Dino Might: THE END OF OAK STREET

We used to regularly have big summer special effects pictures with a light touch, lots of surprises, and a neat conclusion. The End of Oak Street makes it look so easy you’ll wonder why they've gone the way of the...well....dinosaur. If only all of its ilk were so simple and satisfying. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s working with an irresistible premise delivered quickly and confidently. It’s thin, but pays out with big results. The idea is this: a block of suburban Michigan is zapped from 1982 back to prehistoric times. The escalation is expertly handled from the early quotidian unease (maybe it’s just a power outage!), to the slow reveals (oh, it’s definitely not!), to the climactic tumbling out of variables that are both surprising and inevitable. We follow one family (mom Anne Hathaway, dad Ewan McGregor, and two teenagers) as they try to survive dinosaurs roaming their neighborhood. How do they get out of this predicament when their neighbors are getting chomped, and there seems to be no way home? The suspense is obvious here, but it’s no less exciting to see enormous creatures wandering down the asphalt, rummaging in trash cans, slipping through the forest, and towering over homes. What kid in a dinosaur phase hasn’t looked out the car window and wondered what that’d look like? The movie has the energy of imaginative wonderment driven into lean, effective survival thriller plotting. 

The movie has a playful mean streak and a sentimental core, a fun mix that works like jet fuel for its sequences’ thrills. No one’s safe from getting chomped, and the movie’s love of its lead family makes us flinch with every close call. Every time an enormous creatures comes stalking through the background of a shot is as effective as the last. (Watch out!) And each solution leads to another problem in fine roller coaster style. I enjoyed its overall sense of one-thing-after-another that works through every complication with gusto. And I appreciated the seriousness with which the characters take their dilemmas. They have doubts and stress, they slip and flail, they trial and error, they might even wet themselves when an enormous reptile is repeatedly slamming its head into the front door. But they also are animated by a clear love of one another that gets only tighter the more their lives threaten to slip away. That’s consistent with Mitchell’s strength with actors. He’s gotten earnest authenticity out of everything from awkward teen dramedy (The Myth of the American Sleepover) to arty horror (It Follows) and zany conspiracy thriller (Under the Silver Lake). And it’s consistent with the ease he has establishing widescreen mood and space while delineating high concepts. That’s enough on which to hang a quick and exciting genre picture. No need to load it up with extra metaphors or complicated twists. Just set it up cleanly and clearly, populate it with believable types, and let the blood start pumping. It may not be especially deep, but it’s a lot of fun. 

Flight Risk: BIRDS OF PREY

The key object in Birds of Prey is a priceless diamond everyone’s waiting for a pickpocket to defecate, and if that’s not a metaphor for the current state of superhero Hollywood, I don’t know what is. Here’s yet another movie that tries to wring originality out of the subgenre by swallowing another genre whole and attempting to digest whatever charm can be found by extruding it out the other end. In this case, we get a small crime picture, shades of noir, with circling mobsters and cops, that missing diamond, and a host of scheming tough gals whose competing agendas just might align long enough to take down some badder guys. It’s done up in a half-real pop art explosion of Gotham City, though this DC spinoff luckily avoids the toxic cheese of Suicide Squad and the pretentious thematic mess of Joker, the last two villain-centric Batman-adjacent pictures. This one’s just barely the best of the three, mostly by finding a genuinely wackadoo performance at its center. Unlike Joaquin Phoenix, shackled to an origin story that left lots of room for capital-A acting, but little in the way of coherent ideas, this film gets Margot Robbie in a tour-de-comic-book-force, squeaking and squirming and strutting and pouting and slouching (even, by the end, rollerskating) all over every line reading. We’re never meant to take her Harley Quinn, the Joker’s ex-girlfriend, as a person. It’s hard to invest in the character’s plight, but it’s fun to see Robbie’s having a blast. Here she’s a bubble gum time bomb, a splash panel drawn in smirks and squiggles, in a movie that sets its tone as equal parts cotton candy and corroded battery. The whole thing’s sugar-high insubstantial and poison-dart smiley face cynical complete with sickly cutesy title cards and doodles on freeze frames. But I did like the overt musical Howard Hawks homage, and when she storms a police station with glitter bombs then, later, under the downpour of a misfiring sprinkler system. The movie’s a bad good time, or a good bad time, right up until you realize it’s nothing at all.

