King Richard

In 1994, ABC's John McKenzie interviewed rising tennis star Venus Williams, who was fourteen years old at the time. At one point in the interview, McKenzie asked Williams if she thought she could beat her opponent. "I know I can beat her," she replied. McKenzie, surprised at her confidence, asked how she could say it so easily. This is when the interview was interrupted by Venus' father, Richard, who (despite McKenzie's protests of his interruptions) ordered him to "leave that alone" and remember that McKenzie is dealing with a child and that he should "let her be a kid."

That defensive tirade is recreated basically verbatim in King Richard, the biographical depiction of Richard Williams raising Venus and Serena Williams to become two of the biggest tennis stars in the world against incredible odds. There's a clear reason the scene is included: the media was often adversarial to the Williamses, Richard in particular. As Alex Abad-Santos put it, "to understand the animosity and media pressure the Williams family experienced, you have to understand how insular tennis is and how that environment magnified the classist and racist attacks thrown their way." That's not hyperbole. An editorial in the LA Times said at the time that Richard was "failing" Venus as a father. Four years later, tennis legend Martina Navratilova praised the Williams sisters, but then also attacked their father for "getting in the way," while also claiming "there's no racism as far as I know" in tennis, a sport with a long history of racism.

King Richard takes direct aim at the media's portrayal of Richard Williams over the years. From the Williamses' point of view, their father was protecting them. The Richard Williams we see here is played by Will Smith and is a loquacious and determined father, frequently citing his enigmatic "plan" he drafted that outlines the path he's chosen for his girls, and yet he frequently (with numerous yet subtle racial undertones) is rejected by skeptical potential coaches for Venus and Serena, his daughters and future superstars. When he's not in their presence on their fancy tennis courts, he's in danger back in his neighborhood, beaten and disrespected by young criminals who prey on his daughters. Maybe he is a bit too cocky; his confidence is met with rejection from one group and danger from another. 

But Richard won't quit. He finally convinces a successful coach (played by Tony Goldwyn) to coach Venus. This coach will only agree to train one of the girls for free, so Serena has to remain in her sister's shadow (for now) and continue practicing with her mother, Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis). As Venus continues to climb, Richard aims higher, signing a lucrative contract with coaching legend Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal). In other sports biopics, one or both of the Williams girls would be the main focus of the film; in King Richard it firmly remains on the patriarch of the family. 

Smith has taken a more sympathetic and appreciative view of Williams than many others have, telling NPR's Tonya Mosley that Williams was "the father that used love, and he aligned with what they wanted for their lives." Audience members may or may not see it that way. His stubbornness is not hidden, and with Richard, everything is a lesson, whether it's his threat to make them walk home if they brag too much or his threat to make them watch Cinderella again if they don't give him what he believes is the true moral of the story. Undoubtedly, King Richard is a full-throated defense of parenting styles that have high expectations for children and push them hard. And yet the film makes clear that Richard is someone who is wholeheartedly obsessed with making sure his daughters are not pushed to their limits or burned out; he is absolutely determined that education comes before sports, and they must be allowed to live as children. Yet his antics lead critics to deride him as being in it for the money and leading a one-man "Richard Williams Show."  

This is the first time in a long time that Smith has garnered so much attention for a performance, and to be frank, it's also the first time in quite a while that he's been this good. He is absolutely engrossing as Richard Williams. Ellis as Oracene Price is also exceptional, offering further proof of the film's exceptional casting choices. Yet as good as Smith is in King Richard (and he is good), it's the scenes between Richard and Venus and Serena that are the film's highlights. The two actresses playing Venus and Serena (Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton, respectively), both of whom have been acting on screen for the past few years, are naturals.   

King Richard works on a variety of levels: as a story of a determined father, as a story of girl power, as a rags-to-riches story, and as an entertaining sports flick. Like a lot of great sports films, King Richard, with Reinaldo Marcus Green's direction, Pamela Martin's editing, Kris Bower's score, and Robert Elswit's cinematography, knows how to keep its audience in suspense. Yet much of the tension, surprisingly or perhaps unsurprisingly, comes not from the moments on the tennis court but instead how Richard and his family constantly negotiate and even walk away from lucrative opportunities if they are not part of Richard's plan. These scenes might be the ones that keep you on the edge of your seat.  

What might have come across initially as the story of an overbearing, borderline abusive father is instead an homage to how he and his wife guided their daughters with surgical precision from sharing beds in Compton through constant recitation of his platitudes and on to eternal glory. It would be fair to criticize the biased view the film takes (the Williams sisters are, after all, producers of the film), and yet it's a forgivable slight. This is one of the best films of the year.

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Miracle on 34th Street

Pulling on the whiskers of a man who insists he is the real Santa Claus can go a long way in convincing a dubious youngster that he's telling the truth. So marks one of the most famous scenes in Christmas movies, one that almost always ends up in montages of holiday films. Who could blame them for including it? It's a touching scene in Miracle on 34th Street, a Christmas movie that might not be the best ever, but one that has earned its appreciable reputation.

Miracle on 34th Street begins on Thanksgiving when a smartly dressed older man with a great, white beard walks down the street in New York City right before the start of the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Soon, though, he starts scolding an intoxicated Santa for drinking on the job, thus rendering the latter incapable of performing his duties for the parade. The organizer of the parade, Doris Walker (Maureen O'Hara), frantically tries to solve the problem, but the only real solution is to ask the first man (the one with the real beard who was so disappointed in the drunk Santa Claus) to temporarily take over. While initially refusing, this man (who happens to be named Kris Kringle and is played by Edmund Gwenn in an Oscar-winning performance) can't refuse the chance to ensure the children are happy.

