Busted: GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE

How peculiar that a decades-later return to the world of a pretty flimsy comedy is now puffed up with artificial reverence. The goofy special effects comedy Ghostbusters went from being a hit lark in the summer of 1984 to a kind of revered generational classic among a slim cohort. To hear some fans discuss it, you’d think it was a movie of profound emotional development and loaded with lore. They take it very seriously, so they start thinking the movie itself did, too. But rewatch it now and you might see it is a shaggy, silly thing, always more about a fun theme song, some amusing personalities (Bill Murray chief among them), and a sarcastic tone than something spinning its mythology. Thus, after an ill-fated 2016 remake whose women-led cast somehow led to vicious alt-right backlash, the idea of the series as serious business and a generational bequeathment has found a willing vessel: writer-director Jason Reitman, son of the original’s helmer, Ivan. The result is Ghostbusters: Afterlife, an improbably enjoyable movie some of the time, although it runs out of invention and goodwill just short of its finale. That’s because it is better the more it’s just the original reconfigured as a small-town tween adventure family drama, a refreshingly small-scale effort of Amblinesque coming of age sentimentality with a dusting of low-key sci-fi awe—Spielberg’s suburbs and Netflix's Stranger Things in a blender. An ouroboros of franchise filmmaking, the thing is, even at its best, never more than inspiration and rip-off endlessly eating each other. But that is a little fun with surface shine and appealing leads.

This belated sequel trades sarcastic 80’s New Yorkers for a couple of kids relocated to nowhere Oklahoma. A nerdy girl (Mckenna Grace) and her gangly older brother (Finn Wolfhard) are moved by their mother (Carrie Coon) into the creaky farmhouse of their estranged and freshly deceased kook grandfather. Guess what? He was a ghostbuster. And he was prepping the house with gear to stop a new infestation that’s apocalyptically brewing in the nearby abandoned mine. The kids are easy to sympathize with, misfits and outsiders finding some reason to hope for belonging. They’re quickly surrounded with a few more cute young people and one genially amusing science teacher (Paul Rudd). There are lots of cozy shots of the tiny main street and sunny farmlands, with some nostalgia for a crumbling storefront, drive-in-roller-skates Americana. From there, the touches of supernatural stakes—some ghostly hide-and-seek and messages from beyond, and some early splashes of effects-driven scurrying—plays out with a fine slow build and light touch. The screenplay was co-written by Gil Kenan, whose Monster House was a better version of the kid-friendly spooky movie. The moderate enjoyment I got out of this new Ghostbusters’ early going was in its earthier look and genuine interest in its stock types. The pace and tone ends up grooving on a vintage vibe—though it’s set in modern day, there’s a sense it’s playing in tribute to the sorts of blockbusters en vogue forty to fifty years ago.

The trouble really only comes when it decides to be a pure nostalgia play instead. The movie gives over what derivative originality it had to call backs and cameos. The final act of the picture finds a bunch of stuff happening, and tons of creatures and designs appearing, for no reason other than that every bit of that references the original. There’s even a ghoulish digital resurrection that’s so dripping in unearned saccharine notes that it feels all the cheaper. What started as a take on the material that plays perfectly without knowledge of the first couple Ghostbusters, becomes something leaping over gaps that really only get filled in with the logic of a myth-tending sequel. Why did they become that? Why did they go there? How’d they show up? All that’s answered with a shrug and a wink and a rush to make the long-time fans feel flattered. It’s not a million miles away from what Star Wars or Rocky or Star Trek or Halloween (or name your franchise) does from time to time, but this one feels acutely unearned because it is building its ill-fitting puffed up monument to itself on the softest and creakiest of foundations. That’s why it is so much more agreeable the more lightly it wears its legacy.

Off the Press: THE FRENCH DISPATCH

The French Dispatch is an impeccable handcrafted artifice somehow turning into the purest sincerity at the same time. It is, in other words, a Wes Anderson film. He’s a filmmaker who can make intricate dollhouse constructions over the darkest of melancholies. He’s one of our great appreciators of style and tone, able to take a gleaming picture of theatrical techniques and literary flourishes, pack it dense with allusions and yet give it surface pleasures all its own. He’s best at building out little pocket worlds—an eccentric wealthy New York family in The Royal Tenenbaums, a brotherly train tour of India in The Darjeeling Limited, a tiny New England island community in Moonrise Kingdom, or, his best, the towering, luxurious European mountain getaway in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Within he can indulge his eye for design—a blend of vintage mid-century aesthetics informed by a well-curated artistic intellect—while building up beautiful sadness and delightful serendipities. There’s no wonder the astonishing emotional power he can build—whether a gentle reconciliation between father and child, or a bittersweet acknowledgement of encroaching fascism bringing a golden age to a close—can catch viewers by surprise, if they can see it at all, beneath his dazzling, droll surface precision.

