Double Deutch: VOICEMAILS FOR ISABELLE and GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS

Here’s an interesting case study in modern movie distribution. Sony has two comedies starring Zoey Deutch this summer. You might recognize her from supporting roles in Zombieland: Double Tap or Juror #2 or Nouvelle Vague or from confusing her with Haley Lu Richardson. She can make for a sweet and believable center of a movie when given the chance. Of her two starring roles this year, one’s in a straightforward romantic comedy with a traditional blend of charm and sentiment. It’s sturdy crowd-pleasing, pushing all the right buttons. The other’s in an arch alt-comedy riff that transposes The Wizard of Oz into a goofy R-rated joke. It’s deliberately niche, a cult item at best. Which one has been sent straight to Netflix via Sony’s deal with the streamer, and which hit theaters through their boutique Sony Pictures Classics label? Both could’ve found an audience on the big screen. But it’s strange to find the broadly appealing picture is the one you can play from the couch right now. 

If you did you’d find Voicemails for Isabelle is a reasonably effective version of its kind. Deutch plays an aspiring chef trying to survive a tough kitchen run by Nick Offerman. She calls her sister all the time to share the details of her life. They’ve done that since childhood since the younger girl is housebound with an illness and lives vicariously through her big sister’s adventures. When the sister dies, Deutch keeps calling, but the number has been reassigned to the new phone of a yuppie (Nick Robinson) who falls in love with the mystery caller. So he doesn’t message her to let her know it’s now a wrong number just to continue eavesdropping on her life. Eventually he has to meet her. From the premise you can already see the broad strokes of where the plot will go—manipulated Meet Cute to dating montages to revelation to reconciliation. The leads are charming with some sweet chemistry. It gives just enough sparkle to the familiar beats. But where the movie really lifts above routine is the sister relationship, fleshed out in early flashbacks and then lingering throughout the movie as a glossy but honest expression of grief and mourning. Writer-director Leah McKendrick has a light and often routine movie here, with pop music and little quips throughout. It tilts toward glossy phoniness, but remains sensitive with attention to the sisters. It’s the most believable relationship in the movie, and hits hard when gone. That makes the lightness of the surrounding movie all the more of an uplift, and a fantasy. 

Far stranger, though, is Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Writer-director David Wain’s penchant for absurdity and vulgarity is an acquired taste. I quite like his loopy rom-com parody They Came Together, commune satire Wanderlust, and his raunchy man-child comedy Role Models. This one isn’t in that league.  Maybe it’s the ugly digital look, and awkward combination of high-concept winking, sitcom punchlines, and occasional violence and flatulence.(Maybe it’s the severe lack of Paul Rudd, the star of all those earlier pictures.) Regardless I found Gail Daughtry more theoretically funny than actually funny, with the kind of humor you watch silently registering the technical forms of the jokes while rarely rising to level of actual enjoyment. Deutch plays Gail, our Dorothy. The red shoes are a tip off. She’s a naive Kansan hairdresser about to marry a dopey guy next door. They jokingly discuss the hoary concept of the celebrity sex pass. He has a crush on Jennifer Aniston. She’s hot for Jon Hamm. Well, turns out the fiancé actually goes and hooks up with Aniston, which really gets Gail mad. When she’s off on a work trip to L.A. her buddy (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) convinces her to seek out Hamm and do the deed. True to Oz, she meets a collection of misfits on her trip: an absent-minded agent-in-training (Ben Wang), a paparazzo whose heart’s not in it (Ken Marino), and a cowardly John Slattery. There’s also a wicked mob boss (Sabrina Impacciatore) and her flunkies. The whole tone is pitched at a preposterous broad shtick, like a straight John Waters. The actors are committed to the straight-faced absurdity, and there are a few real laughs along the way. (I liked the assistant whose only threat is that he’ll “make you sick!”) But it’s so conceptual and airless that it never fully comes to life. 

