Junk Movies: M3GAN, MISSING, PLANE,and COCAINE BEAR

All hail junk movies! This has been a particularly good couple months for low-expectations genre pictures. If the health of the movie industry, and theatrical distribution, can be measured in the sheer number of simple, passably diverting matinee programmers, then 2023 is already looking up. It has given us, variously, killer robots and missing persons and bad flights and a drugged-up bear. Are these great movies? No. But they deliver on their modest promises, and sometimes that’s exactly enough.

Take M3gan, for instance, a killer robot movie pulled off with some panache. It stars Allison Williams as a workaholic toy designer who gets custody of her orphaned niece. To cheer the child up, she brings home a prototype of her latest device—a life-sized A.I. doll in the form of a tween with dead eyes and blonde bangs. The expensive toy takes its programming to protect her new owner a little too seriously. Soon it’s slipping loose from the bounds of its algorithms and hunting down snarling dogs and sneering bullies. There’s not even an iota of suspense as to where it’s all going—it’s a robot-amuck slasher in form, and a cracked Amblin family story in mode, with a bit of arch genre play in its tone. But the telling is fun, with committed performances, particularly from Williams’ frosty yuppie, her cute, sympathetic ward, and the eerie smooth gestures and seamless contortions of the dancer-like stunts from the eponymous robot. There’s even a soupçon of Silicon Valley cynicism to her tech giant’s willingness to crash through ethical concerns to get M3GAN to market. They’d wish they hadn’t, if they live to tell the tale. You couldn’t claim the movie is a fount of originality, but it does precisely what it sets out to do and does it well enough. That’s a fine matinee.

The latest all-on-a-computer-screen movie is Missing, yet another in what could be on its way to its own neat little sub-genre. The best of them remains 2015’s spooky haunted-Skype-call Unfriended, which is exactly as unsettling as the internet and its effects on our young people can be. This new one comes from the screenwriters who brought you the desktop thriller Searching, a movie with John Cho, in a fine performance, stretching credulity by having an improbable number of tabs open and FaceTimes running while looking for his vanished daughter. Leave it to Missing to get a better balance, partly because its Gen-Z lead (Storm Reid) is the one looking for her MIA mom (Nia Long), and partly because everyone knows this is an overheated mystery. It’s mostly compelling all the way through, as Reid clicks around through Gmail accounts and TaskRabbit prompts, scrolls through TikToks and Snapchats and Venmos, and stumbles onto some pretty lurid twists that are pleasingly shocking. And there’s a moderately clever resolution, too, that uses the logic of its technological screen-based gadgetry for a fine finale.

In Plane, Gerard Butler plays a pilot who’d make nervous fliers in the audience feel a little bit better about their next trip. After all, if the guy flying the plane would go through all this to save his passengers, then surely he can safely get you to Detroit on time. The movie finds Butler’s study blue-collar professionalism well-matched for a simple thriller. His plane gets hit by lightening, and he miraculously lands safely on an obscure island ruled by brutal pirates who’d love to have some hostages. Tough luck. The movie then devotes itself to hoping the passengers can dodge violent dangers while the pilot attempts to call help and repair the vehicle for an emergency escape route. The picture itself is merely functional thriller mechanics in style and pace and script, but the professionalism on screen makes it work. Butler is a believably sturdy man of action, a regular guy who can stumble through a fist-fight with the best of them. He’s weary, but worthy. The others in the cast support well, from the anonymous growling villains (a touch stereotypical, perhaps), to the passenger with a shady past willing to help take up arms (Mike Colter), to the guy in the command center back home (Tony Goldwyn). It’s one of those movies that barely feels like its working, but doesn’t not work either, and then has me thinking “go-go-go!” by the time the thing’s about to attempt take off.

