Category: Pop

The Last House joins a vaguely defined but fun genre

I think I like this genre that seems to be “horror or sci-fi or something?” — Backrooms, Disclosure Day and last Friday’s Netflix release The Last House seem to fit in that nicely fluid category. I think the mishmash helps to make the movie interesting and watchable in a way that a more straightforward jump-scares-and-slasher affair wouldn’t be, at least for me, even when it’s imperfect.

The Last House begins with a regular family in a suburb in coastal Washington state doing regular life stuff: Parents Jason (Wagner Moura) and Anne (Greta Lee) talk about the problems a repair guy found with their home’s chimney cracks and foundation and worry about money, kids Ruth (Riley Chung) and Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski) call each other stupid. The family heads out to get a Christmas tree, even though it has started raining, but when they try to open the door, it won’t open. Nor will the back door. Nor will the windows, even when Jason tries to smash them open. After some frantic “what is happening” — but no calling the police because phones and internet are down — the family notices that their neighbors are also looking out their front windows, unable to get outside. With some signs-in-windows communication, the neighbors learn that this spreads streets away and Jason and Anne decide to put on a good face for the kids, sit tight and stay safe.

What happens next is — well, if you’re old enough to read this, you know what happens next because we all lived it six years ago as this movie gives strong Covid lockdown vibes. The family takes stock of the supplies they have. They dig out things to amuse themselves with (with no internet they end up relying on the two DVDs the family still has, 1982’s Annie and 1997’s Air Force One). They give up on the idea of “sticking to a school routine” pretty quickly (extremely relatable!). Anne starts a countertop garden.

From their windows, the family, especially Ruth, observes some strangeness out in the world. It suddenly rains a lot more, and the rain “looks different,” Ruth says. She also starts to draw pictures of the odd creature-like shapes she sees in the rain. Her parents, who are trying to keep their freakout under wraps from the kids, just sort of shush these observations while dealing with things like the knowledge that an older neighbor couple has run out of food and their own family dog has run out of medicine.

This built in shorthand that the movie gets to use for its vibe-building — putting you back in the emotions of the pandemic — could be considered either a cheat or an economical way to put you in the characters’ mindset, and I think both of those opinions are fair. It worked for me largely because of the Lee and Moura performances and the sometimes prickly way they related to each other. The way the movie balances existential panic and the unexpected joy of family time is nicely played.

The “horror or sci-fi or something” of it all feels less solid, and the deeper the movie goes into that, the less it holds together, both as a compelling thing to watch and as a story with sense-making internal logic. There is both that Netflix-y “remember this thing that happened 10 minutes ago” tendency of over-explaining and some handwaving about the mechanics of everything that is happening, especially as we get into the final act, which still has a bit of an “action goes here, details TK” feel.

Speaking of the “horror…?” genre, Obsession, another one of this year’s “tiny budget, big box office” success stories, is now streaming on Peacock (it is also available for rent or purchase). Obsession’s big scary thing is the deep emotional immaturity of lead male character Bear (Michael Johnston). He is so incapable of expressing his thoughts, feelings and desires that when his crush/co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) comes out and asks him if he likes her, he just sputters something about them being good friends. Cursing himself, he makes a wish: that Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world. Specifically, he makes a wish using a One Wish Willow, a crystal-store novelty purchase that is supposed to grant the one wish he makes before breaking the little willow branch. Bear seems aware of the monkey paw possibilities of this item, making his wish particularly poorly verbalized. But, moments later, Nikki appears, asking to go home with him to his house and flirting with him, but doing it erratically enough that even the desperate Bear wonders what is wrong. And even though part of him believes “dude, Nikki is crazy,” Bear mostly doesn’t care and is just happy to have her suddenly latch herself to him.

Despite some jump scares and odd Nikki smiles and skittery walking, the movie doesn’t feel Horror horror to me, more sort of meanly funny with a side of “you get what you deserve, dummy.” (There is grossness and gore, which picks up as the movie goes along.) Bear is both a lump of bozo and a guy that has stolen the agency of the girl he claims to love. Nikki is broken? Or being psychically held hostage and tortured? You kind of wish the movie would let us see more of her righteous rage.

