TERMINATOR: DARK FATE

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B

And here we have yet another franchise, which once represented a leap forward in movie making, “wiping the slate clean” of later installments of the film series and just pretending they didn’t exist, relegating them to “alternate timelines.” This has already been done several times over the past decade, from Star Trek to Superman to Halloween. At this point, the practice is so common it practically qualifies as a bandwagon.

So now Terminator has jumped on it, with Terminator: Dark Fate presenting itself as a direct, 28-years-latere sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It ignores the events of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (which was . . . fine), released in 2003; Terminator Salvation (2009); and Terminator Genisys (2015), which was the first of these films I never bothered watching thanks to its diminishing returns. I would have skipped Terminator: Dark Fate as well, but for its hook: the direct sequel to what was by far the best and most successful film in the series, and the return of badass heroine Sarah Connor, as played by Linda Hamilton.

The future those original Terminator movies never envisioned, however, was one ruled by comic book movies. When not even Star Wars has the cultural caché it once had—ironically, thanks to flooding the market with five movies in five years, Marvel-style—what chance does a sixth Terminator movie have?

Not much, unsurprisingly: box office returns are already disappointing. This would mean more if the movie were actually great, but it’s not. It’s fine—honestly, about as good as the long-forgotten Rise of the Machines (remember all the chatter about Arnold Schwarzenegger reviving the role as a transparent means of re-entering the cultural consciousness in the early days of his bid for Governor of California?)—but it needs to be better than that to make any meaningful, lasting impact. The days of massive success for a movie like T2: Judgment Day are long gone.

It’s easy to compare Rise of the Machines from 2003 to Dark Fate, because Dark Fate essentially replaces it as an alternate “part 3.” The only edge Dark Fate has over it, though, is that Linda Hamilton returns, she’s even more of a badass than she was in Judgment Day, and now she’s 63 years old. Her presence, and Hamilton’s deadpan delivery as a no-nonsense maternal figure who also happens to be ruthless, makes Dark Fate far more fun than it ever would be otherwise.

And that’s the thing about it: Dark Fate is undeniably entertaining, if by turns also cheesy and fundamentally lacking in logic. I have two particular points of contention with the logic, the first of which is how Arnold Schwarzenegger’s presence is played out and explained. He plays yet another Terminator, somehow aged thirty years even though he’s a robot, whose motivations here run completely antithetical to the canonical rules of the universe of this franchise, and it makes no sense. He’s not even a “protector” Terminator here, so the idea that he would develop some sense of independence without outside intervention (as happens in Judgment Day) simply doesn’t hold up. I suppose you could argue that Skynet—who no longer exists in this installment, not even in the future—became self aware, so why not a Terminator? Except that all Terminators are Skynet, even those stuck in a past whose future has been changed so Skynet no longer exists. Now it’s “Legion.” Are you following this?

Anyway! That brings me to my second point of contention: the “protector” sent to keep the young heroine out of harm’s way this time around is Grace (Mackenzie Davis), an “augmented human.” Grace not being a robot herself—albeit with robotic elements grafted under her skin—may seem like a fresh take on the role, except practically speaking, it sure seems like a step backward from what once amounted to near-indestructible Terminator vs. near-indestructible Terminator. Maybe in this new alternative future Sarah Connor created, they never actually got around to making “protector” Terminators. We can rationalize anything if we try hard enough!

By the way, spoiler alert! John Connor is dead now. He is dispatched early on in the narrative of this film, a flashback to the late nineties, in a matter of minutes negating everything done in Judgment Day to stop it. I guess that’s one way to explain the continued absence of Edward Furlong. There is a new young person fated to be the leader of the future, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), a young woman from Mexico City. Side note: one of the few uniquely compelling elements of Dark Fate is how downtrodden Latinos and illegal border crossings are woven into the plot. Another is that the future “savior” is now a woman, as opposed to some woman’s son.

It’s often said that movies are only as good as their villains, and on that point Dark Fate stands on questionable ground. Gabriel Luna presents as a similar villain to Judgment Day’s Robert Patrick, but nowhere near as sinister, with a much more wholesome look about him. Also, again this Terminator can appear as any human it touches, which means it appears as other characters so often, Luna’s cumulative screen time is not all that long.

There’s also the legacy of James Cameron movies representing huge leaps forward in special effects technology, of which Judgment Day was a prime example (followed by the likes of Titanic and Avatar). Not one subsequent Terminator sequel has come even close on this front. In fact, in sharp contrast to when Robert Patrick melted into mercury-like metal and wowed viewers, we watch Diego Luna morph into a slicked black substance reminiscent of oil and we think, I’ve seen better. In Cameron’s defense, he did not direct this one (Deadpool’s Tim Miller did), but he did return for the first time as producer, and also gets a story credit. Frankly, writing was never one of James Cameron’s strengths.

