I Know I Am, But What Are You? A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX

 

Here’s a dizzying philosophical chin-scratcher of a documentary. A Glitch in the Matrix is about “simulation theory,” the somewhat popular wondering that asks if all of existence might just be a sufficiently advanced computer program. Director Rodney Ascher has experience ceding a feature-length runway for conspiracy theorists to take off. His Room 237 gives uncritical space to amateur analysts of Kubrick’s The Shining to air their pet unsubstantiated claims — it’s about genocide, or a faked moon landing confession, or all sorts of squint-and-you-almost-see-it delusions prattled on and on. His The Nightmare is about sleep paralysis — with bird-walking detours into the occult or paranormal — and starts to feel like the sort of pseudo-horror that could be a kind of gooseflesh inception for the very condition it purports to expose.   So his latest hears out some guys — and they’re all guys, which seems an unspoken commentary of its own — who are convinced to some degree that, yes, we’re living in a simulation. Ascher puts their voices in obvious digital avatars, video-gamey caricatures with computerized visages who hold court on their ideas of our false reality. (That they’re gamers and sci-fi nerds is clear; that they’re all varying degrees of religious or spiritually contemplative is maybe a key to why these ideas converge.) The documentary starts off seeming stupid, maybe even dangerous. After all, if you start to convince yourself that nothing — and, more importantly, no one — around you is real, then what does that mean for your interpersonal behavior, your sense of self, your sense of responsibility to others? (We get clips from Rick and Morty and YouTube conspiracists, the better to emphasize the solipsism this might breed.) One guy even asserts that there’s no way a simulation could possibly be running seven billion completely unique consciousnesses. The film is full of digital spaces — video game footage, comic panels, film images — winking at and inhabiting the worlds-within-worlds, dreams-within-dreams vertigo this perceptual hall of mirrors opens up.

But the more Ascher lets these guys talk, the more he, and they, start to acknowledge the ideas’ potential for crackpot wanderings and destabilizing conclusions. Of course plenty of other cultural influences filter into the mix: Phillip K. Dick writings, Minecraft, Chris Ware comics, Plato’s allegory of the cave, and, obviously, The Matrix. Clips are deftly woven, and expert thinkers wisely chosen, to bolster and balance the core guys' thought experiments. This is smart context to keep things in perspective. The main subjects all describe moments of dawning awareness that sound like dissociative episodes, semi-dreamlike and pseudo-spiritual, and yet are also able to think practically about what these potential revelations mean to them. One admits he’d hate to fall back on the simulation theory if it was really his excuse for his own mind’s inability to grasp the full complexity of others’ existences. And one voice, we discover, in the film’s most skin-crawling, haunting passage, took his journey into the theory too far — his voice has been recorded from prison. And yet even there, Ascher isn’t pushing too hard on the theory — either for or against. He’s structured the film well to confront the theory directly, entertaining the hazy philosophizing of his thoughtful, troubled subjects, contextualizing them where necessary, addressing counterpoints and plunging head-on into the ambiguities of how we try to explain the world to ourselves. This is Ascher’s best movie because he’s willing to confront his subjects’ free-form conjecture—but it still comes up against the unknowable, albeit provocatively. I found myself intrigued and amused, suspicious and disturbed. But really, the question should be: if yes, what then? Of course they have no good answers; maybe that’s the glitch.

Souls of Black Folk: THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

Barry Jenkins is a filmmaker whose images are sensuous, with his cinematographer James Laxton’s light pulling softly and clearly at the details of people’s faces and bodies, pictures cut together with flowing intuitive poetry. But they’re not weightless in their beauty; they’re heavy with meaning, a substance that is the style. His best achievements — the intimate character study Moonlight, the more expansive relationship heartbreaker If Beale Street Could Talk — use their beauty to bring into vivid relief the soft-spoken, slow-rolling interpersonal dilemmas of the people it puts on screen.The velvety texture of his vision, smooth and speckled, would point to inspirations from Wong Kar-Wai and Claire Denis even if he didn’t name them as such in interviews. It’s something of a shock to bring this aestheticized approach into the tropes of slave narratives for The Underground Railroad, a more than 10-hour adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name. The images are unfailingly beautiful, a painterly prose scrawled with Malickian asides attuned to the rhythms of nature and soulful contemplation, even as the subject matter is grim and gory. One of the first shots is of blood hitting a wooden floor, afterbirth mere cuts away from being buried in a garden. The sprawling and epic historical drama — so long and rambling that it can afford to be drawn intimately and unevenly in broad strokes and pinpoint precise portraiture alike — is full of such fraught and freighted imagery. Here, after all, is the birth of our nation, its original sin, buried with the intent to ignore, but springing up fruit from the poisoned tree. Jenkins is nothing if not aware of the power of his images.