The screenplay from Christina Hodson (Bumblebee) is told in a jumble of chronology to bend the narrative to the scattershot personality problems of its main antihero, name dropped in the self-consciously wordy parenthetical subtitle And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. It’s like Deadpool if he was a fourth as self-aware and twice as pleasant company. We get the backstory of a half-dozen characters and endless wheel-spinning setup for most of the relatively slim runtime, just reason enough to give enjoyable performers occasion to swan around in silly caricature performances that are never quite funny enough to call comedic, and never once grounded enough to feel the weight of the stakes. There’s Rosie Perez as a no-nonsense detective, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a crossbow killer motorcyclist, Jurnee Smollett-Bell as a deadly lounge singer, and Ella Jay Basco as the aforementioned pickpocket, a surly and precocious teen. Together they form the unlikely allies who’ll eventually confront the preening gangster played by Ewan McGregor and his bleach-blonde, face-peeling (a particularly, discordantly gross detail) henchman (Chris Messina). When the action finally hits, and the women all work together in a funhouse carnival climax, it’s a fun bit of cleanly cut and crisply choreographed action. The way there is a halting, stop-and-start maze of exposition and vulgar banter that’s both too much and not enough, holding the rest of the DC cinematic universe at arm’s length to protect its R-rated violence and cussing, while avoiding getting tangled in continuity dilemmas. It feels like its own thing, to the extent it can, though it has nothing on the joys of Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Shazam! Director Cathy Yan can stage action and set a scene in relatively eye-catching ways, and keeps the plates spinning fast enough to stave off complaints of the film’s thinness and predictable plot moves. There’s a diamond in there if you can wade through the rest of it.

Tale Retold in Time: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Disney’s latest attempt to spin box office gold out of affection for their old masterpieces is Beauty and Beast. Less alive and animated than the 1991 drawings, which added up to a film of lovely, romantic elegance, this new live-action effort nonetheless fashions its own charms. The foundation is sturdy, and the elaboration is vivid, in the grand old Hollywood tradition of lavish widescreen song-and-dance epic spectacles. It has the same ornate backlot flavor, the voluminous colorful production design, the matte paintings (albeit now as CG swooshes), the masses of extras, pokey pace, and earnest sentiment that the lumbering musicals of the 1960’s accrued. Here, like in, say, Gene Kelly’s 1969 Hello, Dolly!, is the charmingly stiff sweetness of eagerly putting on a show, of making sure every penny of a massive budget glitters on screen as famous faces sing their hearts out and dance as best they can, while the soaring score and witty lyrics make up for any doubts you may have about their performances. It’s easy enough to get caught up in the big-hearted gleaming nostalgia factory on display.

Differing from other recent Disney remakes, they haven’t enriched (Cinderella), reshaped (Maleficent), tinkered with (The Jungle Book), or overhauled (Pete’s Dragon). They’ve simply brought it back to the screen in new fashion. Despite the evident charm and ageless brilliance of the old music and lyrics, I remained skeptical that we’d be seeing anything other than an expensive reiteration, an animated classic unnecessarily elaborated into a glittering live-action repetition. The music bursts to life with the performers’ joy, and yet what is it but corporate karaoke at the highest level? And then, the real magic happened. I got totally swept up in the experience. The filmmakers rise to the challenge, using their evident love for and serious approach to the material to make something at once old and new, a concoction that hardly bests, and certainly never replaces or improves upon, Disney’s original telling, but instead finds a fine widescreen compliment to it.

Director Bill Condon, whose energetic and affecting Dreamgirls is one of the best theater-to-screen musicals of recent memory, invests in the heart and the spectacle, swooping the camera as its characters swoon and yearn. There’s poignancy and melancholy here, and even a touch of playfulness to its phantasmagoric romance, which contains a touch more backstory than its streamlined inspiration. Unlike the much-performed Broadway adaptation, this hugely crowd-pleasing film is never lethargic and rarely ridiculous in transposing the original’s vibrant visuals into something approaching live-action visualization. It’s loaded with glamorous visions decked out in resplendent production design and slathered in CGI accoutrements, real people and photo-real(ish) talking dishes and knickknacks investing in the emotion to this fantasy.

As the movie begins, past a brief prologue in which an enchantress’ curse turns a callow prince (Dan Stevens) and his servants into a Beast and his castle’s objects, respectively, it settles into the familiar rhythms of its inspiration. Small-town French girl Belle (the bookish beauty is played by Emma Watson, her casting surely a wink to cinema’s other great recent bookish charmer) laments her provincial life. The villagers chime in “Bonjour” for the big ensemble opening number that so quickly and wittily sketches in their small-minded attitudes and stuck-in-a-rut-routines, even bull-headed Gaston (Luke Evans), who mistakenly thinks Belle will fall for him.

