Movie Reviews - 2018 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

Wouldn’t it have been better without that final confrontation between Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) and Rez (Rafi Gavron), his wife’s idiot Brit manager?

Imagine it. On stage at the Grammys, Maine, falling down drunk, literally pissing in his pants, embarrasses himself and his wife, Ally (Lady Gaga), recipient of Best New Artist. He goes into rehab, seems to come out OK, seems to be doing OK, when, with Ally on tour, we watch in horror as he quietly hangs himself. All of us would wonder why. Which is the exactly question most suicides leave us with. Why?

Instead, we know exactly why. Rez tells Jackson that he ruined Ally’s big moment and he’s ruining her career and she’s better off without him. And Jackson takes all this in and has nowhere to go with it. Away? What away? Into the bottle? That’s what started the problems in the first place. There’s no place to go except that place. So he goes there.

Afterwards, Jackson’s way older brother, Bobby (Sam Elliott), tells Ally that she can’t blame herself for the suicide; it’s not her fault. “You know whose fault it is?” he asks, and before he can give his answer (Jackson’s), every person in the audience is thinking this: “Yeah! Her fucking manager!”

So by extension her. She’s the idiot who brought him onto the scene in the first place.

Maybe it’s time
I guess I liked “A Star is Born” or I wouldn’t care so much about this aspect of it. And I did like it. I felt improbably sad afterward. I felt a void in me. I wanted to cry but couldn’t.

That said, the movie lost itself for me when Rez showed up. I immediately didn’t trust him, but Ally did, she dropped everything for him, and said, basically, “Sure, I’ll have background dancers. Sure, I’ll be Beyoncé #32 amid a Destiny’s Child #89.” The first song she sings for Jackson is “Shallow,” and includes the line, “We’re far from the shallow now.” But given the opportunity, she ran right back to the shallow.

Is that the point? Is that the tragedy? The honesty and truth that he fell in love with goes away, and it’s replaced by something manufactured? And is that ultimately why he kills himself?

Most of you know the story. It’s been made four times now but this was the first time I’d ever seen it. Guess I got some catching up to do.

I knew it, of course. He’s famous, plucks her from obscurity; and as she rises, he falls.

Was it always drink? It is here. Mostly. Jackson Maine is a country-rock star who plays stadium tours before 20,000 screaming fans. He’s recognized everywhere he goes. He’s even recognized in drag bars despite the fact that his music isn’t exactly theirs. That’s where he shows up one night just looking for a drink. He’s immediately befriended by Ramon (Anthony Ramos, John Laurens in the original “Hamilton”), whose friend, Ally, is about to perform. She sings. All the other performers are men in drag who lip synch, but they like having her around. She’s their Bette. That night she sings Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” and for a moment, as she lays on the bar, Jackson stares at her the way we all want to be stared at one day: with pure love.

They have an evening of it: this bar, this fight, this late-night grocery store, this parking lot. She sings him an early version of “Shallow.” Just getting to know each other and enjoy each other. It’s nice. He invites her to his next gig in the next town, but she’s all no, she has to go to her shitty waitressing job. But the manager is a dick, he says the wrong thing, and so she’s gone, she and Ramon, driven then flown to his next show, where they stand in the wings. Apparently, while she was sleeping, Jackson took her song, arranged it, taught it to his band, and he wants her out there singing it in front of 20,000 people. She resists. And resists. And resists. Then jumps. She’s a hit. It’s a beautiful song and a high point in the movie.

At the same time...

The movie spends a lot of time talking about what makes a star. Ally’s working-class father, Lorenzo (Andrew Dice Clay, thriving in his second act), is the first to bring it up. I thought he brought it up in the negative for her—why she wasn’t, despite the talent—but he’s really talking about himself. He had the pipes (or said he had the pipes) like Sinatra, but he was never in the same neighborhood as Sinatra. Why? What’s that other thing? The thing he didn’t have?

Whatever it is, it feels like she has it in the drag bar but not on stage before 20,000 screaming fans. She acts like she shouldn’t be there. It’s a real reaction—a woman who thought she would be waiting tables is instead doing this—but it’s not exactly indicative of stardom. And sure, the pipes. Blew me away. But what’s the difference between Ally doing this and Lisa Fischer singing “Gimme Shelter” with the Stones? Fischer can sing rings around Jagger but it’s still the Stones everyone came to see.

But it’s a movie, so suddenly everyone’s talking about her? I guess. Bradley Cooper, as director, never really pulls back. The media is never present here, it’s omnipresent. It’s assumed. We never see a headline, spinning or otherwise. Instead , we get the fans, and the cashiers taking photos, and YouTube clicks. Maybe that’s the way now. Maybe that’s how it feels inside the phenomenon.

So now she’s Jackson’s gal, a regular on the tour, like Patti Scialfa to Springsteen; and that’s when Rez shows up offering her a deal. And she reacts like she’s still back at the restaurant.

To let the old ways die
Break it down a little. What’s the tension and conflict in the first part of the movie? It’s them getting together and her getting on stage.

And in the second part? What’s the conflict? So many things. It’s not clean.

It’s his drinking, sure. It’s also tinnitus. He can’t hear the rhythm anymore. Is it also less Ally’s rise than the way she rises? As Beyoncé #32? As someone who bypasses the true for the shallow? At one point, early on, he has a conversation with her about getting that moment and telling your truth, and instead it feels like she’s telling Beyoncé’s. She’s telling Rez’s truth, which are lies. She does dance numbers with back-up singers, and sings about ... what? I don’t think I caught one line. It’s like they turned Patti Scialfa into Whitney. They actually tried that with Lisa Fischer and it didn’t take. But in this world it takes. Soon, too soon, she’s playing 20,000-seat stadium concerts on her own.

I always thought the main (or Maine) problem in “A Star is Born” is that the man became jealous of the woman’s success. Here, it feels more like, “You’re becoming the opposite of who I thought you were.” I think that’s why he calls her ugly, too. Not physically; it’s what she’s becoming. He’s created a monster. He thought he was giving the world something true but it was another false idol for them to worship. But if this is there—intended or otherwise—the movie never owns up to it.

Again: Does he kill himself not just because of the tinnitus and the drinking and the embarrassment, but because Rez wins? Because more and more, it’s Rez’s world? 

Gaga’s good. Cooper’s great. He should get an Oscar nom just for his gin-soaked voice. I was almost disappointed when Sam Elliott showed up. “Oh, he’s doing Sam.” I thought he was doing Blaze Foley. But then Blaze never played 20,000-seat arenas.

Looking forward to the conversations on this one.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The actual title of “Hello, Mrs. Money” is “Li Cha’s Aunt” (《李茶的姑妈》). Transpose the name and you get the idea. It’s based on “Charley’s Aunt,” the 19th-century British farce that became a 20th-century Jack Benny comedy, which is now this 21st-century Chinese rom-com/finger-wagging reminder to China not to lose itself in its quest for riches.

Is there something about empires that demand comedies about falling fortunes and men in drag?

Whatever, it’s not good. Given the filmmakers’ track record, it’s not very popular, either.

三个男人
Mahua FunAge was formed in 2003 to stage plays, then branched out into TV in 2013. Two years later, it released its first movie, “Goodbye, Mr. Loser,” a kind of remake of “Peggy Sue Got Married,” in which a loser goes back 20 years in time, and, with his knowledge of future pop songs, turns himself into a pop superstar. It grossed $226 million. Last year, Mahua released “Never Say Die,” a body-switching rom-com: $334 million. Earlier this year, “Hello, Mr. Billionaire,” the sequel to “Loser,” was released: $370 million. Boom boom boom.

Then fizz. This one is sputtering. No idea why. Would be interesting to get Chinese thoughts on the matter. I wasn’t a huge fan of the others, but they are comedies and a lot gets lost in translation. That said, for me, it’s definitely been a downward trend: most laughs (“Mr. Loser”) to least (“Mrs. Money”).

At a Sunday matinee show at Pacific Place in downtown Seattle (att.: 3), most of my time was spent waiting out overlong set-pieces and not-exactly #MeToo-friendly scenarios. Nothing funnier than a man in drag being sexually assaulted by a grinning lothario who won’t take no for an answer. Nothing funnier than date-rape drugs sprinkled into drinks. It felt like vague consolation that the powder was less sedative than Chinese aphrodisiac, and the people who drank it were already in relationships. At the same time, those relationships were hardly worth saving. The deer that lost its antlers/penis for the aphrodisiac must‘ve gone: “You’re shitting me. For this?”

Let’s see if I can break down the plot.

Andy Wong, CEO of a company that’s quietly going bankrupt, has two daughters: LiLi is married to Jerry (Allen Ai of “Never Say Die”), a corporate VP with a roving eye; LuLu is pursued by Richard, the titular Li Cha, whom she can’t stand because he loves her so. She agrees to marry him anyway to save her father’s business. Richard’s aunt, you see, is Miss Monica (Celina Jade of “Wolf Warrior II”), an expat worth tons, whom no one has ever seen. Everyone is awaiting her arrival at a lavish engagement party on some tropical island. Except Miss Monica doesn’t show. Or she shows up in disguise—as a maid. She wants to see if the love is real.

You got all that?

Meanwhile, our main character, Jerry’s assistant, Huang (Huang Cailun), a flunky who dreams of riches, and who has set up everything perfectly for Miss Monica, spends a night indulging himself in her suite. When he’s discovered by the others in a bathrobe and with a towel wrapped around his hungover head, he’s assumed to be Miss Monica, and Jerry and Richard get him to play along. Antics ensue.

The most tiresome set piece has Huang running from one end of the island to the other, dressed as either Huang or Miss Monica, depending on the situation and demand. One time, of course, he shows up for Huang’s duties dressed as Miss Monica.

The most problematic subplot involves Jerry’s father, who wants to kill himself because he, too, is now bankrupt. Instead, his son suggests he make a play for Miss Monica. The father’s idea of “making a play” is to be the grinning lothario mentioned above.

Increasingly absurd, the movie reaches a face-palm crescendo when both Jerry’s dad and Jerry’s boss threaten suicide unless Miss Monica (Huang in drag) marries them. So a wedding is staged where she agrees to marry both. Except she doesn’t. Instead, she (Huang in drag) counsels the crowd against the pursuit of wealth. I.e., the movie has everyone pursuing wealth and its message is: Don’t pursue wealth. This message brought to you by a company making hundreds of millions off so-so comedies.