One child who finds him appealing but is also quite skeptical of his claims of being the real Santa is Doris' daughter, Susan, played by the adorable Natalie Wood in one of her most famous roles. Susan, the Lisa Simpson of her day, does not believe in fairy tales and therefore does not believe in Santa Claus. This disbelief is largely attributed to her mother, who doesn't feel it's a good idea to be telling children such stories. Despite their differences of opinion, Santa and Susan strike up a friendship. They see a lot of each other because due to his success at the parade, Kris is hired by Macy's to be their mall Santa, a job he takes very seriously.

It's not exactly smooth sailing, however, as Kris clashes with the company's psychologist (Porter Hall), and Doris and the others soon learn that Kris actually believes he is the real Santa Claus. In his company profile, in fact, he lists his age as "as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth," while his next of kin is listed as Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, et al. He also does not hesitate to recommend other stores to families so that they might find what they're looking for. It's unlikely that the business leaders of New York would respond so positively to such a scheme (and the film's screenplay by George Seaton is markedly aware of this, as Harry Antrim as Mr. Macy remarks that while the store will put public service ahead of profit, "Consequently, we'll make more profits than ever before").

The Oscar-winning screenplay by Seaton and the story by Valentine Davies easily switches to a courtroom flick, as the lawyer Doris is dating (played by John Payne) defends Kringle in court to prove his sanity. The trial scenes elevate Miracle on 34th Street and make it more fun and even a tad more realistic, as the judge presiding over the case (Gene Lockhart) nervously watches as the prosecution of Santa Claus damages his reputation with children, whose parents may vote to throw him out of his position. The judge's political consultant (William Frawley) is played as a brash politico enthusiastically chomping on cigars, yet he is the one urging the judge to be lenient toward Kris Kringle.       

Miracle on 34th Street has long been cherished as a holiday classic, and it is currently the second-highest ranked Christmas film on Rotten Tomatoes, right behind It's a Wonderful Life. The image everyone remembers, as already mentioned, is when Susan first sits on Santa's lap and is stunned to realize his beard is real. However, the film's most heartwarming moment is easily when a young Dutch orphan who cannot speak English is delighted to realize that Santa can in fact speak her mother tongue.

Aside from that sentimental moment, it's the actors who bring the film home. Gwenn's performance is perfectly natural, like he isn't even trying. True, he's full of energy and passion when he needs to, but it's the simple moments that have stuck with audiences throughout the decades. The ease with which he delivers the lines helps the audience believe the character's antagonism to the many less desirable qualities of adults, such as embracing the commercialism of Christmas. Kris firmly believes that "Christmas isn't just a day; it's a frame of mind." This attitude of the character and film makes Miracle on 34th Street an unforgettably swell movie.  

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Wolf

Wolves are the largest members of the dog family. Adult wolves have 42 teeth. They prefer to eat large mammals like deer and moose. They can weigh up to 175 pounds.

All of these trivial facts are more interesting than most of what we get in the 1994 romantic horror flick Wolf, the Mike Nichols-directed take on werewolf films from a screenplay by Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick. Wolf is a film in which I had mostly low expectations that were by the end met. The first half of the film is wherein the potential for something greater lies. This is a werewolf movie, but our wolfman here is a sophisticated yet banal editor-in-chief, making this story ripe to do whatever it wants to do, and yet it doesn't take the bait. Early test reactions to the ending were negative, so a new, action-packed one was shot. By that point, though, I couldn't wait for it to be over.

Jack Nicholson (in his second-last of seven horror movies in his career) plays Will Randall, a successful editor-in-chief at a large publishing house in New York. Trouble is brewing for Randall, however, as the tycoon Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer) has recently purchased the publishing house and plans on replacing Randall with his protégé, Stewart Swinton (James Spader). To make matters much worse for Randall, while driving home in snowy weather after negotiating a deal in Vermont, he accidentally hits a black wolf. While attempting to move the seemingly dead animal off the road, the wolf suddenly reanimates and bites him in the hand before darting back into the woods, where it's protected by its pack. (Another fun fact from wolvesmatter.org that's more interesting than Wolf: "Wolf packs work together to hunt for food. The loss of one wolf from a pack can damage cohesion of the group and can cause packs to break up.") Randall escapes and hurries home.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) for Randall, things start to drastically change for him. His senses are heightened, so much so that he can tell what kind of liquor someone has recently drunk and can edit manuscripts without his reading glasses. His hair starts to grow back and become youthful-looking again. He can hear virtually anything, including every conversation in the building. His sex drive rapidly increases. These newfound heightened senses give him a new purpose, mainly for revenge against the back-stabbing sycophant Stewart. "Ruthless" is the word that's used to describe him, and the scenes of him being so are the most captivating to watch.

But Wolf is a werewolf movie, and it's the "man-wolf" scenes that are the most ridiculous, expectedly. Going into a movie like this understandably requires a certain level of tolerance toward the silliness and definitely loads of suspension of disbelief, but Wolf takes that agreement for granted. The film made a profit, though, earning $131 million worldwide from a large $70 million budget, so despite the subpar appearance of the horror effects and sets, audiences at least somewhat embraced the...I don't know what to call it—camp, I guess, as Randall increasingly metamorphoses into a wolf and howls at the moon. You've heard of An American Werewolf in London; this is "A Callous Werewolf in New York Not Afraid to Take On Armed Men About to Mug Him."    