Soon enough, Belle’s eccentric father (Kevin Kline) is stuck in the forgotten castle in the wild forests outside their town, a captive of the beast, and she trades her freedom for his. This becomes the slowly thawing story of connection as empathy and romance as understanding that you’d hope to see. Belle and The Beast (here a CG-assisted buffalo man, not as crisp as his drawn counterpart or as haunting as Cocteau’s makeup version in the forties, but nonetheless the right balance of handsome and perverse) come to realize they’re both outsiders. Yearning for acceptance they fear the town will never give them, they therefore have to find it for themselves. A great added detail to the curse has made explicit the townspeople’s lost memories of the castle and its inhabitants, lost to suffer alone. Crisply making sense of the simple emotional beats, the movie plays nicely in the familiar while providing an emotional texture that is different enough without distracting.

The story of the curse and the potential for true love’s kiss to life it is told through the usual boisterous musical brio – “Be Our Guest” and “Something There” – and the soaring title ballad, the late Howard Ashman’s lyrics as sparklingly clever as ever. Composer Alan Menken returns to the mix as well, stirring in lovely additions to the score and terrific music-box gentle numbers that add to the film’s emotional underpinnings. Now Belle gets a chance to sing mournfully and wistfully of her childhood, and her dead mother. The cast of animate inanimate objects (French period detail speaking with the great voices of Emma Thompson, Ian McKellen, Ewan McGregor, Audra McDonald, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Stanley Tucci) laments their lost “days in the sun.” And, most moving of all, The Beast thunders out a ballad brushing up against Brief Encounter depths to what he sees as a bittersweet potential end to his story.

Sturdy, solid, industrial-strength studio craftsmanship, the film stretches out with a reliably enjoyable and transporting balance of faithful recreations and sweetly subtle new grace notes (an extra sigh, an added look, slightly richer subplots for the objects and the villagers). These moving considerations serve up exactly the movie its audience of pre-sold fans expects while noodling around the edges for new emotional terrain on the margins. It's doesn't all work. A few of the classic numbers are a touch clumsy as reimagined, usually through awkward attempts at rooting it all in gravity and probability. Did we need to know where the spotlight in “Be Our Guest” came from? Not really. We’re already buying a talking candlestick. So the movie loads up the airy fantasy with some over-explaining. But in other ways, the film’s core is strong, and the intoxicating tug of fairy tale logic is embroidered with appealing new embellishments, and the production is lavishly phony, a blend of theatrical fakery and computerized production design melded in velvety cool blues and gold cinematography. It borrows its best moments, but pulls off a likable, even transporting, new entertainment, with the music magnificently flowing, the images a picture book theme park, every big emotional beat landing, and the moving finale misty and warm in the best way.  You’ve seen it before, but, oh, how it works again!

Family Matters: AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

In adapting his Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play August: Osage County to screenplay form, Tracy Letts, who has also adapted his Bug and Killer Joe into movies, trimmed the runtime by an hour but kept a great deal of its rich selection of meaty dialogues and monologues. The resulting film gathers a hugely talented ensemble and sets them before this all-you-can-act buffet and lets them chew. It’s theatrical, obviously finely written and overacted to the rafters. The story kicks off with the disappearance of the old patriarch of a large Oklahoman family. We glimpse him, played by Sam Shephard, in a brief introductory scene during which he reads us some T.S. Eliot in voice over. But now he’s gone, and his pill-popping cancer-patient wife (Meryl Streep) calls her grown daughters (Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson, and Juliette Lewis) home to wait and worry. Showing off its stagebound roots by trapping the ensemble in a stuffy house – you can almost feel the dusty stillness of the oppressive late-summer air – the film is eager to show us these great actors delivering great dialogue.

The screen is crowded with characters and none escape emotionally unscathed. Streep’s matriarch has cancer of the mouth and early on shouts that the pain has her feeling like he tongue is on fire. Hoo boy, is it ever. She spits unfiltered invective at everyone and everything, screwing up her face as if sucking on a lemon before the acid bubbles out of her, eating away at her family members. She feels neglected. She feels unappreciated. She feels abandoned. She’s shockingly mean and caustic under the mistaken belief that she’s simply telling the truth. You can feel sorry for her while completely understanding why two of her three daughters would want to move so far away. Roberts, who flies in with her husband (Ewan McGregor) and daughter (Abigail Breslin), is anxious and depressed. Lewis, the flightiest daughter, arrives with a stranger (Dermot Mulroney) she introduces, to her family’s surprise, as her fiancé. Nicholson, the most reserved and quietly dutiful of the daughters, has been helping her mother’s caretaker (Misty Upham), to what many characters assume is the detriment of her personal life. Streep’s sister (Margo Martindale), brother-in-law (Chris Cooper), and nephew (Benedict Cumberbatch) arrive as well, casserole in tow.