新的妈妈
That said, Huang’s (or the Chinese government’s) finger-wagging speech leads to my favorite part of the movie. Huang’s ex and her fiancé happen to be on the island, and both wind up at the wedding. After Monica’s/Huang’s speech about being true to yourself, the fiancé stands and applauds this important message—then quickly declares his love for Miss Monica and asks for her hand in marriage. This is followed by a flurry of similar offers from other guests, including one foreigner pushing his child forward and saying, “Say hi to your new mommy!” 

At this point, with Monica/Huang in wedding dress pursued by a greedy crowd, there’s almost a “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” vibe. Would that it were that funny.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

“Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” is stupid from the get-go. The characters are stupid, the filmmakers make stupid choices, and everyone is stupid about the one thing the movie should be smart about—money—since that’s the only reason it exists: to take our money.

Here’s a minor, stupid example.

Apparently the place where the dinosaurs live, which is apparently called Isla Nublar, has an active volcano that’s about to blow. Bye-bye, dinos.

Some people, though, including former high-heeled PR flak Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), are working overtime to save them. We see her walking into her warehouse office wearing sensible shoes and carrying Starbucks-y coffee, and talking to the kids working the phones: a T-Rex-phobic tech geek named Franklin (Justice Smith of “The Get Down”); and a tough-as-nails, I-guess-she’s-got-a-medical-degree young woman named Zia (Daniella Pineda). They’re the new kids on the block.

Meanwhile, an old kid from the lab, Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), unseen in the Jurassic movies since 1997, is testifying before a Senate subcommittee and says this: “We altered the course of natural history. This is a correction.” I.e., We shouldn’t have brought them back; it’s probably best to let the dinos die.

That’s not a bad dichotomy. Two likeable characters on opposite sides of an issue. I’m with Malcolm but I see Claire’s side, too.

Except when Malcolm says the above line about “a correction,” the head of the subcommittee, Sen. Sherwood (Peter Jason*), says this: “Are you suggesting the Almighty is taking matters into his own hands?”

Wait, what? Wow, that’s some leap. The worst part: I don’t know whose leap it is: Sherwood’s, for bringing God into the equation, or the filmmakers’—screenwriters Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow (“Safety Not Guaranteed”) and director J.A. Bayona (“El Orfanato”)—who I guess want to condemn Bible-thumping pols. Either way, it’s unnecessary. Let’s say Sherwood is a Libertarian who doesn’t think it’s the government’s place to save owls, whales or dinosaurs. Malcolm has just given him an out. “Hey, this leading scientist says nope.” Instead, before the news cameras, and thus Claire watching TV—and displaying the first of her 50 shades of dumbfounded reaction shots—Sherwood says, “This is an act of God.” I’m sick of powerful Bible thumpers more than you can imagine, but even I thought this was gratuitous.

(* The reason Jason looked familiar to me was because he played the redneck bartender dealing with Eddie Murphy’s Reggie Hammond in “48 Hrs.” Great scene. I saw it many times while ushering at the Boulevard Theater in South Minneapolis. And now Hoss is a senator? Way of the world.)

Again that’s just a minor stupid thing from the first five minutes. It gets worse.

10 million dollars
Private industry gets involved—in the form of wheelchair-bound rich bastard Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), the former partner of beloved dino creator John Hammond (Richard Attenborough). Lockwood’s assistant, Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), contacts Claire, and gets her to contact her ex, handsome raptor wrangler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), who is the only one who can get close to “Blue,” the supersmart raptor he helped raise. (Was all of this in the first movie? I forget.) Lockwood and Mills say they want to save the dinos but that’s obviously a lie. It’s a “Jurassic” movie. Someone has to have a stupid scheme that blows up in their face. Munching will ensue.

Oh, and there’s a little girl, Maise (Isabella Sermon), playing her own game of hide-and-seek in Lockwood’s mansion. It’s Lockwood’s granddaughter. He’s raising her because her mother died in a car accident. But looks are exchanged, a telltale photo is hidden. What could it possibly be—other than the obvious: that she, too, is a clone, probably of the mother. And ... it’s that. The reveal comes two-thirds of the way through and presented as if it were news.

Everything’s telegraphed. When Claire, Grady, et al., land on Isla Nublar, they’re greeted by a sunglasses-wearing, paramilitary dude, Ken Wheatley (Ted Levine), whom we know we can’t trust—and not just because Levine played Buffalo Bob in “The Silence of the Lambs.” The camera just holds on him in a certain way. He says things like, “We’ve got your back, brother,” patting Grady on the shoulder, and Grady looks at his shoulder as if it's infected. But even Wheatley’s betrayal is stupid. They need Grady to bring back Blue and they need Blue alive, right? So when does Wheatley reveal his duplicity? Back at the ship? Nah. Immediately. He shoots Blue with a tranq, and Grady with a tranq*, but allows Blue to attack one of his men. In the struggle, Blue gets shot. Now the target is bleeding to death**.

(* I did like Wheatley blowing a puff of air at a tranqued Grady, who, no longer able to stand, collapses. A serious dick move.)

(** BTW: Why do they need Blue alive? Don’t they just need the DNA—as with the dead Indominus Rex retrieved in the cold open? Or do they need Blue to help train the next gen? But—again—aren’t the new Indoraptors super well-trained already?)

So what’s the nefarious scheme? The least imaginative one possible. Rather than send the dinos to their own island, as Lockwood intended, Mills transports them to Lockwood’s estate, puts them in cages in the basement, and plans to sell them on the black market. When Lockwood finds out, he demands that Mills turn himself in. Instead, Mills kills Lockwood. The lickspittle turns.

Here’s another detail that’s so unnecessarily stupid I can’t stand it. Mills needs a black market connection or auctioneer or something, so he meets with Gunnar Eversol (Toby Jones, doing a bad American accent), who’s supposedly “the best.” Gunnar actually flies to the Lockwood estate in Northern Cal for the meet. But as soon as he gets there, he acts as if he can’t do it. Not for moral reasons. Because he doesn’t think it’s worth his time. He acts as if selling dinosaurs is small potatoes.

By the idiot logic of the movie, he’s almost right. Once the auction begins, before a creepy collection of international war profiteers and Big Pharma, the first dinosaur, an ankylosaurus, is sold for ... wait for it ... $10 million! Gunnar and Mills are actually happy to get such a huge amount, but I immediately flashed on Dr. Evil’s outdated ransom demand: one million dollars. Seriously, don’t Connolly, Trevorrow and Bayona—not to mention Universal—even know the value of their product?

And the idiot hits just keep coming. Mills makes the argument that animals have long been used in war—horses, elephants—and I’m like, “Sure. 100 years ago.” Gunnar introduces the indoraptor as “The perfect weapon for the modern age,” and I’m like, “Wouldn’t one missile take care of it?”

As for our ostensible hero, Grady? After he wakes from his tranq-sleep by a dino’s tongue just as the lava is about to turn him into a burnt hot dog, and he hooks up with Claire and Franklin, and all three make their escape in that plastic ball from the previous movie—riding it over a cliff and into the ocean and swimming onto a nearby beach (cue “From Here to Eternity” homage), then stealing a truck and driving it onto the departing ship just as the island is blowing, but, bummer, back in America, getting captured and tossed into one of Lockwood’s dungeons, after all that, his great idea of escaping from their cell is to taunt the head-butting stygimoloch in the cell next door so it keeps ramming the wall between them and eventually breaks into their cell. I'm like, “That's the plan?” But of course it all works out. Because as the animal charges him, he’s able to leap out of the way at the last second. As we all do with charging animals.  

$1.3 billion
We know how it’s all going to play out, too. The dinos—or at least the indoraptor—will get loose, eat/kill the bad guys, and threaten our heroes. And who will come to their rescue? Blue, of course. 

But even within this obvious framework, they keep adding stupid shit. Maise, for example, knows all the nooks and crannies of the mansion—we’ve seen her hiding out in a dumbwaiter, for example. But when the indoraptor is chasing her, guess where she flees? Into her bedroom. No, not the closet. Into her bed. No, not even all the way under the covers. She just pulls a sheet up to her chin and looks around frightened as the indoraptor approaches. I think it’s supposed to be a Spielbergian moment like in “Poltergeist”—what happens when imagined monsters become real—but Spielberg began from that premise—with the kid in bed, trying to sleep. He didn’t have the kid flee into it*. 

(*That said, in terms of direction, the bedroom scene, with its monstrous shadows, is the best in the movie. A shame it was constructed out of such stupid sand.)

So after Blue saves the day and kills the indoraptor—but not before the indoraptor kills Gunnar and Wheatley—our heroes are overlooking the dungeonous basement where a gas, I guess, has leaked, and the poor dinos are suffocating. They’re being poisoned. So now we get a callback to that original dilemma: Save the dinos or let them die? Claire is on the precipice of pushing the button to release them into the world; but then she pauses, stops, can’t do it. She can’t introduce dinos into northern California. It will wreak havoc. And ruin property values.

If this were a movie made 20, 30, 50 years ago, that would be the end of it. But it’s 2018, “Jurassic” is worth billions, and Marvel/Disney has already paved the way with its continuing universe movies. Shouldn’t Universal join that club? (It tried, certainly, with its abysmal Dark Universe.) Sure, the dinos could be resurrected for the next movie, but that’s same-old, same-old. They need to continue. 

So guess who presses the button that releases them into our world? Maise, of course. Because, as she says, “They’re like me. 

Yes, honey, they’re just like you. Except they’re up to 100 feet long, up to 100 metric tons, and have razor-sharp teeth. And they’re not very smart.

Of course, considering how well this movie did ($1.3 billion worldwide), neither are we.

POST-CREDITS SLIDESHOW OF BRYCE DALLAS HOWARD REACTION SHOTS

WARNING: SPOILERS 

“You look ... well.”