In spite of these many criticisms, though, it all comes back to Linda Hamilton. Without her, I would happily dismiss Terminator: Dark Fate outright. If you were a huge fan of the first couple of Terminator movies, Dark Fate will provide some closure and some satisfaction the other subsequent sequels couldn’t. It’s the fifth time Arnold Schwarzenegger has appeared in these movies (the one exception being Terminator Salvation), and his very presence feels shoehorned in just as an excuse to reunite him with Hamilton (who comes in second by appearing in three of them). It can’t be denied, though: it is fun to see them together onscreen again. Dark Fate is dark and preposterous and sometimes dumb and cheesy, but I won’t lie: it’s never not fun.

Uneasy allies bast away at a common enemy: logic in action movies.

Overall: B

THE LIGHTHOUSE

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-

What. the fuck

?

Overall: B+

PARASITE

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-

If you were to go into Parasite cold, with no prior knowledge of anything about it, it would likely be a delightful surprise—and one that slowly reveals itself as such. It takes a left turn about halfway through that suddenly makes everything much more interesting. And, ironically for me, most of the (probably few) people who read this review would still have that effect, if you happen to decide to see the film even after reading what I have to say about it.

Because the thing is, most of you haven’t spent weeks, even months, hearing about the many layers of success this film is enjoying: film festival awards, near-universal critical adoration, staggering per-screen box office earnings in limited U.S. release. So you could hear about it just this once, seeing this contextualization just once in this very review, and not be much affected by it, beyond thinking, Maybe I should see that. The key difference, and the slight problem from my end, is that I’ve been reading and hearing about it for so long that I have come to expect a level of greatness it could never live up to. The level of hype for this movie is rivaling that of last year’s Roma, which was more deserving of any argument that it was a “masterpiece.” And even that film had certain elements that did not live up to the hype, although its technical achievements were objectively jaw-dropping.

Parasite is a memorably well-made movie, but is really not on the same level. It’s worth seeing, but perhaps not worth evangelizing for. I went in expecting—or at least hoping for—something that would blow me away, and instead I spent half the movie thinking, This is … fine.

That said, Parasite is a slow burn, and in the end it more than justifies itself. Anyone even remotely familiar with the work of Bong Joon Ho (The Host, Snowpiercer) knows to expect that, at some point in the movie, the story will suddenly veer into bonkers territory. And although The Parasite is his most straightforward drama to date, less directly tied to specific genre than his other films, it is still no exception. What makes it stand out is that it has something to say, specifically about class divides.

It’s entirely possible there is a lot about Parasite I could not quite appreciate properly unless I had a working knowledge of South Korean culture and economics, both how they mirror similar issues in other countries around the world and how they are unique to Bong Joon Ho’s native country. I’m willing to accept the idea that I did, I might hold this movie higher up as an example of essential cinema. As it is, from my outsider perspective, it strikes me as just another movie exploring income inequality, with a slightly exotic sensibility.

With any knowledge of Bong Joon Ho’s previous work, you might understandably be tempted to take the title Parasite literally. Two of his previous films were about weird animals, after all (in addition to The Host in 2007, South Korea’s answer to Godzilla, there was the genetically engineered “superpig” of 2017’s Okja). This time, though, it’s entirely metaphorical: an unemployed and near-destitute family of four, with two young adult children, infiltrates a wealthy family by pretending to be qualified to work the jobs for which they get hired: an English language tutor; an art teacher; a cheaufur; a housekeeper. It’s the young son who gets in the door first as the tutor, and one by one, using a mix of expertly applied con artistry and carefully calibrated “personal recommendations,” they all get each other hired in other household positions.

The parts that I cannot tell here for fear of spoiling things are the things that make Parasite worth recommending. Well into the story, new characters are introduced in ways both surprising and understandable; complications arise that lead to both uniquely executed nuance and spurts of moderately graphic violence.

Overall, Parasite is presented with a level of controlled understatement that belies Bong Joon Ho’s usual directorial style. He’s usually much more over-the-top than this, but a strong case could be made that this is his best movie. It’s certainly very well shot and edited.