The centerpiece of the film is a lengthy disastrous dinner scene in which everyone gets to masticate over their lines with great delight as they start slow and build to a great roaring cacophony of spitting, wailing, teasing, lamenting, hollering, accusing, reminiscing, and snapping. In this scene, and many that approach its intensity of character and feeling, the acting is energetic, enthusiastic, and convincing in a beautifully theatrical way. It wouldn’t work if the ensemble was not so nicely balanced, some (Streep, Roberts, Martindale, Lewis) going so big, teeth tearing at every bit of scenery that crosses their paths, that others (Cooper, Nicholson, Breslin) can lean back and go low-key and small. There’s a sense of generosity, the actors pitching their performances at just the right levels to blend wonderfully without a sense that anyone is trying to out act their castmates. It’s gloriously hammy in the best sense of theatricality and the film is wise to step back and let them roar.

That’s precisely what the film is best at giving us: a talented ensemble chewing its way through delicious writing. It’s not much in the way of visually interesting, but that’s hardly an attempt on my part to pin the movie’s faults on staginess. On the contrary, I found the film’s theatrical roots to be better the more clearly and simply shown. This is only the second film from director John Wells, a longtime TV writer, director, and showrunner most famous for NBC’s E.R. and currently of Showtime’s Shameless. He shoots the film only functionally, with little personality. He stays out of the way of the crackling chaos in the familial war of words as old resentments erupt, spilling over into freshly growing fissure vents.

Even after slightly over two hours, there’s not much clarity in the geography of our surroundings or the house’s architecture. And the few attempts to open up past the proscenium – just a couple of car trips, really – seem too desperate an attempt to make it play at some imagined ideal of cinematic interpretation. Wells’s inexpressive direction dutifully captures the performances and allows for appreciation of Letts’s writing, but more imagination in the visual staging, and maybe even a better sense of claustrophobia by heightening the theatrical roots, would’ve brought the whole endeavor up to the same level as the material and the performances. He traffic-cops the cast capably, coaxing a fine-tuned sense of energy and a great underlying tension in the straining relationships. But in the end, I found myself appreciating the performances and the writing more than being moved by the whole.

Hill of Beans: JACK THE GIANT SLAYER

When it comes to recontextualizing an old tale as a modern would-be blockbuster, Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer is way better than Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, but doesn’t even come close to the entertainment value of Snow White and the Huntsman. I suppose that’s the very definition of middling. I may not have liked it much, but it’s certainly not worth disliking, not when it’s so colorful and good natured, a kind of square, clear-eyed spectacle, a red-blooded adventure that wouldn’t have looked too out of place in the 50s with Harryhausen animation instead of blandly intricate CGI fakery. In this new telling, the story of Jack, the farm boy who trades his horse for magic beans which then grow into a beanstalk that leads to a land of giants, is the basic seed of story which sprouts into a typical hero’s journey complete with damsel so hopelessly distressed and a terribly modern extended action climax that drones on and on through noisy digital destruction.

But before it gets there, it starts simply, with a nicely crosscut sequence of a little boy in a farmhouse and a little girl in a castle, each being read a legend of giants and the king who forged a crown out of a melted giant’s heart to order them back to their realm high in the sky. The boy grows up to be Jack (Nicholas Hoult). The girl grows up to be the princess (Eleanor Tomlinson). She, through a series of events I shan’t relay here, ends up stuck at the top of the beanstalk when it smashes up through Jack’s small house. The king (Ian McShane) orders his best knight (Ewan McGregor) up the stalk with a team of men with the mission to save the princess at all costs. Among the group are the girl’s clearly villainous betrothed (Stanley Tucci, who doesn’t twirl his mustache, but might as well) and Jack, who has taken a liking to the girl and wants to impress her by joining the rescue party. He also feels a little responsible. After all, he’s the one who lost track of the bean that started the whole mess.

At the top of the beanstalk there be giants, of course. The giants’ world is a playground for standard adventure beats, with the men scurrying to and fro through setpieces that play with scale in all the ways you’d expect. There’s a smattering of silly visual moments – I especially liked one involving pigs in a giant’s oven – and a handful of fine action beats. The problem that Singer and his screenwriters Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dan Studney don’t quite get around to solving – until the charming, unexpected epilogue, that is – is how to overcome the feeling that we’ve been here before. If not literally here, then we’ve at least been in the neighborhood. The characters never rise to the level of even fully inhabited, memorable one-dimensional types. The plot never shakes off the feeling that it’s all just a thin fable that’s been blown all out of proportion and along with it, the tone’s gone all misshapen too. It’s at once oversized and modest, an odd combination for something so ostentatiously expensive, dripping with state-of-the-art effects that are what they are. The stalk vines its way into the sky with a convincing slither, the giants stomp with motion captured weightless weightiness, and the humans more or less convincingly occupy the same spaces as all of the above.

