talents of the most established charismatic leading man of the 21st century ... whose charisma days are on the wane. “Guardians” found its soundtrack in the bargain bin of forgotten ’70s songs, and actually tied them to the storyline; “Suicide” bought the most established soundtrack songs and pasted them on: “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Spirit in the Sky,” “Super Freak,” “The House of the Rising Sun.”

“Guardians” was funny, “Suicide,” not. “Guardians” was good. “Suicide” is the second-worst movie I’ve seen this year—after “Batman v Superman." 

One of the first things we see in the movie is the DC Entertainment logo in those crazy Harley Quinn pastels; then the logo flickers and go out. Metaphor? 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) the ultimate American hero? He certainly encompasses all of the themes in movies about America’s ultimate spy agency, the CIA. He is:

• an action hero (per the Jack Ryan films)
• an agent hung out to dry (“Three Days of the Condor,” “Spy Game” and “Syriana”)
• a chicken come home to roost (“Hopscotch,” “In the Line of Fire”)
• and—as an amnesiac—an innocent caught in a CIA plot (“Charade,” “The In-Laws,” “The Man with One Red Shoe”)

This last is the most important. Americans want safety, particularly post-9/11, but we don’t like being underhanded. This dilemma was first articulated by Alan Ladd in the first movie about America’s first spy agency, “O.S.S.,” in 1946:

“Americans aren’t brought up to fight the way the enemy fights. We can learn to become intelligence agents and saboteurs if we have to. But we’re too sentimental, too trusting, too easy-going....”

We want safety and innocence. David Bowie once asked of young Americans: “Do you remember the bills you have to pay? Or even yesterday?” Nope and nope, America says over and over again. Iran? Guatemala? Chile? Iraq? Whatevs.

Which is why Jason Bourne is America’s ultimate hero. He keeps America safe by killing our enemies; then he keeps us innocent by forgetting all about it. 

What a tangled Webb we weave
So after nine years, he’s back, directed by the same guy (Paul Greengrass), and involved in the same kind of storyline.

A top CIA director wants him dead (Tommy Lee Jones, replacing David Straithairn from “Ultimatum,” who replaced Brian Cox in “Supremacy,” who replaced Chris Cooper in “Identity”), and, to this end, dispatches a top CIA assassin (Vincent Cassel, replacing 3) Edgar Ramirez, 2) Karl Urban, 1) Clive Owen), while Bourne gets a little internal help, or at least sympathy, from a good female CIA officer (Alicia Vikander, essentially in the Joan Allen role).

As the assassin, in the first act of “Supremacy,” killed Franka Potente while aiming for Bourne, so, in the first act here, the assassin aims for Bourne and kills longtime Bourne ally Nicky Parsons (Julie Stiles). Bourne’s raison d’été has always been to find himself, and last time around he did: Hello, David Webb! This time? Yeah, he’s still trying to find himself. Just more of himself.

That’s why he meets with Parsons. As the movie opens, she hacks into the CIA’s mainframe computer and downloads intel on various CIA black ops, including: Operation Treadstone, which created Bourne; Blackbriar, which replaced it; and Iron Hand, the new one, which turns out to be a mass surveillance program: spying on everyone, everywhere. She plans to go public with this, but sentimental, or maybe in love (the movie doesn’t pursue her motivation), she also downloads extra intel on Bourne—about his past, about his pops—and delivers that first. Bad move. Pow! Nicky, we hardly knew ye.  

If there’s a new thing in the movie, that’s it. The last time we saw Jason Bourne, in 2007, Facebook had only 50 million users, barely anyone knew Julian Assange, and no one had heard of Edward Snowden. Here, Snowden is name-checked twice, Assange gets a Berlin counterpart, while Facebook is fictionalized into “Deep Dream,” a social media site run by Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), who—oops—got his initial funding from the CIA. (Would that our spy agencies were so farsighted.) Now the CIA, or at least Tommy Lee Jones, wants the data, but Kalloor is having second thoughts. He wants to do the right thing, which is protecting individual privacy against government intrusion. The corporate right to monetize our private data goes unmentioned.