The central focus is on the personal trauma of its characters — a catalogue of slavery’s dehumanizing forms — and the tendrils it snakes through society. Jenkins frames his center of attention with loving weight given to her studied expressions. She’s Cora (Thuso Mbedu), a slave run away from a plantation, northward bound. As her episodic journey takes her through various States — and various states of freedom — she finds herself navigating a variety of responses to White Supremacy. There’s a genteel town where Black and White live side-by-side in a tenuous acceptance. There’s a town where a White couple appears to be helpful to Black plight, but have nefarious ulterior motives. There’s a town where a kindly couple is willing to hide runaway slaves, but only to a point. There’s a prosperous town run entirely by Black people — the series’ high point, featuring some of Jenkins’ loveliest sun-drenched images, the better to signal the power of hope, some compelling speechifying from the cast, and the looming threat of White violence from those in the next town over. At each stop, Cora sees society forming and reforming around the voids left by prejudice, violence, and despair — the damage, the potential, and the inescapability of certain destruction. The story cuts backwards and forwards in time, exploring characters’ histories, their families, and the cycles of pain they endure—while finding time for oases of love and connection, too.

The ramifications of slavery — the long-lasting physical and emotional toll, and its generational traumas — are written across every painful picturesque image. An early scene gives us a point-of-view shot from a man being burned alive, the image blurring, blinking. Jenkins spares us the worst of the violence by taking us inside. Somehow it hurts all the more. It’s a signal as to his interest in enlivening history through literary accumulation of empathetic detail. It extends to the entire rambling narrative and expansive ensemble. Among the panoply of supporting characters, the most poignant and fascinating has to be a young Black boy (Chase W. Dillon) who tags along as the assistant to a slave catcher (Joel Edgerton). Well dressed, and with a poise beyond his years, he carries with him the complicated ways one can react to a dehumanizing state. He’s won some degree of safety, and yet his interactions with the people around him, White and Black alike, carry an ambiguity as to his ultimate allegiances. That such complication is carried in the boyish face — held so eerily placid, even inscrutable — says so much about the ways in which the systems of oppression warp and linger in one’s behavior. Jenkins’ visions of humanity keeps this in sharp focus, staging his patient shots that look straight ahead without flinching as character’s ravel and unravel.

It’s full of decisions: strong and bold. Though the many hours are sometimes a jumble of incident — pokey in the way to which all prestige miniseries these days, even ones with craft of this high level, succumb — it has enough track to provoke and compel, to lose you and win you back over and over. For every striking, compelling moment, there is a languorous, aimless downtime that will come slowly back into focus. By the end, the totality is an enormous and overwhelming whole, rough and rattled despite the patience and beauty on the surface. My biggest point of contention is with Jenkins’ boldest stroke: carrying over Whitehead’s novel’s central metaphor literalizing the Underground Railroad not as a covert trail of safe houses and brave rescuers, but as an actual train chugging along buried deep beneath the ground. He takes it seriously, and has his characters treat it as fact. There are moments of eerie allegory as this sunken place subway avant la lettre comes puffing out of the darkness, staffed by kindly mysterious people of color willing to lend an ear or disappear. (It also rhymes unexpectedly movingly off the first episode's credits' surprising blast of OutKast: “you can’t stop a train.”) But just as often its metaphorical presence strikes me as less interesting than the historical truths it intends to express symbolically. Besides, when Jenkins digs deep into other moments of sideways historical invention, he does so with a specificity and attention to psychological detail that needs no too-clever fantasy to sell its intensity. Still, I’m grateful for his efforts to bring something like honest to goodness filmmaking worth wrestling with to our TV screens, a Decalogue of slave narratives yearning to be free from the ordinary tropes with which we’re sometimes numbed. This is filmmaking that’s alive and provoking, dense with allusion, alive with intriguing figures, heavy with electric pessimism and hard-fought slivers of grace and hope.