Elizabeth Banks directs Cocaine Bear with a cheerful disregard for the value of human life, and, all things considered, a fairly permissive and blasé attitude toward cocaine. (When one innocent kid admits to having sniffed a little, a motherly nurse says, “ah, you’ll probably be fine.”) It’s loosely—looooosely—based on a true story about a 1985 drug runner who dumped his stash in a state park, and then a mama bear got high on it. This telling makes her into a CG serial killer, which makes the movie a bit of a cartoony goofball slasher picture, with a wide range of buffoonish characters traipsing around until they’re inevitably mauled in a variety of half-suspenseful sequences. On one side you get the likes of Margo Martindale and Jesse Tyler Ferguson hamming it up with big comedy energy. On the other you have Keri Russel and the late Ray Liotta acting more or less like it’s a straight drama. Straddling both approaches are Alden Ehrenreich and O’Shea Jackson, Jr. and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. They all are serious-ish, but know where the jokes are, and toss them at unexpected angles. I suppose they need all of the above to pull off such a strange mix, with sloshing sentimentality and pitiless gore and a queasily sliding morality. That it works at all in its base, dumb way is credit to Banks’ willingness to commit to the strange premise, and the workmanlike excellence of a talented cast and crew that you rarely catch condescending to the material.

Myth, Legend, Man: HEMINGWAY

Ernest Hemingway was only a man, after all. How’s that for a lede Hemingway himself might’ve enjoyed? For a writer interested in masculinity — a writer of tough, lean, declarative sentences so stripped and spare and straight-to-the-point that one can practically hear the clattering typewriter painstakingly stamp out each letter — he lingers in the public imagination as everything complicated suggested by that designation. At this point he’s passed into cultural assumptions and cliches. We remember him for bull fighters and trench ambulances, for drinking and womanizing, for excursions and adventures, for hunting and fishing, for boating and safari, for shooting and killing. He puffed himself up through self-mythologizing, then sometimes lived up to it. But above all else, he’s a writer and a man. He wrote what he knew. He observed closely, keenly. He wrote careful prose, confronted the difficulties of life. He’s a great writer. And like all great writers he is both exactly what we remember him for, and so much more. He may be a lion of literature, a legend of letters, but he is still only a man and all the complications and contradictions that implies. He was talented — a once-in-a-generation-if-we’re-lucky author who, as Tobias Wolff says, “rearranged the furniture” of American literature. And he was mortal, troubled, fallible, complicated. He was capable of writing about people and places, inner lives of men and women alike, with such vividly drawn and precisely rendered minds suggested in evocative detail drawn in poetic simplicity. And yet he could also treat those around him — his wives, his children, fellow writers, even himself — with breathtaking cruelty. He was masculine to the max, and interested in understanding women, and playing with androgyny. He was quintessentially American, and loved nowhere more than Paris and Cuba. To wrestle with his work is to recognize his genius, and to acknowledge him as a man wrestling with himself.

He’s a figure perfectly suited to the Ken Burns style, intersecting as he does with so many of the great documentarian’s usual thematic interests: Americana, war, letters, literature, the ways social forces and big personalities impact each other. Burns, surely among the most consistent  of working documentarians, and his usual collaborators (co-director Lynn Novick, historian Geoffrey C. Ward, narrator Peter Coyote) load up the six hours devoted to Hemingway with their usual style and technique: perfect pans across striking photographs and documents, well-curated historical footage, an all-star voice-over cast (Jeff Daniels, Meryl Streep, Keri Russel) bringing writings to life, and a handful of literary critics, academics, and writers speaking to the history. Burns’ sturdy filmmaking is not surprising in its construction, but builds to wonderful revelations all the same—a soft, poetic joining of ideas and images that invites contemplation. It may not approach the majesty of his masterpieces (his epic The Roosevelts — a wide ranging, big-picture historical view with all the moving intimacy of close, personal portraiture — is his finest hour in my book), but there’s value to his approach to historical documentary. This particular work digs deep into the man’s life and work, treating both with the rigorous criticism and beneficial biography that builds a full portrait. Brushing past the easy received wisdom — confronting his family’s perspective, allowing debate over some works, acknowledging his blind spots and blurred lines — it leaves you with a good sense of the man and his times, and why, exactly, his work was and remains such an important moment in literary history.

