DOWNHILL

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

Valentine’s Day weekend was an odd choice for the release date of Downhill, which is, for the most part, the depiction of a relationship going downhill. I suppose it kind of has a happy ending in the end, which sets it apart from the critically acclaimed Swedish dramedy on which it’s based, Force Majeure (2014), which had much darker undertones to it. Somehow, Downhill, an American version of the same story starring Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is getting mixed reviews at best—and yet, I like this version better. Back in 2014, I wrote that Force Majeure was beautifully shot but glacially paced, and “this turns what could have been a tightly polished 90-minute movie into a rather slow 118-minute film.” Well, guess how long Downhill is? 86 minutes!

Admittedly, Downhill’s cinematographer Danny Cohen is not nearly as concerned with impactful visuals. The cinematography here, amongst beautiful snowy mountain vistas, rarely makes much of an impression. That’s the one thing I would say Force Majeure has on it. Otherwise, the much greater critical response to the original is perhaps indicative of the type of movie favored by film snobs, whereas Downhill appeals more to people who just enjoy a good, brisk, engaging movie that is by turns entertaining and thought provoking.

Most importantly, Downhill is extremely well cast, especially for American audiences. Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus give very good performances and are totally believable as a longtime married couple with two young teenage children. And perhaps the most key element is the supporting performances of the boys, Juiian Grey (13) and Ammon Jacob Ford (also 13). It’s rare to find kids who give nuanced, believably unself-conscious and human performances in movies, and although their parts are much smaller, both these boys pull it off with impressive skill.

Now, Miranda Otto as the semi-nutty hostess at the hotel is a bit of an odd, left-field choice. Her character’s presence doesn’t quite break down this movie’s construction, but it comes within spitting distance—and it certainly doesn’t make it any better. At best, it is a distraction from the inciting incident of the entire story: a family of four on a ski vacation is terrorized by what turns out to have been a controlled avalanche during an outdoor patio lunch, and in the heat of the moment when they all think they are going to die, the dad just grabs his phone and makes a run for it, leaving his bewildered family behind.

This makes for a lot of subsequently awkward moments, and co-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash slowly but steadily dial up the tension. Pete has made his wife and children feel as though he doesn’t have what it takes to be there for them when it counts. And to be fair to the critics, the way Downhill ends is contrived in a fairly transparent—not to mention specifically Hollywood American—way, leaving things far less ambiguous than in the original story. It doesn’t alter the story that much, though, and it’s not enough to make the movie bad. In fact, to be sure, most American audiences will like the way things wrap up better here than they ever would have in the original Swedish film.

So that sort of turns this remake to the question of “art vs. commerce.” Critics might find the foreign film to be a masterpiece, but general audiences will prefer this Americanized version, with American comic icons as its two stars. Downhill is at times a bit cornier than it needs to be, and it could have some more emphasis on the philosophical questions it raises. But, you can also find the original provocative ideas if you look for them. Also, fun fact: the Norwegian actor Kristofre Hivju, who here appears as the safety department representative at the ski resort, is in both films.

Downhill is neither hilarious nor particularly dramatic, but it exists in a peculiar space in between, skirting the boundaries of amusement and discomfort. With different actors, it perhaps would not have worked. But all four of the actors who make up this family are what make this movie worth seeing.

Be careful how you react when you see what’s coming.

Overall: B+

GRETEL & HANSEL

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

I’m having a hard time deciding who this movie Gretel & Hansel is for, exactly. This is a relatively faithful adaptation of an old-school Brothers Grimm fairy tale, which means it is abundant with dark tones and creepy turns, and short on charms or thrills. It’s quite short, at a brisk 87 minutes, and while I would not say it’s ever dull, it has so little story to tell that it still has measured pacing.

Although the original fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel, was German, American director Osgood Perkins sets the story in some medieval time, its few characters speaking with an accent somewhere between American and . . . Irish? These people seem to exist somewhere outside of time, which is perhaps deliberate.

The original story had more about both these kids’ parents. At the beginning of Gretel & Hansel, we only ever see their mother, complaining about the lack of food, and ultimately demanding that her children leave and fend for themselves. Instead of having the kids close in age, Gretel is far older and therefore here shouldered with most of the responsibility: she is played by a 16-year-old Sophia Lillis; Hansel by 8-year-old Samuel Leakey, in his feature film debut. Both are serviceable in their parts, though Leakey, by virtue of his much younger age, is the one who manages to be adorable. Gretel’s incredibly short haircut seems odd but whatever, I’m willing to go with it.