For me, though, it continues an impressive track record of consistency. This is my fourth review of a Bong Joon Ho film, and in all four cases I’ve given him a B+. This man’s movies are never for everyone, but for those they do speak to, they speak incredibly well. None quite reach the level of “masterwork,” however—frankly, he’s just too weird. Parasite is by some distance the least-weird of his movies, though, which thus makes it likely his most accessible. Plenty of people who can’t get onboard with his other films will have an easier time doing so with this one, and it will be worth the effort.

A poser gets in over his head.

Overall: B+

ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B

As sequels go, Zombieland: Double Tap is pretty old-school standard. It reassembles the cast of an original project, rehashes all the same basic plot points, and attempts to up the ante with the humor and/or action, then winds up falling short of its goals on both counts.

The only thing particularly unusual about it is the full decade—to the month—between the release of the original and that of this sequel. Sure, we live in an era when there is no expiration date on sequels, with some coming multiple decades later, but still, by and large, anyone seeking to cash in with a sequel tends to do so within two or three years if they can. And indeed they did try, when the original Zombieland gained a cult following in the years immediately after its release in 2009. Director Ruben Fleischer, along with original co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick reportedly had to go through several iterations and drafts before all of them, as well as all the stars, could agree on a story concept that was “just right.”

The thing is, I didn’t ever think the original was that great, so it’s not like there was a high bar there. It wasn’t terrible, either; it was fine—I gave it a B-, just as I’m giving this one. My guess is I’d give this one a lower grade it I revisited the original film, but I didn’t bother. I feel confident Double Tap is more enjoyable with the original being a more distant memory. Otherwise it would just feel like a broad rehash. Which it basically is. But, if you just take it for what it is, it’s still entertaining enough.

Still, you might wonder: why the hell did I even bother seeing this one, then? In my case, it’s mostly about the evolving nature of cinema. Ten years ago was many years before anyone even had a thought about monthly subscription services to a movie theater chain. “Apps” and smartphones were still just a few years old then. Now? I pay a monthly fee to see up to three movies at an AMC Theater per week—a threshold I almost never meet—and, so far at least, it’s cheap enough that each month it pays for itself after seeing all of two full-price movies. Beyond that, it’s basically like getting to go to the movies for free. In short, I saw this movie because I had nothing better to do on a Thursday evening, it effectively cost me nothing to do so, and there was nothing better playing. I was tired of zombie movies even by 2009, and I would never have paid a separate ticket price to see this.

I did write in my 2009 review of the original that “this movie will be easily forgotten in no time at all,” and evidently I was wrong about that. I’m inclined to say the same thing of Double Tap, and then double down on the prediction even though I was wrong the first time around. It’s doing okay at the box office for its first week, but gaining a cult following is a lot harder to achieve anymore, with so many quality choices of new entertainment everywhere you look. Who needs to obsessively re-watch anything anymore?

I never needed to re-watch Zombieland, and I’m unlikely ever to find occasion to re-watch Zombieland: Double Tap. For the moment, it’s fun to see the same four core characters—Woody Harrelson as Tallahassee; Jesse Eisenberg as Columbus; Emma Stone as Wichita; Abigail Breslin as Little Rock—in the same universe but aged ten years. Breslin’s change is of course the most dramatic, as she was all of 13 when the first film was released. She kick-starts the plot this time by running off with a hippie named Berkeley (Avan Jogia) who somehow survived all the zombies by being a pacifist and refusing ever to use a gun.

The rest of the gang sets off to find her, now joined by the best new addition this time around, the ditzy “Madison” played by Zoet Deutch. She’s discovered in an abandoned mall having survived by hiding in a refrigerator.

Speaking of which, how does all this electricity keep working, anyway? Simple! A throwaway line explains that continued rain has kept dams running and therefore keeping up hydroelectric power. Don’t such facilities still need people with functioning brains to keep them running? Whatever, it’s just a movie.

There is a sprinkling of fun cameos: Luke Wilson, Thomas Middleditch, Al Roker. Rosario Dawson fills a key supporting role. Bill Murray factors in again, because of course everything that people loved about the original must be revisited. In the end, that’s what makes Double Tap a prototypical sequel: returning to the same well, with diminishing returns. The Bill Murray bit this time around is more exciting than it was before, I’ll give it that. One could argue, however, that novelty has greater value, and you’ll find none of that here.

What you will find is a climactic battle sequence that is preposterous even by this movie’s low standards, but remains fun due to its consistency of spirit. It’s basically a monster truck rally for zombie lovers. And lovers of the original Zombieland will like this one just fine, though no one will say it’s better. It’s a comfortingly amusing hang with old friends who have nothing new to say.

Maybe in another ten years will get a third one that’s even more blandly entertaining!