I didn’t exactly enjoy the movie but there are elements that make me relatively satisfied with having watched it. I’ve seen other critics call out the sound design, and the way the movie uses sound is maybe its biggest special effect, the thing that truly sells some of its weirdest moments. And I am rather impressed with how unlikeable Obsession lets Bear be — I am not exactly rooting for the thing that is tormenting him but I am never rooting for Bear.

Whilst on Peacock, I checked out another spring theatrical release, You, Me & Tuscany(also available for rent or purchase). I think seeing it on a streaming service I’m already paying for is possibly the correct way to see this middling romance confection that feels like less a thing you watch and more a thing you have on. Everybody is very pretty or charming or both in this movie about Anna (Halle Bailey, still reading a little bit like a Disney princess), a culinary school dropout who spends her time drifting between housesitting assignments in New York City, pretending to live the life of her rich clients. After getting fired from a job for wearing the client’s couture, she meets Italian charmer Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), who tells her all about his Tuscan villa. Coincidentally, she has a plane ticket to Tuscany, for a trip she planned to make with her mother before her mother passed away. Anna decides to take that trip and, when she learns that she’s showed up with no hotel reservations during the middle of a popular festival week, she decides Matteo “practically invited” her to stay at his villa and breaks in. Through a series of misunderstandings, Matteo’s mother (Isabella Ferrari) and grandmother (Stefania Casini) believe Anna is Matteo’s new fiancee and Anna, eager not to get arrested, goes along with it. She winds up meeting the whole family, including Matteo’s cousin/adopted brother Michael (Regé-Jean Page), a tall handsome winemaker, as she describes him, who she is even more attracted to than almost-one-night-stand Matteo.

There is nothing surprising about the events here, beautiful people in beautiful clothes in beautiful Italian settings in a story with dialogue that all feels maybe one step up from Netflix rom-com. But it’s pretty to look at and basically inoffensive — though for a movie that talks a lot about food and Anna’s onetime love of cooking, it’s pretty below average on showing us glamour shots of Italian cuisine. I don’t know that Bailey and Page have chemistry, per se, but he is very handsome and, at least twice, he is wet and shirtless and maybe that is close enough to chemistry.

Also on Peacock, among the tonnage of Saturday Night Live content, is Lorne (also a spring release, also now available for rent or purchase), a documentary nominally about Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live, a 50-year-old TV show helmed by a man creeping up on 82 years. Lorne the man seems like he is A Lot, both as a person to have to wrangle for interviews and a person to have as your boss, but Lorne is a fun hang, with SNL luminaries past and present talking about knowing and working for him. As much as we get biographical details about Michaels — born in Canada, left SNL after five years only to come back five seasons later, owns dogs? — the doc gives us the rhythm of the show, both throughout a week of putting it together and throughout the seasons and the flow of cast members. SNL is a bit of a factory that has to put out its product, ready or not, through strong cast and writer years and weaker ones, with great material and with sketches that make Michaels forlornly sigh. It has its winners and its losers and its rebuilding periods. I found the legacy aspect of the story this documentary tells — what the show has been and the uncertainty of what it will be once Michaels is gone — as thoughtful as the stories from John Mulaney and Maya Rudolph and the like are funny.

Featured photo: The Last House.

Spider-Man helps keep the Marvel universe grounded

Neighborhood Spider-Man is the best kind of Spider-Man.

Peter Parker (Tom Holland) returns in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, where he has over some four years established a life of solitude and dedication to crime fighting. Not the big intergalactic crime of Infinity War and Endgame but New York City street crime where the baddies he catches are arrested, often by police detective Jean DeWolf (Liza Colón-Zayas), who likes talking over criminal networks and crime patterns with Spider-Man. But only on the phone — since the Dr. Strange everybody-forgets-Peter-Parker spell, Peter has kept his Spidey strictly profesh, no one knows his identity or sees him with the mask off, even to drink coffee, which sometimes-colleague Frank “The Punisher” Castle (Jon Bernthal) thinks is so dorky.