It’s like the best professorial lecture on the topic at hand. There’s a firm steadiness in Burns’ filmmaking that slows the breathing, quiets the mind, and makes one open to listen and interpret, make connections, push back on claims or welcome new information. It also makes the few bum notes — like the late John McCain saying he understands why Hemingway would kill himself — clang. Yet one only needs to see how dry, slow, scattered or undigestible Burns’ imitators’ films are to see what makes his team’s series special. He brings an immediacy to the artifacts, an intellectual engagement to the voices he selects, and a willingness to contrast talking heads. For instance, here Edna O’Brien, who earlier speaks emotionally and persuasively about the short story “Up in Michigan,” scoffs at The Old Man and the Sea, immediately followed by Mario Vargas Llosa declares it his favorite. Burns is building a careful, dense, and thorough picture. But the whole grand sweep of it becomes like sitting in on a great conversation about a notable figure, several hours marching through the chronology of a fascinating life in the company of interesting people arguing for a great writer. Best of all, it sent me back to my bookshelf, to pluck down a volume of Hemingway’s stories and reread them with renewed eyes and even deeper appreciation.

Apes Together Strong: DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes hits all the required big notes of a Hollywood spectacle. It also delivers what one would reasonably expect from a Planet of the Apes movie, up to and including a chimpanzee firing two guns while riding on a horse. And yet it’s not a mindless action spectacle because the filmmakers are interested in letting us understand its characters not only as pawns of plot or objects of allegory – though they are that – but as living, breathing beings. Like its predecessor, 2011’s surprisingly effective Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn finds rich avenues of exploration, turning imagery and metaphor from the 60’s and 70’s Apes into bigger, slicker, modern efforts that lose none of the soul. This is a franchise that has always been at its best when it uses its monkeys to reflect humanity back at itself. With its latest iteration, advanced digital wizardry lets us stare deeply into the eyes of an intelligent ape, see ourselves there, and confront what we find. It’s a film with action that’s thrilling and exciting, but mournful as well.

The smartly constructed screenplay by Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver finds the good and bad in both man and ape. We see the groups as mirror images, tribes living in tenuous post-apocalyptic peace. In the ten years since research lab apes staged a revolt and fled into the forest outside San Francisco at the end of Rise, scientists inadvertently brought about a plague. Called the simian flu, the virus was an artificial concoction that decimated humans, leaving apes unharmed. Without knowledge of the other’s existence, man and ape live their lives on either side of the crumbling Golden Gate Bridge. In an early scene, apes gather around their leader. Later, humans do the same. Both sets of crowd noises a represented through similar walls of sound, murmuring exclamations that are more alike than not. When man and ape discover the other, there is fear, then suspicion tempered with curiosity. But each tribe has warmongerers who cannot see peaceful coexistence. We come to understand that violence will arrive through misunderstandings, egos, and fear.

First we spend time with the apes. The opening shot – after a hokey pre-title expositional montage – stares deep into the eyes of Caesar, the ape who led the rebellion and now leads his clan of chimps, gorillas, and orangutans. The camera pulls back until we see a forest filled with apes. With a hand signal, they leap down on the attack. They’re hunting deer. In smooth, swooping shots we follow their deadly strategy. We see what they’re capable of. They take the kills back to their village, a visual marvel of rudimentary houses, public spaces (simian versions of a schoolroom, a town hall, a cafeteria), and carved logs set in a ring around the perimeter. As they interact we learn about their society. They communicate with each other through sign language, grunts, whoops, guttural broken English, and meaningful glances. We watch, subtitles our only guide. The workings of their society are intriguingly revealed through action and image. It’s fascinating, preserving their status as animals and shading in subtleties of characterization through magisterial silences.

It almost never looks silly. The effects work is remarkable, not just for bringing the fantasy to life in convincing ways but for the performances it helps shape. The monkeys are digital creations around performance capture data. Like last time, Caesar is created by Andy Serkis, who performed the grunting dialogue as well as movements down to smallest the twitch, and a team of talented technicians at WETA Digital. It’s a moving, complicated performance as nuanced as any fully human work, extraordinarily detailed even and especially in extreme close-up. All the apes are created this way, enlivened by a fine ensemble (Toby Kebbell, Nick Thurston, Karin Konoval, Judy Greer) who are transformed into believably soulful monkeys imbued with personality and emotion beyond what makeup or trained animals could supply. They are, in writing and acting, among the most memorable screen characters in recent memory, sympathetic and humane with multifaceted motivations and expressive faces. What stand out most vividly are their eyes, so alive and compelling you can see the gears of thought and feeling turning, giving them heavy emotional lifting in unforgiving close-ups. We know them as fully as any person on screen.