We get three set pieces—Athens, London, and, to class up the joint, Vegas. In each, CIA techs track everything from Langley, with Tommy Lee or Alicia standing around issuing commands (“Back up a frame ... Enhance ... That’s her!”), and awaiting the imminent arrival of Bourne so he can be killed once and for all. So Bourne has to slip in undetected, do what needs doing—via fights, chases, quick cuts and shaky cams—and slip out undetected. Sadly, we’ve seen it all before. Rarely has an adrenaline rush been so yawn-worthy.

And what’s the big personal reveal? The intel that Nicky sacrificed her life for? Seems Bourne’s pops started Treadstone, but was killed by terrorists right in front of Bourne, which is why Bourne joined Treadstone. But guess what? It wasn’t terrorists that killed Daddyo, it was the CIA—specifically the Asset—because the son was the perfect candidate and the father was a doubting Thomas. So two birds with one CIA stone.

Which is pretty despicable. It also means the tiny bit of culpability Bourne felt at the end of “Ultimatum”? Gone. He’s innocent once more.

Happiness is a warm puppy
Yeah, it’s tired, and so is Bourne. His face looks like it’s seen too many fights or too many movies. Tommy Lee is in fine form, tight smiles and evil grins, but he could do this shit with his eyes closed. Vikander is lovely to look at, but she made me wonder whatever happened to the other foreign girl of the moment, Franka Potente. Bit parts in movies and TV, apparently. Hollywood slurps up and spits out.

Truly the saddest thing for me about the return of Jason Bourne is what Greengrass has him doing since 2007. He has to stay off the grid, right, so he can’t get a regular job with an SSN. So ... day labor in Ghana? Construction in Mongolia? Or using his mind somewhere in private? Nope. Greengrass went with bare-knuckled brawling in Greece. Before jeering crowds, Bourne takes out foreign monstrosities with one punch, then celebrates with booze and broads. Kidding. No booze and broads. He has the demeanor of a man on death row. There’s not an ounce of joy there.

Question: With Tommy Lee, et al., vanquished, isn’t he back to doing this? Off the grid and joyless? C’mon, Greengrass, he’s America’s ultimate hero. Get him a puppy at least.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Interesting movie. Very unique.

Kidding.

I mean, it is, but ...

OK, for those who haven’t seen it: Ben (Viggo Mortensen) is the patriarch of six kids raised deep in the Pacific Northwest woods, and one of the things he counsels them on—besides hunting, climbing, surviving—is grammar: that the word unique, for example, doesn’t take a modifier, and interesting is a limp word that hides more than it illuminates. No wonder I was happy watching it. It’s a movie that cares about words, and books, and scholarship. It’s a movie that actually made me think, “I haven’t tried hard enough in life.” How rare is that?

Then we got to the last act.

Miles from nowhere
“Captain Fantastic” opens as eldest son Bo (George McKay) kills a deer with a hunting knife and is anointed by his father with the deer’s blood before eating its heart; then the carcass is transported back to camp, where all of its parts are put to use. That night, around the campfire, Ben and Bo strum guitars, while perpetually scowling middle child Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton) begins to bang an angry drumbeat. Everyone joins in. It’s like summer camp that never stops. It’s a white family living as they imagine Native Americans lived.

It's also boot camp for Noam Chomsky scholars. Ben is essentially a left-wing martinet—leading the kids on dawn runs, demanding excellence, and handing out Nabokov and Chomsky assignments. When they climb a sheer cliff that would give Ethan Hunt of “Mission: Impossible” pause, and Rellian slips and breaks his hand, Ben tells him to shake it off since there’s no one to help him. The boy’s resentment burns the screen.