In the four years since the spell, Peter has watched from afar (i.e. social media) as former best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and former girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) went to MIT and lived their lives without him. It makes him sad, he wants to tell them who he is but also wants to keep them safe. He’s shocked when Ned suddenly walks into a local shop where Peter is hanging out. Peter follows Ned to his new apartment, where Peter sees MJ hanging out with her boyfriend. Perhaps the stress of watching the girl he still loves kiss another dude is what causes the strange headaches he’s been having to go from annoyance to a full-on blackout, from which he awakes to find himself covered in webbing that, in a change of pace for this Peter, didn’t come out of a web shooter but came out of his own person. He also realizes that his Spidey sense is getting much stronger, stronger to the degree that the ambient noise of New York is too much to take.

These changes seem to also be getting in the way of chasing down an elusive baddie (Sadie Sink) who seems to jump from body to body and is targeting the Department of Damage Control, the shady organization that Spider-Man has primarily dealt with in their rehabilitating villains capacity. Spider-Man can, at first at least, track this person throughout their jumps from body to body. But as he finds his abilities going highwire, the shadowy-jumper seems to be a step ahead of him.

This particular baddie’s whole deal is pretty good and I’ll admit, as a person who doesn’t seek out Marvel movie spoilers, I was pleasantly surprised with the reveal. I also liked how the baddie’s designs are specific and limited in scope — this is, for the most part, not a skybeam world-in-peril situation. And even when we rub up against bigger parts of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — Peter asks professor Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) for some sciencey advice and asks Yelena (Florence Pugh) for information on the baddie’s Damage Control aims — it’s narrowly focused on these circumstances.

This movie manages to be about Peter growing and changing and dealing with life’s complexity without being too soggy about it and while still keeping it grounded in the emotions of the characters and a kind of streets-of-New-York sense of reality. And it’s funny in moments, not perhaps as gleeful as earlier Spider-Man outings but still managing lightness and ending with a note of extremely sweet joy.

Featured photo: Spider-Man: Brand New Day

New comedies and other home movie watching fun

I often wonder if a movie I watch at home has to clear a lower bar than a movie I see at the theater.

72 Hours, a new Netflix comedy starring Kevin Hart, feels like it might have been excruciating to watch in a theater. Viewed at home, where I can pause to get a popcorn refill, it is merely very bad — so, evidence of lower bar? Or did I just suffer less?

Hart, who is 47 in real life, plays 40-year-old Joe, a marketing executive gunning for a promotion but failing to wow the room with his latest vodka commercial, which has “how do you do, fellow kids” stink lines wafting off it. How do I pitch to Gen Z? thinks this millennial. Coincidentally, that very day he was also accidentally included in a group chat of 20something dudes headed to Miami for a bachelor party. Because he Venmoed them some drinking money after making fun of their posts, they off-handedly invited him to come along. Failing at work and in a dumb fight with his girlfriend (Teyana Taylor, who I hope was paid really well), Joe decides that he will indeed show up for this stranger’s party weekend, offering to upgrade their rental house and overall experience in exchange for their including him. The bros — groom-to-be Mason (Mason Gooding), his “this is all he’s got in his life right now” buddy Nick (Marcello Hernández), the mourning-a-breakup Hunter (Ben Marshall) and good-natured dummy Freshman (Kam Patterson) — think it’s all very weird but they decide to go with it to have someone pay for a limo.

The movie also piles on gangsters, a subplot where Joe is forced to do cocaine and turns into a Scarface knock-off and a gang of girl criminals posing as a bachelorette party. It feels like someone felt the core comedy situation here wasn’t working so they added on a dozen other things. Which also don’t work.