His latest takes as its conceit the last issue of a fictional magazine, The French Dispatch, upon the death of its founder, editor, and chief benefactor. The old man (Bill Murray) willed it so. One gets the sense it wouldn’t have the money to keep going without him. He expired near the end of editing the latest volume of what we’re told is an outgrowth of a weekend supplement for his late father’s Kansas-based newspaper that became, over the course of fifty years, its own periodical run out of storybook-perfect, snow-globe-pretty Ennui, France (the sly Francophilia is from the heart). It was a haven for the sort of literary journalists and essayists that flourished in the early to mid twentieth century. (The first card of the end credits lists, in tribute, several who serve as inspirations for Anderson’s inventions, from E.B. White and Lillian Ross to A.J. Liebling and James Baldwin.) The film becomes an amusing, eclectic mixture of that era’s art, music, design, and politics run through the typical Andersonian styles. But above all it is driven by evoking long, discursive, artfully poetic journalistic inquiries, some terse typewriter clatter, others honeyed descriptive detail. This kind of magazine writing has been practically driven extinct, save a few New Yorker-style holdouts, over the last few decades of rapacious hedge fund buyouts and relentless internet erosion of readership and attention.

It’s this sense of a bygone era that animates the movie’s wistfulness. As it begins with a death, it feels all the more like an end of that era. The movie is set in 1975, a time when a magazine like this still seemed almost the norm. Anderson begins with the editor’s obituary, and then dramatizes the four articles that make up the farewell publication. Each begins with the title positioned in crisp type, and is greeted with lovely pastiche prose that sounds just right for the period and style. They’re narrated by the journalists—a laid-back observational man-about-town (Owen Wilson), a snooty and secretly wild art expert (Tilda Swinton), a persnickety quasi-radical researcher too close to her subjects (Francis McDormand), and a refined, poetic appreciator of appetites (Jeffrey Wright). Each section is thus framed as a nesting doll—authors recounting stories within their essayistic impressions to interlocutors in faded color stock, bursting into beautiful black-and-white reportage that still further blooms into vivd color at key moments of artistic transcendence.

Thus these dispatches proceed as a collection of lovely little short stories told in a collage of filmmaking techniques. They mix film stocks and aspect ratios, split-screen juxtapositions, vigorous intuitive montage, miniatures, rear projection, slide-away stage walls, freeze frames made by actors standing still, stop-motion and hand-drawn animation. It’s a Whitman’s sampler box of a film: a sturdy, segmented container with a place for each bite-size bit of everything Anderson can do, every little nugget crafted for distinct aesthetic appeals and bittersweet surprises bursting when bit into and chewed over. The resulting stories are all in their own ways about the oddities of human experience and the dilemmas in which eccentrics and artists can find themselves. They’re over-brimmed with petty disappointments, deep wells of sadness, and grand attempts at connection outside oneself. First is a bicycle tour through the town of Ennui. The next takes us to the world of a prisoner (Benicio del Toro) painting his muse, a beautiful guard (Léa Seydoux). An art dealer (Adrian Brody) wants to invest. The next has a college activist (Timothée Chalamet) who wants to change the world, or maybe just find a lover, as he’s groping toward a manifesto. Then we get the tale of a taste test in a police kitchen (run by chef Steve Park and cop Mathieu Amalric) interrupted by an urgent kidnapping investigation. (That one gives new meaning to the term pot-boiler, eh?) The stories never quite go the way you’d think, and take detours into the silly, the tragic, and the profound, sometimes even all at once. Each ends back in the editor’s office as he mulls over some suggestions. His favorite is one all good English teachers should adopt: “Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.”

That’s what Anderson does, too. He makes movies with rigorous structure and visual whimsy, together drawing out his whip-smart dry dialogue, textured thematic concerns, and layered images with clear intentionality and a crystal clear unity of form and purpose. This latest is deceptively light, the stories tossed off and slighter than the richness of his character work in other films. But as it draws to a close, it has a cumulative effect. Throughout, we see characters engaged in all kinds of artistic pursuits—painting, cooking, philosophizing, writing—and appreciations—viewing, eating, buying, reading. We see madness in pursuit of new tastes and new visions, and we see the comfort of finding those who understand you through your ideas, your perspective, your words. In these ways, the segments speak to each other, and build to a lovely epilogue that ties the larger portrait together. It’s about art’s capacity to draw us outwards and upwards toward the beautiful, no matter how fleeting. And it’s the story of a man through the work he shepherded—a true editor’s funeral. And it’s a filmmaker at the height of his powers, in total control over his techniques. One can sit and marvel: look at it go. In the list of artistic pursuits it demonstrates and venerates, it makes sure filmmaking is always one of them.