Bubble Girl: EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING

Here’s one of those passable, cloying YA adaptations that’s totally artificial and utterly sentimental, torn between metaphoric exploration of romantic teen alienation and stupidly contrived conceits. Everything, Everything (so nice they named it twice) is about an 18-year-old girl (Amandla Stenberg) who has lived locked inside behind air filters and Plexiglas as long as she can remember. It’s for her health and safety, since her deadly immune deficiency was discovered by her protective physician mother (Anika Noni Rose). The girl has cultivated a rich and playful interior life through reading books, watching movies (always nice to see even a glance of Moonstruck), and checking in on support group chat rooms. But one day, a cute boy her age (Nick Robinson) moves in next door and, in a twist usually only found in stories like this, his bedroom window that looks right into hers. They make eyes at each other for a bit, then he writes his phone number on the glass. She texts. He texts back. It’s love at first emoticon, or maybe at first read receipt. The more she gets to know him, the more she wants to go outside, an urge we’re too swoon over despite the very real threat to her life if she encounters those germs floating in the world at large. Sure, the course of true love never did run smooth, but why risk everything (everything)?

Adapting Nicola Yoon’s book, the screenplay by J. Mills Goodloe (The Age of Adaline) contorts itself to justify the romantic urges, finding tragic backstory and late-breaking twists to convince the audience that it’s all for the better. So it has a premise that’s barely convincing on a literal level and yet – and yet! – it’s often sweet and emotionally appealing because of the unassuming openness of its lead and the soft-spoken, underplayed loveliness of its metaphor. What is first teen love but the blushing sense of getting away with something? The movie doesn’t exactly work, but, hey, I’m not made of stone, either. Stenberg brings shy expressiveness to her confined character, able to communicate her deep yearning for human contact through bashful glances while also signaling the fierce intelligence behind her hesitant smiles and flustered flirting. She’s totally believable as a girl who has more time alone with her thoughts and who has read more than most her age, and yet has experienced precious little of what we’d call the real world. She’s able to give the movie the earnest innocent desires and curiosity that almost provide enough emotional oomph to make the construct work.

Although director Stella Meghie shoots the movie with a pleasant commercial gloss – all bright sets, soft lighting, gauzy close-ups, slick pop-music montages, and coy, implied PG-13 heat – it also gives the sense it’s as closed off as its main character. The darker implications of its premise remain unexplored, tossed overboard for the sake of maintaining a sense of teenage fantasy and persecution. But the way it allows space for Stenberg’s performance to ping off Rose’s strong, stern, maternal love gives the movie the small metaphoric charge it needs to be effective. It becomes, in its strongest moments, a movie about the lengths a parent can go to maintain a child’s safety, security, and purity. Starting with good intentions, this can result in a young person for whom flirtation, let alone dating, seems like a far riskier and fraught prospect than it should. This is a simple movie about teenage love that deploys its dramatic conceit to literalize the sheltered girl’s boxed in feelings, then watches as they’re coaxed out through a sense of determination and outside influences. She and her crush are cute together. He’s sweet. She’s nice. Meghie gives their texting an imaginary mind palace of a meeting spot – fantasies of actual dialogue in the likes of a retro diner and in outer space taking the place of text bubbles as they grow closer – and when they finally appear in the same room, share the same space, well, I said I’m not made of stone. Even middling movies can occasionally get their hooks in you.

Doomsday Schleppers: THE 5TH WAVE

The 5th Wave is the latest young adult apocalyptic dystopia of the week. It gets its name from the final stage of the most convoluted and absurd alien invasion plot this side of Ed Wood. Wave 1: shutting off the planet’s power. Wave 2: sending tsunamis crashing into every coast. Wave 3: spreading bird flu everywhere. Wave 4: flying drones and sending out snipers. It seems like any one of those waves could’ve been sufficient to take out the entire human race, but these unseen alien beings either haven’t planned well or are deliberately toying with us. Or maybe they just like echoing Biblical plagues. Who am I to say? The movie tears through these initial waves, any one of which could be an entire disaster movie, with such quickly paced table-setting glossiness that it forgets to find the impact. It’s in a rush to get to the 5th wave: convincing the surviving humans to lose hope and do themselves in.

