Category: Film Reviews by Amy

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

Charlize Theron is an immortal warrior in Netflix’s The Old Guard.

Andy (Theron) leads a small team — Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) — of sorta-immortal fighters. Andy has been around for millennia, Booker “died” the first time fighting in the Napoleonic wars, and Joe and Nicky fell in love after killing each other during the Crusades. Fighting in battles big and small throughout history, these immortals heal and come back to life every time they’re “killed” — though, we’re told, eventually their time will be up.

Mostly they’ve stayed hidden but a man named Copely (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an ex-CIA agent, has figured out their abilities and sets them up for capture. His intentions aren’t so terrible, maybe, if you don’t think about it too hard: he wants to bring them to petulant hoodie-wearing biotech bazillionaire Merrick (Harry Melling) for study so that their regenerative abilities can be used to heal disease and injury. But Merrick is clearly evil so what are the odds this experiment will just be a peaceful gift to humanity, as Copley intends?

As the group is on the run from Merrick, they get a psychic alert that there is a new immortal: Nile (KiKi Layne), a U.S. Marine recently killed in Afghanistan. Or she appeared “killed” but then healed — freaking out her squad mates. Andy sets off to find her and explain her weird new powers to her before the U.S. government or anybody else can ship her off to a lab.

In addition to the problem of Copley and his motivations (he is presented as a basically good, smart guy, though his initial actions undermine this), The Old Guard has, for me, a structural problem: the “Episode 1” trap. This movie feels so intent on setting up a series of movies that it piles up exposition and slows down the action. The Old Guard does a lot of filling us in — about characters or plot points that are clearly meant to pay off in the future — that doesn’t necessarily add to a fuller understanding of this story and that is a drag on the progress of this movie.

Near the movie’s end, when we get well-choreographed action and characters making decisions, I could see what this movie was and I enjoyed the world this had all built. But all the “TV pilot” business weighed the movie down.

These problems aren’t, however, fatal. I like the characters set up here. Much like in ABC’s Stumptown, another property based, as this is, on a Greg Rucka comic, The Old Guard has a good handle on how to create well-rounded female characters who feel like real people, not just one-dimensional Strong Ladies. The romance between Nicky and Joe adds much needed joy and humanity to the story. (They are a romantic-as-heck couple and it’s a treat to have something so swoony tucked inside an action movie.) Their scenes and scenes of Nile figuring out her new “eternal” status are good examples of the movie folding in heart and lightness without resorting to quippiness. (KiKi Layne, who I liked in If Beale Street Could Talk, holds her own next to Theron here.)

Did I immediately add The Old Guard graphic novel to my library request list? Of course. And the movie’s final moments set up a next chapter that I am eagerly awaiting. I just wish this movie could have been a little tighter and able to stand on its own. B

Rated R for sequences of graphic violence and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood with a screenplay by Greg Rucka (who created the comic book with Leandro Fernandez), The Old Guard is two hours and five minutes long and is available on Netflix.

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

Go watch Hamilton, the movie created from filmed performances of the musical made in the summer of 2016 and now streaming on Disney+.

You don’t need me to tell you that the musical based on Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, the “ten dollar Founding Father” as the play reminds us, is great. I feel like even if musical theater isn’t your thing, you’ve read stories about the production, which follows Hamilton’s life from the time he arrives in New York City through the Revolutionary War and into the first few decades of the new American government. Maybe you’ve heard a few of the songs, maybe seen video of the performances at the White House. Maybe you’ve gone further — listened to the cast recording or seen the PBS show Hamilton’s America, filled with making-of and behind-the-scenes information. I’m not one of the lucky people who have seen the production live but I feel like I had some familiarity with Hamilton. Even after all that exposure to the story and the songs and the performances, this production still feels fresh and this movie is still excellent.

As advertised, this movie features the people I most associate with Hamilton when it first came out: Lin-Manuel Miranda (also the play’s writer and lyricist) as Hamilton, Leslie Odum Jr. as Aaron Burr, Daveed Diggs as Lafayette and Jefferson, Renee Elise Goldsberry as Angelica, Phillipa Soo as Eliza, Jonathan Groff as a delightfully maniacal King George and Chris Jackson replacing whatever image I had in my head of George Washington. Rather than run down the plot, which you probably know, either from previous Hamilton coverage or, like, history (which, sure, this takes some liberties with), let me run down some of what stood out from finally getting to see the whole play and see it as a play and not as a movie adaptation (which, I feel like I would have missed out on so much seeing a version of the story shot on location, 2012’s Les Miserables-style).