As the movie marches forward, with the humans and giants scrambling about in the forest in the sky and back on the ground the kingdom’s citizenry assemble a sort of Ace in the Hole carnival atmosphere around the stalk’s base, the tone grows into what, if I’m feeling charitable, I’d call relaxed, or, if I’m not, I’d call half baked. Still, it allows some of the performers to really pop. I enjoyed McGregor’s smirking swashbuckling and his delight playing his character’s personality as somewhere between a flip Obi-Wan Kenobi and an excessively dashing Errol Flynn. His answer “Not just yet,” to the question “Are we dead?” is one of the movie’s most memorable moments, as is his laughter in a later scene as he watches a giant get repeatedly stung by bees. In a movie with bounteous visual trickery, he’s the best effect. Everything else, from the bland leading roles to the broadly sketched supporting roles and all the borrowed fantasy frippery in between, is so much sleepiness that’s so close to being fun that it’s all the more disappointing for falling short.

Swept Away: THE IMPOSSIBLE

J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible is exactly what it wants to be and you should know what you’re getting into. It’s a film in which a recent real-world natural disaster is recreated in horrific detail. I almost couldn’t handle it. Perhaps the filmmakers couldn’t either, choosing to tell one small story instead of taking in the disaster in all its disturbing immensity. Rather than attempting to tell a wide, generous panoramic story set during the devastating December 26, 2004 tsunami that wiped away miles of Thailand, the film narrows in on the plight of one vacationing European family. It’s through their eyes we see the wall of water drown a picturesque resort in the blink of an eye. It’s their plight we follow in the aftermath as, heartrendingly separated, they struggle to survive, locate medical help, and find one another. This has the effect of lessening the big picture while making it all seem like a particularly bad instance of a spoiled vacation, but the acting is so strong, the filmmaking so powerful, that it’s overwhelming (for better and worse) all the same.

The film’s opening scenes are structured with the suspense of a horror film. Even if you somehow managed to stumble in blind, unaware of the impending tsunami, the opening title cards will quickly let you in on the disaster that’s about to unfold. We meet a nice young family, a father (Ewan McGregor) and mother (Naomi Watts) with a young teen boy (Tom Holland) and a couple of towheaded youngsters (Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast). They check into their hotel. They open their Christmas presents. They swim in the pool and party on the beach. These scenes of comfort and fun are, much like the opening of any slasher film that follows a group of carefree youths into the woods unaware of the masked killer awaiting them, tense. We know what’s about to happen; it’s hard to be comfortable while awaiting the sudden arrival of discomfort.

And arrive it does. Through enveloping special effects, the family is swept away in a scary swirl of muddy waters that overpowers then recedes, before spinning back around to scrape away even more of the recognizable features of the land. Amidst the fallen trees, downed utility lines, and jumbled piles of debris, the mother and her oldest son find themselves entirely alone, cling to what little they can find, and painfully make their way to help. They don’t know where to locate it or even where, exactly, the sudden catastrophe has deposited them in relationship to their hotel and their loved ones, but they continue to move anyways. Rest will surely equal death. Watts and Holland do fine work here as people forced to move forward on instinct and determination alone, the full extent of the destruction and the possible deaths of their entire nuclear family unable to fully sink in while they drag their bruised and bloody bodies to safety.

This is shell-shocked filmmaking that made me wince and squirm. I’m not the most squeamish filmgoer around, but this is uncommonly effective, harrowing stuff that had me asking if this is really what the MPAA is calling PG-13 these days. The camera moves with the young boy, capturing a kind of horror that will off-handedly find grotesque body horror in the edges of the frame, then stop to linger just long enough for the full grossness to sink in, before quickly averting the gaze. Walking behind his mother, he catches a glimpse of her leg with a large flap of skin dangling loose. When he alerts her to this fact, she turns, her shirt ripped revealingly, exposing her chest and her lacerated skin. The boy winces and averts his eyes. Later, scenes at an overwhelmed hospital catch glimpses of ripped and mangled bodies, loose limbs, and drips of unidentifiable liquid. At one point, a wretched retching sound fills the soundtrack as Watts, slightly out of focus in the middle distance, vomits what appears to be plant matter and is joined by a nurse who quickly helps her pull what appears to be a tangled vine out of her throat. Reader, I’ve managed to sit through bloodier films of splatter and gore without once shielding my eyes, but this scene had me looking away, wishing for it to end. I wanted it out of my head.

But I suppose that speaks to the power of Bayona’s filmmaking. This is an overpowering experience. It eventually cuts away from mother and son to discover the fate of McGregor and the two little boys – I won’t spoil it here – and the script by Sergio G. Sánchez and María Belón orchestrates nearly-unbearably teasing moments of sentimental suspense as the various main characters survive, or don’t, and are reunited, or aren’t. In the end, I cried a little, but felt so emotionally mangled by the film that I almost wished I hadn’t. It’s undeniably effective, but the small scope, which, although beneficial, making the devastation personal and slightly more manageable, begins to feel like it’s doing the event itself a bit of a disservice by limiting the full impact.