Sympathy for de Vil: CRUELLA

Director Craig Gillespie’s energetic follow up to his swaggering true-crime I, Tonya plays out a rollicking rivalry between fashion designers in 70s London. One is an old fashioned grand dame Baroness (Emma Thompson) used to ruling the scene by any means necessary. The other is a prickly proto-punk misfit who gets a job as an underling, but all along is gunning for the older woman’s throne. There’s fun to be had here, as Gillespie keeps the pacing quick and camera fluid, catching sumptuous production design and snappy performances. That it happens to be a quasi-prequel to 101 Dalmatians is simply a fact of what elements get projects green lit in Hollywood these days. As such it suffers from some belabored backstory and a need to make everything connected. Who needed to know about Cruella de Vil’s unhappy childhood? However, the rest of the picture is such a feast of fashions and attitude that I hardly cared. It works best when it leans away from the need to provide token psychological underpinning to such a classic Disney villain — the standard formula in many of what Bob Iger so inelegantly coined “brand deposits” — and leans into giving us more of her beautiful wickedness. The result is great actors are swanning around in fabulous costumes and chewing every bit of snazzy scenery in sight. That it would be an enjoyably outsized glossy period melodrama drifting on a confident hodgepodge style and a soundtrack grooving on loud hits of the era without the cute references to an animated classic is a good sign.

The movie finds the most fun when it sticks with its charismatic cast colliding. Stone makes a good theatrical villain-in-the-making and Thompson a fine foil. There’s always been that underlying sarcasm, the self-satisfied smirk, underneath Stone’s work and here (as with the cunning schemer she played in The Favourite’s prickly palace intrigue, a role also scripted by this film’s co-writer) she can cut loose against Thompson serving her finest looking-down-the-nose casual cruelty. As Cruella enlists the help of longtime friends and flunkies (Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser) to help her plan elaborate revenge plots to get one over on the older woman and make herself a name in the fashion world, there’s a capering heist quality to the film’s best set pieces. She shows off her designs — all color-coded to match her natural shock of black-and-white hair — in elaborate prankish stunts, upstaging the fuming Baroness every step of the way, and provoking her potentially homicidal wrath. This tension is joined by a dash of twisty family drama that’s just over the top enough to fit the bill. But the focus is never pulled from the core contest of wills between two stubborn women jockeying for power. And that's where all the fun is. The more the project feints toward character study, the falser it feels; I could do without the cloying voice over and the attempts at making us feel sorry for Cruella instead of serving up what’s sure to become the marvelous whirling dervish of monstrous high-class privilege. Better to let the ladies plot and plan and fight. Unlike the 1996 live-action remake of Dalmatians, which gave Glenn Close similar excuse to cut loose with a howling well-dressed villain, Cruella, cut free from most constraints of a straight remake, has the ability to let Stone grow into that enjoyable cackle, taking a sudden chill the more she's prepared to take her rival down.

Hush-Hush: A QUIET PLACE PART II

To watch A Quiet Place Part II is to realize that the premise behind A Quiet Place had only about enough to sustain that movie’s run time. The novelty of monsters attracted to sound — hence the title — ravaging the world and a tight focus on the plight of one small family to stay alive by making as little noise as possible did make for an exciting watch. But once you know the solution — and it’s not not the one from Mars Attacks! — the air goes out of the balloon a little. Where do they go next? Well, this time the surviving members of the family carry their monster repellent as they try to find a new safe place, but it only works when the plot allows it. But that’s really the answer to why anything happens in this sequel. The whole thing ends up an exercise in decisions made simply to extend the suspense. Why do they stop at the hideout of a lonely Cillian Murphy? To make us wonder if he’s trustworthy. (They don’t even know his 28 Days Later post-apocalyptic bona fides.) Why do they split up? The better to cross-cut between two, and sometimes three, little missions. Why do they need to go to a place to get a thing to another thing? To try to save their little corner of the world, of course. It’s what dad would want, the daughter says. Fair enough.