Daddy's Home: ON THE ROCKS

Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks could be called a sitcom farce if it had some more pep in its step. As it is, it’s slow-drip farce, a low-key look at a middle-aged married woman with doubts (Rashida Jones) and her rascally womanizing father (Bill Murray) who flies into town and encourages her doubts in order to spend time with her. It’s sweet, sad, and sentimental as the two of them tool around New York City trying to figure out if her husband (Marlon Wayans) is cheating on her. Like a minor B-side to Coppola’s great father/daughter picture Somewhere—where there a womanizing movie star father is slowly, potentially, pulled out of his ennui by taking care of his daughter for a while—this new movie finds the push-and-pull of a warm but contentious familial relationship a source of strength and consternation. Coppola is such an astute observer of human behavior, and finds a dreamy specificity in her pin-prick precise production design, so perfectly right it looks tossed off and casual. Because of this, her airy and breezy approach to a situational comedy of this sort looks easy. It has the cheery rhythms of repartee at half speed, a lived-in prickly warmth between a charmingly disappointing —or disappointingly charming—father and his slightly stressed daughter, whose insecurities surely must come, in part, from her dad’s approach to women. “You can’t live without them,” he says, “but you don’t have to live with them.” He says it not like a punchline, but as a bromide the old fellow has surely dusted off one too many times before. The whole project balances on this sparkling smallness, on subtle turns of phrase and shifts of mood. Here’s a portrait of love, aging, and family that’s sweet and sad. Without pressing down too overtly, it becomes a deceptively light domestic drama hidden just under the quotidian daily routine and dilemmas—drop offs and pick-ups, lunches and dinners, RSVPs and random catch-ups, babysitters and cabs—and the naturally paced development about what lesser hands would escalate to unreal crescendos. Coppola’s a sharp filmmaker, and here finds a generously slight picture of uncomfortably comfortable middle age, its discontents, and its pleasures. No wonder a key recurring image is that of a gifted watch, for the older you get, the more you realize the greatest present you can give someone else is your time.

Boo Who? GHOSTBUSTERS

Like the 1984 supernatural comedy Ghostbusters, the 2016 remake is a plodding effects-heavy silly spectacle strung along a rickety thin plot. The jokes aren’t particularly funny. The ghosts aren’t particularly scary. And the story isn’t compelling. The whole enterprise rests entirely on the charms of its comedian cast. In both cases, this allows for a certain eccentric personality that keeps it from being a total waste. The original had its sarcastic Bill Murray, technical Harold Ramis, eager Dan Aykroyd, and helpful Ernie Hudson banding together to start a small business as ghost catchers. Now there’s a reluctant Kristen Wiig, earnest Melissa McCarthy, loopy Kate McKinnon, and capable Leslie Jones putting together a ghost busting team. They want to prove their research isn’t bunk, and that they can do some good removing New York City’s pesky hauntings. Because the cast is likable and game, throwing themselves into the swirling effects work with some sense of commitment and chemistry, it’s not too bad.

The run up to the movie’s release was marred by sight-unseen sexist anger from guys who objected to women in the ghostbusting business, followed by an opposing contingent who felt the best way to combat that nonsensical rage was to claim seeing the movie to be a sort of feminist duty. (Hopefully all right-thinking people know women can be ghostbusters; and you don’t need to buy this particular movie ticket to prove you believe in gender equality, despite its undeniably productive symbolic value.) In retrospect, the movie itself is hardly worth the foofaraw. Watching it I was neither entertained nor annoyed. I was, in fact, the closest to no thoughts at all as possible. Technically a movie, a great deal of obvious cost and effort went into making it a shiny, amiable, blockbuster bauble. It’s not a good movie, but it’s certainly no worse than the original, sparks of inspiration duly served up in a bland container. There are good intentions and good will on the part of director Paul Feig, co-writing with his The Heat screenwriter Kate Dippold, beholden to the idea of what a Ghostbusters should be. It hits the same beats, invites in many of the same spirits, and plays it safe. There’s an overwhelming feeling of been there, done that, despite the refreshed surface details.

Tasked with reviving a long-dormant property important to Sony’s bottom line, Feig, who has steadily been accruing a good run of big screen comedy, is beholden to the dictates of big, bland studio product. He doesn’t have the freedom to be as loose and observationally character driven as his Bridesmaids or as sharply pointed a gender studies genre critique as his Spy. So it feels emptier than we know he was, at least in theory, capable of making it, like it’s a fresh take sloppily shoved into stale packaging. But at least he is allowed to give his cast enough room to make it their own. Wiig and McCarthy nicely underplay sweet old friends who reconnect over their love of the supernatural. McKinnon is a continual delight as a loose-limbed weirdo fawning over the ghostly happenings and her oddball tech. (Whether she’s dancing to DeBarge or licking her weapons, every cutaway to her is worth a smile.) And Jones makes the most out of an NYC history buff, good for pointing out a subway spirit is of one the earliest criminals to be electrocuted in the city. (“It took so much electricity they said, forget it, just shoot him.”) They wring some small laughs out of the dead air.

To the extent this Ghostbusters is a pleasure to watch it’s thanks to these four women, plus Chris Hemsworth as their incredibly dim hunky secretary so dumb he plugs his eyes when he hears a loud noise. (That’s the movie’s one smart commentary on gender roles in these kinds of movies, giving women the center stage while the token man is there to be stupid and objectified.) Otherwise the movie’s a slog through repetitive and flatly deployed hauntings at which the women show up, take care of business, and then leave deflated when the mayor’s office routinely decries them as fakes. Then there’s an endless CG climax with swirling ectoplasm and a snarling underwritten villain. It’s business as usual. Every scene is too short – no good build to the comic rhythms or scares’ staging, with the hammering editing stepping on most punchlines – and yet the whole movie is too long. There’s a push-pull between the new and old (several cameos from original cast members stop the action cold), the comedy and horror, the grinding predictable plot and the thwarted desire to turn into a loose hangout with funny people. It never resolves these tensions, leaving the movie off-balance and never wholly satisfying. The women are great. The movie is not. A more radical reimagining was in order.