A question that came to me after the family heads out in a beat-up bus for the funeral of their mother in New Mexico: What is all of this training for? To what end? His kids are superfit but unfit for modern life. They can recite and interpret the Bill of Rights, which is more than their dopey cousins can do, but they don’t know how most people live. Have they seen a web browser? Can they turn on a computer? “How did you kill those chickens—with an axe or a knife?” the youngest asks her aunt at a family dinner. At a trailer camp, after a make-out session with a pretty blonde, Bo gets down on one knee like a 19th-century balladeer and proposes; he's laughed at. “Unless it comes out of a book I don’t know anything!” Bo later cries to his stunned father.

(Some of this seems a reach. Is there no modern literature in Bo's curriculum? No Doctorow, Irving, Kundera, Roth? Surely the Nabokov helped.)

Ben’s bête noir, his father-in-law Jack (Frank Langella), annunciates the dilemma. “Even if they make it through whatever it is you’re doing to them,” he says, “they’re going to be totally unprepared for the real world.”

He’s right. But I was still rooting for Ben. Then Rellian decides to remain with his grandparents, Ben sends one of the girls to kidnap him, the girl falls off the roof and nearly dies, and Ben, mortified, does what any loving parent would do: He gives up his kids and drives back home alone.

Wait, what?

Wild world
I suppose it’s the other side of the same coin of Ben’s intolerant perfectionism. He raised his kids away from what he viewed as the impurity of society; but when he saw himself as part of that impurity, he removed himself from the equation, too. Thus:

• Thesis: modern culture bad (so we live away from it)
• Antithesis: me bad (so I live away from them)
• Synthesis: living together in the little house near the woods (where we borrow from the best of both cultures)

This ending is way too neat for me, but the movie truly slipped away when Ben gave up his kids. (They return as stowaways on the bus.) I just couldn’t care about a man who would abandon his family that way.

I still recommend the movie, though. From the opening shot, writer-director Matt Ross (Gavin Belson of “Silicon Valley,” ironically) gives it the weight and randomness of cinema vérité; he gets great performances out of everyone, particularly the children; and he delves into an important issue: how to raise kids in an era of unrelenting consumerism and screens. His ending may be facile but his questions aren’t.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Third time’s the charm, I guess.

The first rebooted “Star Trek” was too “Star Wars”-y for me, second was too “Raiders of the Lost Ark”-y (not to mention stupid). This one gets the appeal of “Star Trek.” So who do we thank for this midsummer gift? Simon Pegg (Cornetto trilogy), for co-writing it with Doug Jones? Justin Lin (Fast/Furious movies) for directing it? Or J.J. Abrams for finally stepping aside?

It starts slowly, which is so not-done these days it felt like a relief. Capt. Kirk (Chris Pine) is in the doldrums because in the third year of his five-year mission it’s all beginning to feel a bit “episodic” (great line: I laughed out loud), and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) tries to bolster him with bad beside manner and good Scotch. Meanwhile, Spock (Zach Quinto) is on the outs with Uhura (Zoe Saldana, call me), and ready to leave the Enterprise, because he feels he owes something to New Vulcan—like propagating its nearly decimated species.

Not to brag, but here’s what I wrote about Spock three years ago in my review of “Star Trek: Into Darkness”:

How many members of the Vulcan species are left? Wouldn’t this small fact alter his trajectory a bit, get him off the Enterprise maybe, doing something else? Wouldn’t it give him a different girlfriend? (No offense, Zoe.) Doesn’t it make sense for Spock to want to propagate his species now that they’re nearly extinct? Or at least consider doing so? Or at least talk about it with someone?

It really isn’t bragging since it’s all rather obvious. You might even call it logical.

Arena-ish
While on shore leave at the starbase Yorktown—which is a kind of M.C. Escher painting in space—Kirk volunteers the crew to retrieve a ship stranded in a nearby nebula. But as Admiral Ackbar would say, it’s a trap. The Enterprise is attacked by a swarm of ships that literally cut it apart, and it plunges to the planet below. And our roller coaster ride begins.

What I liked about the ride? Mystery. Who was the alien Krall (Idris Elba) and why did he attack the Enterprise? What’s his game? The early “Star Trek”s—and I’m talking TOS, first season—had a real air of the bizarre and mysterious and dangerous. You’re going into space. You’re finding all kinds of creepy shit. We get a whiff of that here.