• I was surprised, delightfully, how much of this is Aaron Burr’s story and how meaty and complex that part is.

• I also liked how much heft the character of Eliza Hamilton, Alexander’s wife, has. This story acknowledges women (and the limits of their opportunity) in a way I don’t think you often see in big mainstream Revolutionary era stories outside of Abigail Adams and her “remember the ladies” quote.

• I am not the first or the 1,000th person to say this, I’m sure, but wow is the staging a real thing of wonder — how the play uses its set and set pieces, how it uses costumes. It’s beautiful and clever and just such a joy to watch how one actor can be two different characters or how a relatively sparse set can be a battlefield or an office or whatever is needed.

• For being a film of a stage production, this movie is incredibly dynamic. I have seen plays turned into movies (the recent Cats, for example) that felt more stuck on a stage than this one. There is great movement and action.

• King George is a hoot.

• I was not prepared for the different times and different reasons this movie would get me all choked up.

Go watch Hamilton if you’re a super-fan. Go watch Hamilton if you’re mildly curious. Just go watch Hamilton, a slice of history about a slice of history. A

Rated PG-13 for language and some suggestive material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Thomas Kail with music, book and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda (based on Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow), Hamilton is two hours and 40 minutes long and is streaming on Disney+.

The Vast of Night (PG-13)

Two kids in 1950s New Mexico chase after a strange sound and a mysterious something spotted in the sky in The Vast of Night, a delightful bit of sci-fi campfire tale.

Introduced as an episode of some Twilight-Zone-ish mid-20th-century TV show called Paradox Theater, the movie takes place over one night in Cayuga, New Mexico, a town of 402 residents, many of whom are settling in for a night of basketball at the local high school. Teenager Fay (Sierra McCormick) and maybe slightly older teenager Everett (Jake Horowitz) are on the outskirts of the happenings: Everett works as a DJ at the local radio station and is the kid they call in to check out the wiring when the electricity starts to flicker in the gymnasium where the game is about to begin. Fay is his, I guess, fellow audio/visual nerd buddy; she seems to be hanging around to show off her new tape recorder to Everett. The two chat and play around with the tape recorder while Everett checks on the recording equipment for the game — the radio plays it back the next day and and people listen because, even though they know the outcome, they like to hear their kid’s name on the radio, he tells her. Then they walk together to their respective jobs — Everett to his night shift at the radio station, Fay to the switchboard where she serves as the telephone operator.

It’s there, with the radio tuned to Everett’s radio show, that she first hears the sound. The sound, a sort of mechanical-y, whir-y sound, comes through the radio, briefly interrupting the broadcast.

That, followed by some strange calls in to the switchboard, lead her to contact Everett and the two begin to investigate the sound, becoming more anxious as a couple comes racing into town saying they followed strange lights in the sky in from the highway and as people call in with strange stories.

Like a cocktail that mixes the ingredients just right, The Vast of Night is a cool, crisp delight. The mysterious unknown of a rural New Mexico night and the “modernity” of a post-World War II but pre-internet world are great materials to craft the “something spooky is out there” tone that drives this movie. The way the kids marvel over the possibilities of the future — self-driving electric cars, tiny TV-like phones you can keep in your pocket — while displaying their mastery of the audio recorders, radio signals and telephone boards that are their in-the-moment high tech has that “world of tomorrow” retro-future bittersweetness. McCormick and Horowitz make a great “let’s solve a mystery” duo, with Horowitz’s Everett looking for great tape that will jump-start his career out of Cayuga and McCormick’s Fay earnestly looking for answers (and maybe shyly looking for more reasons to hang out with Everett).