Man Cub's Burden: THE JUNGLE BOOK

Disney’s latest attempt to transmogrify one of their animated classics into a live-action spectacle is The Jungle Book. This production takes their 1967 Rudyard Kipling adaptation, a simple, rambling, musical story, down to its bare necessities, building it back up into a pleasant jungle adventure. In the process it loses most of the cartoony energy and all but hints of two songs. But some of what it loses in vibrant animated silliness it gains in the weight and heft of the best imitation wilderness money can buy. It’s CGI made with an eye for live-action, computer animated with a real boy running through. The amiable feature tracks along leafy green oasis and rocky cliff, swampy waterhole and cavernous ruin, getting undemanding picture book tableau out of every development. It’s high-stakes and kid-friendly, a child’s eye view of the jungle as a place where, if you believe in yourself, you’ll survive just fine with the help of your animal friends.

In this jungle-as-playground we meet Mowgli, the kid who was found abandoned as a baby and raised by a pack of wolves. He’s played by newcomer Neel Sethi, an agreeable boy who seems to enjoy scampering about the scenery and speaking to the animals who growl and howl around him. (He also doesn’t mind wearing only red shorts, the traditional garb of the Jungle Boy, from Bomba on down. Nice of the animal parents to understand the need for pants.) He’s enjoying life as a wolf, playing with pups and looking up to his canine parents (Lupita Nyong’o and Giancarlo Esposito). Alas, the menacing tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba) knows the danger man poses and demands Mowgli be killed for the good of all jungle kind. This leads wise panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) to decide the best option is taking the man cub to be safely reunited with his own kind. There’s not much to it, the characters filled in by typecasting and cultural memories, but the movie has a sturdy construction on which to build its digital sights.

What follows is a trip through beautifully fake scenery, with towering waterfalls and sun-dappled trees, swinging vines and staggering vistas. It’s as much like a jungle as a greenscreen stage in downtown L.A. can be these days. Top-notch effects work creates an often-convincing vision, fitting a movie that’s content to poke along through episodic little vignettes enjoying the company of a variety of animals. The creatures Mowgli encounters will be familiar to anyone who knows Disney’s original. Screenwriter Justin Marks makes sure to include the expected cast of characters, some voiceless (elephants, birds), others voiced capably by recognizable performers, like sneaky snake Kaa (Scarlett Johansson, slithery seduction), sweet lazy bear Baloo (Bill Murray, warm and loveable), and the envious orangutan King Louie (Christopher Walken, making eerie musical use of his usual unusual punctuation). Every majestic creature – a menagerie that would barely look out of place in a motion-capture Planet of the Apes – is animated with uncanny accuracy and remarkably authentic textures, real enough to pull off the illusion, but fake enough to not scare too many kids.

Director Jon Favreau is a good fit for this sort of film. Think of his work on Christmassy Elf, sci-fi board-game trip Zathura, and kicking off the Marvel Cinematic Universe with two Iron Mans. He knows his way around bright, clean, clear popcorn imagery, bringing a fine workmanlike competence to the spectacle that works because he believes in the movie magic of his effects and has the cast and crew to pull it off. There is some real majesty to its best moments, and at its worst a sense of predetermined comfort. We know where we’re going, but the way there is reasonably entertaining. There are primal fable-like qualities to the images of an innocent boy standing next to these dangerous beasts and finding his way to be their equal. It’s not a story of man conquering the flora and fauna, but becoming a part of them, an age-old scamper-through-the-wilderness-to-find-yourself tale.

Favreau realizes the Kipling tale’s cinematic heritage as a red-blooded boy’s adventure story, eager to admire the beauty of its setting and creatures so cheerfully faked for our amusement. It may take direct inspiration from Disney’s own classic in story, character, and music cues, but it’s as indebted to the Kordas’ Technicolor 1942 version, or Stephen Sommers’ 1994 pulpier-ish iteration. It’s always about giving a man cub a fantastical place in the natural spectacle of nature, to play with danger and emerge safe and sound. Favreau concludes his Mowgli’s story with appealing lessons about standing up for what you believe in, using your talents to protect others, and being proud of becoming your best self. Though it is interesting to note where the boy ends up. This isn’t a story about emerging from the wilderness to become a man, but engineering a way to remain boyish forever. Seems a fitting message for a company that hopes we’ll keep paying to see new versions of old childhood staples.

It's a Wonderful Night: A VERY MURRAY CHRISTMAS

An obvious outlier in Sofia Coppola’s career, A Very Murray Christmas is her shortest (just under an hour) and simplest work. An unserious holiday special caught somewhere between experimental TV and indie trifle – a neither here nor there object appropriately debuted on Netflix, because where else would it fit? – the film finds Bill Murray playing a version of himself. Trapped in the Carlyle hotel in New York City during a Christmas Eve blizzard, he reluctantly trudges downstairs for a live broadcast set up by some barely competent producers. They want him to sing a few carols and grin out at a nonexistent audience. None of the guests have made it through the storm, though one glimpse at the place cards shows that the invites (Pope Francis?) involved more than a little bit of wishful thinking. Murray doesn’t want to go through with it, and gets his wish when the power conks out. This leaves the man free to hang out with Paul Shaffer and wander the hotel. That’s it. Told you it was simple.

