In the Spotlight: MAINSTREAM, THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE, and TICK, TICK...BOOM!

A fluke of pandemic scheduling found Andrew Garfield starring this year in a loose accidental trilogy of movies about ambitious people for whom others’ perceptions of them becomes their reality. In Gia Coppola’s Mainstream, he’s a social media influencer on the rise. In Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye, he’s a televangelist in over his head. And in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s filmmaking debut adapting Jonathan Larson’s tick, tick…BOOM!, he’s a struggling young musical playwright hoping to finally get a break on the eve of his thirtieth birthday. Garfield appears to be working out ideas of stardom and success, artistry, ambition and attention, and these films give him different notes to play and conclusions to draw. It’s fitting for a supremely talented actor looking to find the best avenues for his atypical charisma.

His career so far has been one of the attractive young man who gets stuck between character actor and matinee idol. Either way, he’s always one to watch, from artful ease in the likes of The Social Network, Silence, and Never Let Me Go, where his stubborn wet-eyed self-seriousness forms a moral backbone, to shouldering Mark Webb’s underrated Spider-Mans with a loose-limbed moodiness that sets him apart from Maguire’s sturdy earnestness and Holland’s jumpy excitement. Stuff like the flat-footed war movie Hacksaw Ridge strand him between those modes, while the loopy pop conspiracy Under the Silver Lake tapped into a wilder streak that springs from a fount of wiry, wound-up interior intensity. The through line is clear: Garfield loves to perform. No wonder he’s been drawn lately to this material that interrogates that impulse, asks what people get out of that transaction, and sees all too clearly how it’ll hollow someone out if they aren’t prepared, just as surely as it’ll be a lingering frustration to never make it there to begin with.

Mainstream is an underwritten modern Network that noodles around Big Ideas about How We Stream Now without ever quite getting to a point. Somehow Gia Coppola, in her follow-up to her level intimate teen drama Palo Alto, is content to swirl up a storm of ideas and moods and leave it at that. Garfield plays a free range prankster whose antics catch on through the help of a bartender with a crush on him (Maya Hawke), and eventually the two get hooked up with a promoter (Jason Schwartzman) who’ll fake their way to the top of the viral charts and all the promoted content that implies. Of course it spirals out of control, fame going to the head, power corrupting, and underlying mental problems compounded, as the feedback loop between audience and star grows precariously thin. But even if the general spirit of the thing has a bleeding-edge bite, the scenarios it concocts are never convincing enough to underpin any serious social satire, from an interview show that literally puts its clownish lead between Johnny Knoxville and Logan Paul to some kind of YouTube gameshow—called “Your Phone or Your Dignity,” natch—that looks like something Paddy Chayefsky might’ve put in a first draft. It’s all so much glitter and flailing, but Garfield’s wild-eyed gesticulation sells that dead-eyed striving you see creep into these wannabe pseudo-celebs from time to time. It ends with everyone involved worse off in some way, and a towering close-up of Garfield grinning like a maniac while he’s applauded, as if to say, that’s showbiz, folks.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a more believable look at this kind of boom and bust celebrity. The film is based on the true story of televangelists Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, played here with sunny surface cheerfulness and an undertow of sadness by Jessica Chastain and Garfield. They inhabit them with a cheery artifice and cheek fillers. The result is a serious character study with a slight satiric streak as it watches their scrappy rise and eventual entanglement with evangelical corruption that brings them down as scapegoats while letting the worse above them off free. Showalter, a long-time comedy pro, views his central figures with sympathy and skepticism, which sometimes softens the edges and holds them at a slight remove. The style, too, is a soft and pillowy look, a critique cushioned in unlikely blurred affection. 