In the film’s final shots, the camera flies away with survivors, peering back at the destruction while gliding away from the island and out over open waters. It’s a survival narrative that’s ultimately only about escape and not about the ramifications for the people – and supporting characters – left behind. I was more than ready to escape; I was glad to escape. But I wondered if a film less single-minded could have found room to tell a small, simple story without losing so much of the big picture. The ending plays triumphant, but the film was so effective that by that time I was exhausted.

Knockout: HAYWIRE

Retired mixed martial arts star Gina Carano is the center of Haywire, a terrifically exciting actioner. This is essentially her acting debut, playing Mallory Kane, a tough ex-Marine who works for an independent com- pany hired by the United States government to execute special missions. She’s a secret agent for hire. Carano is perfect for the role. She’s tough. You don’t want to cross her. She has intensity in her eyes and muscle to her physicality. She doesn’t just look like a fighter; she is a fight- er. When her punches land, not only are they convincing, they look like they cause real pain.

That Carano can really handle herself in a fight is no small fact. It’s the very purpose of the film. Every step of the way, she has to fight off attackers. With simply stunning fight choreography, Carano kicks, flips, and punches her way to freedom. The music drops away, leaving only the grunts and thunks to score the action. There’s tantalizing eeriness as the camera stands back and regards with a restraint that suits the judicious editing. Diegetic sound is all we need to feel the full force of these knockdown drag-out fights.

The film could easily have been a routine story of espionage and double crosses, but it’s so energetically and stylishly told that it’s anything but. Directed by Steven Soderbergh from a smoothly complicated script by Lem Dobbs (they last worked together on The Limey, another great thriller), it moves with a slick, artful excitement. We start in the middle of things, with Carano getting attacked in an upstate New York diner by a former coworker (Channing Tatum). It unfolds with quick brutal resourcefulness as she kicks him out cold and then demands a cowering patron (Michael Angarano) give her a ride and patch up her arm. On the way to wherever she’s heading, she tells him her story.

It globetrots through flash- backs revealing that a government bureaucrat (Michael Douglas) hires a security company, headed by a slick suit (Ewan McGregor) consulting with a Spanish counterpart (Antonio Banderas) to rescue a Chinese dissident held hostage on Spanish soil. It appears to be a successful op, and Carano heads off to her next mission, playing wife to an undercover British agent (Michael Fassbender). There she learns she’s framed for murder charges. She escapes, barely finds the time to call a warning to her dad (Bill Paxton), and then spends the rest of the film on the run, leading us back to where we came in and beyond as she pieces together the con- spiracy that put her in this predicament.

It’s so sleek and fast, with nary a wasted shot, it’s practically aerodynamic. The action is well-staged by Soderbergh, whose films are at least as interesting for how the story is told as for the story itself. His cool digital cinematography and editing have a clinical movement to them, laying out spaces with ease and allowing the fights – and the chases, shootouts, and even simple conversational clashes – to unfold with clarity and cold, blunt observational precision. This is gleaming pop pulp filmmaking, hurtling through familiar tropes with an uncommon energy. It’s just plain fun.

And I think Soderbergh and Dobbs had fun coming up with this film too. Carano’s compelling athleticism may be the driving engine of interest here, but the pleasantly jumbled chronology of the plot, the precision of the shots, and the deeply talented supporting cast are just as compelling. There’s a fleeting moment when, during a chase scene, an animal darts across the road. It’s a perfect whimsical moment that’s at once a lovely visual detail, a funny little gag, and an escalation of tension. Soderbergh creates frames that are composed to have information in the background. He doesn’t overwhelm you with visual noise. He invites you to look closer. A moment during a rooftop foot chase finds Carano slinking through the foreground while we can see, tucked away in the corner of the frame, her pursuers a few roofs back. Neither the pursuers nor the pursued has the whole picture, but there’s a thrill in understanding the layout that enhances the stakes. (The moment is twinned in the climax when Carano comes hurtling from the background, smashing into the unaware villain in the foreground).

Steven Soderbergh films are about the stakes inherent when people are very good at their jobs (Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13), which makes it all the more troubling when things go wrong (Contagion, Out of Sight), when people who may at times seem competent aren’t (The Informant!, Bubble, Solaris), when we question the value of what they do (Traffic, The Girlfriend Experience). All of the above applies to Haywire. Carano is good in a fight, but when she beats a path through her former coworkers, it’s destabilizing. She’s been cut loose from her company and her extralegal status does her no good. She may have skill, but the system itself is broken.