Coppola, from a script she co-wrote with Murray and Mitch Glazer (Magic City), makes this her slightest, lightest portrait of loneliness and alienation. It helps that she has both sides of Murray, the public figure, to play with. Here he’s the sad sack clown (the side she used perfectly in her Lost in Translation a dozen years ago) and the unpredictable aloof feel-good meme. He’s almost, but not quite, enjoying himself as he quips and sings songs with people he meets in the hotel – wait staff, chefs, a bride and groom – cheering up their dreary holiday eve with a sparkling low-key charm and cozy impromptu party atmosphere. The joke is that the usual TV Christmas special is artificial connection, a faux-coziness between the stars du jour and the lonely saps at home. But what Murray does when the power goes off, and the few guests huddled in the hotel bar have to stay close for warmth, eat food before it goes bad, and enjoy a few songs together, is real holiday connection between strangers.

Of course, the even bigger joke is that, for all the quiet, hipper-than-the-usual-holiday-variety-show atmosphere, it’s totally a Christmas special. Coppola has smartly cast it with a parade of guests stars playing it small and natural, some in funny cameos as themselves, others playing characters like dotty producers, smarmy agents, sweet assistants, random hotel employees, and the like. (I’d list off a few of the familiar faces, but they’re to a person such lovely surprises and delightful charmers I’d hate to spoil them for you.) There are also plenty of musical numbers, from old standards – “Jingle Bells,” “Let it Snow” – and classic carols – “Silent Night” – to a rousing and moving group sing-along to The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York.” The performances are full with eccentric vocals and authentic communal spirit. Cinematographer John Tanzer’s warm photography captures a fireplace glow, and Coppola blocks the performers like she’s finding a close moment in a cozy party. She concludes the film with a few gently silly hallucinated production numbers, then a pleasant breakfast, and one last song. It’s nice.

The project exudes offbeat warmth, curled up with the deep melancholy that can arise when the holidays don’t go as you’d hoped, but content with the excuse to find human connections in unexpected places. The result is the emotional equivalent of the Yule Log video, steady and comforting with only minor variations on its theme throughout. (It’s not too far removed from A Charlie Brown Christmas in affect.) You could throw it on your streaming device and let the soft sounds wash over you for the hour. But it’s also such a lovely bit of filmmaking, simple and yet evocative, a sustained mood piece of people isolated on Christmas slowly building a fleeting sense of holiday community, a fine unassuming bit of whimsy from one of our finest filmmakers. It’s Yuletide magic in a minor key.

Hello Goodbye: ALOHA

Aloha is another Cameron Crowe picture about a successful man who finds his professional life in jeopardy while his inner life is restored by romance. Furthermore, it’s another of his romantic comedies spiked with office drama, like Jerry Maguire was falling in love while negotiating sports agent business and Matt Damon fell for Scarlett Johansson while she helped him with his zoo in We Bought a Zoo. There’s also Orlando Bloom’s disgraced suit meeting Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, and you could throw the reality-scrambling Vanilla Sky into the mix, with publisher Tom Cruise crushing on Penelope Cruz, if you view its twisty ending optimistically. In Aloha, a depressed defense contractor (Bradley Cooper) survives an explosive encounter in Kabul and is reassigned to Hawaii, where he’s to negotiate a new roadway through Native Hawaiian territory. His military liaison is a bright charming young woman (Emma Stone). If you already think he’ll fall in love and grow a conscience, you’ve been paying attention.

Because Crowe is a warm writer sincere in his sentimentality, he can usually make his formulaic tendencies work. (Of course, he’s even better when drifting away from formula. It’s why Say Anything… is still his best film.) What’s most peculiar about Aloha is how everything around this central romance plot is much more fascinating and effective than what is inside it. Cooper and Stone have fine chemistry playing two people who have to fall in love because they’re the stars of the movie and the script keeps pushing them together. It’s largely unconvincing, following a period of initial irritation, then intense love, then a tearful misunderstanding, and so on. What’s far more interesting is watching Cooper’s interactions with other characters in a breezy, low-key, undemanding story of a man slowly regrowing his conscience.

This growth takes root as Cooper works with his boss (Bill Murray), a tycoon trying to launch a satellite with the armed forces’ help. One gets the impression Cooper has been unscrupulous in the past. Half-articulated military industrial commentary abounds in a guardedly biting way, as the rich man’s real aims are hidden from the brass (Danny McBride and Alec Baldwin). Meanwhile, both public and private interests are all too willing to manipulate Native Hawaiians to go along with their schemes, trading them land and assistance to wave construction through sacred spaces. This thread is far more interesting than whether or not the girl will fall for the guy, especially when their relationship is so thinly sketched and taken for granted. The story is dusted with a few intimations of magical realism that never amounts to anything, and is resolved far too neatly and softly to retain its teeth, but is a more intriguing element in every way.