Overall: B-

DOLEMITE IS MY NAME

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

Perhaps it’s just a quirk of Eddie Murphy’s career that he manages one role per decade that showcases real acting chops, which he never had much reason to tap when he was making money hand over fist with the countless comedies of his early career. But then came Boomerang (1999), a film I never liked particularly but which caught the attention of critics in a way Murphy never had; he followed that up with several years of dumb comedies which, again, made him lots of money. And then he came within striking distance of Oscar gold with his supporting part in Dreamgirls (2006).

Now comes Dolemite Is My Name, Eddie Murphy’s first starring role since technically 2016, but his first that anyone has paid any attention to since about 2012. It’s fair to say the 2010s has not been this man’s most fruitful decade, and certainly not his greatest in terms of quality. It would also be fair to call his part in Dolemite Is My Name a comeback role, as it’s easily his best film in nearly twenty years.

Unfortunately, that’s not exactly a high bar, and although it’s generated a fair amount of buzz, Dolemite Is My Name is not going to be part of any 2019 Oscar conversations. As directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan), this film has moments where it kind of feels like he’s not paying attention to everything going onscreen. More than once I noticed supporting actors, who were barely more than extras, basically over-acting. How many times does a person need to shrug nervously?

The story of “Dolemite,” an alter ego created by a musician and comedian named Rudy Ray Moore (here played by Eddie Murphy), is a true one, however. And if that story tells us anything, it tells us the importance of a target audience—and in this case, the target audience is not especially Academy voters. I wouldn’t say it’s particularly critics, either, although by and large they are certainly on board with this movie. There is a scene rather late in the film that is very telling: in a limousine on the way to the premier of the Dolemite movie, the “blacksploitation” flick that was actually the first of many featuring Moore in the mid- to late-seventies, the actors read the movie’s terrible reviews to each other. They are briefly dejected, until they notice the massive crowd at the theatre, eagerly waiting to see the movie. In other words, no matter what the critics say, there’s an audience out there if you know how to find it.

That said, I’m not sure Dolemite Is My Name will find the same kind of passionate audience. A movie about a guy who made blacksploitation movies is a little different from actual blacksploitation movies, after all. There’s no doubt that people within the industry have real affection for “Dolemite,” given the actors involved: Keegan-Michael Key as the script writer; Wesley Snipes as the movie’s perpetually exasperated director (and giving a delivery, curiously, very similar to the one he gave in To Wong Foo, even though this time he plays a straight character). Smaller supporting roles are filled also by the likes of Snoop Dogg as a radio DJ; Craig Robinson as a fellow musician; Chris Rock as yet another DJ; and Tituss Burgess and Mike Epps as more of Rudy’s friends helping him make the movie. All of these actors have their fans, to be sure, but we now live in an era where box office depends far more on IP than on actors, and how many people actually remember Dolemite?

That has no bearing on how good this movie is, to be fair. I would call it “decent,” but as a gay white guy, I’m not sure I fit all that squarely into the target demographic. I hate pretty much any movie by Tyler Perry, after all, but that is a man who knows his audience and he makes shit tons of money. I will say this: Eddie Murphy’s performance is good enough to elevate the film single-handedly, and honestly, the acting is solid all around. Even Snoop Dogg, who is not exactly known as an “actor,” holds his own. Dolemite Is My Name is also very well shot, and has excellent production design, and especially, costume design. It’s set in the seventies and the outfits are almost worth the price of admission on their own.

I still have a couple specific quibbles. Rudy casts a very heavy woman, Lady Reeed (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), to stay in Dolemite, and the script of Dolemite Is My Name makes multiple references to her being supposedly “unsexy.” In one exchange, she literally says, “I may not be sexy, but…”—would it kill the people making this movie to have even one other character tell her she actually is sexy? Let alone have her come to the realization herself? Similarly, Tituss Burgess is revealed to be playing in openly gay character in only one scene, at a barbeque where he makes a crack that indicates his desire for men. Rudy says something along the lines of, “Come on, we’re eating,” and the script just leaves it at that. To the movie’s credit, it’s very clear all the other characters accept this man for who he is. Why include that line at all?

Beyond such nitpicks, though, Dolemite Is My Name tells the tale of a man so tenacious and ambitious he made his dreams come true on his own terms even when people were closing doors on him at every turn. I can’t decide whether this movie would work as well had it been a complete work of fiction, but knowing it’s based on a true story changes the context, as well as what it generally means to the viewer. And as a personality, in his truly unique way, Rudy Ray Moore was an inspiration. And this movie has that much going for it, at least.