Per subgenre dictates, we start with a normal teenager, this time a pretty blonde high school senior (Chloe Grace Moretz). Then, soon enough, generic sci-fi elements clear the way for a scenario in which adults are either powerless or domineering and only teenagers can save the day. If you think this sounds like any number of post-Hunger Games knockoffs, you’re right. This one starts with a smidge of interesting thought, transmogrifying senioritis’ valedictory lap finality into an end-of-the-world metaphor, and then quickly descends into popcorn nihilism and cotton candy platitudes. It’s unusually violent for this sort of tween thing – rampant gun brandishing, bloodless sprays of bullets, and roiling catastrophes, as well as gooey close-up impromptu surgeries. And, though its story goes down some moderately weird side roads on the way to predictable beats, it all too rarely comes to life.

Moretz, despite being very good in a variety of roles (from Carrie to Clouds of Sils Maria) and the star driving this vehicle, is shunted to the side for a good portion of the film. Separated from her father (Ron Livingston) and searching for her little brother (Zackary Arthur), she ends up recuperating in a farmhouse after a mysterious hunk (Alex Roe) rescues her. It’s instant romantic tension. Meanwhile, her brother is stuck in a military compound where Liev Schreiber and Maria Bello are training kids to combat the aliens who have begun latching themselves onto human hosts, Body Snatchers style. At this boot camp we find adorable moppets wielding military-grade firearms and enduring war movie montages. A few older kids are there, too, including It Follows’ Maika Monroe, stealing ever scene she’s in with rebellious charisma, Jurassic World’s Nick Robinson as a mopey hero, and Grand Budapest Hotel’s Tony Revolori as a guy nicknamed Dumbo. Imagine Nicholas Sparks rewrote They Live as a Maze Runner prequel (no politics, more forced sentiment and jumbled mythology) and you’re on the right track. So, yeah, it’s a little weirder than I’d expected.

It’s almost admirably unexpected in the way director J Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed), from a screenplay adapted from Rick Yancey’s book by Susannah Grant (In Her Shoes), Akiva Goldsman (Insurgent), and Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2), ghoulishly churns through large scale (and only partially convincing) calamities to get to the smallest possible scenes where two young people stare at each other in the woods. It discards the waves of alien threats for close moments between teens stuck in the wilderness, or isolated in a child soldier factory. That could be an intriguing small look at a bigger picture, but is instead an uninvolving and weightless perspective. The immediate stakes are so simple – brother and sister need to be reunited – and the larger stakes – saving the planet – are written off as impossible. What a strange mix of brutal conditions and mushy execution, harsh bruising nastiness and gushing sentiment. Overly clean and bright photography throws its artificiality and small thinking into dull obviousness.

That’s what’s ultimately so unsatisfying about The 5th Wave. It strands a good cast in a movie that could’ve really popped with evocative metaphor and a harrowing concept, but fails to really reckon with the implications of its premise, glossing over moral dilemmas. Sure, it features our lead killing an innocent man (we see the same moment twice, even) and a twist that complicates easy morality, but these ideas remain half-buried in the slick formula. Heavy ideas, up to and including the end of the world and the deaths (or potential thereof) of everyone they love, are merely used for superficial weight holding down the edges of a premise so flimsy it threatens to blow away right before our very eyes. By the ending, which resolves the immediate conflicts through convenient luck, then coasts to a limp cliffhanger, I nearly forgot why I had bothered to care in the first place.

Safety Not Guaranteed: JURASSIC WORLD

Why is it so difficult to make a good sequel to Jurassic Park? It's been 14 years since Joe Johnston made a half-decent B-movie-ish III, and 18 since Spielberg himself brought us The Lost World, a collection of good images in an underwhelming whole. Sure, the great original 1993 blockbuster benefited from one of those perfect confluences of creative people at the height of their powers. It has Spielberg’s eye for beautifully shaped spectacle, an iconic John Williams’ score, an appealing creature-feature structure of exquisite set-ups and pay-offs, and a hugely likable cast able to turn stock characters into warm and sympathetic people we want to see escape danger in one piece. But it’s not like the core idea – theme park stocked with resurrected dinosaurs descends into chaos – is unrepeatable. And yet here we are with Jurassic World, the third unsuccessful attempt to recapture the magic.