It’s a line spoken halfway through “Juliet, Naked” by Duncan (Chris O’Dowd) to his ex-girlfriend, Annie (Rose Byrne), and O’Dowd nails it. His character is an insufferable professor of cultural studies who’s jogging on the boardwalk with his new girlfriend, Gina (Denise Gough), in their small, sleepy, British seaside town, when he spots Annie with some dude and a kid on the beach. So he condescends to say hello. He literally descends to their level. And after they greet, and while Annie’s trying to explain something to him, he leads the conversation to where he wants to lead it, which includes the above line. It should be well-meaning but isn’t. The way O’Dowd says it, eyes showing a faux concern, it implies: You look well for someone who’s been through what you’ve been through. You look well for someone who no longer has me. 

It’s both awful and delicious.

It’s delicious because we anticipate the fate that awaits him. Because the thing she’s been trying to tell him? The dude with her? That’s Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), the reclusive musician Duncan has been obsessed with since forever. Duncan has a rec room and a website devoted to Tucker and considers himself the world’s foremost Tucker Crowe expert. He’s his everything. 

It’s the ex’s ultimate revenge. You leave, but I wind up with your greatest love.

The truth is banal
“Juliet, Naked” is that increasingly rare animal: a small, fun, funny and original movie made for adults.

That said, it felt a little less original when I found out it was based on a Nick Hornby novel. Hornby is like his own genre, isn’t he? He writes of fallible loves and overwhelming obsessions. 

His obsessives have gotten less sympathetic over the years—at least in the movies I’ve seen. In “High Fidelity,” who doesn’t like John Cusack and his obsessive top 5 lists, which are really about obsessing over the girl he’s lost. BoSox fan Jimmy Fallon in “Fever Pitch” is a little less sympathetic simply because he’s played by Jimmy Fallon. And now here, with Duncan, we get the least sympathetic of all. Also the funniest. Most of the laughs in the movie come from O’Dowd’s line readings and reaction shots. He’s both absurd and relatable. So much so, that when Patricia and I were walking home, laughing about this or that bit, I had to ask.

“Do I remind you of him?” 

“Who? Duncan? No! Why?”

“You know. Obsessive behavior. Like me with Lin-Manuel Miranda or Joe Henry.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, but maybe thinking deeper on it this time; maybe wondering if there wasn’t something there.

Ethan Hawke is perfectly cast as the reclusive rock star who released an album of quiet love songs, “Juliet,” in 1993, then promptly disappeared. He was playing a gig in Minneapolis, took a break, never came back to the stage. He was a handsome young man on the indie rock scene who went poof, and back then Hawke was a handsome young man in the indie movie scene who didn’t. He kept working and growing and taking risks: “Before the Devil Knows Your Dead,” “The Woman in the Fifth,” “Boyhood.” He let his looks sag. Everyone in Hollywood has superhero abs and he’s got a paunch. Hawke has a lived-in quality to him now, like the worn, musty sweaters he wears in this movie, and the air of a dude who finds life more perplexing as he ages.

Tucker and Annie are opposites. He took chances, she didn’t. He left messes. Duncan and the other fans parse the rumors about why Tucker left and what’s become of him, but the truth is banal. He fathered five children by four women, but was never much of a father. Some children didn’t even know about the others, which leads to this bit of dialogue with one of his eldest:

Tucker: Parenting. Sometimes I think I could use a manual.
Lizzie: Or tips such as, “Always tell your kids they have siblings.”

Lizzie (Ayoola Smart) is visiting him in ... is it New England? Pennsylvania? He lives with his son in a remodeled barn behind the house of his latest ex. We actually see him at his best. He’s raising a child rather than running from one. The child, Jackson (Azhy Robertson), is endearing. The actors work well together. Tucker seems both father and younger brother. He’s teaching the boy about life but also seems more broken. Maybe that’s the nature of Ethan Hawke now: to seem broken. 

Tucker and Annie get together for the same reason Duncan and Annie break up. Someone mails Duncan a demo of “Juliet” called “Juliet, Naked” (Cf., Paul’s “Let It Be ... Naked”), and she has the gall to: 1) listen to it first, and 2) not like it. When Duncan posts his glowing review, she, in the comments field, tears it down. Then she gets an email from someone agreeing with her. Tucker, of course.

Is it odd that Annie is the central character but we know the least about her? She curates at the local museum, and sees herself in a1964 photo of two couples on the beach. Specifically, she’s drawn to the face of one woman, who, she finds out later, regrets all the chances she didn’t take—the timidity with which she approached life. Not enough carpe diem, or seizing the day—if we want to back to “Dead Poets Society,” the movie that helped Hawke break out. But that’s about all we get of her. It’s a weakness in the film—and particularly odd since two of its three screenwriters are women: Tamara Jenkins and Evgenia Peretz. The director is Jesse Peretz, who also directed “Our Idiot Brother” and episodes of “Girls.” 

I also didn’t buy why Tucker left the music scene in 1993. It’s the movie’s big reveal but it lands with no weight. It just glances off. It’s just, “Oh ... I guess?”

Opposites exist
Is it a weakness that there’s a tonal difference between the two men? Duncan/O’Dowd is coming from a place of comedy while Tucker/Hawke is closer to drama, romance. Hawke is muted, O’Dowd broad. But I think that’s a plus. And it feels real. In any group you’ll find your broad-comedic types and your muted-romantic types. It’s particularly true with our perceptions of significant others. The one out the door is the clown, the new one is serious and vulnerable.

It’s a shame “Juliet, Naked” didn’t find a bigger audience. Roadside Attractions released it in mid-August, but in four theaters. It waited two weeks before expanding to 300/400+. I don’t get the delay. It’s adult romance. August is perfect and September too late. But it will find its audience after its theatrical run. It’s too funny and sweet not to.

WARNING: SPOILERS

It sounded like fun. The new teacher for ne’er-do-well kids in a poor Hong Kong neighborhood is Donnie Yen, Ip Man himself, who, when the kids act up, or when gangs threaten the school, breaks out the gongfu. It’s “To Sir, With Love” meets “Iron Monkey.”

I was also intrigued by what ne’er-do-well kids in a Chinese movie are like. Turns out:

• Two brothers have an alcoholic dad, so one escapes into video games, the other into Ritalin
• One girl feels like her dad doesn’t love her so she wants to race cars
• A Pakistani kid wants to sing but remembers when others kids laughed at him because his Cantonese was good even though his face was dark, so he can’t
• One boy schleps for a local gang

There’s also a fat kid but he’s just fat; he gets no backstory.

As bad as all that sounds? It's worse than that. 

不是乖孩子
When Henry Chen (Yen) first shows up in class, none of the kids pay attention. So he pays attention to them. Individually, he asks after their interests. They don’t care. To be honest, they seemed more spoiled than underprivileged. 他们不是乖孩子。 So he activates the fire-safety sprinklers, dousing them all, while he smiles, self-satisfied, beneath an umbrella.

The next day they try to get him back with the water-bucket-over-the-doorway trick. It’s like they’re the Katzenjammer kids. And of course it doesn’t work. He kicks the bucket across the room, dousing them all in the process. They’re amazed but not particuarly curious. They should be saying “Wow. Who the fuck is this guy?” But no.  

Oh, then he solves all of their problems. All of them. Like that. 

He gets the Pakistani kid up on stage. He gets the girl to race go-karts with her dad; and when she crashes, Dad, thinking she’s dead, breaks down, sobbing, saying how much he always loved her, and she overhears. 当然。The most clichéd problem and insulting resolution is the alcoholic dad. He comes homes from what little work he does and demands the kids buy him booze. Then one day Mr. Chen sends the class on a field trip to a rehab center. And guess who’s speaking? Dad! Not sure when he decided to give up drink—the night before?—and if this is what the Chinese do instead of AA meetings. Is it supposed to help addicts? Bare your soul to some high school kids who don’t know shit. What step is that—lucky 13th?

The gang kid story is the most convoluted. He lives in a shack with his sweet, obtuse grandma who sells things on the streets. When he steals the gold lighter of a gang boss (Yu Kang), he’s beaten up and then forced to join the gang. His first test? To drug an ultimate fighter who refuses to take a fall for the money. But the kid isn’t sly about it, the fighter’s manager catches him in the act, and all of them force the kid to drink a lot of water (????), and then shove him in a locker. They’re high-fiving each other in the loutish way of foreign villains in Hong Kong movies when Chen shows up, figures everything out, and takes them all on. He’s defeating 5, 10 of them, including eventually an ultimate fighting champion, and when he momentarily loses the upper hand, they do that loutish high-five thing again. Really? As with the kids, none of them wonder, “Hey, who the fuck is this guy?” Wouldn’t that be more interesting? That curiosity?

Anyway, Mr. Chen solves the kids’ problems (“The White Shadow” wishes he were this involved in his students' lives) and we’re about 30-45 minutes in. So what’s going to happen now? Well, we finally find out who the fuck this guy is.

The incident with the ultimate fighter leads to a news story, and the journalists do the due diligence the school didn’t. They get Chen’s backstory. Turns out he’s a former U.S. Marine.

Chinese movies have an odd love for the Marines, don’t they? At one point in “Wolf Warrior II,” Leng Feng, its jingoistic hero, admits U.S. Marines may be the best fighting force in the world before adding, “But where are they now?” The implication is that America cuts and runs. The implication here is the exact opposite: America fights forever. Our wars never end. That’s why Chen—in a not-good flashback—leaves the Marines; he gets worn down. Then he walks the earth, as Jules said of Kwai-chang Caine. He tries to find a purpose again. He’s also being followed by an eagle—to which, sure—and he remembers eagles always return home to nest. So that’s what he does. He returns to the secondary school he was kicked out of so he can teach kids like he was back then. It’s “Welcome Back, Kotter” meets “Restrepo.” Except awful.

当然
What are the movie’s other conflicts?

• The school needs to do well in the national exams or fold
• Gangsters want to demolish the school for a development deal

All of this comes to a head on the same day. The gangsters take the students hostage so they can’t attend exams. But Mr. Chen to the rescue. 当然。Turns out the gang leader is the kid Chen beat up back in the day, hurting his hand and making it impossible for him to play the piano. That’s why he's a gangster. As we all know, the fallback position for any classical pianist is a life of crime.