 His film cares about them to a point, but doesn’t quite know how seriously to take their early intentions to spread the word of God. The couple starts young and passionate, speak softly and earnestly about their missionary fervor as they meet in Bible college and, quickly married, set out on a touring puppet show that catches the attention of Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio) and his burgeoning Christian television network. It’s clear they like the spotlight and the trappings of fame as their show grows into a media empire. But the movie also sees the poignancy between the distance between who they want to be and who they actually are, the blindness in their conflation of their desires and the Lord’s. Garfield, especially, leans into the sleaze that can ooze in around the edges of such an ego. Ultimately the movie enjoys the silliness of Christian kitsch surrounding them—the outlandish 80’s hair and makeup mixed with reverential semi-country ballads that are sticky as hell—while allowing for the weight of semi-secret struggles within the community—especially the plight of women and gays. I found an improbable amount of empathy for these two despite their obvious shortcomings, since eventually they’re as much victims of this system—typified by a slimy Falwell—as they are victimizers within it. Chastain and Garfield are capable of showing the pained souls underneath the layers of fakery.

Garfield’s at his best, though, in tick, tick…BOOM! Here he inhabits the bohemian energy animating a frustrated artist who believes entirely in his talent, but has run aground on worries he’ll never break through with it. You can see that tension in his posture, the moment where the carefree drains away, leaving that do-or-give-up sense of now or never. In Larson’s semi-autobiographical show, the future writer of Rent is on his eighth year working in a diner while struggling to complete a sci-fi musical opus. (That we know the real Larson would die before Rent opens gives a melancholy layer to this youthful work.) Under the direction of Miranda, it becomes a kind of doubled vision of aspiring theater-making. He knows of musical workshops and the difficulty in honing a massive vision to a kind of pop theatrical purity. (One sees his capable direction in this feature and might think, gee, does the creator of In the Heights and Hamilton need to be a solid filmmaker, too?). 

Told through the kind of conversationally anthemic songs that would make Rent itself such Gen X lightning-in-a-bottle, the musical plays out in greasy booths and corner offices, cramped apartments overflowing with struggling artists and practice spaces warmly lit. Garfield sits at a piano and invites us into his mindset—a frame story that snaps into place with a softly moving reveal near the end—while a backing band croons support. He takes us into anecdotes as he drafts songs and scrapes together money, tries to get his agent to call back, juggles friendships and romance, and, yes, takes shifts serving coffee and toast to dismissive diners. Miranda balances the tone between realist and theatrical and Garfield straddles both admirably, able to dive into an artificial flourish of magical realism as his character’s Broadway mind imagines his surroundings out into stage lighting and prosceniums, or hunker down on the arm of a tattered couch to extemporaneously sing his feelings. The rest of the cast (Alexandra Shipp, Robin de Jesus, Vanessa Hudgens) capably follows along as a swirling ensemble of influences, supportive yet clear-eyed. The songs are strong; the dynamics are believable; the small flights of fancy are a window into a writer’s mind where everything can be material. The constant across scenes is the simmering suspense of doubt that’ll be painfully familiar to anyone who has ever felt stuck in a life of artistic interests, in that awful double-bind of needing experience to get recognition and recognition to get experience. He just needs a break. The clock’s ticking.

Give 'Em Shell: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

I must admit the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have never really worked for me. There’s something about their characters that holds me at a distance. Maybe it’s because they’re so similar in look – big humanoid turtle things differentiated only by the color headbands their wear – and personality. They have the names of Italian Renaissance artists: Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Donatello. They all love pizza, do martial arts, shout “cowabunga,” and live with their adopted mutant rat father in the sewers below New York City. It’s a collection of silly details that never quite grabbed me in any form be it comics, animated series, video games, or feature films.

I still felt that distance in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a reboot of the live action big screen turtle movies. But somehow this transparently silly goof of an adventure movie kept me distracted, if not quite entertained. It’s not a good movie, but it’s competent as it runs through a standard superhero plot with a big bad threatening a city and the heroes who save the day. That its climax only puts about 10 city blocks in immediate danger is a nice change of pace. Is it progress that this summer spectacle is a retread of blockbuster beats from a decade or two ago instead of staking a claim in the apocalyptic stakes race we’ve been living through the last few years?