That this flimsy construction works at all has to be a tribute to director John Krasinski (here taking over scripting duties as well, in his spare time when not living on screen but for one extended flashback). He proves a perfectly fine button-pusher of a filmmaker, stringing his characters and his audience along through one moderately effective suspense sequence after the next. There is nothing else to it. (There was nothing else about the first one either, although I do enjoy Wesley Morris’ take that it’s a horror movie about White fears of cancel culture, ha ha.) Here there’s a baby in a box and oxygen dipping. There’s the son (Noah Jupe) with his leg in a bear trap. There’s a deaf girl (Millicent Simmonds) off on her own. There’s the looming threat of nasty others lurking somewhere out there. Maybe they’re by a crashed train or an abandoned boat. And there are those monsters, too, sometimes stalking unnoticed in the background of one of the film’s handsome longer takes. It’s all too elemental to entirely ignore. Of course you don’t want a slimy thing bursting out and chomping on the sweet kids doing their earnest best to play notes between scared silly and steely resolve. Giving the movie over to them, with Emily Blunt and Murphy playing support is a smart move. They’re easy to care about, and Krasinski knows how to play the child-in-danger card mercilessly.

There’s real pressure-cooker qualities to the cross-cutting that works up a decent head of steam in the back half, even if I could feel the grinding gears and clunking mechanics moving the pieces into place. Why’s he standing there? Why’d she stop over here? Why can’t he take a few more steps? Why does the monster hear this but not that? To keep the movie going, that’s why! If anything the delay dealt the movie by the pandemic — it was one of the first big movies pushed, due to its spring 2020 date, and now gets to be one of the first big movies welcoming us to something like back to the multiplex — served to make the whole thing marginally more believable. (It also lends the opening flashback to the last normal moments before the monsters arrive a certain poignancy.) After all, it’s a straight-faced slightly-silly thriller about a mysterious critter that’s actually pretty easy to avoid, but people are just out for themselves and not thinking about sharing this information or even using it effectively if they do know. A solution that humanity nonetheless hasn’t figured out how to implement effectively? Yeah, sounds about right.

Being Bo Burnham: INSIDE

Bo Burnham had a rough year. No rougher than anyone else’s, but rough all the same. Like so many of us, he’s had time alone inside to think deeply about the state of the world, and himself. But unlike many of us, except Taylor Swift and a few others, he had the opportunity to turn it into his work. All that free time to compose and write and record. He’d already proven himself a talent to watch, turning silly songs (closer to the tradition of Tom Lehrer’s noodling social satire and observation than Weird Al’s parodies) that made him YouTube famous into something like a full-fledged comedy career he then pivoted into filmmaking. His directorial efforts, like Tamborine, a Chris Rock set with the stand-up special innovation of having good cinematography, and Eighth Grade, a small empathetic film about young teen angst, proved Burnham the rare YouTuber to grow a cinematic mindset. But 2020 gave him only things to worry about, canceled his plans, derailed his decisions, put everything on hold. So say we all.

So here’s Inside, Burnham’s new feature: a tribute to the influence of anxiety. He writes, directs, shoots, edits, performs, and stars. It’s an endlessly self-reflexive thing, preemptively self-critical and performatively nervous about its own narcissism. He tells us he’s been working on it for over a year, a collection of silly songs with a persistent undertow of fear and darkness. He opens by examining his own impulse to create — snarkily jabbing at himself as he asks why anyone needs comedy at a time like this. He wears his concerns on his sleeve: racism, climate change, income inequality, and the unnamed pandemic that is the reason he’s stuck in this little box. The whole film takes place in one room. He films it creatively, using elaborately simple lighting tricks, color filters, aspect ratio play, superimpositions, silhouettes and shadow. But there’s always a sense he’s trapped. He stages his tall, lanky frame so we don’t know if he’s big or the room’s small — both, probably. It’s inventive, capturing a window-to-wall one-room claustrophobia that’s recognizably 2020.

He traps himself in this small space, or in picture-in-picture stacks for sharp parodic riffs on digital media forms like reaction videos and Twitch streams. One moment of direct-to-camera address starts as chipper influencer speak but grows ominous through the uncommented use of a sharp knife as a prop with which he gestures. Sometimes amid all this formal foolery he sings the sort of light songs — like an extended bit about “White women’s Instagram” — that made his name, although his songcraft here, with shades of the late Adam Schlesinger (the chameleonic pop genius behind That Thing You Do and Music & Lyrics), is better than ever. And often there’s a bitterness sneaking in through negative self-talk, circling existential concerns. He sings about turning thirty, about having potentially problematic jokes from his youth, about the calamitous social dilemmas surrounding him, about thinking the world’s ending or maybe ending himself. But really, he wonders, should he really be the center of attention here? He asks that overtly several times, even as he puts himself on display. The picture is revealing in more ways than one. For a few numbers, he performs in his underwear; other times he leaves in dead air or flubbed lines. Even so, you have to think about the fact he decided to leave them in. And what he didn’t. It’s still all a show.