But it all ends well for him and for everyone else onscreen. Just not for me. By the end, I was exhausted by how stupid it was.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Four people, all Chinese, watched a screening of “The Island” with me at the Regal Cinemas in downtown Seattle last Thursday. When it was over, I wanted to ask, “什么意思？” What does it mean? What’s that all about?

In the past, if I had such a question after watching a movie from China, it was invariably cultural in nature. This is more. “The Island” is a mix of “Lost,” “Lord of the Flies” and “Swept Away.” It’s the darkest comedy I’ve seen in a while and definitely the darkest comedy I’ve seen out of China.

Team building
It starts simple. Ma Jin (Huang Bo, “Lost in Thailand,” directing for the first time) is a down-on-his-luck dude with big dreams and big debts. He pines for ShanShan (Shu Qi of “The Assassin”), his way-too-beautiful co-worker, but she doesn’t give him a second glance. She’s way too beautiful.

One day, during reports that a meteor might strike the earth causing giant tsunamis, his company is on a team-building morale event—one of those “Ride the Ducks” things on the ocean—when Ma learns his latest lottery ticket has come in: $60 million! He can barely contain himself. He’s celebrating, singing karaoke in front of the bus, when they suddenly encounter a giant tsunami. Amid ocean liner wreckage and a frisky giant whale, the bus/boat is tossed and tumbled and winds up broken on the rocky shore of a small, deserted island. Everyone is stunned, horrified, in tears. Particularly Ma. All that money—gone.

Right away we get a bit of “Swept Away” (or is it “Lord of the Flies”?), as the busdriver, Wang (Wang Baoqiang, Tang Ren in the “Detective Chinatown” movies), figures out how to get food, water and shelter, then begins to lord it over everyone. The old boss, Lao Zhang (Yu Hewei), is humiliated.

Ma, still holding onto his winning lottery ticket, which must be redeemed within 90 days, plots to get away. He builds a raft with his agreeable, somewhat dim cousin, Xiao Xing (Zhang Yixing, AKA Lay of the hugely popular boy band EXO), and off they go. They find nothing but a dead polar bear floating in the water. When Ma wakes again he’s back on the island, and is beaten and humiliated by Wang, who, with everyone agreeing that the world has ended, and they’re all that’s left, now considers himself their absolute ruler. That’s the first stage.

The second stage is the comeback of the old boss. Lao Zhang has found an upended cruise ship on the other side of the island, with supplies and fishing nets, and half the group follow him there. His rule is more corporate than primitive. Playing cards become a form of barter used for goods and services—and he has all the cards. Meanwhile, Ma, who has exiled himself with Xing, counts down the days until the lottery ticket is worthless. On that day, fish fall with rain from the skies. Ma considers it a gift from God, a way of making up for the lost lottery ticket. That’s when he plot his own power move—trading the fish to his hungry colleagues for seemingly worthless devices like smartphones. After Xing repairs a generator, they’re able to charge up the phones, and Ma and Xing begin to sell hope in the form of old family images. I.e., As Wang was the primitive leader and Zhang the corporate one, Ma becomes the religious leader. He is revered.

The fact that all of this is happening during the aftermath of a team-building exercise is the film's great unstated joke. 

Wo bu xihuan ni
Much of the movie is extreme and over-the-top. Everyone shouts, the people are sheep, security forces come and go.

How “Swept Away” does it get? A bit. A buxom woman becomes willing concubine to Wang, while a professor creates a system to spread out the gene pool by having the few women have babies with as many men as possible. He’s shouted down. Later, the buxom woman jumps rope, or some such, while men ogle her. The Chinese today are less like Italians in the 1970s, than Brits in the ’60s: cleavage crazy.

I did laugh out loud a few times. Early on, Ma finally comes clean to ShanShan. Back in the office, he was the one who was giving her those secret gifts. “Why didn’t you tell me you liked me?” she asks. There’s a long pause, he hems and haws, and paws at the dirt. Then he finally says it: 我喜欢妳： “I like you.” As he’s barely finishing the sentence, she immediately responds with: 我不喜欢你: “I don’t like you.” It’s click-boom. The timing is as perfect as in a Jackie Chan fight.

Of course, they wind up together, and Ma is happy. So happy that when he, Xing and Wang discover a cruise ship gliding through the water on the other side of the island, lights on, fireworks sparkling—meaning the world has not ended—he conspires with Xing to keep it all quiet. They tell the others Wang went crazy, imagining a ship, and thus when he returns, superexcited about the ship, no one believes him. They chase him and give him a primitive electro-shock treatment.

But Ma’s conscience gets the better of him, particularly after ShanShan talks up how truthful they are with each other. Except by now, his dim cousin, Xing, has learned the cold-blooded lessons of achieving power, plots to talk all of Lao Zhang’s wealth and then leave everyone on the island. So Ma conspires with Wang to light their broken cruise ship on fire as a signal. There’s this great moment when Ma, pursued through the woods, falls off a cliff. And as he’s floating down, he sees their broken ship on fire, and the new cruise ship, seeing this, diverting its course to come rescue them. He smiles. I expected that would be his end. I thought he would be dashed on the rocks. The movie might have been better for it.

Instead, he plunges into deep water, wakes on the shore with ShanShan nearby. Everyone else has been rescued. She stayed behind to find him. Sweet. The camera pulls back and the credits roll.

And that’s when it gets really weird.

Breakup Buddies assemble
During the first credits sequence, we see our company members, our team builders, post-rescue. Their story is now famous, and Zhang has already monetized it by making the island a tourist destination.

Except ... Ma has won the $60 million, Xing is in an asylum, and Ma sees its inmates walking in a circle wearing the same kind of striped clothing they wore on the island. So ... was it all just a fantasy? That would explain the fish from the sky. But if so, whose mind were we stuck in? Xing’s? All of them? And if it didn’t happen, how is Zhang monetizing it?

And then we get a second credit sequence, which, I’ll assume, takes place before anything we’ve watched. It’s Ma and Xing on the metro, dreaming of riches, while a bystander, played Xu Zhenng, Huang’s “Lost in Thailand” and “Breakup Buddies” co-star, listens, rolls his eyes, then makes a disparaging comment about them on his phone. That’s it. It seems to exist for the cameo. It certainly doesn’t clear anything up.

And maybe that’s the point. The Chinese movie title is not the Chinese version of “Island.” It’s《一出好戏》, which translates roughly as “A Good Show” or “A Good Play.” That last character, xi, also means “trick,” so one assumes a pun is involved—implying something fake: jiade. The question remains: Who’s doing the tricking? And on whom?

WARNING: SPOILERS

I was bored. Sorry. 

I misread the title, too. I thought it meant “crazy and rich” rather than, you know, “super rich.” Although I’m sure the author of this series, Kevin Kwan, meant both.

Even so, there’s not nearly enough crazy in “Crazy Rich Asians.” There’s not enough unique crazy. It’s same-old. The matriarchs are steely and plotting, the married men philandering. The young women are catty and go on insane shopping sprees while the young men are loutish and rent expensive boats for booze- and bikini-clad-girl-filled parties.

And a perfect couple runs through them.

Essentially our titular Asians escape the confines of racial stereotypes only to get trapped in the rom-com kind. Progress, I guess.

Steely Matriarch 3
The perfect couple is Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), an NYU economics professor, and her boyfriend Nick Young (Henry Golding), the scion of a freakishly wealthy Singapore real estate/development family. In Singapore, he’s like JFK Jr., but with a financial rather than a political legacy. Oddly, after a year of dating him in NYC, Rachel doesn’t know any of this. Did she never Google him? She finds out, bit by bit, when they travel to Singapore for his best friend’s wedding.

What else does she find out?

• Nearly every young woman in Singapore hates her—having imagined themselves as Mrs. Nick Young.
• Nick’s mom, Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), hates her. She isn’t about to let her oldest child marry a mere economics professor.
• She didn’t bring the right clothes.

Thank god Rachel has her bestie, Peik Lin (Awkwafina), whose own family is rich—just not Young family rich—and who essentially plays the traditional rom-com black BFF: hipper, straight shooting, without a life of her own. We also get a gay confidante, Oliver (Nico Santos), who also doesn’t have a life on his own. Everyone exists to either impede or help Rachel.

I liked Wu but Rachel is that rom-com staple: the girl who’s pretty (but not threateningly so), who’s sometimes clumsy (so girls can identify), and who beats the odds with grit and determination. Really, the only thing new are the faces.

And they’re only new to Hollywood. “Crazy Rich” might be the first Hollywood movie with an all Asian-American cast since “The Joy Luck Club” in 1993 (an unforgivable stat), but it’s the third movie I’ve seen just this year involving the machinations of Chinese matriarchs. The others: “The Bold, the Corrupt and the Beautiful,” which won won the Golden Horse Award for best picture in Taiwan; and “Love Education,” which should have won the Golden Horse Award for best picture in Taiwan. “Crazy Rich” isn’t nearly in their category, but I'm curious about the matriarchal theme. Why does it keep returning given the patriarchal nature of Confucian societies? Or is that why it keeps returning? Scheming is what's left. 

Is it odd that the thought of rejecting Nick never comes into play? Once the other women are aligned against Rachel, the goal simply becomes fighting back and getting him. Sure, he’s handsome, but everything he’s hidden from her leaves her floundering. There’s a kind of obtuseness to his reticence, too—as if he’s glided along in this gilded world for so long he doesn’t know how difficult it might be for others without money to keep up. Or is he simply testing her? To see if she can keep up? That wouldn’t be bad. At least it would mean something’s whirring inside him. It would mean he inherited some of his mother’s nature. But I doubt it. He just seems bland and nice. And this is the guy who’s supposed to run the family business?

Wedding Singer 2
“Crazy Rich Asians” was directed by Jon M. Chu, whose other work includes the second “G.I. Joe,” the second “Now You See Me,” the second and third “Step Up”s, and the first and only “Jem and the Holograms”—all bottom dwellers on the Rotten Tomatoes charts. This one somehow landed a 93% rating. Because it was that much better? Or because everyone is ashamed of the “Joy Luck” stat and want it changed?