Fuckin’ up mothafuckas is his game. He reminds us of this frequently.

Overall: B

WHERE'S MY ROY COHN?

Directing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

By all accounts, Roy Cohn was the Crown Prince of Creeps. This was the man not only forever notorious as Chief Council to Joseph McCarthy at the height of anti-Communist fervor in the fifties, but he was instrumental in procuring the unjustified death penalty for Ethel Rosenberg, who was convicted of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union in 1951. Cohn also made Donald Trump is protégé.

This was a man who, when confronted with the evidence that Ethel Rosenberg had been innocent, doubled down and stated that if he could, he would have pulled the electric chair lever himself. Where else could Donald Trump have learned to double down on his “conviction” that the Exonerated 5—formerly known as the Central Park 5—still deserved to be imprisoned, even after they were proved innocent?

Where’s My Roy Cohn?, the new documentary about the sinister lawyer, doesn’t get into that specific case, but it doesn’t need to. A fair amount of Cohn’s relationship with Trump gets focus, and the subtext is clear: if Donald Trump is an unrepentant piece of shit, Roy Cohn is the asshole who shat him out.

Much of Cohn’s story won’t be anything new to anyone old enough to remember when he was still alive; he lived to the age of 59, dying of AIDS in 1986. Until this film, though, the majority of my exposure to him as a historical figure was Al Pacino’s depiction of him in the 2003 HBO miniseries adaptation of the Tony Kushner play Angels in America. Meryl Streep played the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, tormenting Cohn on his death bed. That story focuses broadly on queer issues in America at the height of the AIDS crisis, with Roy Cohn as one of many narrative threads. (It holds up, incidentally: seek if out.)

For those of us who had barely reached the age of ten by the time Roy Cohn died, Where’s My Roy Cohn? is illuminating in a multitude of ways. Who knew Barbara Walters was one of the 37 character witnesses—alongside Donald Trump himself—to defend Cohn at his disbarment hearing? Suddenly my respect for Walters has plummeted. So he did her family a couple of favors, and that earns this transparently despicable man her enduring loyalty?

There are moments when this film skirts with hyperbole, as it pertains to Cohn’s influence on virtually all of modern American history, including the fates of two of America’s worst presidents. The other one would be Ronald Reagan, the man who turned a blind eye to AIDS for many years, and still lent Cohn the favor of special treatment, getting him access to experimental drugs he would never have gotten otherwise. Roy Cohn was his entire life, and to the end, a pathological liar about both his sexuality and his HIV status, never once admitting to either, in spite of both being widely known and the subject of multiple lines of questioning in interviews.

There is one particularly questionable choice on the part of the director, Matt Tyrnauer. One of the interview subjects, one of several cousins interviewed (an only child, Cohn had no siblings), recalls asking Roy of his nearly daily rotation of male sexual partners if he’s “the boy or the girl,” and apparently Roy replied, “I’m the girl.” And this begs the question: who gives a shit? Anyone who thinks it has any relevance whatsoever is victim to ignorant, regressive thinking, and its inclusion here is reckless at worst and clueless at best.

It’s also the only glaring misstep in the telling of Roy Cohn’s story here, a distant second being a slight tendency to traffic in shorthand when it comes to what was once Cohn’s most infamous life moments. But the Rosenberg conviction was 68 years ago; the McCarthy hearings were 65 years ago; his death of AIDS 33 years ago. Some of these things—particularly the McCarthy stuff—might still get regular play in TV montages, but they are rarely fully contextualized to the extent that they are here. And for the most part, Roy Cohn’s life is very well contextualized by this film, in a way that makes absolutely clear how relevant his legacy is to the state of American politics, culture, and public discourse in 2019. I’d be hard pressed to call Where’s My Roy Cohn? “entertaining,” but it is certainly fascinating.

Devil with the Stars and Stripes on.

Overall: B+

THE ADDAMS FAMILY

Directing: C
Acting: B-
Writing: C
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C
Animation: C+

I know full well I’ll sound like an old fart when I say this, but the target audience for this animated feature film of The Addams Family was many years from even being born when the 1991 live action version was released, and boy howdy, these kids have no idea what they missed. Of course, the irony in such a statement is how anyone my age in 1991 likely said the same of kids then who were not familiar with the TV show, which ran two seasons between 1964 and 1966. And it goes back even further: perhaps elders in the sixties said the very same thing of Charles Addams’s original New Yorker cartoons, which debuted in 1938.