The movie follows an intrepid reporter (Megan Fox), the sort of ambitious young newsperson who is sick and tired of fluff pieces and wants to do serious journalism. One night she spots a group of mysterious vigilantes breaking up the evil Foot Clan’s nefarious deeds on the docks and comes face to face with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Some fun is had with their improbable details as Fox tries to explain to her newsroom colleagues (Will Arnett and Whoopi Goldberg) what she has discovered. She sounds crazy. Meanwhile, desperate to keep their existence secret, the turtles and their rat father set out to find and befriend her.

The human characters are stock flat types that don’t make much of an impact beyond whatever charms the actors bring. But there’s a CGI realism to the textures of the turtles’ and rat’s skin that makes them marginally more convincing as living beings. It also makes them far creepier than the phony rubbery costumes of their previous early-90’s live action appearances. Now they’re uncannily real and utterly fake in the same instance. We’re not talking the apes from Rise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes here. The Ninja Turtles speak with energetic voices (provided by Johnny Knoxville, Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, and Jeremy Howard) as their faces light up with giggly banter and gain flashes of gravitas. Their rat guardian Splinter (Tony Shalhoub) has damp and furry features of uncomfortably verminous countenance as his dojo voice intones ponderously.

Eventually, as a nefarious C.E.O. (William Fichtner) and Shredder (Tohoru Masamune), the head of the Foot Clan, team up to spray poison from the top of a skyscraper and make billions off the cure, the turtles and their new human ally get drawn into saving the day. It’s a small, thin plot. You’ve seen the basic beats before and here they’re replayed dutifully. Even the surprises aren’t surprising, you know?  At least it has a small, thin sense of humor about itself.

Arnett becomes Fox’s sidekick, providing sarcastic asides, while Goldberg gets the most charm out of far too little screen time. (I could’ve used at the very least one more scene with her wisecracking editor.) The screenplay by Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec, and Evan Daugherty is peppered with corny wisecracks and laughs that may not be entirely intentional, but still fit the silly mood. It's not much of a plot, and I certainly couldn’t tell you which turtle was which at any given time, but at least there’s room for a villain preparing to get inside a robotic samurai suit to say, “Tonight, I shall dine on turtle soup.” That’s the kind of straight-faced laugh line that makes me smile.

Speaking of straight-faced, director Jonathan Liebesman, behind spectacles both bad (Battle: Los Angeles) and okay (Wrath of the Titans), directs with a heavier hand than the material requires. It’s kid’s movie bounciness – the turtles are goofballs – smashed up against PG-13 roughness – a bad guy is dissolved from the inside out in somewhat graphic fashion. Lulu Carvalho’s beams-of-light-soaked cinematography is presented with a glossy seriousness, cut together in a standard amped-up chaos cinema style. I suppose when you’re dealing with material this flimsy, and so half-aware of its own inanity, grounding it in a sense of thriller weight makes the utterly weightless bounding of its inhabitants slightly less likely to float away into nothingness.

The overly familiar plotting is done and over with quickly and not as painfully as the who-is-this-for? tone or the tediously expositional rat would lead you to believe. The movie is completely empty-headed, a bland and mostly undistinguished effort that spends more time acting like it’s fun than actually being fun. It mostly goes through the motions, but at least it’s not a total waste. In the movie’s action centerpiece, a semi slaloms down a snowy mountainside as bad guys give chase and characters fall in, out, and around. It has a zip and novelty that makes it one of this summer’s better spectacle sequences, provided you can forget that there’s no towering mountain a mere 19 minutes out of Manhattan. But by that point you’ve already accepted that there are man-sized mutant turtle teenagers with ninja skills. What’s a little geographic confusion on top of that?