A few moments aren't bad. I liked the turnabout with Ah Ma (Lisa Lu). I liked the mah-jong scene, where Rachel gets the upper hand on Eleanor even as she concedes Nick. It’s a good winning-by-losing scene. But we know it’s not going to last. Hollywood has to have her win. So, yes, Nick chases her onto the plane, and there, amid luggage and crowds, he gets down on one knee and proposes and everyone applauds. Then they throw a party next to the insane infinity pool atop the insane Marina Bay Sands hotel; and everyone, all the crazy rich, party like it's 1929.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Since Melissa McCarthy broke big in “Bridesmaids,” three of her movies have been directed by husband Ben Falcone:

• Tammy (2014)
• The Boss (2016)
• Life of the Party (2018) 

And three of her movies have failed to gross more than $100 million domestic:

• Tammy: $84 million
• The Boss: $63 million
• Life of the Party: $52 million

Downward trajectory, too.

Schtup son
I’ll give it this: The first half of “Life of the Party” isn’t supremely awful.

McCarthy plays Deanna, a chipper, “Fargo”esque, fortysomething mom whose daughter, Maddie (Molly Gordon), is beginning her senior year of college. Then Deanna’s husband Dan (Matt Walsh of “VEEP”) drops a bomb: He wants a divorce to marry their bleach-blonde realtor, Marcie (Julie Bowen of “Modern Family”). What’s Deanna to do? Well, she got pregnant a year shy of her archeology degree so why not go back to school? 

It’s fish out of water stuff but blithely out of water. That’s the comedy. She buys colorful rah-rah college gear but is stuck with a depressed shut-in (Heidi Gardner), for a dorm roommate. Maddie is freaked for about two seconds but then is surprisingly cool with sharing senior year with mom. So are her sorority sisters. Each has a shtick: Debbie (Jessie Ennis) always asks for permission before commenting; Helen (Gillian Jacobs, “Community”) was in a coma for eight years and has 3 million Twitter followers; and Amanda (Adria Arjona) is just, I don’t know, really, really good-looking. Like shockingly, nobody-looks-that-good good-looking. So of course at one point Deanna has to make a speech to buck Amanda up and give her confidence. Because girls need confidence. Even the ones who are like crushingly, knee-bucklingly good-looking.

There’s also Mean Girls (Debi Ryan and Yani Simone), who can’t fathom why the old woman bothers and say nasty things to her. Indeed, for a movie in which a woman is dumped by a man, the true villains are often other women. 

Early on, Maddie gives mom a makeover to make her look less mommish. And it works. Deanna winds up schtupping Jack (Luke Benward), a tall, handsome, supernice fratboy who becomes obsessed with her. The schtupping I’ll take, but the obsession? That’s tougher to buy. Tougher to watch is how Jack is used in the bitchy melodrama. At an expensive restaurant with her adult friends, including bestie Christine (Maya Rudolph), Deanna runs into Dan and Marcie, and Marcie acts all catty. Then their waiter arrives. It's Jack. More: Jack is Marcie’s son. So trump card for Deanna, right? Yes. But it quickly gets uncomfortable as Christine in particular rubs it in Marcie’s face as if Dan weren’t standing right there. That’s all he does, by the way: He doesn’t defend mom from Christine, doesn’t defend Deanna from mom. He just stands there, a stupid expression on his face, while the others improvise around him.

None of it is funny.   

Much of the movie is like this: unfunny improv. Before a family law mediator, Rudolph and Bowen try to outdo each other in outrageousness. Nothing. The usually reliable Stephen Root (Deanna’s dad) doesn’t manage a good line. Everything Gillian Jacobs says lands with a thud.

But it’s even worse in the third act.

Third act, fourth film
So Deanna and the girls show up at Dan’s wedding, inadvertently high but with good intentions. They plan to make nice. Then they see the “wedding propaganda” in the lobby, including a posterboard in which Dan declares he is “upgrading” his wife, and they go off and trash the reception area. Confronted, they skulk out, and Marcie declares that Deanna is cut off financially. 

Wait, what? How was Deanna relying on them financially anyway? What did the idiot mediator decide?

Whatever, it sets up our stupid problem/idiot resolution finale.

• STUPID PROBLEM: Now penniless, Deanna is ready to give up college again.  
• IDIOT RESOLUTION: Ah, but the others aren’t ready to give up on her! Nope, they throw a fundraising party! Yay!
• STUPID PROBLEM: Except, oh no, the party is on the same night as the Christina Aguilera concert, so no one is there.  
• IDIOT RESOLUTION: Ah, but Helen, with her 3 million Twitter followers, tweets that Christina is coming to their party after the show! Now tons of people show up! Deanna is saved! Yay!
• STUPID PROBLEM: Except some of these people are understandably upset when Christina Aguilera doesn't show and demand their money back.   
• IDIOT RESOLUTION: Which is when the real Christina Aguilera shows up! Turns out she’s cousins with Deanna’s shut-in roomie! And she sings! And everyone parties! And Deanna is saved! Yay!

The final stupid problem Deanna had to overcome is her fear of public speaking so she can pass her archeology oral exam. She does. And then she graduates. And then ... that's it. The movie just kind of dribbles to an end. It skulks out before we can. 

At least Melissa and Ben learned their lesson, right? After the poor reviews and poorer box office? No more movies directed by Ben, right?

Wrong. Falcone's “Superintelligence,” starring McCarthy, is scheduled to open Christmas Day 2019. Fourth time’s the charm?

WARNING: SPOILERS

In 2006, I wrote the following for a piece on Spike Lee:

Too many of Spike’s choices are political, not aesthetic. In a way Spike isn’t enough like Bleek [Denzel Washington’s character in “Mo’ Betta Blues”). Bleek’s loyalty was always to the music but Spike’s loyalty isn’t always to the story. If he can get in a little speechifying, he will. 

“BlacKkKlansman”’s 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, along with various raves on social media, not to mention the six-minute standing ovation and Grand Prix it received at the Cannes Film Festival, made me think that maybe Spike was finally past all that.

Nope. Heavy-handed as ever.

But first, “Gone with the Wind”
The story is true. In the early 1970s, a black Colorado Springs cop, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), infiltrated the Colorado chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. He contacted them via phone and used a fellow cop (Flip Zimmerman, played by Adam Driver) for in-person appearances. During that first phone conversation, he mistakenly used his real name, which is why he got a KKK card with his real name on it. He still has it.

That’s a story worth telling. But Spike keeps blowing it. Did he blow it with casting? Stallworth is played by John David Washington, son of Denzel, and until 2015 a football player rather than actor, and he’s rather flat in the lead. He’s uneven. He seems respectful when applying to become the first black cop in Colorado Springs, then a bit of an ass when he’s assigned to the records department. I get it—no one wants that gig—but there’s not much there there.

The movie actually begins with a bang. OK, not so much the “Gone with the Wind” pullback shot of dead Southern soldiers, which I guess sets the scene. I guess for Spike, if you’re making a film about a 1970s Colorado cop and the KKK you begin with a 1939 film based on a 1936 novel about the fall of the South in 1865. In case people don’t know.

No, I’m talking Alec Baldwin’s turn as Dr. Kennebrew Beaureguard. Wearing slicked hair and dark-framed glasses, he angrily stumbles through a filmed lecture on the racial superiority of white people. It’s got crackle and fire, and made me think of the jolt Baldwin gave “Glengarry Glen Ross.” “I wonder what else he does in this?” I thought. Turns out? Nothing. That was it. It’s another scene-setting but at least within the vicinity of the story.

After Stallworth becomes an undercover cop, his first assignment is attending a speech by Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael (Corey Hawkins), whose rallying cries contain the usual Black Power/Black is Beautiful pronouncements of the day. Stallworth finds himself nodding along—as apparently he did in real life. That’s a good bit: He’s inspired by the man he’s supposed to be spying on. Unfortunately, Spike can’t leave well enough alone: He intersperses this with shots of uplifted black faces mesmerized by the words. If Steven Spielberg tends to underline points, Spike underlines then three times; then he gets out the highlighter.

Stallworth winds up romancing Patrice (Laura Harrier, Liz Allen from “Spider-Man: Homecoming”), the black student organizer with the big, beautiful Angela Davis afro dwarfing her small beautiful face. Problem? They don’t have much chemistry and their conversations are uninteresting. Cops are pigs/No, they’re not. Hey, let’s talk about Blaxploitation films for 30 seconds. That first night, Kwame’s entourage is pulled over and harassed by cops, and she’s felt up by a racist cop named Landers (Frederick Weller), and she relays all this to Stallworth at a bar afterwards. His reaction? Almost a non-reaction. He doesn’t even seem angry. And he doesn’t do anything about it until the 11th hour. And then...

Yeah, let’s talk about that. Landers, we’re told, is also responsible for shooting/killing a black kid, and he only got away with it because cops don’t rat out cops. But he remains a thorn in Stallworth’s side, and at the end of the movie, Stallworth, Patrice and like half the force trick him into confessing on tape, and he loses his badge. So why did the cops entrap one of their own after letting him get away with literal murder? Who knows? It comes out of nowhere and smells of bullshit. In the memoir, there is an unnamed cop who got away with shooting/killing a kid, but the rest of it is made up for the movie. It feels like it.

Then there’s the KKK. Of the four main Colorado members we see, the leader, Walter (Ryan Eggold), is most interesting for being least stereotypical. It feels like he has some wheels turning up there. The others? Felix (Jasper Pääkkönen) is simply seething hatred, his wife (Ashlie Atkinson) is dull and mewling, while Ivanhoe (Paul Walter Hauser) is so sleepy-eyed and brain-dead it’s a wonder he’s not drooling. The joke is these sad sacks believe in their own racial superiority; the problem is they’re uninteresting. Ivanhoes may exist but are they worth watching? How do you make them worth watching?

Who is interesting? Adam Driver’s Flip Zimmerman. Just the way he hangs at the police station feels real. It’s in his work as a cop, the way he holds a gun, the way he quietly informs Stallworth he never felt particularly Jewish until this assignment—when he was surrounded by anti-Semites. One of the better undercover scenes is when he shuts down Felix’s Holocaust denials by claiming they’re the weaker racist argument—that they should take pride in killing six million.