It’s both a finished product and a doubling-back on itself to be about its own making, surely mimicking the process of reflection and reassessment many of us have fallen into of late. If this endless self-reflection starts to make one wonder if his hand-wringing is all a bit overdone, a doth-protest-too-much worry about his privilege and status and narcissism, it’s undercut by a seemingly honest reflection of an artist in the middle of a mental crisis. He’s thinking about all the boxes we’ve built for ourselves, as among his new tunes here are hypnotic carnivalesque ballads in the personified voice of the Internet, or dripping poison odes to Jeff Bezos and soliloquizing about Silicon Valley’s profit-driven destruction of our societal capacity for mental health. (That his new work is streaming now on Netflix is just another irony stacked on top.) This world brought him, and us, so much. But at what cost? And now we’ve been inside for too long. What will we do when we get out? The key to Inside achieving escape velocity away from mere pity party is recognizing that we’ve all lost our minds to some degree over the last 15 months, and a full return to pre-pandemic life feels daunting as the world still confronts so many crumblings both global and personal. It’s like Tom Lehrer sang: “we’ll all go together when we go.”

Girls Trip: PLAN B

I miss movie theaters. It’d be a shame if only the biggest product gets placed there as the release schedule shows tentative signs of approaching normal sometime soon. When calling up a new streaming title, I still find myself hitting play thankful for the convenience of a new movie on my TV — it has certainly made these many months somewhat more bearable — but wishing I could see it large and loud with a crowd of like-minded strangers. Watching a movie like the Hulu debut Plan B — a small raunchy teen comedy that charmingly works out a tough social issue — might not at first seem the obvious place to make this point. One could easily see it playing like a sitcom special episode. But watching it build to big laughs and squirming sight gags that would surely have a crowd erupting, before defrosting its sweet sentimental core with gentle surprise turns, and then cutting to black with a laugh and a booming end credit song that’d guarantee you walk out grinning, made me yearn for the communal experience. I think it’d play even better with the rolling amusement that might overtake a crowd on the right wavelength.

The movie itself, the directorial debut of actress Natalie Morales from a screenplay by a couple iZombie scribes, is one of the better in a recent run of R-rated teen girl buddy comedies. That’s a welcome corrective to the years of boys being boys — though nothing close to full return to the freewheeling days of pre-code larks or screwball farces of Hollywood’s Golden Age that consistently let women run the show. The best of this new batch has to be 2018’s Never Goin’ Back, a dopey, easy-going, low-stakes, gross and silly stoner comedy about two teenage girls just trying to scrape up enough money to afford a better future. Also good, the transparent Superbad riff that is 2019’s Booksmart, with some huge laughs as its good girl protagonists try to cut loose on the last day of school. The least is probably last year’s HBO Max release Unpregnant, which stretches broadly to find its forced road trip wackiness — it’s for anyone who’d watch the brilliant drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always and ask where the laughs are. Still, Plan B, with its fine wide screen and loud poppy soundtrack, is in good company as it finds a crackling friendship chemistry between the anxious yearning of studious Sunny (Kuhoo Verma), who bristles under the expectations of her strict mother, and free-spirited Lupe (Victoria Moroles), who clearly uses her anything-goes exterior to cover up some roiling insecurities of her own. They throw a typical teen parents-are-gone house party at which Sunny has an ill-advised, and super fast, hookup with an unexpected partner. The next morning, she discovers she probably should go get a Plan B pill. Good thing she has such a good friend to help her.