Old, Tired, Mean: BAD GRANDPA

When Amy Poehler was on The Ellen DeGeneres Show earlier this week, she talked about her disdain for pranks. Ellen showed her several YouTube videos of people going to elaborate lengths scaring friends and family. After each one, the camera would cut back to Poehler, brow furrowed, mouth drawn into an exaggerated frown. “How about that one?” Ellen would ask. “Nope,” Poehler would grunt. I’m glad she did that, not just because it was a funny bit, but also because it helped me know what my face probably looked like for most of Bad Grandpa. It’s a loosely plotted movie that is wall-to-wall hidden-camera pranks, most of them bizarre, upsetting, or filthy behavior that happens in the vicinity of strangers. As I watched, I felt my face scrunch up for so long I was nearly worried it would stay that way. As the antics played out across the screen, I spent my time debating logistics – how did they film this? – and worrying about the well-being of the innocent bystanders.

These are no Candid Camera good-natured goofs. The movie comes from star Johnny Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine, the pranksters behind the Jackass show and movies in which a team of like-minded buddies would egg each other on into masochistic pranks involving shock gross out squirminess and threats of bodily harm, all for our ostensible amusement. Here, the humor comes from staging dangerous and crude stunts in front of the general public. It’s no longer masochism; it’s mean-spirited. Take, for instance, an early scene in which Knoxville, who spends the entire movie in convincing old-age makeup playing the Bad Grandpa of the title, hosts an estate sale. He sits down on an adjustable bed and goads a middle-aged woman, who thinks she’s just a customer at an average sale, into testing the bed’s buttons. It predictably goes haywire, snapping upright from both ends and trapping Knoxville inside. The camera lingers on the trembling woman in glee as Knoxville extricates himself. Relishing the poor woman’s fright isn’t funny. It’s just cruel.

The plot, such as it is, involves the Bad Grandpa on a road trip to take his eight-year-old grandson (Jackson Nicoll) to the boy’s dad. It’s mainly an excuse to stage moments like shoplifting from a convenience store, which culminates in the manager yelling at them in the parking lot, saying quite rightly that the boy should be taken away from him. Another gag involves a funeral with invited strangers, thinking they’re helping a poor old man’s grief, witnessing the body (fake, of course, but awfully real looking) falling out of the casket, after which Knoxville proceeds to dance with it while angrily insisting the congregation sing a hymn. Other gags include a malfunctioning mechanical contraption launching the Bad Grandpa through a plate glass window, the old man pushed in a shopping cart up to a drive-thru window, a bout of explosive diarrhea that splatters a diner wall, and a crashed beauty pageant featuring a risqué drag performance by the little boy. Bystanders are often more perplexed and weirded out than anything else, especially when, say, Knoxville takes his old man character into a male strip club and tries to muscle his way on stage.

Compare the slack, mean pranks here to Sacha Baron Cohen’s not unproblematic overrated Borat and underrated Bruno. There Cohen tends to go after satirical targets with his hidden-camera improv stunts. He’s hilarious and cringe-worthy at once, precisely because it’s calibrated to tweak racist, xenophobic, and homophobic undercurrents, blowing past the limits of propriety to make a point. When he gets a group of people to sing his fake folk song “Throw the Jew Down the Well,” it’s as upsetting and unnerving as it is hilarious for the bias he unearths. When he throws a cage match in the deep south and suddenly begins making out with his opponent mid-bout, the howls of protest from the drunken crowd give the whole thing an edge of danger and upheaval for the ultimate benefit of all involved, if for nothing else than the societal observation it provokes. When Bad Grandpa goes to a bingo game, drinks the ink out of his markers, pours lime juice down his pants, and aggressively flirts with all the ladies around him, it’s ultimately pointless. I felt bad for those women. They’re the butt of the joke in a scenario that exists only to have us laugh at their discomfort.