Better still is a subplot involving an ex-fiancé of Cooper’s, played by Rachel McAdams with glowing happiness tinged with a hint of regret. It's been a dozen years since their break up. She has two kids (Danielle Rose Russell and Jaeden Lieberher) with a military man (John Krasinski). She loves her family. And yet the appearance of her old love gets her thinking. This storyline features the best writing and acting in the film, Crowe at his best drawing relationships that play out with real compassion and unexpected developments. It’s a reflection of where the main character’s life went wrong, a cozy family unit he’s invited to spend time with, but left just on the outside of embracing. There’s too much history there, and too much pressure to get his job done. If the corruption he encounters is the seed of his moral reawakening, seeing the love he left is the fertilizer for this new growth. 

There are plenty of worthwhile pieces to Aloha, but Crowe doesn’t put them together. They play like separate elements instead of a cohesive whole, connected by character and only faint echoes of each other. It’s telling that the conclusion finds several final moments, tying up individual threads – an arrest, several reconciliations, a tearful reveal – without a feeling of overall finality. This is a film of gentle rhythms and light tropical breezes. French cinematographer Eric Gautier captures lovely island landscapes and floats between the performers with ease. Crowe writes a handful of terrific lines and finds some nice cuts from his record collection for the soundtrack. It’s certainly well intentioned. But why does it feel so slight and disconnected? The writing lacks a certain sparkle, and lingers in disjunction between disparate elements. There are strange asides – a grisly toe injury, a ghostly vision – distractingly out of place, appearing once, then never mentioned again. Hardly a disaster, it’s perhaps best to approach Aloha as a sweet, earnest jumble, likable parts in search of a whole.

Same Old Story: ST. VINCENT

Over at Forbes, Scott Mendelson wrote that St. Vincent, the new Bill Murray/Melissa McCarthy film, “could have been written in a quirky indie comedy Mad Libs book.” That’s precisely the reason why I was set to ignore it. I went to see it last weekend and paid good money to do so, but the experience left me completely empty. There are a few sweet touches to the performances, but I could barely hear them over the clunks and clanks of the plot machinery.

It’s a movie about a cranky old man (Murray) whose quiet life of sleeping, gambling, and drinking is interrupted by new neighbors, a single mom (McCarthy) and her precocious ten-year-old son (newcomer Jaeden Lieberher) he reluctantly agrees to babysit after school. Reading that sentence, anyone who has seen any comedy-tinged indie-adjacent drama knows that Murray’s crusty exterior will soften enough to let his warm heart through, McCarthy’s harried mom will find a new support system, and the kid will learn life lessons from an unlikely source.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with telling familiar stories, but writer-director Theodore Melfi brings absolutely nothing to latch onto. It’s not even a tired story told with fresh perspective or confident familiarity. It’s just exactly what you think it’ll be every single step of the way. Like the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod said, “A bad neighbor is a misfortune, as much as a good one is a great blessing.” And sometimes you can find both in the same neighbor, especially if you have someone like Murray who can play up the sarcastic grump as well as the likable schlub with a tragic backstory.

The performances are all fine across the board, including the stacked supporting cast with the likes of Naomi Watts, Chris O’Dowd, and Terrence Howard. They’re good, and Murray has his charming curmudgeon act down as perfectly as McCarthy has instant audience sympathy. Then there’s young Lieberher, who has the right amount of believable intelligence behind his eyes to sell even the most specious precocious moments. But the material is just not up to the level of the performers, who simply can’t make something out of nothing. It’s not that anything goes too terribly wrong with the film. But nothing was engaging or interesting, either. It’s agreeable, but empty, like Melfi’s obvious plot beats, simple sitcom staging, and bright cinematography.

I was all set to let St. Vincent pass uncommented upon by me, but the box office held up surprisingly well in its second week. It’s starting to smell like a modest performer, the kind of warm, undemanding, unsurprising movie that three weeks from now the guy in your office who almost never sees movies and doesn’t particularly like them anyway tells you he saw and wasn’t it something special? I suppose it is a totally competent version of this kind of movie. The performances are good and the final notes of redemption, complete with the typical big school event and a grown-up running in at the last second to show off misty eyes and a solemn nod of support, do ring with a certain earned pleasant feeling that can yank on audience heartstrings. But it’ll be far more entertaining the fewer movies you’ve seen.

Fail to the Chief: HYDE PARK ON HUDSON

One of the lousiest films in recent memory, Hyde Park on Hudson is a visually impoverished period piece of little consequence. I could imagine a perfectly fine film to be made out of the story of a 1939 meeting between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the King and Queen of England in upstate New York, but this is most certainly not that film. In the hands of director Roger Michell (he of bland, irritating romantic comedies Notting Hill and Morning Glory) and screenwriter Richard Nelson, the true historical events are turned into the airiest, blandest concoction imaginable. This is a thinly written barely-there 94 minutes, a treacly, atonal disaster that shuffles its ignominious way through a painfully uneventful and unpersuasive series of half-realized events.

Told through the point of view of Daisy, FDR’s distant cousin, the film does its best to skirt around what little is interesting about the story it recounts. It’s a love affair presented without passion. It’s a meeting of heads of state on the eve of global conflict presented without suspense. It’s a weekend in a mansion in the midst of a global depression presented without any reflection of economic or sociopolitical realities. No, it all is treated like the mildest possible farce, a lukewarm sub-soap opera comedy of errors that’s mostly error and entirely comedy free. In fact, in writing the previous sentence I felt bad about tarnishing farce, soap opera, and comedy of errors by even mentioning them in connection to this film, even if only to demonstrate how little it manages to accomplish.