But the stuff with Nick Turturro ratting him out? Why is Turturro and his Queens accent hanging in Colorado Springs anyway? I’m sure New York guys live there but mostly it reminded me I’m watching a Spike Lee joint.

It’s like the “Birth of a Nation” scene. Spike intercuts civil rights legend Harry Belafonte telling the Black Student Union about a horrific, early 20th-century lynching with the Klan and David Duke (Topher Grace) watching “Birth of a Nation”—the movie that led to the resurrection of the Klan and that horrific lynching—and I didn’t buy either scene. The lynching I knew was true; I just didn’t buy the students being so respectfully rapt, and so uninformed that any of this came as news. And I didn’t buy the Klan watching a silent film in 1972. But guess what: That part was actually true. Those idiots did that. In a way, Spike’s like the pitcher who keeps missing the strike zone: Even when he gets it close, I don’t give him the call. To me, it felt like more of Spike’s pedanticism. He has to fit in “Birth” like he had to fit in “Gone with the Wind.” Because he has to educate so, so many of us.

The KKK took my country away
What I wouldn’t mind being educated on? What the KKK was like in 1972. According to Wiki, its membership was at historic lows. What made it rise in the late ’70s—when all of this was actually taking place? Did Reagan help? Did his “welfare queen” story? Why didn’t Spike probe that rather than sticking us back in ’72? Was it just for the afros?

At the end, after the Klan is routed and Landers kicked off the force, we get the most stirring scene of the movie: footage from the 2017 Charlottesville protests and counterprotests, and the subsequent comment by Trump that you have “some very fine people on both sides.” Throughout, the movie has reminded us where we were, where we are, and what a huge step backward it’s been. No truer words.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I was bored.

I know: 97% RT rating, good word-of-mouth, “greatest action movie ever.” People I know and respect liked it.

Was it the sense of déjà vu? The fact that no one seems to remember the previous movies so they get repeated, again and again, world without end? It’s the same roller coaster ride, people:

• Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and IMF begin the movie under suspicion
• Introduce new IMF/CIA agent played by handsome B-lister (Dougray Scott, Billy Cruddup, Henry Cavill), who is the real traitor
• Introduce crazy man and his crazy terrorist plans
• Crazy man makes it personal with Ethan
• Include scene of Ethan running through foreign city in his super upright, arm slicing motion
• Include crazy stunt everyone will talk about: outside skyscraper, outside airplane, in helicopter
• Don’t worry about making sense

It’s the “under suspicion” thing that bugs me most. In every movie, Ethan saves the world, and every new movie begins with him back at square one. At some point, Ethan should wonder if it’s all worth it. He should get drunk at a bar and just ramble.

I saved you ... and you and you. And you didn’t even know it. You don’t know shit. I saved you from Chimera, I saved you from Rabbit’s Foot, I saved you from the Syndicate and the Apostles. I stopped San Francisco from getting nuked, motherfucker. That was me. And what did I get for it? Did I get a medal? Do you see any medals on me? Helloooo, medals! No. I got blamed. They blamed me. I went blam blam blam and they went blame blame blame.

I’d pay to see that. Maybe I'd be less bored. 

Needs of the many
In the past, Ethan was distrusted for being reckless—blowing up the Kremlin, etc.—but here he’s too caring. In a bit of a “Star Trek: Wrath of Khan” ripoff, he’d rather spare the life of one member of his team, the useless Luther (Ving Rhames), even if it means plutonium getting into the hands of terrorists and risking billions. Me, I would’ve taken the plutonium and run. Sorry, Luther, but you were only on the team anyway because “M:I” was made a year after your big splash in “Pulp Fiction.” You’re doing straight-to-video piranha movies now. Time to cut you loose.

I'd forgotten a lot of the last movie. I’d forgotten that the new CIA director, Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), subsumed IMF into his org. Now he’s such an Ethan fan he’s demoted himself to director of IMF. Except, oops, the new CIA chief, Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), like all new CIA directors, doesn’t trust Ethan and IMF, so she crashes their party with her own heavy hitter, Walker (Cavill). Ethan is the scalpel, she says, and Walker is the hammer. He’s the real man. He’s the Superman.

He’s also the traitor. The mustache is a dead giveaway.

Last movie’s villain, Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), all whispering brogue, is back, too. His organization, The Syndicate, has morphed into “the Apostles,” and there’s another dude, John Lark, who’s trying to acquire plutonium from an arms dealer, the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby, Princess Margaret on “The Crown”). Ethan gets all this intel in the usual tape-recorded message that self-destructs in five seconds. What made me laugh? Lark and the 12 apostles are all represented by blank avatars. U.S. intelligence knows there’s 13 guys, knows their codenames, and can’t get one decent photo? Not even a blurry Bigfoot shot?

As writer-director Christopher McQuarrie moves the pieces around the board, from Belfast to Berlin to Paris to London to Kashmir, I kept losing the thread. Like why did Ethan and Walker need to parachute into that Paris party rather than, you know, walk in the front door? IMF can fake faces but not invites? And how odd was that Eiffel Tower meeting between Walker and Sloane? It’s just kinda stuck there. And what was the White Widow’s game anyway? Just money? She’s giving plutonium to fundamentalist terrorists without a second thought? Does she wind up in prison? Shouldn’t she? Where’s the accountability?

Speaking of: Let’s talk about the movie’s 11th-hour save of Sloane. As CIA director, she forces her right-hand man onto IMF’s search for a terrorist ... when he’s the terrorist. Then after IMF tricks him into confessing that he’s the terrorist, she still insists on sending in her agents ... except half are Apostles, Walker escapes and Hunley is killed. Imagine that. She’s responsible for the death of the former director of the CIA. Her right-hand man is a terrorist ready to kill billions. Yet because she sends a helicopter for Ethan in the end, we’re supposed to forgive and forget?  

And, for a change, could the shadowy villain not be one of the five people in the room? There’s seven billion people on the planet. Spread the wealth.

Meet your second wife
This is McQuarrie’s second “M:I” movie. No “M:I” director has ever done that:

• I: Brian De Palma
• II: John Woo
• III: J.J. Abrams
• Ghost Protocol: Brad Bird
• Rogue Nation: McQuarrie
• Fallout: McQuarrie

BTW: What a shame they didn’t stick with the numerals. This one could’ve been called “MI6” rather than subtitled “Fallout,” which is a little flaccid and forgettable. 

Cruise? He gives it his all, and he looks great for 56, but his face is getting oddly puffy. An injury? Bad plastic surgery? Age? Is it time for him to hang up Ethan? He won‘t, of course, it’s his only true moneymaker these days, but maybe he should. Consider what Ethan's “Fallout” love interests and nemeses were doing when the first “M:I” was released back in '96:

• Michelle Monaghan was studying college journalism
• Henry Cavill was 13
• Rebecca Ferguson was 13
• Vanessa Kirby was 8

Awkward.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The fact that I left a screening of “The King” happy and ready to sing its praises should probably be taken with a grain of salt—or two beers, since that’s what I drank during the show. I’d ordered one (pilsner), the concession guy opened the wrong one (IPA), so he offered both. I looked at the bottles on the counter and thought, “Why the fuck not?” It was another shitty day in Trump’s America—the week Justice Kennedy announced his retirement—and I was dispirited. Ninety minutes later, I felt great. I felt ready to fight again. Was it the doc or the beer? Or some combo?

The doc, by the way, isn't exactly uplifting. But it does discuss, on an intelligent, macro level, much of what I feel is wrong with the country. So I felt less alone afterwards. 

During the summer of 2016—the run-up to the Clinton-Trump election—director Eugene Jarecki (“The Trials of Henry Kissinger,” “Why We Fight,”) drove Elvis Presley’s 1964 Rolls Royce through the towns and cities that made Elvis who he was. Chronologically:

• Tupelo
• Memphis
• Nashville
• New York
• Germany
• Hollywood
• Las Vegas

Jarecki lets different folks into the backseat to play, sing, or just talk about Elvis and the state of the country. Basically, Elvis is seen as a metaphor for America. We took over the world with a sneer and a shake of our hips and without really knowing what we were doing. Then we grew addicted and overweight and addled. We forgot the words. Trump is our late-stage Vegas period. He's our fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. The toilet isn’t far away.

Money Honey
Give Jarecki credit. Not many filmmakers would let a supporting player, two-thirds of the way through the movie, say, in effect, “Your metaphor is all wrong.”

David Simon, creator of “The Wire,” gets to say just that. He gives Jarecki shit for the Rolls. He says he should’ve been driving one of the many American-made Cadillacs Elvis gave away to friends and family over the years. Emmylou Harris echoes a bit of this, too: “I thought he only drove American cars,” she says. In effect, Simon wants to continue the argument from “The Wire”’s second season: “We used to make shit in this country, build shit,” Baltimore dock worker Frank Sobotka says. “Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.” But it’s not Simon’s movie. And maybe the opulence of the Rolls is a better metaphor anyway.

Based on the trailer, I was worried the doc would be too much Elvis-bashing in terms of race: that he stole black music and made a fortune on it; that the various country and gospel influences in Elvis’ background didn’t factor in at all. Simon, of all people, is the one who brings up the other influences.

As for “stole,” well, you can argue Elvis was simply playing the music he liked. At Sun Records, he was recording stuff he assumed would be popular—ballads and ‘50s pop—and that just didn’t click for Sam Phillips. It was only between sessions, goofing around, that he launched into an old blues number, “That’s All Right, Mama,” which caused Phillips to perk up and ask him what he was doing. Elvis’ inclination was to apologize. Phillips knew, Elvis did not.

That said, Chuck D has a point, too. Whether Elvis “stole,” “appropriated” or was simply “influenced by” black music, he never repaid the debt. A lot of white stars, without such a debt, participated in civil rights marches and the emblematic 1963 March on Washington, including Paul Newman (born and raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio), Marlon Brando (Nebraska) and even Charlton Heston (Illinois/Michigan). Elvis stayed silent. He didn’t get involved in any of it. He doubled down on “good ol' boy.”  