The more exciting casting choice is that of Alice Krige as the witch, who awaits these children in a house in the middle of the woods they are wandering. Alas, the house is not made of gingerbread or sweets, or any kind of food, for that matter. It’s made of wood, what a disappointment! The kids peer through the window and find a table covered end to end with freshly cooked meats and breads and cakes.

Until this point, for maybe a third of the film’s run time, Gretel & Hansel is a sort of on-foot road movie, occasional surprises awaiting them along their journey. For instance, Charles Babalola as “The Hunter,” who dispatches a threatening . . . I don’t know, zombie? This movie has a tendency to go in directions that have little straightforward explanation.

And that aspect of it, I was kind of into. Osgood Perkins seems intent to establish and maintain a peculiarly creepy tone, rather than flesh out this story. This includes a couple appearances of pentagrams, and a vaguely sickening sequence involving entrails. It’s all scored with music that has a hint of melancholy eighties synthesizer, composed by Robin Coudert but only referred to in the credits as “Music by Rob.” According to IMDb, he has many projects on which he is credited in this manner. Maybe it’s aspirational: one day he hopes to be one-name famous, like Cher or Madonna. Well, he’s been at it for fifteen years, so I hope he’s not holding his breath.

There are moments of earthly beauty, as the dark magic takes greater hold over these children. In one shot, a tree outside the house becomes attracted to Gretel, and reaches down toward her with its branches, like a giant, outstretched arm, as she reaches out back to it. It’s an indelible image, and I found myself thinking, Okay, that’s cool. I wish this movie had more moments like it.

So, happy ending or no? Gretel & Hansel splits the difference, which is certainly respectable. This is that odd kind of outlier of a movie, which is unlike anything else, but still won’t likely linger in your memory long.

Don’t go in the house!

Overall: B

BIRDS OF PREY: AND THE FANTABULUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN

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

I should have known better. I did know better. I knew I was scraping the bottom of the barrel—or at least, I suppose, halfway to the bottom—by taking myself to see this Birds of Prey movie when I have long been over superhero movies as a rule, only going to see the rare one that came along which by all accounts truly stood apart. Quite definitively, Birds of Prey does not stand apart. It was just the option I had, though: February is always a sad month for movie releases, and this week there was literally nothing better in theaters for me to go see.

Virtually every single element of this movie’s production is a retreat of an idea already used in other movies, in many cases more than once. Once again I find myself longing for the days when we got one superhero / comic book movie every few years, as opposed to several such movies every year. It’s always just the same shit, on a different release date. The one thing that sets Birds of Prey apart in any way is that it has an ensemble cast that is nearly all women—which was also the one thing that triggered my “affirmative action” approach to movie-going: I want to support movies with this kind of casting, to be a part of the proof that movies by and about women really do have an audience.

Maybe I would have liked Birds of Prey better if it also had a female villain. That would have changed the impact of the story significantly. Instead, we get Ewan McGregor—one of my all-time favorite actors, as it happens—horribly miscast as Roman Sionis, a psycho night club owner whose calling card is cutting people’s faces off. McGregor just doesn’t work as a straight-up unrepentant villain, and he feels completely out of place in something like the DC universe. Also, every time he adopts an American accent for a part, his speech feels a just a little off. He’s a great actor but he’s not great at accents.

Also, Roman Sionis’s very existence poses a problem in this world set in Gotham City. Birds of Prey acknowledges the existence of “The Batman” (who is mentioned, by Harley Quinn, one time) and, of course, the Joker—with whom Harley Queen has recently broken up. Both that hero and that villain are larger-than-life names who exist in this universe, and yet we never see either one of them, and that makes little sense from a storytelling point of view. Harley Quin, the aggrieved ex, throws knives at the Joker’s face mounted on her apartment wall—except, it’s just a cartoon drawing of his face. In what universe would such a woman not use an actual photo of the guy? In this dumb universe, apparently.