This week, I went searching for movies that were as close to pure fun as I could find and The Vast of Night is definitely the best scrappy example of this. B+

Rated PG-13 “for brief strong language,” according to the MPA. Directed by Andrew Patterson and written by Andrew Patterson and Craig W. Sanger, The Vast of Night is an hour and 30 minutes long and is distributed by Amazon Studios. It is available via Amazon Prime.

Da 5 Bloods (R)

Spike Lee blends a Vietnam war movie with a quest-for-treasure movie with Da 5 Bloods, a new Netflix release.

Former Army squad-mates Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) arrive in 21st-century Vietnam to retrieve the body of their squad leader, Norman (Chadwick Boseman), who died during the war. They have also returned in search of gold. As we see in flashbacks to the war, they were sent to retrieve a case of gold bars (CIA money meant to pay local allies) from a plane that crashed in the jungle. After an ambush left only these five men alive, Norman, who had held the squad together through their anguish over the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the ongoing inequality faced by African American troops, argued that they should keep the gold for themselves and their community.

Now a mudslide has revealed a bit of the plane, which, along with the burial site for Norman and the gold, had been lost in the fog of war. But even before the men find the gold, they are weighed down by the past. Paul seems to be the man most aggressively suffering from post-traumatic stress, which has spilled over into his relationship with his adult son David (Jonathan Majors), who shows up, uninvited, on the trip. Otis reaches out to an old girlfriend (Lê Y Lan) and learns that their relationship was more complicated than he knew. The ghosts of the past haunt all of the men, with greater intensity as they set out to hike to the crash site.

I reread my review of Miracle at St. Anna, Lee’s 2008 World War II film, and my feelings about that movie are very similar to my reaction to Da 5 Bloods. This movie, like that one, plays with Hollywood war movie conventions, is packed full of rich moments, pulls in fascinating elements of history, has very Spike Lee visual arrangements, has a very Spike Lee movie score (by Terence Blanchard, who has scored most of Lee’s movies) and has character beats that make you want to know more. It’s a lot for one movie and it doesn’t all always come together. Even though this movie is two hours and 35 minutes, it felt like it needed more time to develop all of the elements it throws into the mix (or needed to edit out a few that didn’t get as much development).

Da 5 Bloods is actually the first of these cinema-at-home movies that I wished I had seen in a theater. I feel like the bigness of what Lee is doing would have worked better on a big screen. At times, the “in search of gold” half of the movie feels like it is fighting with the “fuller look at history” half with its sharp commentary on African American military history and the wider context of racism and injustice in American society. There are a lot of moving parts here (including a whole subplot about a French woman and a landmine clearing nonprofit that I feel like is thematically relevant but a drag on the narrative) but there are also strong performances (from Lindo in particular) and eloquently delivered Spike Lee statements that stick with you.

Here’s how I’m going to recommend Da 5 Bloods — and I do recommend this movie, especially to movie nerds and Spike Lee fans: Make your viewing experience as cinema-like as you can. Dim the lights, put away the phone and watch it all the way through. B

“Rated R for strong violence, grisly images and pervasive language,” according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Spike Lee and written by Danny Bilson & Paul De Meo and Kevin Willmott & Spike Lee, Da 5 Bloods is two hours and 35 minutes long and available on Netflix.

Shirley (R)

A young couple comes to live with author Shirley Jackson and her husband in Shirley, a not-quite biopic based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell.

The movie seems set in the late 1940s and early 1950s at the still all-women Bennington College in Vermont. Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred (Logan Lerman) are a newly married couple who come to Bennington so Fred can work as an assistant for professor Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), husband of famous but reclusive writer Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss).

Stuhlbarg really goes the extra mile to make Stanley unlikeable. I have no idea what real-life Stanley Hyman was like but here he is a blowhard who has affairs and makes little speeches about the horrors of mediocrity when he himself seems pretty mediocre, particularly in comparison to his wife. The picture of Shirley here is a woman suffering from mental illness but also from some degree of gaslighting by her husband, who seems to exaggerate her difficulties and seems to have her convinced that she desperately needs him.