Here are the “at home” points that I might have been too annoyed to award at a theater: Marcello Hernández is inherently funny and even though this movie doesn’t give him much of a character, he does get a few good lines in. Fun line readings, limited though they are, are doled out to most of the group of bros. Also, maybe one in 10 of the “Millennials versus Zoomers” jokes is a “ha, cute” level of funny.

I feel like the vanity of Kevin Hart — or maybe the writers’ desires to keep him a hero — gets in the way. Born in 1979, real life Hart is a younger Gen X person. Why not have him play his actual age, or older even, to widen the cultural divide? Or why not have him play a younger millennial, experiencing that first existentially painful taste of not being on trend? Why not make him more desperate — the movie doesn’t really go as hard as it could on the weirdness of Joe and his situation. I don’t know that weirding up the movie would have fixed all its problems but it probably couldn’t have made it worse.

For an example of what the tartness of an unself-aware weirdo can bring to a comedy, check out The Dink, on Apple TV, which stars Jake Johnson playing the New Girl’s Nick Miller variant that he does so well.

Here, he is Dusty Boyd, a one-time tennis star whose career ended in his teens after an injury. Now working as a pro at the tennis club his father Chuck (Ed Harris) manages, Dusty is still trying to dine out on his old glories, with fellow employee PJ (Aaron Chen) serving as just enough of a hype man to keep his delusion going. But then Dusty reinjures his wrist and is sent to a doctor (Ben Stiller in a fun cameo part) who suggests Dusty play pickleball to help recover. Dusty, like his father, thinks pickleball is a dorky, not-a-sport endeavor — even though the pickleball crowd (led by Patton Oswalt) is demanding more court space at the club. Dusty plays his first doubles game against retired ladies Gail (Cleo King, who puts extra mustard on her part) and Judy (Lynne Marie Stewart) with his partner Candace (Mary Steenburgen), a woman he first met when he kicked her out of the club for hitting her pickleball into the tennis courts. He hates the game and thinks it’s stupid and, of course, jumps at the chance for a rematch. He also strikes up a friendship with Candace, who is recently divorced and trying to figure things out and is willing to meet him for late night pickleball when he needs some mind-clearing competition.

Even Candace, who admits that, post-divorce, she bought a snake and unsuccessfully attempted pottery, gets to be weird here and I think that helps with this pretty standard sports story that leads up to a big game and a sort of redemption. This movie is lightweight and not terribly taxing but enjoyable enough.

April release The Devil Wears Prada 2 (rent or purchase and as of July 29 streaming on Hulu and Disney+) is a meatier watch. Andy Sacks (Anne Hathaway) did in fact become the important serious journalist she wanted to be back in the 2006 original. And, like so many important serious journalists these days, she gets laid off from her newspaper, in her case via text while accepting a journalism award, giving her an opportunity to go viral tearfully proclaiming that journalism still matters. Meanwhile, Runway magazine, the Vogue-stand-in where she worked her first post-college job, is dealing with a scandal related to a recent story about a fashion brand that turned out to be running a sweatshop. Needing some of Andy’s integrity shine, Runway’s parent company boss, still Irv (Tibor Feldman) from the last movie, hires her to be the features editor — a fact Runway editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) learns on Andy’s first day of work.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a delightfully catty, well-attended, beautiful-to-look-at funeral for a beloved friend, is how I felt watching it. Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt return (as does Tracie Thoms as Andy’s freebie-bag loving friend) and we get newcomers Justin Theroux and B.J. Novak as two different flavors of modern monsters; Lucy Liu and Kenneth Branagh as two different flavors of decency, and Simone Ashley, Caleb Hearon and Helen J. Shen as Kids Today. And everybody is great and fun to watch and does just enough without doing too much. There are some lovely clothes and some good jokes and a nice visual gag about the two belts that looked so different. But throughout I felt an ache at the passing of magazines and newspapers and the desperate condition of those who are left. The constant attempts to save Runway are aimed at saving something that several characters say is a shell of itself — in the real world it would probably be some kind of bi-monthly-ish affair that might still have a September issue but also put out issues labeled just “Winter.”