Nichols certainly pulled out the big guns for this film, his only horror movie. In addition to uncredited screenwriting work from his longtime collaborator Elaine May, the score is by Ennio Morricone, the makeup effects are by Rick Baker, and the production design is by Bo Welch. All of them, however, put in much better work before and since, especially Baker, whose makeup effects make Spader basically look like a thin version of Fat Bastard and Nicholson look like an older Wolverine. There's nothing particularly noteworthy about Morricone, Welch, or Baker's contributions to the film; the same could largely be said about the acting, and certainly the characters. Other than Nicholson's Will Randall, every other character is about as two-dimensional as possible. The other huge star here is Michelle Pfeiffer, who worked with Nicholson on The Witches of Eastwick. Pfeiffer plays Alden's daughter, often in trouble with the law and not a big fan of her father. Pfeiffer does a fine job, no doubt, but her character only serves as a sex object for Randall and to a lesser extent another element of animosity between the protagonist and his jerk boss, Alden. 

Both Nicholson and Spader overdo it from time to time, but it's less bearable watching the latter do it. Nichols at least got Nicholson to tone down the obnoxiousness that was present in Carnal Knowledge, the first film the two worked on together. (They also collaborated together on Heartburn.) That being said, it's impossible to take your eyes off Nicholson. For one, he's in basically every scene, usually at the center. Even watching him eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and drink a glass of milk can be fascinating. It may not be his most challenging work ever, but he and some of the others make it look like a piece of cake. There are also a variety of pre-stardom cast member appearances here in almost blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments, such as Allison Janney, David Schwimmer, and Peter Gerety.  

Wolf is usually rather predictable; the only thing anticipated about it that follows through is its absurdity. The simplest way of describing Wolf is that at times, it's more or less watchable. But it certainly becomes less so during its second half. One of the fundamental problems with Wolf is that it's not sure what it wants to do. Is it a conventional horror feature? Does it want to satirize the dog-eat-dog world of editing? Is it trying to do something different? All of the above? Who knows, and who cares? 

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The Many Saints of Newark

This review contains minor spoilers.

"Your mama always said you'd be the chosen one."

Fourteen years after the iconic HBO show The Sopranos ended its seven-year run as a critical and audience hit, fans' patience has been rewarded with a prequel titled The Many Saints of Newark. It may not exactly be what fans would wish for in a perfect world, but it is likely to suffice anyway. Directed by Alan Taylor and written by Lawrence Konner and show creator Dominic Chase, familiar characters quickly show up. They are obviously played by younger actors, but fans of the show will recognize them immediately. Younger versions of Junior Soprano (Corey Stoll), Livia Soprano (Vera Farmiga), Paulie Walnuts (Billy Magnussen), and a pre-toupée Silvo Dante (John Magaro) all show up. The gang's all here. 

Much of the hype around the film when it was in production centered on the fact that it was an origin story of Tony Soprano, the central, groundbreaking anti-hero of the famous show who was played by the late, great James Gandolfini, and that the character would be played as a teenager by Gandolfini's son, Michael. But Tony is surprisingly not the main character here. That part goes to Alessandro Nivola in a rare starring role as Dickie Moltisanti, Tony's uncle, who basically is the only authority figure Tony will listen to. Nivola does a fine job here, although, because Uncle Dickie (a character whose presence looms largely over The Sopranos) is not as eccentric as some of the other characters mentioned, it's difficult to imagine his mileage lasting as long as other figures have. As a character, Dickie may seem initially to possess at least some decency, or at least he might not be as monstrous as the others; we get sporadic reminders that this is not true.

Ray Liotta makes a triumphant return to the cinematic gangster world more than three decades after Goodfellas helped turn him into a star. Here, he plays two characters: Dickie's father ("Hollywood Dick") and his uncle he never really knew (Sally), locked away in prison for murder. The two older Moltisanti twins are very much a yin-and-yang duo: Hollywood Dick is bombastic and charismatic, with a frightening and violent temper (and it's often his new, young wife from Italy played by Michela De Rossi who is at the receiving end of it), while Sally is sullen and remorseful, rotting away but enjoying the small things, like jazz music. Sally is like a priest or counselor to Dickie (it's the closest we get to a recreation of the therapy scenes in the original show); it's clear Dickie is going to see him because of his guilt, but he won't reveal much to his uncle, only lies. Uncle Sally can see right through him, though. It's a better acting challenge than Liotta has had in the past few years. 

The Sopranos was one of the whitest shows around, but it's at least a little more diverse this time around, largely because of a major part of its setting: the 1967 Newark riots. Chase originally had an idea for this project—that of four white guys being sent to Vietnam during the riots—in the beginning part of his career, but the idea didn't go anywhere. This central element to the story (the way Black people have been treated in this country, especially by the police and the military industrial complex) adds an element of politics the show only occasionally dabbled in (often through Tony inching his way into modernity, often because of the lectures from his social-justice-warrior daughter). This angle makes its way to the Moltisanti/Soprano family by way of a rising criminal named Harold McBrayer, who's played by Leslie Odom Jr. Harold and Dickie are associates, but between little insults and a host of other tensions, their relationship sours, and they soon become enemies.

Despite the commendable acting from Odom, Nivola, and Liotta, there is an enormous emotional weight to the project due to Gandolfini's presence. Tony is still the most interesting character here. The most compelling tragedy to witness in The Many Saints of Newark isn't the rise and fall of Dickie Moltisanti or the rivalry between gangsters, but instead the inability of Tony's mother to be a good parent. It's not as if Livia is the sole reason Tony turned out to be a ruthless, murderous mob boss, but her ineffectiveness as a mother is a large part of what made the show so iconic because that's one of the major reasons Tony ends up in therapy.   