What else I liked? We get character development and humor during the ride. There’s good repartee between Spock and McCoy, as well as Scotty (Pegg) and Jaylah (Sofia Boutelia), an alien who saves him. Yes, she’s the usual bodacious bod, ass-kicking chickiepoo that all the sci-fi geeks love, but she’s a great version of that. When they first meet, she repeats his name, “Montgomery Scott,” and he lets her know she can use the familiar, “Scotty,” so for the rest of the movie she calls him “Montgomery Scotty.” She speaks a sing-songy English, and knows all about the Federation, because she lives on the downed U.S.S. Franklin, which was the first starship equipped with warp drive. It went missing 100 years ago. One assumes it fell into Krall’s hands but the answer is more surprising and less interesting.

For a while I wondered if Krall was Cardassian (forgive: it’s been a while since my “ST” heyday), but—alley oop—he’s actually the former commander of the Franklin, whose physiognomy has been altered because ...  I didn’t quite get it. Apparently he absorbs other life forms to stay young, a technology which he—I don’t know—found on this rocky, desolate planet? Anyway, his goal in downing the Enterprise wasn’t just for vengies on the Federation, which he blames for abandoning him, but to get a thingamabob (maguffin), that fits with another thingamabob, which creates a superpowerful bioweapon. He’s going to use this to destroy the Yorktown.

Are we better united or does it encourage weakness? That’s the slight (very slight) philosophical showdown between Krall and Uhura in the film. Krall gets the maguffin by torturing one crew member until another caves—thereby demonstrating the weakness in unity argument—but of course Kirk, et al., demonstrate its strength by working as a team and using the Franklin’s still operating transporters to beam the rest of the crew to safety.  Then, in the Franklin, they take off in pursuit of Krall and his hive-like ships, and bring down the latter with a blast of old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll. (In space, everyone can hear you scream bad heavy-metal.) BTW: Doesn’t this undercut Uhura’s, and the movie’s, argument? The hive-like unity of the ships is their weakness. And sure, that’s hive-like, which is bad, rather than creative team-building, which is good, but still. It’s also a ripoff of “Best of Both Worlds,” isn’t it? Not to mention—and not to brag again—“Fuck-Ups of the Federation.” Mr. B, you have the conn.

All of this leads to the inevitable battle between Kirk and Krall, which is done well, and then the usual bow-tying: Kirk turns down a vice-admiralship to keep his command, and Spock decides to stay with Uhura (schmaht!) and on the Enterprise (newly rebuilt). Screw New Vulcan, I guess. There’s a nice homage to Leonard Nimoy and the original crew, and a new version of the original opening monologue (“Space, the final frontier...”), but this time, per the movie’s theme, with many voices of the crew reading it rather than the one. Because the needs of the many...

Split your infinitives
I would’ve sacrificed some of the roller coaster for more character development, or a greater explanation of Krall. And once the endorphins wore off, I noted a lot of absurdity. But I had a good time.  

A few thoughts for the future:

• Simon Pegg should keep writing these; well done, laddie.
• Jaylah should return; superhot and a good character.
• They still haven’t figured out Uhura. She’s still kind of a blank.
• Is Kirk? “You spent all this time trying to be your father,” McCoy says. “Now you’re wondering what it’s like to be you.” So are we.
• Sulu, too. Gay isn’t a personality.
• They still can’t get Spock’s hair right; but at least they get the Spock-McCoy dynamic right.

The movie focuses on the triumvirate—Kirk, Spock, McCoy—but right now McCoy’s relationship with both feels deeper than Kirk’s with Spock. So there's room for improvement. Just keep the characters in mind and boldly go.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I shouldn’t find this shocking but I do: Stephan James is only the fifth actor to ever play Jesse Owens on TV or in the movies. Chronologically:

1. Garrett Morris in a 1976 “SNL” skit: “Jesse Owens presents a set of commemorative medals honoring white athletes” 
2. Dorian Harewood in a 1984 TV biopic
3. Ronnie Britton in a 1988 TV movie about IOC president Avery Brundage
4. Bangalie Keita in the 2014 feature film “Unbroken”
5. This

I bring it up for two reasons: 1) It’s indicative of the racism implied in the film’s title; and 2) we still don’t see much of Jesse Owens here. He’s in almost every scene but he’s basically MIA from his own biopic.