There is a nice Hollywood spin on this story that, like a lottery ticket and its “maybe it will be me,” feels both fantastical and just plausible enough that, you know, it could happen. And it feels nice watching a fairy tale ending that is actually more about the joys of a career making a print product and female friendship than a romance. On one level, I enjoyed this movie and had a good time watching it. On another level, sniff.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is another movie I avoided seeing when it came out on Netflix in May, largely because My Octopus Teacher and its Oscar win over better documentaries had me wary of schmoopy octopus movies. And, make no mistake, this is a schmoopy octopus movie, but I rather enjoyed its gentle weepy drama and the performances by Sally Field and Lewis Pullman — and Alfred Molina, voicing the octopus Marcellus, who isn’t particularly impressed with his human captors. He does have some fondness for Tova (Field), the woman who works nights cleaning the aquarium where he lives, giving a proper shine to his tank and talking to him all the while. When she injures her ankle putting Marcellus back in his tank — he likes to squidge out of his tank and wander around, eating some of the other exhibited marine life — the aquarium hires Cameron (Pullman) to fill in. Cameron is passing through town looking for the father he never met. When his van, where he is also sleeping, breaks down, he’s eager for the temp work to pay the repair bill. Tova is at first not impressed with Cameron’s mediocre cleaning skills but she teaches him the “right way” to do the job and introduces him to Marcellus, who also begins to have an irritated fondness for Cameron. Humans with their clumsy interpersonal skills are, Marcellus tells us, rather a dense bunch.

This movie is very pleasant, which I know sounds like faint praise but when paired with the lovely Pacific Northwest scenery and the very beautiful cabin-like home Tova lives in makes for a nice relaxing bit of chillout.

After many weeks in theaters, May release Backrooms is nearing $400 million in worldwide box office and is now available for rent or purchase. This A24 horror-I-guess movie has many claims to fame including its less than $10 million reported production cost and its director, Kane Parsons, who was 20 at the time of its release, according to Wikipedia. And all of that is great, sincerely, both for film now, with this summer’s hopeful box office and the constant need for some non-IP wins, and for the future, since it will encourage production companies and studios to keep taking the occasional chance on weird stuff. About the movie itself, my feelings are more complicated.

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the depressed owner of a furniture store who is drinking his way through a divorce, finds a portal to somewhere one night in his store in the 1990s. When he walks through a particular spot in his store’s seemingly solid wall, he finds himself in another room, a mostly empty room with a pile of furniture at its center. That room leads to other rooms, all mostly empty, like a hastily abandoned office space that might still have a desk or a sofa or a stop sign or a cardboard cutout of a caveman that seems to be playing a recording of people speaking multiple languages — you know, normal stuff. The rooms are all lit by fluorescent lights giving off a kind of depressing brightness but that also flicker as he walks through hallways and into new rooms, some of which have tiny doors or slanted floors that at first seem like tricks of perspective. When he hears and almost sees what seems to be another being, he runs back to his store and apparently returns often enough that he is able to draw a map of this new space.

When he tells his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) about all this, her unbelieving reaction spurs Clark to bring his employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett), who has a video camera, to the store to witness and record what he is seeing.

This movie’s real talent is creating mood, putting you in a place not unlike a nightmare, where spatial relationships don’t always make sense and people and objects don’t look correct. In some rooms, furniture doesn’t sit on the floor but more looks like, Star Trek-style, it has transported into it. Half a sofa sticks out of the floor as parts of a chair stick out of the wall. The emptiness and the room-into-room is disconcerting, the furniture is unsettling but then the sense that a not-fully-seen thing might be lurking is terrifying at a core level. It’s a really well constructed, layered kind of terror that this movie sets up. I feel like the movie sort of stops with the set-up; the resolution, such as it is, feels kind of floppy comparatively. But that quiet, slow-motion panic created by wandering through rooms and halls into doors, that’s pretty impressive.