I make Bad Grandpa sound like an unendurable experience. I’ve no doubt that for many it would be. For me it could have been and nearly was, but I must confess to laughing right out loud maybe three times, even though all those best jokes are lifted from Little Miss Sunshine and Borat. And there’s some genuine camaraderie between Knoxville and Nicoll that generates a few freestanding moments of mild entertainment when the two characters simply scamper around pulling pranks on each other. Maybe they work well together because they’re on a similar level of juvenile dumbness, a mix of fearless energy and unchecked mischievousness. It’s too bad the movie’s so sour it can’t even capitalize on their chemistry for the sappy grandfather-grandson bonding conclusion it so desperately tries to pull off. For me the biggest laugh comes not from any of the elaborate dangerous or crude stunts the production pulls, but from a comment a woman on the street directs towards the boy when confronted with the pair: “I feel like I should take your picture and see if you’re on a milk carton somewhere.” Otherwise the movie kept waving its pranks in my face asking, “How about that one?” To which I could only reply, “Nope.”

Local Hero: THE LAST STAND

I was surprised how welcome it is to see Arnold Schwarzenegger back on the big screen in a starring role. It’s at least as good as it is to see South Korean horror/action/comedy hybrid genre filmmaker Kim Jee-woon's new feature opening wide all across America, come to think of it. That the former’s return and the latter’s Hollywood debut is one and the same is a nice bonus. If only the movie they made together was better. It's the kind of pared down actioner featuring a small setting and big stakes that should make for some nice lean excitement. And sometimes it does. This is a movie of fleeting diversions, but mostly it plays as witlessly flip, excessively violent, and creakily predictable.

The slight plot features a fugitive drug cartel leader (Eduardo Noriega) fleeing capture, leaving a frustrated F.B.I. agent (Forest Whitaker) in Las Vegas. He stays a step ahead of the feds, racing a super fast sports car towards the Mexican border. To get there, he has to go through a sleepy one-stoplight Arizona town where the aging sheriff (Schwarzenegger) and his green deputies (Luis Guzmán, Jaimie Alexander, and Zach Gilford) are dealing with a shady trucker (Peter Stormare) and a missing milk farmer (Harry Dean Stanton). They’re a bunch of stock characters – complete with stereotypically twangy Americana scoring in the background – waiting around for the shooting to start. The film works along parallel paths as a car chase zooms towards a slow small town mystery, cutting between the two, biding its time before the two halves will eventually collide in a whole climax in which every character gets to play a part.

If you don’t think a crazy weapons-museum proprietor (Johnny Knoxville) and a jailed-for-the-weekend drunk and disorderly Iraq war veteran (Rodrigo Santoro) will become important in the lengthy climactic firefight, then you’ve not seen an action movie before. But who would go to this movie without having seen an action movie before? The script cobbled together by Andrew Knauer, Jeffrey Nachmanoff and George Nolfi leaves no room for memorable characters beyond the typecast personas. It’s an uncomplicated movie of dusty setups for obvious payoffs that take their sweet time showing up. In the opening scene, Schwarzenegger is thrown the keys to a shiny new car, its owner telling him “Don't let anything happen to it.” It’s overwhelmingly obvious what condition that car will be in by the movie’s end. There’s a lot of bloodshed coming as well and when the sheriff growls that he “knows what’s coming,” I believed him, because I did too.

Cartoonish and hollow, it is, in tone and genre positioning, a pale American echo of Kim's slapstick spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, the Weird. That’s not a great film, but it’s a similarly convoluted and empty expression of well-staged style. The Last Stand has an admirable looseness about it, a jokiness that sometimes comes across as genuine. I especially liked when Schwarzenegger has a line about one of the villains “making us immigrants look bad.” It’s not often that one of his pictures feels the desire to explain, even in a throwaway line, why a thick Austrian accent is rumbling out of the mouth of an American character. But the ease with which Arnold can command the screen is thrown away by the ways in which Kim’s pacing is off. Jokes misfire through bad timing. The humor is strained, especially when Knoxville gets involved, and the setpieces, though clever enough at times, like when a car disappears into the night by turning off the headlights, or when two men chase blindly through a cornfield, never really becomes more than repetitive. Action beats arrive too slowly, last too long, or end too soon. Plot twists are fumbled. I felt myself straining to have a good time while my affection slowly drained away.