For the record, I liked The Sopranos (a lot, I think). Maybe not as much as The Wire, but I still liked it. I do, however, still hold reservations about the show, namely its depictions of violence against women. In The Sopranos, that violence is often inexcusably gratuitous, like in the controversial episode "University," in which a twenty-year-old woman played by Ariel Kiley is beaten to death in a parking lot by the gangster Ralphie Ciffaretto (Joe Pantoliano). The people behind the scenes would try to explain the necessity of depicting these gangsters as monsters. (This wasn't necessary, though. We understood they're terrible people going into the show way back in 1999; we've all seen Goodfellas.) Yet depicting such a scene and then trying to mansplain it away reveals issues with the series: Like basically all of the gangster flicks Martin Scorsese has directed, The Sopranos is a show (as Anne Cohen reminded us a few years ago) by, of, and for men. The show was a rarity in pop culture: it had numerous great, interesting, terrifically written and acted roles played by women, and yet it also possessed a male-only perspective on their depiction. The issue again roars its ugly head in The Many Saints of Newark.  

As a film itself, it's essentially fine, partly due to it having impossibly high expectations. But what works, works. It features a great soundtrack, and its actors, as mentioned, do a commendable job. It might not be as awesome as some kind of Sopranos Part II might have been, but it's recommendable nevertheless. 

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I Carry You With Me (Te Llevo Conmigo)

It may come as a surprise to many U.S. viewers of the new film titled I Carry You With Me (Te Llevo Conmigo), but Mexico has a longer history of LGBT rights than the U.S. does, according to research by Caroline Beer and Victor Cruz Aceves. 

Despite the U.S. having a more powerful LGBT rights movement, a less religious population, and a center-left political party ruling the country for the majority of the past few decades, it is Mexico that decriminalized sodomy one hundred years before the U.S. did. Mexico also unanimously passed an anti-discrimination law in 2003, yet there still is no such law on U.S. books (though the U.S. Supreme Court did outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation last year). The Mexican Constitution prohibits discrimination based on sexual preferences; the U.S. Constitution does not. Part of this (again, according to Beer and Acevez) is due to secularism playing a bigger role in national politics in Mexico, despite the higher popularity of religion (especially the Catholic Church). 

That being said, the story of I Carry You With Me primarily takes place in 1994, a very different time than 2021 or even 2003. Many queer Mexicans had rights, but things could still be difficult. 1994 was before Patria Jiménez became the first openly gay member of the Mexican parliament in 1997, and it was more than a decade before Mexico City legalized same-sex civil unions. Despite how things have generally been better for a longer period of time for queer people in Mexico than in the U.S., this is also not to suggest that Iván and Gerardo's stories (the two main narratives we witness in this film) are not without trials. Some anecdotal accounts offer powerful reminders of real-life homophobia, like a blog from teenager Paulina Aldaba, who wrote about being told that homosexuality was how "Satan separated people from God," or how "homophobic slurs became a staple of everyone's vocabulary." 

I Carry You With Me is one of two Mexican dramas that have made its way to the United States this year dealing with border crossings (the other being the significantly darker and more depressing Identifying Features). It starts in modern-day New York City. Iván (played here in as a middle-aged man by Gerardo Zabaleta) carries a lifetime of memories, achievements, and heartache. There has simultaneously been for him an enormous amount of guilt and alienation as a gay man who crossed over from Mexico into the United States, leaving behind his son to live with a mother who was repulsed by Iván's sexual orientation. Iván dreams of his younger self. Most of the film's scenes show younger Iván in Mexico, struggling to make money as a dishwasher while he's a qualified and talented chef, but also hiding his orientation in order to keep seeing his young son. 

In these scenes (in which the character is played by Armando Espitia), he meets a teacher named Gerardo (Christian Vázquez), and there is immediate attraction. The two start flirting (telling stories like how Iván spent his younger years in the 80s masturbating to posters of Tom Cruise) and dating. Gerardo is more comfortable in his skin, while Iván is a "complicated boyfriend." How could Gerardo not be less closeted? His mother has been quite supportive of him, despite the undeniable cruelty of his brutal father, who left him alone in the remote part of their village at night as punishment for "acting like a girl." In this scene, the young actor Nery Arredondo provides a scene-stealing moment as a scared Gerardo non-verbally begging for mercy from his father. This is one aspect of their stories that are similar; when Iván was a boy (played by Yael Tadeo), he was discovered by his father in a dress and with makeup on, and his father, too, was disgusted, though he didn't resort to measures as extreme as Gerardo's did.

For the scenes in which Iván and Gerardo become intimately involved, there is a romantic and subtle yet dreamlike quality to the filmmaking. (Compare this to scenes in Identifying Features, which very much are nightmarish.) But for much of the film, the scenes delve into the tragic aspects of queer stories; this may make the film come across as a bit old-fashioned to many post-Call Me By Your Name audience members, as I Carry You With Me contains many expected tragic elements of queer storytelling: acts of random violence, cultural conservatism, closetedness, toxic masculinity, and familial rejection. I wouldn't blame some people for not wanting to watch the film due to the depressing nature of it. 