There have been other iterations, including different Saturday morning cartoon series in both the seventies and the nineties—the latter no doubt cashing in on the success of the 1991 film—but Barry Sonnenfeld offered its first theatrically released motion picture treatment in the nineties. Reviews at the time were somewhat mixed, but perhaps no one in 1991 had any idea how well the film would still hold up nearly thirty years later. Both it and its 1993 sequel, Addams Family Values, still contain far fresher wit and visual invention than the film released just last Friday can manage even to strain for.

What makes The Addams Family work is its characters’ understated behaviors within overtly ridiculous circumstances and environments. There’s a uniquely deadpan aspect to the delivery, which, to be fair, the voice work actually attempts here—and by a cast comprised of vast amounts of talent: Oscar Isaac as Gomez; Charlize Theron as Morticia; Chlöe Grace Moretz as Wednesday; Bette Midler as Grandma; Allison Janney as Margaux the vapidly cheery real estate agent; even cameos by Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara as Morticia’s deceased parents. But getting so many actors of such caliber together means little when you can’t actually see them performing, and the animation regularly moves away from the dark humor of the property’s origins to outright zaniness. That just doesn’t quite fit the brand. Give me Anjelica Huston an Raul Julia any day; those were people who got it.

Speaking of which, the drawn design of Gomez seems very much like an even cross between Raul Julia—whose natural Puerto Rican accent from the live action films Oscar Isaac is apparently channeling—and John Astin, who played the part in the sixties series. That said, take a look at any of the original New Yorker cartoons and they are clearly a direct inspiration for how the 2019 Addamses are drawn. This is an objectively respectable choice; would that the script, by Matt Lieberman (The Christmas Chronicles), could have lived up to it.

Because ultimately, it’s the story that’s the problem: 2019 The Addams Family has nothing new to offer. It just bounces all over well-worn territory, falling far short of updating its darkly comic sensibility in any of the ways it could have. This would be the first time the Addamses are shown with access to mobile devices, which you would expect to be fertile territory. Instead, smartphones factor into the plot in a way that feels shoehorned in. At least one gag lands, involving Thing’s use of a laptop. With the exception of a sprinkle of authentically inspired chuckles, most of the gags land with a groaning thud.

The Adams Family here is just to . . . cutesy. It’s often outright corny. This is a family whose ideas are supposed to be genuinely subversive, truly dark and twisted but with a wink. The whole notion of “accepting people for who they really are,” a running theme with this family through the decades, only works on a genuine level when there’s a twisted edge to their satire of what we think of as “normal.” This movie, aimed at kids and hammering hard on the “accept differences” message, is all wink and no bite.

Also, as directed by Greg Tiernan and Conran Vernon (Sausage Party), it’s broadly unsubtle. Much of the visuals feature a tornado of movements and explosions (literally: Pugsley, voiced by Finn Wolfhard, has a penchant for explosives). This wouldn’t be so bad if the chaos onscreen had an ounce of clever inspiration to it, but it does not, and neither does the rest of this movie. Unless you want to consider the casting of Snoop Dogg to voice the gibberish of Cousin It “inspired.”

The Addams Family had its time. It had its moments, and they are long passed. The old cartoons hold up; much of the original TV show remains watchable; the live action films from the nineties are eminently rewatchable, deliciously dark comedies. This animated feature is so forgettable no one will remember or care it ever existed before the week is out.

Not what they used to be.

Overall: C+

LUCY IN THE SKY

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: C
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

Indicating a movie was “inspired by true events” is always a tricky proposition. How can I not wonder how much of the story is based on truth, and how much is embellished? Especially when it culminates in a “what the fuck, you’ve got to be kidding” ending? You can bet I made a beeline for the nearest Internet browser as soon as the movie was over. Turns out, the events immediately leading up to the arrest of astronaut Lida Nowak, on whom “Lucy Cola” is based, were indeed quite similar to those depicted in Lucy in the Sky, albeit with fewer of the principal players present. I guess in the movies, if you have Jon Hamm on hand, you want to keep him onscreen as much as you can.

An attempted kidnapping isn’t even the first Wait—what? moment in the movie. The most egregious is when Lucy is stocking up for the trip, and she pops into a store where she picks up supplies like a knife, duct tape, rope, and a wig in what is apparently the “Psycho Kidnapper’s Supplies” aisle.

It’s too bad there are moments like this at all in this movie, as they are few at least until the very end. Before that, director Noah Hawley, whose previous work mostly consists of writing for television shows like Bones, Legion and Fargo (his previous directing experience limited to five episodes among those shows), is on to something. He has ideas worth exploring in Lucy in the Sky, with an astronaut emotionally unraveling as she can’t cope with returning to Earth after time in space blew her mind. He just doesn’t explore them with any clarity.