What was Jesse Owens like? According to screenwriters Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse (“Frankie & Alice”), and director Stephen Hopkins (“Lost in Space,” “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers”)—white folks all, by the way—Owens was a dutiful son, a good listener, a mostly loyal boyfriend/husband. Politically, he’s ... I don’t know. Academically, he’s ... whatever. In sum: he’s a decent guy who runs/jumps fast. Thanks for coming.

Should I stay or should I go?
“Race” tries as hard as possible to insult none of us so it insults all of us. It takes us from Jesse Owens’ first day at Ohio State University in the fall of 1933 to the glory of his four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics. But we know he wins four gold. So where’s the drama?

This is what they try.

Learning to focus: On the OSU campus, Owens has to deal with a tough schedule (classes, track, part-time job) and racism, and coach Larry Snyder (SNL’s Jason Sudekis, better than I expected) solves both. He gets Jesse a sinecure with the state legislature so he can give up the part-time job; and while he doesn’t exactly solve racism, he helps Jesse deal with it. It’s a good scene, actually. In the locker room, with the football team yelling the usual shit football teams yell (even when they’re not racists), Snyder teaches Owens to block out the noise and focus on what matters.

Losing his focus: After setting three world records at a Big 10 track meet, he becomes known as “The world’s fastest human.” Fame leads to a fling with a beautiful, ritzy girl (Chantel Riley), but that causes him to lose his focus and that causes him to lose a race. It’s basically “The Natural,” with Quincella in the Kim Basinger role, and the girl back home, Ruth (Shanice Banton), playing Glenn Close. But all is righted again. Except...

Hell no, we won’t go: There’s a subplot about whether the U.S. will even attend the games, since Nazis/Jews/etc., but Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons), president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, makes it happen. Then Jesse is counseled against attending by an NAACP rep for reasons that remain murky. Because of racism abroad? Racism at home? “Master Race” rhetoric? This goes on for half an hour even though we know the outcome. We wouldn’t be watching if he’d missed the ’36 Games.  

Summertime for Hitler: In Berlin, it’s little dramas. Will Jesse be allowed to train the way he likes or will Snyder’s bête noire, Coach Dean Cromwell, block him? (He trains the way he likes.) Will he make the preliminaries in the long jump? (Yes.) Will Hitler shake his hand? (No.) Are Owens and another black athlete replacing two Jewish athletes in the 4x100 sprint relay to placate the Nazis? (Yes.)

Surely there’s better drama to be mined.

Helping Goebbels
The key figure in the movie is Avery Brundage, and Irons is good in the role, but it’s all so reductive. The real Brundage was virulently anti-communist to the point of being pro-fascist (cf., William Randolph Hearst), and he may have been anti-Semitic. But the movie tones all of this down in favor of a simple, barrel-chested businessman who: 1) tells Goebbels to hide anti-Jewish policies so the U.S. won’t boycott (as if Goebbels needed propaganda advice); 2) allows himself to become part of a business deal with Nazi Germany, which is then 3) used to blackmail Brundage to kick off the two Jewish athletes in the 4x100 relay. 

We get nothing on Owens’ sad, later life: racing horses to make a living, the business and commercial deals that fell through. He declared bankruptcy in the 1950s and was prosecuted for tax evasion in 1966. In the movie, Snyder tells Owens that some young punk can break your record but a medal is forever. The real Jesse Owens said, “I had four gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals." 

There’s so much gloss here it’s tough to see the history beneath. The real drama in Jesse Owens’ story is defeating racism abroad and being defeated by it at home. But that’s too much drama (by half) for modern-day Hollywood.