Caesar, a compassionate leader and caring father, meets his human counterpart in the man (Jason Clarke) who arrives in the forest looking to restart an old dam in order to restore power to the fledgling human camp living in a small section the crumbling, weedy, fortified ruins of San Francisco. He has his wife (Keri Russell) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) in tow. Once they discover the animals, they want to learn more about the apes and their culture, convinced these intelligent creatures will help if they hear them out. Caesar wants to keep the peace, but other apes agitate for war. The humans are weak. Why not kill now and never worry again? Other humans aren’t so kind, either. Back at their base, a leader (Gary Oldman) is stockpiling heavy weaponry. He wants to reclaim the dam by wiping the apes out. As characters, the people aren’t as deeply felt as their animal counterparts, but the strong ensemble brings complexity to what’s on the page. The strength of the writing is in its activating of the dread and desperation of its scenario as pieces slowly fall into place, as weapons and suspicions reach the inevitable.

In its broad strokes, the conflict is expected and the plot moves towards the typical summer blockbuster conflagration that grows tiresome. But director Matt Reeves (of other excellent efforts Cloverfield and Let Me In) has given us down time, quiet reflection, moral complications slowly developing. We’re not tired of action before we even get there. He thinks in shots and sequences, deploying his camera with patience where many of his contemporaries slap together chaos. Here he builds tension and empathy out of crisp staging and long master shots. How better to be overwhelmed by the sight of hundreds of apes emerging in the trees behind humans in the foreground? By the time the action sequences roar, he cuts for the impact of clarity, not the impact of shocks and sensations. He pans 360 degrees with a tank’s turret as its driver changes from human to ape, foreground struggle reflected in the background that sweeps across the entire conflict. He watches as groups of combatants swarm over rooftops. He finds memorable moments: gunfire lighting flashes in the darkness; a kind character dropped to his death out of frame; a tight close-up of a whispered warning.

Reeves can’t get around the ultimate wearying effect of the typical blockbuster climax, but action is all the more impactful for being rooted in flesh and blood.  Digital beings and stock characters alike are invested with humanity. Every violent action has weight, consequences that matter. It’s a film that doesn’t want to see anyone hurt, certainly not the main sympathetic characters, but even villains of both human and animal variety who remain stubbornly humanized individuals. They do bad things for what they think are good reasons, reasons we can understand. Humans should be scared of apes. The animals are strong, resourceful, adaptable. The apes should be scared of humans. They have guns. This is a gripping sci-fi adventure that expresses not shoot-‘em-up militarism, but regret that the worst of man and ape brings conflict to the fore. It slowly brings two worlds to crisis and grows sad as the prospect of peace dwindles. It makes for a multipurpose allegory, applicable to any conflict with two intractable, yet similar, sides. Peace is close, yet, with great sadness, war is closer.

Lost in AUSTENLAND

Austenland is a film of affection for its inspirations, which happen to be the works of Jane Austen in general, but even more specifically the romantic comedy. It’s been ages since we’ve had a good one, so it makes a certain amount of sense that this film works as one by foregrounding its fictional status and thinking about locating your ideal romance squarely in the safe confines of literature. Based on the novel by Shannon Hale, who also co-wrote the screenplay, the film takes place at the titular Austenland, a resort that promises the ultimate Jane Austen experience. The owner (Jane Seymour) welcomes guests to spend time on the grounds of a richly appointed Regency Era home set on a large sweep of generous county acreage. The period wardrobe appears to be provided. It’s all so perfectly too-much and just-so, a tackiness that comes from an overabundance of frippery. Maybe it’s the small taxidermy farm animals scattered about that puts it over the top. To maintain the fictional illusion, the guests must abstain from all modern convenience (except for indoor plumbing, which is thankfully provided).