His peculiar visual choices don’t help. Never before have I seen a movie that is so fast and loose with aspect ratios, which change with such frequency it’s to the point of distraction. Until the kind of bonkers climax, I was fairly on board with the narrative flow, yet prevented from full immersion by the constantly changing height and width of the picture. And I do mean constant: black boxes would close in on both sides, or from the top and bottom, and then zoom right back out again in a single scene. In some instances, the image is roughly square. In a few cases, the picture narrows vertically to such an extent that it looks like someone got slaphappy with the “panorama” feature on their smartphone. It’s an interesting idea, I suppose, presumably intended to evoke Lucy’s emotional state. I could only find myself wondering about its necessity.

Often, though, what’s actually composed within these constantly changing frames is quite visually compelling, a kaleidoscope of visions and memories and waking dream sequences, in one case an apparent hallucination, and several lovely shots taken from so far over neighborhoods and streets they evoke the passing of satellites overhead.

Lucy in the Sky would be much worse if not for Natalie Portman as the title character. People love to drag her for her accent work, first in Jackie and now as a Texan here. Admittedly I do not have a nuanced ear for southern accents, but she sounded great to me. In fact, Portman is easily the best thing about this movie. Most of the others, including Jon Hamm, are merely serviceable. The only other possible exceptions are Dan Stevens as Lucy’s increasingly worried and exasperated husband (a kind of nice reversal of the usual gender roles in stories of this sort), and Pearl Amanda Dickson as Lucy’s visiting teenage niece, Blue Ivy.

These actors, and even the script, are engaging enough for the first three quarters of the run time to make all the moving picture shapes almost forgivable. But then Lucy in the Sky approaches its climax, and it goes off the rails in spectacular fashion. True, the life of the real astronaut by whom this was “inspired” did the same. But the movie would have been crazy enough had it stuck to what actually happened, rather than piling on extra fictional details—like the presence of a gun—that serve no real purpose other than eye-rolling melodrama.

And by the sound of things, Lisa Nowak was maybe just kind of nuts. Real-life astronauts have weighed on on the implausibility of this film’s very premise that several days in space might cause them to lose their grip on reality. In other words, Lucy in the Sky is a pure fantasy, and a potentially problematic one at that. At least it’s also an intermittently pretty one, I guess.

Somebody’s in over her head!

Overall: B-

MS. PURPLE

Directing: B-
Acting: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: C
Editing: B

I could see why some critics enjoyed Ms. Purple, a very small-budget drama about a Korean American family in Los Angeles, with a particular focus on the grown daughter who works as a karaoke bar hostess in Koreatown. For the life of me, I could not find a way in, to connect with it in any real way.

The largely amateur sensibility of director and co-writer Justin Chon — probably best known as Eric from the Twilight series, but here directing a feature film for the third time — is a pretty significant barrier. But, I was most consistently distracted and irritated by Ante Cheng’s cinematography. Making pointlessly liberal use of slow-motion effects to convey, I guess, a sort of dreamlike state in a film that otherwise never means to be “dreamlike,” most scenes look as though they were shot by someone who saw great cinematography in other, far better films and took great pains to emulate it, without any visual cohesion.

I’ll grant that the story, largely mystifying at first, starts coming together in unexpectedly satisfying ways in the last act. It’s enough to make me feel like I did not completely waste my time. I still don’t feel like I would missed out on anything special had I not bothered to see this movie to begin with, but whatever.

At the very lest, the acting is . . . fine. Tiffany Chu plays Kasie, the central character, who struggles to make ends meet as she lives alone with her unconscious, bedridden father in obvious need of hospice. When the live-in caretaker can’t take it anymore and resigns, Kasie calls up her estranged brother Carey (Teddy Lee) to ask for help. He actually shows up, although soon enough a relatively twisted family life reveals itself in flashbacks, and we see Carey screaming at his unconscious father’s face. We eventually learn that his and Kasie’s mother left them all when they were young children, although the story never reveals nearly enough about how or why.

Such is the case with much of this story, which follows Kasie around, largely at the karaoke bar where she works, with clients often indifferent to her relatively listless presence. When Ms. Purple begins, it’s with several minutes following her around such environments, with no straightforward dialogue. I began to when we’d start hearing people speak in audible and complete sentences. We eventually learn about a man in Kasie’s life who gives her large sums of money and, although her role in his life is never defined as such, treats her basically like a call girl.