Another vibes-forward movie capturing more of a sense of the world than its literal reality is I Love Boosters, written and directed by Boots Riley and available for rent or purchase after a May theatrical release (that seems tiny, based on its Wikipedia description). Buddies Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) are the leaders of a crew of boosters called the Velvet Gang — along with a few other members providing distractions and get-away driving, the ladies steal clothes from a medium high-end chain run by designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore). When selling these clothes at pop-up sales in their neighborhood, the women seem to both be eager to turn a reasonable profit and feel like they’re offering access to fashion to a community that needs it. If Corvette seems a little mopey about the whole thing, perhaps it’s because she also wants to design clothes and Christie isn’t just a mark but also an idol to her. Or she is until Corvette learns some things about Christie, including that, according to Jianhu (Poppy Liu), another woman doing some boosting, the Chinese factory where Christie’s clothes are made treats the workers terribly, constantly increasing the speeds at which they’re expected to work and getting workers sick due to the “sand-basted denim” process. Jianhu is in the booster game for a little righteous revenge and while she doesn’t have a crew she does have a device that can transport all of the items out of the store in seconds.

There is also a supernaturally hot and intense LaKeith Stanfield and a Ponzi-scheme operator played by Don Cheadle and Eiza Gonzalez as a labor organizer, radicalized when her boss (Will Poulter) explains that she must wear Christie Smith clothes for work and their cost will be taken out of her salary.

Its bendy approach to reality and unrestrained use of color make I Love Boosters a treat to watch and also help deliver a rather warm and fuzzy message about people coming together to support friends, coworkers and a wider community to make change. It’s heartwarming, which is unexpected for a movie with a goofy, very R-rated subplot about Stanfield’s character and a delightful spikey performance from Moore.

Female friendship is also at the core of Ride or Die, an eight-episode series released on Prime Video in July and starring Octavia Spencer and Hannah Waddingham. Debbie (Spencer) is the American wife of a British politician who has long put her own career on hold. Her best friend is Judith (Waddingham), a forensic accountant — so she says. Actually, Judith is an assassin trained to have no emotional attachments but who has long nurtured and protected her friendship with Debbie, the one “real” thing in her life. When Judith’s new assignment turns out to involve Debbie’s terrible husband (Jamie Parker), Judith and Debbie soon find themselves on the run from assorted intelligence agencies and the mob, with their friendship on the ropes as Debbie is horrified to learn what Judith actually does.

Waddingham and Spencer have nice long-time friend chemistry — you buy that they can love each other, be mad at each other and work together all at the same time. Debbie might be a civilian but she has useful skills of her own and their work to find their way out of their potentially deadly situation truly is a buddy endeavor. This maybe didn’t need to be a series, might have been more energetic as a movie, but it makes for a nice watch nonetheless.

Released on Prime Video in January, The Wrecking Crew is perfect for when you just need two hours of dumb goofery to cradle you in its beefy tattooed arms. Navy super soldier James (Dave Bautista) and his half-brother cop Jonny (Jason Momoa) annoyedly reunite in Hawaii after years of estrangement when their father, a private detective, dies in suspicious circumstances. Through their bickering and with the help of their cousin Nani (Frankie Adams), James’ wife Leila (Roimata Fox), Jonny’s ex Valentina (Morena Baccarin) and their father’s assistant Pika (Jacob Batalon), the two anger various mobs to uncover a skeevy plan involving business man Marcus Robichaux (Claes Bang). Explosions, fist fights, shootouts and car smash-ups are sewn together by insults and visual comedy about the size of Momoa and Bautista — and it’s all great. I mean, dumb but great. Momoa is quite skilled at being this kind of a character, mixing in the right bit of silliness with his whole “Hulk smash” deal. He and Bautista, here playing the straight man, work well together, with their “muscle vs. muscle”-ness creating something much lighter and sillier than when they play the muscle men individually.

Featured photo: 72 Hours.