It’s all enough to make one wonder what scared the filmmakers away from actually doing something with their material. As is, the whole thing just sits up there on the screen, inert from frame one. Michell has somehow even coaxed the wonderful, idiosyncratic Bill Murray into this mess, in the lead role no less. He does a passable FDR impression, I suppose, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that the script gives him little to do. Worse still are the film’s attempts to mine some comedy out of the president’s medical problems, framing an early interior moment of guest-greeting with a window in the background that allows the foreground to be interrupted by the sight of the president being carried around the back of the house. Ha ha, we’re supposed to think; FDR can barely walk. How delightful?

The rest of the floundering cast is made up by such generally dependable performers as Laura Linney, who plays Daisy about as well as a shallow characterization with copious terrible narration to recite can be played, and Olivia Williams who wears a nice set of false chompers as Eleanor Roosevelt. As the King and Queen of England, Samuel West and Olivia Colman, adequate though they are, can’t help but pale in comparison to Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter’s portrayals of these people in The King’s Speech. If one were to cynically suppose that this cinematic endeavor was nothing more than a late attempt to draft off of the success of that Oscar-winner of a couple years ago, I would not be inclined to disagree.

As the film drags itself through a seemingly endless runtime, thinking it is finding much humor in a King in a bathing suit or eating a hot dog and much poignancy in a thoroughly unconvincing love affair, the picture begins to take on the distinct feeling of a film with nothing to do. It’s a film without a point of view, without any point at all, come to think of it. With little to say and no reason found to say it, I can’t help but feel that this film is about as useless a film as I’ve ever seen. 

Goodbye, Children: MOONRISE KINGDOM

During the summer of 1965, on a small island of the coast of Maine, a 12-year-old boy (Jared Gilman) slips away from summer camp to meet up with his secret pen pal, a 12-year-old girl (Kara Hayward) who lives with her family on the other side of the island. The boy and the girl, friendless and lonely, figure themselves romantic adventurers, meant to head off on their own and care for each other in the wilds of this island. He has learned much about surviving in the woods from his camp days. He proudly wears a coonskin cap and plans out their hike with itemized checklists and carefully studied maps stuffed in his bag amongst his compass and air rifle. She has learned much about adventure from library books about brave girls going off on their own to become magical heroines. She packed as many as she could fit in her suitcase, along with her favorite record, a portable battery-powered record player, a pair of left-handed scissors, and her pet cat.

These items reveal that their excursion originates from a particular childhood understanding of running away, but the new feelings stirring inside them, of curiosity, attachment, caring and, yes, perhaps even love, feel so strong and immediate. In self-confident, yet halting ways these kids begin to see their adventure writ larger and more passionately on their hearts. The boy is an orphan and the girl is emotionally troubled and from an eccentric family. To them, this is not just an attempt to flee lives they find inadequate and have a fun time together. They’re fleeing into their fantasies and the merging of their imaginations becomes not just a woodsy adventure or a lovely camping experience, but a grand romance with two budding lovers on the run. The boy’s peppy scout leader (Edward Norton, with a gee-whiz wholesome exterior) has marshaled his remaining campers and joined forces with the island’s sole police officer (Bruce Willis, bespectacled and business-like) to track down the runaways. The girl’s family – three small brothers, a worried mother (Frances McDormand, tightly-wound) and a slow-boiling depressive father (Bill Murray, looking through sad, tired eyes) – join in on the search as well, which is rather patient, considering the circumstances.

This is Moonrise Kingdom, the new film from the distinctive and consistent Wes Anderson who takes this opportunity to populate one of his terrifically realized dollhouse worlds to make a film with a simple, sweet, and emotionally open surface, and a beautiful, moving emotional complexity underneath. Unlike his earlier films like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited, which are in large part about people trying desperately in various neurotic ways to prevent the collapse of familial relationships, this is a film that locates its concerns directly on the border between generations, finding a little community trying to work together, a ragtag collection of flawed adults and precocious children out to find two of their own. (The group picks up small, funny roles for Bob Balaban, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, and Harvey Keitel as it goes along.) It’s a situation in which adults might realize how childish they behave, in which children try on identities they imagine belong to more mature perspectives. Finding the humor inherent within, Anderson (who wrote the script with Roman Coppola) balances scenes of arch dialogue matter-of-factly stated and cartoonish delight elaborately staged – like a treehouse perched at the very top of a tall tree in a scout camp run with a regimented, militaristic structure – with scenes of striking emotional honesty and clarity.