Their mad dash through the byzantine rules and regulations around birth control — especially in small town South Dakota, where the movie sets its scene — involves the girls sneaking off on an impromptu trip to the nearest Planned Parenthood, over three hours away. If you’d think that along the way the girls would grow closer together, encounter a revolving door of eccentric supporting roles, have harrowing near-catastrophes that turn into larks at the last second, and learn deep truths about themselves, you’d be correct. There’s nothing surprising on that level. But the movie has a nice spirit to it, and takes its cues from the clever, but not too clever, banter between its leads. Verma and Moroles feel genuine in their bubbly teen angst, and comfort in the way their personalities fit together like the best high school friendships. They genuinely seem to like each other, talking about boys and music and parents, and even when misunderstandings or secrets burble up the conflict between them its structure requires, there’s never that false sense of irreparable separation. You just know they like each other too much to give up. The movie’s also refreshingly even-handed in its treatment of sex. It knows that it’s a source of anxiety for young people, no matter their interest, experience, or activity. But it also has the maturity to acknowledge the full complexity of the matter without acclaiming or denigrating—it’s positive and realistic, squirmingly awkward and generously frank. And it’s totally fair about consequences in a way that isn’t a scare tactic or a hand-waving. (That it also has a really gross scene with an intimate piercing painfully torn is a sign the movie isn’t entirely in control of its comedic impulses.) But above all, Morales ensures the movie has the slick shine of a studio comedy and a steady focus on the buzzing eventfulness of its plotting and the buoyant charms of its leads. I bet it’d play really well to a crowd.

Escape from Vegas: ARMY OF THE DEAD

If you’re going to stage a zombie outbreak and are looking for some sociopolitical resonance, you could do worse than Las Vegas. Seeing hordes of zombies milling about the slot machines or mindlessly shuffling down the strip isn’t exactly a stretch. It’s a pretty clear escalation of Romero’s use of the mall in Dawn of the Dead. Why are they there? Well, it’s what they’re used to. But really, what Zack Snyder proposes in his newest film, Army of the Dead, which, name aside, is not an extension of his remake of the Romero picture from nearly twenty years ago, is that it’d be a really neat thing to stage a heist movie inside a zombie movie. He's right. (So was Yeon Sang-ho, whose okay sequel to his great zombie actioner Train to Busan coincidentally used the same premise last year.) So why does it have to have a metaphor at all? He creates a rough future — shooting it with a smudged bleary digital paleness; ironically there are even some fleeting dead pixels in some dark scenes that had me thinking my TV was on the fritz — in which Vegas is the source of a zombie outbreak. An early scene with a speeding car accidentally smashing head-on into a military convoy transporting Patient Zero from Area 51 is a splashy start. (Car crashes are just so cinematic, no?) The city has been walled off, Escape from New York style, and is, in fact, about to be leveled with a nuclear bomb in order to stop the spread. That leaves just a few days for a casino owner (Hiroyuki Sanada) to get a team of mercenaries into his abandoned vault and rescue his money. It’s up to a mournful tough guy (Dave Bautista) to gather his forces and execute the plan.

Snyder knows what he’s doing, making a movie retrofitted from borrowed genre parts, an ambulatory homage that doesn't push too hard on anything but gore. He brings some slow-mo and needle drops and complicated world-building. But here even the lore of his take on this sort of world gathers lightly and in the margins. He’s making what might be his simplest movie. The movie gathers up some unfussy men-on-a-mission exposition in its open act, introducing a big cast of potential zombie chow to arm up and go in. Bautista is a soulful center to this thin pulp, and the fun mix of personalities around him puts Omari Hardwick next to Ella Purnell next to Garret Dillahunt next to Tig Notaro and lets their various energies crackle well enough. Then the movie spends its time plunging headlong into an extended Aliens homage the rest of the way through as the machine guns and strategy play out against hordes of dangerous undead. As bullets splatter the decomposing dead walkers, and the blood in general gathers to such ludicrous geysers that one grenade down a corridor appears to result in a gush of chili against the wall, it’s clear Snyder is enjoying the brutal goofiness inherent in his approach. 

That aside, the action is mostly hectic instead of visually striking, with Snyder, one of our last big budget visual stylists, making some of his blandest functional shots. A Romero or Verheoeven or Carpenter would’ve pushed harder on the style and satire, too, the bright lights city going to set its soul on fire. But Snyder, for all his excess and action, has some hint of a softie in him, making a movie ultimately about broken families mirrored in both humans and monsters, and with Bautista approaching the mission mostly as an excuse to repair a relationship with an estranged daughter. (Those inclined to read autobiography here will find that relationship extra poignant.) So it may be so much reanimated thrills from its inspirations, but it has just enough motivation and good structure to its hook to work at a sturdy popcorn level nonetheless.