I Carry You With Me juxtaposes this tragedy with tales of border crossings and other experiences of undocumented workers, adding on top of that moments of betrayal, desperate measures to survive, loneliness, lies, and questions about how authentic the American Dream actually is (and who gets a shot at it). Like Moonlight before it, I Carry You With Me contains the stories of two gay men in love told through three different periods of their lives. By the end of the film, one will clearly recognize the major elements of the film's success in terms of storytelling: the direction of Heidi Ewing (the documentarian who makes her narrative feature film debut here), the superb screenplay by Ewing and Alan Page Arriaga, and especially the acting. There is not a single flawed performance in this movie, especially those of Espitia and Vázquez.   

The somber tone and heart-rendering moments may understandably not be for everyone, but for a chance to witness such exceptional acting, as well as a reminder of just how much progress has been made in such a relatively short amount of time, this film is one many should seek out. 

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Drunk Bus

In the beginning of Drunk Bus, a film "inspired by real shit," the audience is notified that the story takes place in 2006 (winter, based on the omnipresent snow and winter coats), which was noteworthy for me because I would have been a university freshman or sophomore in the winter of 2006. I also routinely took the campus buses, which were free for students. The driver of the bus in this film is named Michael, a young man played by Charlie Tahan, sporting a winter beanie lots of university students wore then (and now, I assume). Michael, one can tell immediately, hates his job. How could he not? University students are constantly drunk on his bus, after all. 

I had a variety of jobs as a student at Kent State University. Some of them I loved (writing movie reviews for the Daily Kent Stater), some of them I liked (being a waiter or a Resident Assistant), and some of them I hated (being a telemarketer for the university). I never drove a bus, but Michael says out loud that other than nude modeling (another job I didn't do), it's the highest-paying job on campus (a fact confirmed by co-director Brandon LaGanke, another KSU alumnus). 

While I wasn't a bus driver like Michael is, I was thrilled to see the film take place in Kent (though the college is called Kent Institute of Technology), bringing about a rush of memories immediately spinning in my head. As Michael's bus pulled up to a curmudgeonly man with a long white beard, I wondered to myself if this character (whom Michael pleads with to get on the bus) was based on local Kent legend Fuck You Bob. Indeed, it was. He's even called that in the film. For the record, the "hippie-looking" Fuck You Bob was a local artist named Robert Wood, who died in 2012. He was "flippant," to put it mildly, even being told by police in 1992 that he could not enter KSU's campus anymore. Now the world of indie-loving cinephiles can know that such a man truly existed.

However, my initial delight and all the wonderful nostalgia soon evaporated. Nobody likes obnoxious drunk students, but no one does (or should) like movies that glamorize them in the name of empathy. But obnoxiousness is only one edge of this sword. The other in Drunk Bus is a smorgasbord of toilet humor; the movie is completely saturated in it. When the bathroom humor does't work, then we get a lot of screaming and yelling in attempted shots for laughs, whether it's from drunk students being drunk students or someone having an orgasm. It's not funny, either. And when that doesn't work, then we get morbid humor, which is only a step above toilet humor if there were some kind of Bloom-inspired hierarchy of producing comedy. It's frustrating that a film so painfully unfunny has received such acclaimed, and yet it has. As of this writing, it is number twenty-six on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the one-hundred best films of 2021. Yet it's undoubtedly one of the least funny films I've seen in a long, long time. 

Most of the reasons why the film doesn't work as a comedy (beyond its fetish for toilet humor) is that so many of its characters are not interesting or redeemable in the slightest. University-level students aren't always the most likable people in the world, but few of them are as unpleasant as the majority of these characters. Within twenty minutes of Drunk Bus, I found myself caring less and less about any of them or any situation they found themselves in. Halfway through the film, I just wanted the whole thing to be over. It's a particular pity that Will Forte, who plays the sophomoric middle-aged boss who peaked a little too early and now manages Michael and the other bus drivers, tormenting them with flatulence, is spending a lot of his career making overrated garbage like this and the overrated Netflix series Sweet Tooth. 

One character and actor who at least is compelling enough is Pineapple Tangaroa, playing a fictional version of himself. (Tangaroa, a bald Samoan man with tattoos all over his face, was a university friend of LaGanke's.) In the film, Pineapple is hired by the bus company to be security to assist Michael with the unruly drunkards each night. Pineapple's intimidating presence and almost mystic wisdom immediately have effects, with Michael being guided along the way as he learns to stand up to jerks and maybe even lose his virginity. Michael is under a lot of pressure, though, and soon there are fissures in their friendship. They even get into a shouting match, and terrible words are exchanged between them. That's basically the stakes in the film: characters lie to each other, characters hurt each other, and it goes round and round, just like Michael on his constant bus loops. It may work for some, but it didn't for me. 

A big problem I have with Drunk Bus is its hubris. If you were to sit down LaGanke, co-director John Carlucci, and screenwriter Chris Molinaro, and then accuse their Drunk Bus of simply being a movie of the likes of Road Trip, the 2000 road trip sex comedy starring Breckin Meyer and Tom Green, or National Lampoon's Van Wilder, the 2002 college comedy with Ryan Reynolds, they might be offended. Those films, which LaGanke, Carlucci, and Molinaro surely saw when they were younger, clearly influenced Drunk Bus, whether they want to admit it or not. But Drunk Bus isn't Road Trip or Van Wilder, we would be told. It's about...I don't know. Life or youth or friendship or something artsy that the three would clumsily spit out. It wouldn't be a convincing argument. Drunk Bus thinks it's like The Perks of Being a Wall Flower, a coming-of-age tale of young people, but it's definitely more of a Road Trip, a dumb comedy. This one just happens to take place in a bus on the same route, night after night, with copious amounts of sound, fury, and weak attempts at humor all being flushed down a toilet. 