You could probably do a doc just on “Hound Dog” alone. Most know Elvis made a hit of it in’56; a few know Big Mama Thornton had a hit earlier; fewer still know it was written by a couple of Jewish kids, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, who got so screwed from Thornton’s recording they started their own label in 1953. The hand-wringers claim Elvis stole the song from Thornton, but she recorded her version back in ’52, when it was a rhythm-and-blues hit. It went as far as it could under the circumstances. His take is different. It races. It rocks and rolls. You can blame racism for why her version didn't hit bigger. Elvis was just singing a song. 

“You have no idea how hard he hit American culture,” James Carville reminds us, and it’s because of what he was bringing into white living rooms: race and sex, the forbidden duo. The white power structure—both South and North—went crazy. Elvis was condemned, mocked, viewed as a freak. He was viewed as low class. Eventually they just drafted him away. When he returned he was tamed: maybe by age, or the Army, or Hollywood, or maybe just by the need to fit in; to not be a freak in the eyes of people whose approval he wanted.

Maybe he was tamed by money? That’s something Ethan Hawke, sitting in the front seat, with a dumbass toothpick in his mouth, mentions. Every chance Elvis had between money and art, he went with the money. But this could also be about his need to fit in; to win over his detractors. Sadly, as he was mollifying one group, others, off his flank, were rising. One mocked him as a thief; another made him irrelevant. Mike Myers tells a great story—probably apocryphal—about Elvis’ early Hollywood days. At the studio gates, girls gathered, hoping for a glimpse and a chance to scream. So Col. Tom Parker had them put a blanket over Elvis in the back seat, and he sailed through. Then when the Beatles broke, the girls went away but the blanket stayed. Before it was to hide Elvis so he wouldn’t cause a frenzy; after, it was to hide from Elvis the fact that he was no longer causing one.

Heartbreak Hotel
We get a little on Elvis’ early days: the dead twin; how his dad went to prison for a few months. I could’ve used more of this. That background is so sketchy. I’ve read several biographies of the Beatles but none on Elvis. Maybe I should get on that. But what can I say? Their music is more interesting and they’re more interesting.

The doc includes some great music I haven’t heard before: Emi Sunshine & The Rain; Immortal Technique. My favorite backseat drivers are Carville, Simon, Immortal Technique and Van Jones. I'd love to hear them get together and just talk. John Hiatt, meanwhile, gets in the backseat and cries. You think it’s because he's sitting where Elvis sat, and the power of that thought, but it’s the opposite. He sits there and senses just how trapped Elvis was.

Saddest moment? Alec Baldwin in New York talking politics. He makes a prediction about the 2016 election. He's wrong. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

The people who made “Skyscraper” seemed to say to themselves, “OK, whatever ‘Die Hard’ did, let’s double it!”

So in “Die Hard,” John McClane loses his shoes. In “Skyscraper,” Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) has a prosthetic leg. In “Die Hard,” Nakatomi Tower is pretty tall. In “Skyscraper,” The Pearl is the tallest building in the world. McClane’s estranged wife is a hostage in the building; for Sawyer it’s his entire family. 

McClane is a cop, Sawyer is ex-FBI. McClane is buff, Sawyer is The Rock.

Etc.

Of course, it doesn’t work. In fact, it's just awful. 

The patsy
Why don’t we give a shit about any of it? Why is “Die Hard” so much better? Because McClane has personality? Because he seems like an average joe? He complains in the air duct: “Come to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs.” He references pop culture: “Ehhh! Sorry, Hans, wrong guess. Would you like to go for Double Jeopardy where the scores can really change?” He's the smartass in the back row. He doesn’t want to be the hero, he’s just trapped in the building and has to make do until the cavalry arrives; but then he finds outs, no, he’s the cavalry. Half his lines are classics: “Make fists with your toes.” “Welcome to the party, pal.” “Yippee-kai-yay, motherfucker.”

(For more on why “Die Hard” rocks, see here.)

Will Sawyer doesn’t have any memorable lines. He doesn’t have a memorable personality. He’s a bland nice guy whose sole mission is to save his family. Even his name is bland: “Will Sawyer” C‘mon, people, it’s The Rock. Give the man at least one hard consonant.

Plus you more-or-less buy what happens in “Die Hard.” You buy that Bruce Willis is a cop, you buy Bonnie Bedilia as his estranged wife and up-and-coming executive. The building seems real, the terrorists seem splashy but kinda real. Most of what McClane does—even the crazy outside-the-building stuff—seems vaguely plausible.

Do I buy The Rock as a security executive? Neve Campbell as a surgeon? Do I believe the size and shape of The Pearl in Hong Kong: 3500 feet, 240 stories, with outside turbines forever spinning? Do I believe that Sawyer, who must weight 250 and has a prosthetic leg, can climb a building crane, swing it close to the Pearl, and leap from the crane’s top into an open window on the Pearl 150 stories above the ground? No, no, no. None of it. The one thing they get right is the duct tape. It’s the best part of the film. It’s the John McClane part of the film. 

When the movie begins, the Pearl is nearing completion, and its designer, Zhao Jong Li (Ng Chin Han), has looked at different security experts; but based on the advice of his—I guess—assistant, Ben (Pablo Schreiber of “The Wire” and “Orange if the New Black”), he chooses Sawyer, who is an ex-FBI buddy of Ben’s. Plus Sawyer’s done his homework or whatever. He’s even kind of memorized a Chinese phrase his wife taught him: 很高兴认识你: “Nice to know you.” It’s in Mandarin, but later we hear her speak Cantonese to a Hong Kong police officer. So does she know both languages? And she’s a surgeon? And she looks like Neve Campbell? 好棒啊!

Getting Zhao to hire Sawyer is part of the bad guys’ plot, by the way. Imagine that. They need a patsy, and who better than 250-pounds of solid ex-FBI muscle? Ben is in on the plot, of course, which you can tell by the way he fidgets and because he's played by Pornstache Mendez. Pierce, the accountant (Noah Taylor), is a traitor, too, which you can tell by the way he glowers and the fact that he’s played by Locke from “Game of Thrones.” Everything is telegraphed here. None of it is a surprise.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when Pablo told his friends about his new role:

Yeah, and I get into a fight with the Rock!
You?
Well, I’m ex-FBI.
So how long does it last—a second?
No, but he doesn’t expect it.
Who would?
C'mon, I could totally take him out. 
For ice cream?

Here’s the scheme. An international mob organization, run, as usual, by a Scandinavian (Roland Møller, playing Kores Botha), shakes down Zhang halfway through construction, demanding kickbacks sent to encrypted bank accounts. Except Zhang is Chinese and shit, so he un-encrypts it all and gets all their real names, and he keeps this info in a safe in his penthouse on the 240th floor. That’s why they start a fire on the 90th floor and turn off all fire-safety protocol; to get this info. Which I’m sure is backed up nowhere.

The bad guys then get Ben to get Zhang to hire Sawyer because all security measures will be on one tablet, and how hard can it be to steal one tablet away from the Rock? But they do it, Sawyer is blamed by the media, but he eludes the cops, climbs the crane, leaps into the burning building to save his family—all to the cheers of Chinese onlookers. Mother and son get out first but then daughter is held hostage on the rooftop. Sawyer and Zhang have to work together to get her free and beat the bad guys. They do. But even then they’re about to be burnt to a crisp.

Thankfully, back on the ground, Dr. Sarah has already defeated the bitchy Chinese chick with the mod haircut (Hannah Quinlivan), taken back the tablet, and promptly puts the fire protocol back online to save husband and child. Is there nothing Neve can’t do?

We were so much older then
Afterwards, in the helicopter transporting them to safety, Sawyer asks Zhang “What next?” and Zhang contemplates for a second before replying, “We rebuild.” The Rock smiles. Oh, that indomitable human spirit.

Compare this with the end of another obvious predecessor, “The Towering Inferno,” which was released in December 1974, a few months after Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal, and a more cynical time generally. Its architect, played by Paul Newman, surveys the charred wreckage of his building and says:

I don’t know. Maybe they just oughta leave it the way it is. Kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world.

I miss those days.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I had two main thoughts by the end: one deadly serious, one less so.

Here’s the deadly serious thought: Surely the filmmakers were wary their doc might be continuing the experiment. Surely they knew that by making a film about how these boys, now men, had been in essence turned into lab rats, and then finding new evidence about why this had happened, and showing it to them and filming their response in real time, surely they knew that this wasn’t far removed from what the scientists themselves had done. Here you go. Here’s what this one lab tech had to say about your adopted parents. How does that make you FEEL? The filmmakers must have had these conversations deep into the night, right? Conversations about the ethics of it all? Surely?

The other, less serious thought was this: If only the Eddie Murphy comedy “Trading Places” had existed in the late 1950s. This whole thing might never have happened.

Nature vs. nurture
Pretty amazing stuff. Twins separated at birth, then reunited. Wait, not twins: triplets. They found each other in New York in 1980, and they were all tall, good-looking and fun. They were Jewish but seemed Italian, and became minor celebrities. They went on Today and Phil Donahue. They had a cameo in “Desperately Seeking Susan,” smiling at Madonna in the early morning light.

What’s amazing, and not commented upon enough, is how much joy being reunited brings them. I think if I were in college and found a long-lost twin—someone who looked, talked and thought like me—I’d throw up. I wouldn’t want to hang with them. I certainly wouldn’t want to dress like them. I’d see it as an affront to my individuality. At least I suspect I would. But maybe this is because I don’t have a long-lost twin. I was alone in the uterus, they weren’t. And maybe this accounts for their special joy. It’s an ur-reunification. They feel it in their bones.

Or maybe they’re just joyful people.

Are they interesting people? That’s an issue a third of the way through. In the ’80s, they hang with each other, go to clubs, drink, etc. Do they have jobs? We don’t know. All we’re told is that after years of partying they open a restaurant, Triplets, in the Soho district. I expected disaster but it does well. First year, they clear a million. They each get married; they start families.

Then David breaks away.

Do we get the why of that? Or just the consequences? It happens suddenly, doesn’t it, and then we’re into Eddy’s fall. But we expected that one. We hear and see David and Bobby, today, in their 50s, talking directly to the camera, and we’re painfully aware there’s no Eddy. So that hangs over our viewing: What happened to Eddy?

Apparently he had trouble with David leaving; he had trouble with the group splitting up. He was most likely manic-depressive—outgoing, loving, beloved—and then the opposite of that. During one of his opposites, in 1995, he took his own life.