And even though Birds of Prey acknowledges The Joker as the formidable villain of Gotham City, we’re expected to accept Roman Sionis as the primary villain of this story? Roman Soionis is the supervillain version of sloppy seconds. Why should any of us care? And why does everyone else in this story almost never even mention The Joker? This movie treats The Joker as untouchable, a villain that not even the police department feels is worth spending time and resources on. They regard Harley Quinn as a villain, and only when word gets out that her broken relationship with The Joker has dissipated her “immunity” do they even try going after her.

I have one particularly good thing to say about Birds of Prey, and that is Margot Robbie, as Harley Quinn. She is clearly having a blast as this giddily psychotic character. This film is also both directed by (Cathy Yan) and written by (Christina Hodson) women, which should lend it a perspective noticeably different from most movies we can see in theaters. I find myself wondering how many “studio notes” they were bombarded with in the making of this movie. But then, they were damned from the beginning as far as I’m concerned, being saddled with telling the story of characters who are by definition secondary, and remain so even in a movie that is supposed to be all their own.

I’ll say this much. If you just like superhero movies a general rule, then you will likely indeed enjoy Birds of Prey. It won’t be anyone’s favorite, but it will succeed at tiding you over until the next DC or Marvel movie comes along. I did laugh out loud a few times, and it has some fairly fun action sequences, although the climactic battle amidst a carnival fun house struck me as pretty tired. The so-called “Birds of Prey” of the title comprise several other women, played by Rosie Perez, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, and Ella Jay Basco. All of these characters, and even Chris Messina as Roman’s primary henchman, are all well cast, and their performances make Birds of Prey more fun than it would be otherwise.

I just wish a different actor had been playing a different character as the villain—but then, in a world where The Joker exists, any other character would be doomed to come up short. That, in the end, is really Birds of Prey’s fatal flaw.

Margot Robbie et al do their best in the fruitless effort at elevating the material.

Overall: C+

2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Documentary

Life Overtakes Me: B-
Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl): B
In the Absence: B+
Walk Run Cha-Cha: A-
St. Louis Superman: A- It never comes as any surprise that the cumulative run time of the Documentary Shorts is always the longest among all the Oscar-nominated shorts. This year they clock in at two hours and forty minutes, beginning with this 39-minute Swedish-American film Life Overtakes Me. Ironically, I struggled to stay awake during this film about children affliced with a phenomenon called "Resignation Syndrome," in which they become totally unresponsive, as if in a coma. To be fair, my response was not entirely the film's fault; I started the presentation eating a box of Cheddar Squares crackers with pimento cheese dip, and maybe it was that that just about put me into a coma. That said, the subject being objectively compelling notwithstanding, I would still argue this story would work better in print than as a film. It certainly deserves attention, this increasingly common response to trauma among refugee children facing the stress and threat of deportation back to their dangrous home coumtries. On the upside, you can watch it on its own whenever you want, on Netflix. Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl) is similarly quiet and subdued, and thus faced a challenge in waking me up, but at least the children here were not all in some version of a coma. On the contrary, this 39-minute British short filmed in Afghanistan details young girls being educated in Kabul, one of the most dangerous places in the world to be born a girl. Curiously, they are also taking lessons in skateboarding. I never quite gleaned why skateboarding, in particular, as an extracurricular activity, but it's certainly something that brings joy into what might otherwise easily be joyless lives. In the Absence, a 28-minute film from South Korea about a horribly botched 2014 rescue effort for a sinking ferry boat which ultimately resulted in the removal of the country's president, is arguably the most exciting of the bunch. It just starts off much more promising than it ends, as the opening moments feature clips from emergency phone calls and has a real-time feel to it. There are even select clips of dashcam footage and cell phone videos which are either heartbreaking, a wonder to behold, or both. Learning the totally incompetent moves were staged just to make it look like the authorities were doing anything successfully at all, just because their president was watching, made me wonder how that nation functions at all. Then, learning that this one incident resulted in the successful removal of said president, I felt a pang of jealousy. After that, with the revelation that certain things about it were still being kept secret under new national leadership, I realized, oh right—it's never that black and white. In any case, most of this film is quite gripping, although I was mystified that it never reveals why the ship sank in the first place. Turns out that's rather complicated, but still, it would have been nice to get some sense of the cause, as opposed to just the response, as both apparently were the result of a disastrous mix of incompetence, recklessness and carelessness. A lot of people died. Walk Run Cha-Cha, on the other hand, would qualify as the most delightful and sweet of these five documentary shorts, this one a far more uplifting twenty minutes. It follows the dancing hobby of elderly South Korean couple Chipaul and Millie Cao, who long ago escaped to Los Angeles from Communist Vietnam. We see a lot of footage of them in dancing classes, some at family gatherings, and in the end a very well-produced staging of the entire dance they've been working on. I was surprisingly moved by it, and although it likely has no real chance of winning the Oscar, as soon as I saw this, I kind of wished it did. But then I saw St. Louis Superman, a 28-minute film about 34-year-old Missouri State Representative Bruce Franks Jr., which is unfortunately the only one of these short documentaries that cannot currently be found in full online. This man, also a Ferguson activist whose own brother was killed in crossfire at the age of nine, as well as a battle rapper, is an inspiration, and once I finished watching this one, I decided this is the one that really deserves the win. Apparently a piling on of related challenges regarding violence in his community, and its effect on his mental health, resulted in Franks choosing to resign, but that should not discount the achievements he had while in office, which are impressive of any junior representative, let alone one with the specific challenges he faced. We can only hope this man can one day return to politics and help change this country for the better, which this film movingly depicts him doing from the start. Overall: B+