Tricks and Treats: FUN SIZE

The worst thing about Fun Size, a one-crazy-night teen comedy set on Halloween, is that it’s so close to being better than it is. As it stands, it is not difficult to see the funnier movie within that nearly bursts through. The set-up is simple enough. Teenage girl Wren (Victoria Justice) wants to go to a party with her best friend April (Jane Levy), but plans change when her mom (Chelsea Handler) saddles her with babysitting duties. So, while Mom goes out partying with her new boyfriend, Wren and friend set out trick-or-treating with her pudgy, uncommunicative little brother Albert (Jackson Nicoll), who, wouldn’t you know it, wanders away. This leads to an episodic scramble around town to find the kid before the night is over or Mom gets home, whichever comes first. 

Director Josh Schwartz (creator-showrunner of such TV shows as The O.C., Gossip Girl, and Chuck in his feature debut) and screenwriter Max Werner (who writes for The Colbert Report) have a way with snappy teen dialogue that benefits greatly from the solid performances from the leads. They’re believable teens who are somewhat torn between going to that huge party and finding Albert, but there’s the main problem. In order for the madcap scramble of the plot to truly take off, there needs to be considerably more urgency in this main plotline. The movie sets up a situation that seems to be heading towards the girls getting into increasing trouble looking for Albert, but instead the plot meanders and seems to forget that there’s a little boy wandering into dangerous scenarios, like a rift between a gas station employee (Thomas Middleditch) and the guy (Johnny Knoxville) who stole his girl (Abby Elliott), a subplot that goes nowhere fast.

All of the ostensible danger inherent within all this plotting seems so distant that there’s no real reason to think anything bad will happen to the boy or that their mom will find out about the antics. The movie is built upon a crisis that fades into the back of the mind, something to be brought up only to prod the story along. But what little story there is can be thinly amusing, as is the way the background is perpetually crowded with all manner of people wandering about in goofy costumes. The girls find two sweet nerds (Thomas Mann and Osric Chau) not-so-secretly crushing on them who are more than willing to give them a ride around town as they try to find the missing kid. I liked the scene in which Wren tells one of the boys that she considers him a friend, a revelation that causes him to drop his can of Crush soda. “My Crush…” he murmurs. Later, the group and his car will be involved in the best sequence in the movie, a solid, escalating bit of hilarity that involves a Josh Groban song, an angry Roman Gladiator with his Hulk friend in a big truck, and a giant malfunctioning mechanical chicken.

Schwartz approaches the material in a slick, quickly paced way that frames the action with functional studio comedy style, shifting the emphasis to the charming young performers in the film’s center. In a John Hughes-reminiscent touch the film has a welcome focus on its female leads, with Justice (who spent several years appearing in Nickelodeon sitcoms, all unseen by me) and Levy (so good as the lead in ABC’s Suburgatory, at least in the couple of episodes I’ve caught) sharing a believable best-friend chemistry that’s at once warm and prickly. It’s a shame that so much of their interactions hinge on social status and boy talk, but that’s just par for the course I suppose. This is a standard movie of smart, pretty girls and endearingly dweeby guys in a predictable plot filled with one-note comedic characters that walk in and out of their scenes without making much of an impact. Although some subplots, like Handler’s, veer off into welcome changes of pace, the whole thing comes around to precisely the romantic pairings and emotional resolutions you’d easily guess that it would. And, despite the modicum of laughs along the way, in the end it’s just a little bit less than enough. I guess that means Fun Size is to teen comedies as a fun size piece of candy is to full-size candy bars.