Did this wreck the relationship between Bobby and David, or was that already wrecked? When we see them today, greeting each other on camera, it feels awkward, like they haven’t seen each other in a while. They were the extremes, classwise. Part of the experiment involved placing the boys in different economic strata: upper class (David), middle (Eddy), working (Bobby). Bobby’s dad was the most gregarious, Eddy’s the biggest disciplinarian, David’s (a doctor) the most absent.

The experiment, started by renowned psychologist Peter Neubauer—who fled the Nazis and should’ve known better than to experiment with people, with children—was apparently the old nature vs. nurture argument. What’s bred into us? What do we learn? Much of the early media surrounding the boys focused on their superficial similarities. They all wrestled, smoked the same cigs, dressed similarly even before they did it on purpose. Over and over again. The boys, back then, played this up. The doc does, too.

The differences turned out to be a matter of life and death. All suffered depression but it was Eddy who took his own life. Why?

J’accuse
The doc places the blame on Eddy’s martinet father, now in his 90s. He’s a talking head early in the doc so there’s a dramatic “butler did it” quality to the accusation. So it was him all along! But this turnabout made me uneasy. We’re blaming an old man for the death of his son based on ... dime-store psychology? A desperation to show nurture matters? I’m not sure. It feels facile. 

“Three Identical Strangers” is still worth seeing. It’s an amazing, crazy, awful story. I just hope British documentarian Tim Wardle wanted me to feel uneasy afterwards. I hope his ethics discussions went deep into the night.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I spent more time covering my eyes during this movie than I do during most horror movies. That’s a testament to the accuracy writer-director Bo Burnham and star Elsie Fisher bring to the project. Anyone who’s been through it knows: eighth grade is like a horror movie.

Fisher plays Kayla, a girl living in two worlds: the hallways of junior high, through which she slinks, hoping no one will talk to her, praying someone will; and the online/social media world, where she acts confident and posts self-help videos to not-many followers. In her videos, she gives advice such as be yourself, which she clarifies as “Like, not changing yourself to impress someone else.” Then she spends much of the rest of the movie not following her own advice.

There’s not a false note in Fisher’s performance. She’s amazing and heartbreaking.

Quietest
It’s the last week of eighth grade, and Kayla’s view of her real-world self is upended—or her worst fears realized—when during auditorium it’s announced that she’s been voted “quietest.” She’s mortified (quietly), but becomes determined to upend that image. She makes an effort. That’s part of the horror: the earnest effort to put herself out there. Most of us know where earnest efforts—particularly in junior high—lead.

Is the pool party first? The mom of the cool girl in school invites her to the cool girl’s pool party, and Elsie decides to make her determined stand in this most awkward of situations: in a green bathing suit. It’s an indelible scene. She arrives late, changes inside, then makes her slow, slouched, painful way through the happy throngs playing in the sun. We’re relieved when she finally makes it all the way into the water. There’s almost a collective sigh from the audience. Even better: a goofy kid, Gabe (Jake Ryan), begins to talk to her, so she’s not alone. But of course she’s not interested in the goofy kid. She’s interested in Aiden (Luke Prael), who has sleek eyes, tousled hair, and a cool demeanor that’s probably hiding not much.

We get an endearing scene. At night, in bed with her smartphone, she visits Aiden’s Instagram page, closes her eyes and kisses one of his selfies. At this point, Dad (Josh Hamilton), walks into the bedroom and in a panic she tosses the smartphone across the room, then yells at him. When she recovers it, the screen is cracked. It’s like a girl version of a Portnoy scene.

We also get an icy scene. During a classroom test, Kayla sneaks over to Aiden—literally crawling on the ground—to deliver a message, and flirt, and pretend to be more experienced sexually than she is. She winds up bragging about things she doesn’t know about. His eyes light up. We want to shout at the screen: RUN!

Thankfully, that goes nowhere. Much of the movie goes nowhere. It’s episodic. The movement forward is in starts and stops. We, and she, anticipate disasters that never happen. At the pool party, she sings karaoke, but it seems to go fine. She’s given a high school mentor, like all the eighth graders, and hers isn’t an awful person—like, say, Parker Posey in “Dazed & Confused”—but nice and nurturing. The girl’s one mistake—after a meet-up at the mall with other high schoolers—is getting dropped off before Kayla. That allows a high school boy to get weirdly creepy. Thankfully, that goes nowhere, too.

Burnham, who made his name via YouTube, has an overt message in the movie: get off social media; go offline. But his subtler message is the better one. Every scene has the potential for disaster, but it never arrives. You put yourself out there, disasters generally don’t befall you. Hell, most people don’t notice or care. Which, in eighth grade, can be a huge positive.

Small victories
Some of the jokes are OK but seem like retread “Fast Times” and/or “Simpsons” bits. Kayla looks around at her peers and sees dudes sniffing markers, girls dealing with retainers. The cool girls are vapid. Instead of “Fuzzy Bunny,” the narrator for the hip-new sex-ed video says, “It’s gonna be lit.” The vice-principal dabs, but he seems self-aware doing it. He’s the older dude doing it as a joke on himself. He was on screen for seconds and I liked him immediately. 

Throughout, there’s small victories. By the end, Kayla is beginning to find her voice, beginning to find her peers—including Gabe—and beginning to think the self-help videos aren’t helping her self much. It’s a great slice-of-life. Kudos to Burnham for making it.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

Does Sandra Bullock have to kill off George Clooney in every movie now? Is that a stipulation in her contract? 

Bullock plays Debbie Ocean, sister to Danny, who, as the movie begins, gets paroled, visits her brother’s grave (buh-bye, George), and then goes on a high-end shopping scam at Bergdorf’s. I like the scam. She picks some items, plays the rich bitch returning them without a receipt, is frustrated by the poor customer service rep simply following rules, then says, “Well, can I at least have a bag for them?” And out she walks out with the bootie.

After she scams a room at the Plaza for a long soak, she’s ready to call together the old team.

Come back to the nickel-and-dime
OK, so initially it consists of Lou (Cate Blanchett), her partner from way back when, and ... that’s it. The two of them were involved in nickel-and-dime stuff before Debbie got involved, personally and professionally, with Claude Becker (Richard Armitage), a jerky gallery owner who used her to bid up prices of artworks. When the feds closed in, all the evidence, including his quick confession, pointed to her, and she got five years. Now she’s after revenge.

How? As a sideplot while heisting a $150 million Cartier diamond necklace. It will be worn around the neck of famous actress and pain-in-the-ass Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway), who will play co-host at the biggest fashion show of the year: the annual Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum.

This means Daphne goes from nickel-and-diming, and then getting scammed herself, to pulling off the heist of the century. It’s like a little league pitcher tossing a no-hitter in the Majors. Yet no one in the movie gives it a second thought because she's Danny Ocean's sister. The movie doesn't give it a second thought. The movie isn't big on second thoughts. 

Here, by the way, is our titular team:

1. Debbie: Leader, revenge maven
2. Lou: Kitchen help
3. Rose Weil (Helena Bonham Carter), a Betsey Johnson-like fashion designer on the downside of her career
4. Amita (Mindy Kaling), diamonds expert
5. Nine Ball (Rihanna), computer hacker
6. Constance (Awkwafina), pickpocket
7. Tammy (Sarah Paulson), fence and general professional

The eighth comes at the 11th hour: the seeming dupe, Kluger, but I was confused about exactly when she came on board: before or after the emetic? And even with Kluger, shouldn’t it be Ocean’s Seven? Do you count yourself in your own group? And is this a question for linguists or mathematicians?

The scam, complicated and smooth in the “Ocean’s” fashion, veers, at a key point, to idiotic. This is that point: Rather than replace the necklace with the cubic zirconium they’ve created, which would’ve alerted no one, they let everyone know the necklace is missing. So there’s this big search, and the fake is eventually found in a fountain. By Tammy. Everyone seems fine with this—including the necklace’s security detail, which is full of former Mossad agents. The movie has already insulted Mossad by implying its former agents wouldn’t dare enter a ladies room, so this is just more salt in the wound.

But I guess all that hubbub was to create a diversion? Allowing for a bigger haul—swiping the crown jewels from a Met exhibit? News not only to us but to the rest of the team. And it’s only accomplished because Yen (Qin Shaobo), the Chinese Cirque du Soleil dude from the other Ocean’s movies, lends a hand. Lends a hand? Let me rephrase: He does it all. Most of the money they swipe is because of him. So why isn’t he celebrating with the rest? Because he’s a dude? Because he’s Chinese? He didn’t even make the title cut. 很可怜。

Much of the movie is like this: It doesn’t work if you think about it for two seconds. After the haul, James Corden shows up as a super-smart insurance investigator, John Frazier, but once he hits a dead end he lets Debbie point the way. She points it toward her ex, Becker, but Frazier needs probable cause to search his place. So Daphne prostitutes herself to snap a photo of some of the missing jewels. She sends it to Debbie, who sends it on to Frazier, who gets his warrant. How likely is this to stand up in court? What are the odds the photo signatures lead back to Debbie and Daphne and the scam is revealed? And everyone else is discovered? And winds up in jail? And Becker is released? And laughs at all of them?

But whatever. Cue happy ending: Rihanna opens a pool hall—as all hackers do. 

Frozen
“Ocean’s 8,” directed by Gary Ross, has moments, but it doesn’t have much forward movement. It’s both zippy and oddly stagnant. It also bothered me that no one else thought cutting up this priceless Cartier necklace was the wrong thing to do—like destroying a Rodin sculpture. 

Here's who I loved: Hathaway, Helena and James Corden. Blanchett is shockingly wasted. The biggest problem may be Bullock. She’s so busy being cool she’s nearly frozen. The plastic surgery doesn’t help. Cate's either. And good god, Mindy, lip injections? You’re supposed to be funny. You’re supposed to be us.

At one point, Debbie says they’ll go under-the-radar because nobody notices women, which, with this crew, is the exact opposite of true. Nobody notices Rihanna? C‘mon. The line should’ve been about how nobody notices older women. Then you hire good actresses in their 50s and 60s who haven’t had plastic surgery and send them off to do this thing. Hollywood: There's still time.