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Charade

 "All I want for Christmas is to make another movie with Audrey Hepburn." So said Cary Grant, Hollywood's amiable king of charisma. Alas, he never got his wish, but one can certainly imagine that a second pairing would have been just as rewarding as the first. The two stars were paired as the leads in Charade, the 1963 film directed by Stanley Donen, that remains possibly the finest film in the public domain. (It ended up there due to a copyright notice error.) Often described as "the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never directed," Charade is one of the most alluring films in cinematic history. Much of it is due to the wonderful pairing of these two. It would be unfair to say they carry the film. Many others involved deserve acclaim for how Charade turned out. But their pairing remains one of Hollywood's most brilliant castings.

Hepburn plays Reggie Lambert, an interpreter working in Paris taking a skiing trip in the Alps. Her vacation doesn't seem to be bringing her much comfort, though, as her upcoming divorce to her husband, Charles, weighs on her mind, providing her a presumably equal sense of liberation and anxiety. While on vacation, she meets a man identifying himself as Peter Joshua, played by the incomparable Grant. He may be quite older than she (something that made Grant uncomfortable during the filming), but she appears quite smitten with him. (Needless to say, as much as romance works, the way Peter sometimes lectures Reggie comes across as very condescending.) Perhaps the two will meet again after Reggie's divorce goes through, but soon the problems commence.

Things aren't quite what they seem regarding Charles. To start, he's thrown off a train (in his pajamas, a reoccurring theme that is pointed out to us). The police detective (Jacques Marin) points out to her that Charles went by a variety of aliases and possessed a variety of passports from a variety of countries, which comes as a shock to Reggie.

At Charles' wake, attendance is low. Aside from Reggie, her friend Sylvie (Dominique Minot), and the detective, a trio of antagonists storm in one by one. Gideon (Ned Glass) takes a good look at Charlie, then promptly sneezes. Tex (James Coburn) enters next; he seems to be an equally suspicious figure, and Reggie doesn't recognize either of them. The third "mourner" is Herman (George Kennedy), a towering figure with a claw hand who bulldozes his way into the church, takes a quick look at Charlie, then violently thrusts a needle into his flesh to determine if he truly is dead. (He is.) Herman leaves immediately. Reggie has no idea what's going on. "Don't ask me," she tells Sylvie. "I'm only the widow."

At the wake, she receives a note from a CIA official named Hamilton Bartholomew, played by Walter Matthau, summoning her to the U.S. Embassy in Paris. There, looking like Dan Aykroyd imitating Walt Disney, he chews on his sandwich rather ostentatiously as he tells her that her husband was involved with the three men at the wake in an OSS operation to deliver $250,000 to the French Resistance during the war; the money never reached the Resistance. Charles was likely killed by someone after the money, and that same person may be after Reggie, believing that she now possesses it. But who is the culprit? Herman? Tex? Gideon? All three? Someone else? In this cat-and mouse thriller/comedy/romance/mystery, Reggie may have three or more murderers after her and this money she supposedly has. Making matters worse for her is the fact that there is increasing evidence that Peter may not be who he says he is. The film is a fantasy, but perhaps the most fantastical element is Reggie constantly believing Peter after every edit to his story.

From her first moments, Hepburn demonstrates her mastery at delivering dialogue, particularly the one-liners aplenty provided by writers Peter Stone and Marc Behm, such as when she asks why Jean-Louis (Sylvie's son) can't do "something constructive like start an avalanche or something." This is a remarkably witty film, and if you like escapism from the way real people talk in the real world, Charade might be just the fit for you.

It's not just the rich screenplay that helps Charade succeed so well. Charles Lang's camera is an active one, whether it's from the perspective of the dead Charles in the morgue or frantically following Reggie as she finds her apartment shockingly empty. The fight on the roof between Grant and Kennedy is effectively shot, and is assisted by Henry Mancini's score, which also adds to the delight of Charade. Incidentally, Mancini's famous score remains the only aspect of Charade that is not in the public domain.

The acting in Charade is, for the most part, top-notch. Hepburn and Grant hit all the right notes, as does Matthau, a performance dripping with bureaucratic aridity. Despite Glass' sneezing in a gratuitous manner that comes across as very unfunny, Kennedy going full boogeyman, and Coburn really reaching for all those Southernisms, they all do a fine job as a trio of menacing villains. Even the boy playing Jean-Louis (Thomas Chelimsky) is fine, or as fine as a French-speaking child actor in a 1960s English-language film could be. Hepburn, it must be said, gives the best performance. But it is Grant who has the funniest bits. In a scene that bathes itself in 60s quirkiness and perhaps even sexual liberation, the two participate in a game at a club involving passing fruit to other people without using their hands. Grant relishes every moment, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes everyone else (characters and audience). These days, just about any character showering in his clothes to flirt with someone would be seen as peculiar at best and desperate and misguided at worst. With Grant, it's effortlessly charming.

I really adored this film the first time I saw it in high school. I've seen it at least two other times since. I cannot say it never gets old. It does, but only because the constant twists and turns are no longer novel. But other elements never diminish. The charm of the two leads is a constant joy. It's a pity they didn't have a cinematic reunion, one as fun as Charade.

This review was originally published on July 19, 2020 at the Public Domain Film Review.