Our entry into this world is Jane Hayes, winningly played by Keri Russell. She’s an ordinary woman with a fine job and a string of bad breakups. Her apartment is covered in Austen merchandise, up to and including a banner over her bed that reads “Mrs. Darcy.” Unattached and with vacation time to spare, she jets off to England to visit Austenland and get lost in the literature she loves. Jane discovers that visitors to the resort come in different varieties. The other women attending this particular week are an uninhibited wealthy woman (Jennifer Coolidge), who seems to know little of Austen’s work, and a younger lady (Georgia King), so deep into character her real self barely surfaces at all. Deliberate caricatured, the guests are instantly recognizable as superfans. They may not have Jane’s merchandise, but they’re commitment to leaving modern day real world concerns behind is total. It’s not so strange. After all, it was none other than E. M. Forster who once wrote, “I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen.”

That Austen is a novelist who attracts a devoted following is not news. It’s a phenomenon that predates Colin Firth’s Darcy’s dip in the water by more than a century. She speaks so directly to the hearts and minds of her biggest fans, conjuring her characters with such matter-of-fact precision. She writes crisply and sparklingly with easy wit and pithy observation, sometimes both at once, “It is a truth universally acknowledged” and all that. To fans Austen is not just a Great Author. She is, in her capability to inspire in some of her readers the kind of zealous personal attachments we’d more often associate with, say, superhero superfans, a great author as friend. It’s no wonder that her biggest fans, on a first-name basis with good old Jane, seem to be able to disappear into her world again and again.

That’s what Austenland concerns itself with, as the three ladies take tea, ride horses, sketch, sew, sing, gossip, and dine. At the end of the week there will be a ball. All along, they interact with actors playing typically Austen types of men: a prickly Darcy (JJ Feild), a colonel (James Callis), a captain (Ricky Whittle), and an inebriated patriarch (Rupert Vansittart). For all the artifice, Jane finds herself drawn to the resort’s handyman (Bret McKenzie). The cast is universally charming. Russell is a fine, appealing, immensely likable center. We want what’s best for her. The others, from scene-stealer Coolidge to marvelously prickly Feild, create sparkling chemistry and fill in great supporting detail.

Jerusha Hess, who co-wrote Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre, and Gentlemen Broncos with her husband Jared, directs Austenland with a light, confident touch. Her tableaus don’t grow stiff and awkward like in those earlier efforts, but rather pop with delightful detail. This is a film that’s sprightly. She stages the film’s unexpected complexities with ease. The world of the film is at once ridiculous and relatable, broad shtick with heart. She pushes the exaggerated characters and locale without losing the real emotions and warmth in it. The affection for the characters and for Austen is infectious, the details that make up the resort’s activities funny in unexpected ways. When the group trudges out to the fields for an old-fashioned quail hunt, it’s with matter-of-fact precision that the employees launch stuffed birds into the sky.

All along we dance through meta-layers of storytelling. Guests are acting and actors are acting, but all are aware of the artifice. And yet, the artifice itself can provoke very real emotions that can carry over into reality. That the film is interested in its premise and characters enough to actually consider all sides of the scenario is welcome and hilarious. Some guests find themselves romantically drawn to the actors, but are they drawn to the character or the real person underneath? In a nice touch, we eventually cut behind the curtain to see the actors themselves gossiping about the guests. Is it possible the artifice can be broken from their side as well? It’s a film thoroughly and literally scrambling concepts of reality and fiction in much the same way Austen superfans (or any superfans, for that matter) do when lost in a fictional world.

Austenland designs stories for its guests’ amusement in much the same way Austenland designs all of them for ours. This is a film that’s a breezy, warm comedy that’s light on its feet. It’s at once a loving spoof of Austen tropes and a loving embrace of her marvelous plotting and emotional stakes. But I’ve been making it sound weightier and trickier than it is. The film is a clear and bouncy comedy, filled with loud pop music and tickling asides. The mix of comic conventions eventually puts us near where Austen and rom-coms alike tend to, but the whole-hearted embrace of its every aspect is a total delight from beginning to end. It’s a film that can wink the whole time through and still in the end make one swoon, too.