The classification allowing the company to do whatever it wants in the name of national security is of no help whatsoever to her. This confident and capable woman has only so much fight in her. She can only run for so long. Confidence and capabilities will mean nothing if she can’t prove her innocence and uncover the corruption. And that’s what makes the movie work so well. Carano has incredible action star charisma. I believed she could beat up any- one she needed to. But the resolution doesn’t rely solely on her physical capabilities. She makes a compelling center surrounded by calculating sliminess. Much like the film itself is proof of the coolness of verisimilitude in a genre of pretenders.

Backwards and Forwards: BEGINNERS

It’s never too late to get a new start. At least, that’s what writer-director Mike Mills has to say in Beginners, a semi-autobiographical movie that follows a father and a son, each starting new romantic relationships. It’s a mostly solid effort, a film in which characters feeling boxed in by the lives they are living attempt to break out of them by trying to connect with others, to try and make their new starts last.

The father (Christopher Plummer), a handsome, recently widowered elderly man, sits down his son (Ewan McGregor), a single artist, to finally divulge a long-held secret: “I’m gay.” This surprises the son, but what surprises him more is the joyful intensity and all-consuming nature of this revelation. His father gets new clothes, new friends, and finds a boyfriend. He’s vibrantly alive in ways he had never been before, freed from the constraints of the closet. A few years later, he dies.

While grieving, his son glumly heads to a Halloween party where he meets a pretty young woman (Melanie Laurent) who came to celebrate the holiday despite suffering from laryngitis. They strike up a flirtation. He murmurs his charm from underneath a fog of depression. She writes down her responses in a small notepad, accenting her scribbles with gestures and wide-eyed expressions. From this Meet Cute, they begin a relationship. Mills cuts back and forth between the new beginnings of father and son, creating a film in which the memories of the father slip into the rhythms of the son’s narrative. The man just died, but he remains a presence. The grieving son is moving forward, but, through the film’s structure, he keeps moving backwards to reflect the past.

This is a low-key film of shaggy charms, wistful laughs and gentle sobs, filled with endearing performances amidst spare visuals. There’s a forced whimsy to it all, though. McGregor narrates the film with a super dry deadpan that errs on the side of preciousness, a fussed-over stream-of-consciousness that is interrupted from time to time by little drawings, photographic montages, or, worst of all, subtitles that give us unwanted insight into the thoughts of his pet dog. I could have done without the twee embellishments of such cutesy accoutrements.

Though I have plenty of little quibbles with smaller details, this is a muted film that works slowly and quietly and I can’t deny the power of the big picture. Yet I feel some indifference, some ambivalence, towards the film. I could see, respect, admire, and occasionally feel the impact of Mills’s choices, even if I was rarely drawn into the film. But the emotion of the film filters out through the layer of whimsy and feels painfully, acutely real. The contrast between father and son is the emotional heart of the film, a loving but testy relationship that uses their pasts to reveal emotions and expectations for the future.

Plummer is nicely subtle as a dignified older man surrounded by the books and artifacts of a long and learned life energized with the new freedom of living without secrets. He’s so good, in fact, that when we shift back to the present, I felt disappointed that we didn’t get to spend more time with him. This is, I suppose, part of the point. In the present, his son is trying to move forward without him, to start a new relationship while he still feels the pain of losing his father. He misses his father, and so do we. It’s a film about the damages of ending one part of life in order to gain the possibility of beginning again, that is itself somewhat damaged.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

The Men Who Stare at Goats has a great title and, with George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey, a great cast. Unfortunately, it’s a comedy that’s stuck awkwardly between light and dark, soft and edgy. It spins its wheels tonally while also forgetting about narrative drive or thematic development. As a result, it’s merely 90-minutes of watching big stars goof around in a giant sandbox playing true characters, mostly (Clooney, Bridges and Spacey) psychic soldiers trained in a secret Armed Forces project known as New Earth Army. McGregor is just a tag-along journalist (inexplicably shifted from London to Ann Arbor in a pointless case of adjusting the truth) learning about the history of the group, who call themselves Jedi Warriors (cute, considering they’re talking to Obi-Wan Kenobi).

The four men provide the film some modest pleasures. Clooney is good-natured and humorous, as he usually is, here deadpanning dubiously effective combat technique and flatly describing improbable abilities including a “death tap” that killed a man (Instantly? Nope. Eighteen years later. One never knows when the curse of the death tap will strike). Bridges is basically an enlisted Lebowski who indulges in New Age hippie-culture and invents the majority of techniques on display. Spacey has a great few scenes, rolling back his eyes and talking in a funny voice for one scene in which he tries to fake paranormal powers. In another scene he will calmly pass on good wishes to a newlywed couple with the funniest two lines in the movie (Spoiler: “Congratulations. Sorry it doesn’t work out”).