This is a film full of delicate scenes, tenderly acted by Gilman and Hayward, the young leads. This is their first film and Anderson has helped them create such confidently, wonderfully drawn characters, located so precariously on the edge of childhood, but not quite ready to tip over into full-blown adolescence. Each of these kids has moments where they look straight-ahead into the camera in tight close-up and reveal such deep feelings, which only adds to their soft kindness and moments of adorable precociousness. Their relationship – love, or something like it – develops with an emotional truth that is often (unfairly) not associated with Anderson’s exacting mastery over the formal elements of filmmaking. Torn between the worlds of childhood imagination and problems of adulthood, these two troubled kids run away to the woods where the privacy of shared solitude allows them to become who they think they are, deep down inside. Here is a film world of real innocence and real potential danger. This is a film with a profound respect for childhood and the perspectives and feelings of the young. Music swells and the camera moves for big moments of emotionality; to the young, any event sufficiently impactful is worthy of a personal epic. After all, the young couple first met the year before at a local church’s production of Benjamin Britten’s Noah’s ark opera, an appropriately ornate dramatic backdrop to spark puppy love. Their escape feels ripped out of the movies and informed by the adventures in the books they cart with them and the sophistication they think find in totems of adulthood (like French pop music or a pipe).

This is not a fussy film despite Anderson’s typically mannered approach and meticulous art design, which here makes the New England island setting appear to have leapt right out of a charming, slightly yellowed, mid-century storybook, a delicate world of children’s imagination nestled just-so in the midst of rugged natural terrain. The dollhouse qualities of the sets, props, and costumes are placed in a context of forest and bodies of water. The camera glides, finds stillness, and even shakes from time to time as Anderson puts delicate fantasy – heightened, but not fantastical – and relaxed farce right up against quiet scenes of intergenerational emotional connection. This is a sweet, sad comedy about comically confident children and comically flawed grown ups. Selflessly acted, but no less richly evocative, the adults in the cast allow deadpan ease to mask roiling turmoil, to blend so effortlessly with their young costars, who let turmoil settle in like they’re discovering it for the first time. The ensemble moves through the simple plot like a finely tuned orchestra, each striking different notes at different times, blending to become a whole moving experience.

Moonrise Kingdom is a deeply romantic film about change, about moving into adolescence, about the doubts, uncertainty, depression, and confusion that can follow into adulthood where such feelings can settle, creating miscommunications and dissatisfactions. It’s such an evocative portrayal of this collision of moods and sensations in a film that’s at once so contained, taking place over the course of only a few days on a small island, and yet filled with so many whimsical flourishes of Anderson’s imagination that it feels like a rich world, wonderfully, carefully designed. It’s a film full of liminal moments shot through with a potent melancholy of childhood’s end and the growing knowledge that adults have within them a deep sadness and uncertainty. Passions and interests seize the soul with intensity and then pass like an especially violent storm. And from the devastation comes new and unexpectedly fruitful growth.

Life at a Funeral: GET LOW

Get Low is the latest example of how competent direction of a middling script can be elevated, even saved, by a host of great actors. The direction from Aaron Schneider, in his feature debut, is flat and flavorless. The script from Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell is full of phony cornpone sentiment that aims only at those with the most easily softened emotions. All involved in the creation of the film should be thankful that they attracted actors who can cut through the falseness to convey some emotion truth that would otherwise be nonexistent.

At the center of this modest little depression-era tale is the great Robert Duvall as a man who has lived like a hermit for 40 years. Naturally, he has also been cultivating an aura of mystery and danger among the gossiping people of the nearby town. He’s getting old and feels the weight of time and age pressing down. He heads in to town and asks the local funeral home to throw him a funeral party while he’s still alive so he can invite “everyone who has a story to tell” about him.

The owner of the funeral home is, of course, a welcome Bill Murray. He calmly sizes up the odd request and offers to get it done. Murray, and his young associate Lucas Black, set about setting up the party and grappling with the old man’s eccentricities and inconsistencies. There’s small humor to be found in the ways these three men try to get the invitations out by radio and by posters. Duvall brings to the role distant warmth that balances Murray’s sly, shifty subtlety and Black’s fresh-faced good-intentions.

The plot is wrapped around a profoundly uninteresting, though not entirely uninvolving, mystery about the true intentions behind Duvall’s self-imposed exile that is haltingly teased and ultimately revealed, but by then I cared even less. Early on, Duvall stares at a faded photograph of a young woman in a shot that fades into a close-up of a flickering flame, annoyingly telegraphing part of his past. She’s his old flame (get it?) that he has carried a torch for (get it?). Do you think the secrets in this old man’s past have anything to do with all of this flame imagery? If you do, don’t worry. Schneider won’t give you a chance to miss a thing, even if you try.

The hermit’s past is not as interesting as the film seems to think it is, but at least it gives a reason for Sissy Spacek and Bill Cobbs to enter the picture and remind us why they’re so good. Spacek has a nicely restrained emotion to her behavior while Cobbs towers over his scenes with a well-earned sense of command and a welcome melodious voice. Their performances are wonderful to watch. They even overcome the contortions the script puts them through to avoid revealing things prematurely.

Glancing back over what I’ve written, it sounds like I disliked the movie more than I actually did. At the time, I found it passably enjoyable. Only afterwards has my head been full of small complaints. This is a perfectly fine little film that’s quick and unchallenging. It’s a chance to see great actors working, using their craft in ways that go above and beyond that which this particular film calls for. It’s a nice 100 minutes with an amiable company of top-notch actors. It’s a pleasant enough diversion, enjoyable on its own terms, but it’s certainly nothing more than that.