World, directed and co-written by the forgettable indie Safety Not Guaranteed’s Colin Trevorrow in his first big-budget excursion, is the largest, loudest, and fastest Jurassic movie thus far. It’s also the emptiest. It tells the story of corporate greed reopening the dinosaur island and creating Jurassic World, a larger theme park with more creatures and better security. It’s a hit. The new park is swarming with crowds delighted by the dinosaurs. But the owners want more profit, forcing the geneticists to cook up brand new monsters to advertise. (Sort of like injecting new filmmakers into an old franchise, no?) There’s an early scene in which the icy head of operations (Bryce Dallas Howard) sells the naming rights to their new “Indominus Rex” and assures her boss (Irrfan Khan) the beast has “more teeth.” Most Hollywood blockbusters engage in a little double think, but here it is rampant, a corporate calculation scoffing at corporate calculations.

Jurassic World is about nothing more than itself, attempting to preempt some criticism by acknowledging its nature as a product. It creates a bland self-serving parody theme park, realistically kitsch and poking fun at its own existence. It’s an old idea resurrected for the sake of big profits. Get it? We’re to giggle at parallels between the film and the park, laughing at business excesses dazzled by technology while dazzled by the technology of a film made for business excess. The World has a monorail and hamster-ball safari pods. It has a massive aquatic beast in a big tank. It has a resort hotel, chain restaurants, holograms, flat screens, and a raptor trainer (an unsmiling Chris Pratt). This film expects an audience to enjoy a fake theme park as much as the original film wanted us to thrill at dinosaurs. We even have two boys (Ty Simpkins and Nick Robinson), Howard’s character's nephews, to follow through the attractions as they stare mouths agape at CGI busyness. I’m glad someone’s enjoying it. 

This is how it always starts, with oohs and aahs. But then there’s running and screaming as, inevitably, the big, bad “Indominus Rex” gets loose. It’s predictable, and worse, witless. The crisis escalates, soon enveloping the whole park, entirely due to bad decisions characters make. Every effort to contain the mess goes stupidly wrong. It’s a collection of dino attacks, spectacularly visualized in fine effects work, but hollow in impact. Countless people are devoured and animals are gunned down or torn up. It’s sometimes visceral and exciting, but where’s the care? There’s no impact when it’s only there for a thrill without considering the weight of the moment. (Contrast that with Gareth Edwards' much better work with scale and staging in last year's great Godzilla.) Rampaging dinosaurs and hundreds of imperiled tourists make for awfully small thinking when there’s no sense of stakes. It’s full of competent visuals, but has uninteresting characters and set-pieces without suspense because it doesn’t take the time to matter.

Our characters, stereotypical and humorless, enter with dopey stock plotlines both overfamiliar – the boys are worried about their parents divorce – and vaguely offensive – the business woman, always clad in a tight white suit and high heels, is repeatedly told to loosen up and let a man save her. They mix with familiar types – an antagonist with secret commercial goals (Vincent D’Onofrio), a comic relief computer guy (Jake Johnson) – but the likable cast is given lifeless material. Where are the ripples-in-the-water moments? There’s no time for awe, for sublime anticipation. We’re just racing to the next tyrannosaur-sized brawl, the next cruel kill. They’re faced with routine violence they can’t even begin to contain. It saps the urgency to know a convenient contrived deus ex machina is the only way out. They’re not racing to restore power or call for help. They’re just bumbling through the jungle hoping not to get eaten by dinosaurs we barely get to know. And what about the park’s guests? The movie doesn’t care. They’re just background screams.

There’s never any sense of danger, just bright colors and loud noises. There’s a moment when an anonymous woman is plucked out of the crowd by a loose pterodactyl, then dropped into a pool, and dragged up and down until an even bigger dino munches them both. It’s cruelly elaborate. And what purpose does it serve? It’s not thrillingly shaped or given emotional weight. It just exists because the filmmakers could do it, not because they should. There is more tension and personality in one shot of Jurassic Park than all of Jurassic World’s wide shots of impersonal computerized spectacle intercut with dutiful reactions. It’s over-thought – self-amused, loaded with references to its predecessor – and under-imagined.