Directed by first-timer, but longtime actor, producer, writer, and friend of Clooney, Grant Heslov, the movie ends up a wishy-washy mess, not as good as it should be, but not as bad as it could have been. The movie’s good-natured enough, but ultimately Heslov can’t muster up enough heft to really start the movie so that by the time it’s wrapping up I found myself thinking “is that all?” It’s a goofy, insubstantial little thing (save for a case of most unfortunate timing with a scene showing an acid-tripping soldier shooting up his base) that just never works. The last scene has McGregor’s reporter typing away, promising to tell the world what happened, then lamenting that his story received little coverage in the media. We’re supposed to sympathize with him, but I found myself agreeing with the media. This story’s a non-starter.

Angels & Demons (2009)

There’s an entertaining thriller somewhere within Angels & Demons, but it’s hidden behind a creaky pace. Tom Hanks is back, looking unusually exhausted and once again without his charisma, as Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist (ha!) who cracked the DaVinci Code. This time he has to stop a plot to destroy the Vatican. The movie is helped by the presence of a literal ticking-bomb scenario but why, then, does everything seem to happen at such a sleepy rate? The movie is intermittently thrilling but never really involving or frightening. By the time the movie turns splendidly pulpy in the last act, it’s too late.

There’s a solid cast of supporting characters. If there's one sure way to liven up a dull B-movie, it has to be: hire European character actors. Ewan McGregor and Armin Mueller-Stahl play officials of the Catholic Church who billow through the ornate cathedrals and archways with a grand sense of purpose and grave portentousness. Stellan Skarsgard is also on hand to huff and puff as head of security and Ayelet Zurer - as a bioentanglement physicist (double ha!) - gets to stand in the background of many scenes (sometimes she even gets to say something). On the whole, this movie is less ponderous and pretentious than DaVinci Code, which leads me to assume that director Ron Howard realized that, despite the high gross, all the people who found the first film a little on the stuffy side were correct. But Mr. Howard has not swung far enough the other way. This time, instead of quietly murmuring monologues of pseudo-historical hogwash, the characters shout it or gasp it while racing through Rome but it’s just as repetitive as the first film. “Blah blah blah cathedral! Blah blah blah statue!” Repeat. The film also helpfully reminds us of major plot points regularly, for the convenience of those who have nodded off between murders.

Speaking of murders, the movie manages to be quite bloodthirsty and the MPAA ratings board has had no qualms about giving the film a PG-13 despite lingering upon brandings, rats gnawing a fresh corpse, one bloody slit throat, and, oh yes, a delightful scene in which a man with a chest wound is given CPR that causes a spurt of blood to soak the face of our hero. And yet Slumdog Millionaire received an R? It would be one thing if the carnage here served a fun, fast plot but it's merely a sad attempt to liven up some dusty proceedings.

In the face of all that brutality, it’s a shock to find that the movie goes soft in other aspects. There’s a legitimate conversation to be had about the respective roles that science and religion play in modern life, and perhaps a summer blockbuster is not the appropriate place to have it, but this movie pays lip service to grander ideas, uses them to fuel its plot, but is never honest about the conflict or lack thereof. I can understand not taking sides so as not to offend any member of the audience, but Ron Howard, and his writers David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman, downplay both sides to such an extent that a member of the audience could be forgiven for assuming that neither side has any point at all. Though such intellectual dishonesty has long marred all movies focus-grouped beyond the point of making any statements about anything, it’s rare to stumble upon one that, if thought through, has the capacity to make one question the basic meaning of life. If both science and faith are wrong, where does that leave us? It’s a good thing that no one goes to these kinds of movies looking for answers to life’s big questions (I hope).

Grotesqueries and hypocrisies aside, the movie manages several scenes of competent thrills and spills amongst some gorgeous production design. Mostly taking place at nightfall, the characters run and stalk through settings choked with atmosphere: cobwebbed caverns and shadowy passageways with dramatic lighting (and dramatic camerawork) accentuate the beautiful architecture of the city. The plot is appropriately twisty and the last act, as previously hinted, goes pleasantly insane with some last minute twists, some Vatican backstabbing and skullduggery, an act of self-martyrdom, and one very large explosion. It’s too bad it takes so long to get there. There’s a fun summer movie to be had at times, and if you’re forced to see it, there are certainly worse ways to spend two conspiracy-minded hours (see, or rather, don't: National Treasure or The DaVinci Code). I just wish someone had been let into the editing room to shave thirty to forty minutes off this thing to make it sail past its tepid attempts to tackle serious topics and get us even faster to the fun.