I spent a lot of time watching Ms. Purple with my attention waxing and waning, but there is a scene near the end that certainly got my attention, in which Kasie is involved in a violent incident, coming to the defense of a client getting belligerent with another hostess. A bit of a melee occurs, but a ton of the other women working there come rushing in, to her defense. I’d be much more interested in a movie about the dynamics and interpersonal relationships among these women, a sort of Koreatown Karaoke version of Hustlers.

But, this is the one I got. There are some “aha moments” as certain childhood traumas inform this set of siblings’ current life circumstances, and a bit more life gets injected into the story. Indeed, the broader story arc is a lot better constructed than most of the actual dialogue, which is often rambling and aimless. It’s easier to appreciate the big picture than the details in this movie.

Waiting for the break.

Overall: B-

CHAINED FOR LIFE

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B-

Sometimes a movie is thematically ambitious in a way the production can’t keep up. Such appears to be the case with Chained for Life, a movie deemed so obscure that it plays exclusively today and tomorrow at the SIFF Film Center at Seattle Center, destined to be watched eventually on some streaming service by . . . almost no one. It’s true the showing I attended was the first of the day at 3 p.m., but still only five people in the audience seems a little sparse. This movie is far from perfect but it deserves better than that.

Then again, it could be argued it deserves better than an editing style that only serves to rob the narrative of any real clarity. Writer-director Aaron Schimberg is clearly influenced by Robert Altman, both with his multiple characters talking over each other and with camera movements that quickly zoom in on faces with a semi-rapidly veering style that feels like a reference to a bygone era of cinema. He also has something to say about beauty, and about how people with disabilities or deformities find their way into a culture’s ongoing narrative of beauty.

Chained for Life is a movie-within-a-movie, about the production of a movie called Marked for Life, in which disfigured people meet up with a doctor who can offer them miracle corrective surgeries. But, before any such surgery occurs, blind woman Mabel (Jess Weixler) falls in love with Rosenthal, who has neurofibromatosis, a condition which causes noncancerous tumors to grow along someone’s nerves. Rosenthal is played by Adam Pearson — previously seen in a small part in 2014’s Under the Skin — who actually has the same condition.

In fact, Weixler and Pearson are surrounded by a supporting cast playing characters who also have the same respective conditions they have in real life. Or at least, they do inside the movie-within-the-movie. It’s unclear how for real-real all the conditions are, such as the “hermaphrodite” who presents as two genders literally split down the middle, or the pair of young women who are conjoined twins. Some of them are unavoidably authentic, such as the super-tall man, or the little person, or the little person who is also a wheelchair user.

Watching Chained for Life, it feels like this ambiguity is the point, and I’m just not sure how effective that is. I left the movie having no idea what I was supposed to have gotten out of it, although it certainly has some compelling and provocative ideas. Schimberg deliberately blurs the lines between fact and fiction, though, regularly cutting from dialogue between cast and crew on the set of Marked for Life, directly to a scene of dialogue between the “othered” characters, only after several minutes revealing they are actually acting out a scene rather than having a real conversation outside the making of the movie. There’s even one sequence that is rather shocking and later reveals itself not to be either an on-set scene or a “real world” occurrence, but rather some kind of projected dark fantasy. At least, I think it was.

Chained for Life seems a little like a modern take on the 1932 film Freaks, with that famous scene of “circus freaks” chanting the phrase “One of us! One of us!” It’s definitely a point of reference for Schimberg, where he sort of flips that narrative, having that very phrase repeated by a couple of the so-called “normal” people.

I keep wondering how the disabled and/or disfigured actors felt about this movie, and their involvement with it. It’s easy to assume they we on board with however Schimberg’s script appeared to them, although of course they would not have any idea while filming how it would look edited and on camera (although, ironically, there is a scene in which all said characters gather in a small screening room to watch dailies). On the other hand, it’s also easy to imagine actors with all manner of disabilities, who get very few acting opportunities otherwise, simply being happy for the work. Does this movie make sense to them? Does it matter?

From scene to scene, I found Chained for Life compelling enough, until it jumped to another scene that deliberately avoided making clear whether we were supposed to take it at face value or as a performance of a scene on set. Even the acting skill among this ensemble cast is all over the place, and it’s hard to tell if a lot of them are just supposed to be playing bad actors, or if the acting just isn’t great on average in this movie. Nearly all of them range from wooden to noticeably performative, even when we’re watching crew members talk amongst themselves.

The critical consensus for this movie seems to be pretty positive, although I can’t help but wonder how much of that is informed by condescension. I was more bemused by it than anything.

Contemplating the film’s own question, “Is this exploitative”? First let’s try to make sense of the story.

Overall: B-