Rose and Fred, shakily on their own after an elopement that Fred’s family frowned on and expecting a baby, are no match for this couple and their drama. Fred seems to quickly give in to the temptations of Bennington while Rose is saddled with becoming the designated housewife for both families — cooking and cleaning for Stanley and Shirley as well as her husband. Shirley, who is mulling over a novel based on the disappearance of a local girl, is sick, Stanley tells Rose, but also we suspect that Stanley is clearing the decks so Shirley can write — the movie (and Wikipedia) leaves us with the impression that not only is Shirley’s fame greater than Stanley’s but so is her paycheck.

Moss’s Shirley is fascinating. She crafts a character who is clearly suffering but isn’t a victim. She seems to resent Stanley, love him deeply, need him and see him for his flaws, all at the same time. She is, as with other recent Moss characters (in The Invisible Man and Her Smell for example), full of big emotions but Moss is able to convey those big emotions and big moments and even elements of madness (another thing Moss excels at) without tipping into cartoonishness.

Shirley feels like she’s running twice as fast as Shirley. About halfway through the movie, I realized I was still waiting for it to start. As Shirley pulls Rose in — to the source-material story of the missing girl, to Shirley’s creative process, to Shirley herself — we see Rose getting lost in all of it. It’s interesting, but it’s all slow to develop and it’s almost as if the movie is so focused on everything Moss is doing that it has to remind itself to pay attention to Rose.

As not-quite-tight as the movie overall is, it’s worth a look, especially for Moss’s performance. B

“Rated R for sexual content, nudity, language and brief disturbing images,” according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Josephine Decker with a screenplay by Sarah Gubbins (from a novel by the same name from Susan Scarf Merrell), Shirley is an hour and 47 minutes long and distributed by Neon. It’s available for rent or purchase.

The King of Staten Island (R)

Pete Davidson plays a young man adrift and suffering in The King of Staten Island, a somewhat-autobiographical (about Davidson) movie directed by Judd Apatow.

The “Apatow” part of that sentence might have you thinking this movie is a comedy, even if you know about Davidson’s mental health struggles and his family history (his firefighter father died at the World Trade Center site on Sept. 11). It would be more accurate to say that there are funny moments in this drama.

Stuck in his life, Scott (Davidson), age 24, dabbles in self-destructive behavior (shutting his eyes while driving on the highway) and in tattooing and is generally aimless, hanging out with his buddies, unwilling to take his relationship with Kelsey (Bel Powley) seriously and half-heartedly working a part-time job while still living with his mom, Margie (Marisa Tomei), even as his younger sister (Maude Apatow) heads to college.

As the movie tells us early on, Scott hasn’t really been able to move forward after the loss of his firefighter father (who died fighting a fire when Scott was a kid). Just how much becomes clear when Margie starts dating Ray (Bill Burr), also a firefighter and the first serious relationship she’s had since her husband died. Ray’s presence spurs her to nudge Scott to think about moving out, which sends him into a tailspin of anxiety.

I feel like both Davidson and Apatow have a very solid and complete idea of who this character is and what his struggles are — not surprising since everything I’ve read and seen about this movie (including videos on the movie’s official website) so heavily underlines how much of Pete is in Scott. And Davidson plays this character version of himself with genuine, to-the-bone emotion — he brought similar layers to a performance in Big Time Adolescence, a movie released on Hulu earlier this year, and here brings even more vulnerability.

But I didn’t get the sense that this movie always knew what to do with this character. At about the 50-minute point I felt like this movie was spinning its wheels still setting up who Scott is. The movie is also uneven in how it uses a subplot involving Scott’s friends, and Scott and Ray’s relationship seems to take an unnecessary amount of time to get to where it’s pretty clear that it’s going. Everything in the middle of this movie — from the initial 30 or so minutes and until it hits its final 30 to 40 minutes — seems to suffer from a lack of a heartless editor, someone who could slice out all the moments that are probably viewed fondly by Davidson (and maybe also Apatow, whose movies seem to have become progressively looser and filled with scenes that probably should have remained outtakes) but get in the way of both Scott’s arc and where the movie heads in its final act.

It’s hard to completely discount a movie as deeply felt as The King of Staten Island clearly is and with such a clear and specific character at its core. And I didn’t hate it. But I did wish I didn’t have to slog through all the messy extra bits.B-

“Rated R for language and drug use throughout, sexual content and some bloody violence/bloody images,” according to the MPA on filmratings.com.