 

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My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To

In My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To, directed by Jonathan Cuartas, two siblings (Patrick Fugit as Dwight and Ingrid Sophie Schram as Jessie) struggle to make ends meet while caring for their ill brother, Thomas (Owen Campbell). Jessie works as a waitress in town, while Dwight doesn't seem to have a job other than to try and fetch the only ailment that helps the sickly Thomas: human blood. Given that Thomas needs to drink blood, it should be quite clear what actually is going on, and I don't think that's a spoiler because we see Dwight and Jessie collecting blood (in a manner you can probably guess) before giving it to their brother, who drinks it in bed. Oh, and he can't go outside during the day. 

These acts of murder and bleeding have become ordinary to the siblings, especially Jessie, who seems the least fazed (at least on the surface). Despite occasionally showing signs of cracking, her steely resolve allows her to sing along to songs on TV even though she stays up late into the night to take care of Thomas before going into work again the next day. Dwight, however, is a wreck, losing more and more of his humanity with each kill. Things start to get complicated for the three: Jessie might target someone Dwight cares about in order to feed Thomas, Dwight soon starts to feel that he cannot keep doing these horrendous acts, and Thomas just wants a friend. One of the interesting things about Cuartas's screenplay is that Thomas' "illness" is never named. Dwight and Jessie only talk about how he's not getting any better. The audience, though, obviously knows what's really going on, yet in the film's mythology and universe, it seems that no one has ever heard of vampires, similar to how the word "zombie" is never used in The Walking Dead. To Dwight and Jessie, there are no vampires, just a sick brother, and they don't know how else to help him. The things we do for family. 

A typical rule of thumb in viewing movies is that if nothing happens in the first twenty minutes or so, nothing will happen for the rest of it. With this one, things certainly happen, but they happen at such a slow pace that some audience members, even horror fans (who often are among the most loyal to their beloved genre) may be turned off. While it is slow moving, this unhurriedness is punctuated with moments of intense violence. Because of this, the strongest element of this film is its tension. It's worth mentioning, though, that while it is a violent horror flick, it employs violence in the classical sense; that is, you don't see much of it. However, even if you can't see it, you can hear it, and you most certainly can imagine it, so there's a strong chance the hand will go up to cover the images on the screen.

While I liked the My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To, the biggest problem I had with it is that the whole thing doesn't feel very original. It reminded me too much of the Swedish film Let the Right One In, which had a Hollywood remake a few years later. There's also the 1997 novel Thirsty about a teenage vampire, as well as the film Only Lovers Left Alive about modern-day vampires contemplating their existence. But one interesting bit of novelty with the movie is its decision to focus on poor and working-poor characters (protagonists and victims). Typically, the horror movies that come to mind center on middle-class folks and above (think the suburban teenagers in Halloween and Scream or the rich families in The Exorcist and Hereditary), but this film's setting and characters almost make it feel like it's hinting at being allegorical. 

At any rate, Fugit, Schram, and Campbell all do a fantastic job in these sympathetic portrayals of three family members trying to survive, especially Thomas, who just wants to be a normal boy. In fact, I thought it probably would have been more interesting if the filmmakers had cast a younger actor in the role (perhaps someone around Jacob Tremblay's age or younger), which would have made his mannerisms and the way the three of them act around each other much more believable. Campbell was about twenty-four years old during film, and his age seems to make the situations awkward at times.   

If you can tolerate the deliberate pace of the film, My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To is a recommendable film. It's scary and unsettling, sure, but not gratuitously so. So if you prefer your horror films to have lots of gore, rest assured that there is plenty of blood in this movie. 

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Riders of Justice

"The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means."
-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven 

"Denmark is a pretty good place to live but it is by no stretch of the imagination the utopia many in politics and the media in the U.S. claim to be." That's how British author and journalist Michael Booth put it in an interview with The Washington Post a few years ago to promote his book The Almost Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavia Utopia. The gist of the book, from what I could gather in the interview, is that yes, Denmark and other Scandinavian countries do well and offer a lot that other countries could learn from, but they're not perfect. There is petty theft, for example, and there also is violence.

In fact, nine thousand Danes filed a criminal complaint with the police last year. In a country of almost six million people, that comes out to about 0.0018 percent. But it still happens. We see it in the opening moments of Riders of Justice, the Danish film directed by Anders Thomas Jensen, when an uncle wants to buy a bike for his niece. The problem is that it's red, and she wants a blue one. Perhaps she will one day get it, her uncle assures her, and then the seller places a call for the order. The order, however, is not a legitimate one. Two common thieves break off the chains of a blue bicycle, and now they have it to sell to the uncle.

This action leads to a tragic chain of events. The blue bike belonged to a teenage girl named Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), and now she can't get to school. The family car won't start, so her mother (Anne Birgitte Lind) decides to take her via train. They're already having a bad day because on top of those two inconveniences, they've learned that Mathilde's father, Marcus (Mads Mikkelsen), will continue to be deployed in Afghanistan for another three months.

Also having a bad day are Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Lennart (Lars Brygmann), two probability scientists who are fired from their jobs when the algorithm they've come up with proves useless to the company they work for. Having packed up his things, Otto gets on the same train as Mathilde and her mother. Being the gentleman he is, he stands up and gives his seat to Mathilde's mother, but there's a terrible accident that kills eleven people, including the mother who sat down in his seat only a few moments earlier. Naturally, Mathilde is in a state of shock and falls into a depression, and Marcus returns home. Angry at what has happened, he doesn't know how to connect with his daughter and console her. He even punches her boyfriend (Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt). 

Otto likely also goes through shock and grief (especially as he realizes that it should have been him to die), but his mind knows this could not have been a mere accident. One of the victims of the crash was an informant who was to testify in the trial against the violent leader of the notorious Riders of Justice gang, Kurt (Roland Møller). With the witness now dead, Kurt will likely be acquitted. But Otto and Lennart, once the police aren't interested in helping, take a chance and confront Marcus with their slightly far-fetched theory. So consumed with anger, Marcus makes a likely candidate to join them in their ragtag quest for justice. Now, instead of just petty theft, there will be blood, and lots of it.

Riders of Justice, the fifth film Mikkelsen and Jensen have collaborated on, is a film that changes tones with remarkable ease while effortlessly blending a variety of genres—from action to drama to comedy—while keeping one's attention and investment throughout. There is emotional weight here, especially regarding the father-daughter dynamics, yet there are also lots of laughs, particularly from Brygmann and frequent-Jensen collaborator Nicolas Bro as Emmenthaler, the third part of the mad geniuses who work out together that something is amiss with the train crash and that something must be done. Yet the drama and comedy are really buoyed by the universal desire for revenge. Marcus has been pricked, he bleeds, and he desperately wants revenge.  

In addition to the perfect acting from the film's cast, much acclaim should be given to Jensen for his smart script. You may struggle to keep up with all the mathematical jargon, and it may be especially challenging if you're reading the subtitles, but it's worth the effort. Just about every other moment in this flick is unpredictable, making the whole thing seem like a smarter version of Taken. Indeed, it might be the smartest action movie you've seen in a while. 

While some of the gratuitous violence grows stale as the film reaches its denouement, most of the rest of the film is a blast, and a thought-provoking one at that. I kept thinking about consequentialism while watching it, the idea that a moral act is one that produces something good. The choices our protagonists make against the Riders of Justice may challenge this. Do the ends justify the means? What happens if mistakes are made? What happens if the ones you love get hurt along the way? These are all worthy questions, but even if they're not your cup of tea, there's still a lot of shoot-outs and laughter along the way to keep you entertained.   

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The Paper Tigers

"Don't you people know how to park?" This racist attack towards an Asian-American man named Danny, played in The Paper Tigers by Alain Uy, represents a painfully common act of racism against Asians and Asian-Americans, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Audience members, when seeing something like that in a film, might be primed to anticipate Danny fighting back (especially since he used to be a very talented martial artist) or at least say something aggressive back. This is, after all, a movie about kung fu. 

Danny doesn't fight back. He has his kid (played by Joziah Lagonoy) with him. Not fighting back is a teachable moment for his son. It's better to walk away than fight, he tells him. But Danny's messaging is inconsistent. Later in the film, he'll tell his son Ed that he should fight to defend his friends. His ex-wife disagrees. It's difficult to put much stock into anything Danny tells Ed because in addition to his inconsistency, he's often not there for him. He's late picking him up, and he has to cancel trips to amusement parks due to emergency deadlines, all the while Ed's mother inevitably comes across looking like the mean parent. 

The failed-father dynamic in The Paper Tigers isn't particularly interesting, but it's not like the film, written and directed by Tran Quoc Bao, is trying very hard to make it work. Instead, the film puts most of its efforts into two elements: comedy and action. The Paper Tigers is a martial arts comedy; its martial arts scenes are the film's finest moments, but its comedy is flat. Nothing is funny in this movie, not the jokes about "breakfast pasta," not the flatulence, not the funeral selfies, not even the awkward white guy in the movie. The white guy (a very muscular Matthew Page as Carter) is a former high school rival of the Three Tigers (more on them in a moment), constantly losing to them and feeling bitter about it as an adult yet emboldened, for he clearly kept in shape over the years and now is a kung fu teacher, while the others (or at least two-thirds of them) got a little flabbier. 

Carter, though, takes things a little too seriously, learning to speak Chinese while passionately delivering honorable kung fu beliefs (which are dismissed as fortune cookie sayings by Danny). Carter blurts out his trust of the "old ways" and says other things that certainly come across as appropriation, and yet the film can't even get that right. The character of Carter should be low-hanging fruit for the film, but even though middle-aged white guys can say some pretty cringe-worthy things, none of them (we should hope) would never go so far as to say something like "we Chinese have a saying." 

The Paper Tigers centers on three middle-aged men who excelled at martial arts under the tutelage of Sifu Cheung (Roger Yuan) when they were teenagers but who've grown apart in their older years. Aside from Danny, Hing (Ron Yuan, Roger Yuan's real-life brother) has suffered from a leg injury and has gained weight, while Jim (Mykel Shannon Jenkins) has continued to keep his body in pristine order as a boxing coach but has forgotten kung fu. The three of them, formerly known as the Three Tigers, reunite when their sifu has mysteriously died from a heart attack. Suspecting foul play, they try to discover the true cause of his death and who might have had a hand in it. 

Some of the actors (like Page and Ron Yuan) certainly try to make this bizarre humor work (to no avail), but most of this silliness isn't their fault, but that of Bao's script. The script sometimes tries to instill some weight and emotion (like Danny's problems being a reliable father and his past issues living up to Sifu Cheung's expectations), often with some kind of "but the truth is" sappy speech, but it doesn't succeed, instead trying too hard to go for laughs. True, kids might laugh at it, but they'll likely be the only ones chuckling at these antics. 

If there is anything to be praised in the film, however, it's the unpredictable fight choreography of Ken Quitugua, who also appears as Zhen Fan, the film's villain. Adding to the delight of watching this masterful choreography is Daniel L.K. Caldwell's score; the two fit perfectly together. Music and fighting, though, can't save a movie like this, making this a very disappointing film. Unfortunately, it might pain you to try and remember whether or not you saw The Paper Tigers one week after viewing it. 

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