2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Live Action

A Sister: B+
Brotherhood: B
The Neighbors' Window: B+
Saria: B+
Nefta Football Club: B Much like the animated shorts, this year's crop of Oscar-nominated Live Action Shorts are largely devoid of much in the way of lightheartedness. As presented in theaters this week, the program begins with A Sister, a 16-minute Belgian film detailing a phone call to Emergency Services. There are only three characters: the man driving a car; the woman in the passenger seat placing a call she claims to be to her sister about care for her child; and the emergency services worker, a woman, who actually receives said call. It's maybe not that plausible that a man who sexually assaulted a woman and is now driving her to some undetermined place would just allow her to make a phone call to anyone, or trust that she is actually calling her sister. But, the tension in the phone call between two women who have to speak largely in code is effectively gripping. Funny how the Animated Shorts featured Daughter and then Sister as titles, and in the same year the Live Action Shorts feature A Sister and then Brotherhood. Clearly they're grouping them together this way on purpose. Anyway, Brotherhood is a 25-minute Tunisian-Canadian film about a Tunisian family whose eldest son returns from fighting in Syria with a very young, pregnant bride in tow. Apropos of nothing, what struck me the most about this show was how all three boys are covered in massive amounts of freckles. As it happens, director Meryam Joobeur found the two redheaded brothers by chance and later convinced them to be first-time actors in her film. That does deepen how impressive the final product is, although if you know little of the details of local sociopolitical issues in the Tunisian region, some measure of the story will not retain the intended impact. The Neighbors' Window, a 20-minute Ameican short set in New York City, was in the end my personal favorite of these five, and would get my vote for the win. I have a feeling Brotherhood has a better chance, and I'll freely admit that The Neighbors' Window just speaks to me as a more typical American voyeur. It's a bit of a modern, more bittersweet riff on Hitchcock's Rear Window, dealing with the consequences of spying on neighbors in an apartment in the building directly across the street. In this case, it's an early-middle-aged couple (Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller) with three young children, who become somewhat obsessed with the free-spirited twentysomething couple across the way. It's less sexual than it is wistful, this couple seeing a sort of youthful freedom they have lost. A plot twist comes regarding that young couple, as you might expect, and it jolts the older couple out of their self-pity. It sounds a little hokey, but in writer-director Marshall Curry's hands, it has a surprising finesse. Saria is also an American film, 23 minutes, but set in a Guatemalan orphanage and based on the true story of 41 teen girls who died in a fire in 2017. It is a fictionalized dramatization, but one that sheds a global light on a horrible event that plenty of people in the rest of the world don't know about. I certainly didn't, and thus this film succeeds at its stated intent that these girls' lives not be forgotten. Apparently these girls' caretakers did not bother to even open the door they were locked in with a fire for nine minutes, and to date there has been no prosecutions of any kind. That is obviously disgusting, and hopefully the exposure of this film puts some much needed pressure on local authorities. Nefta Football Club, a 17-minute film from France but also set in Tunisia, comes the closest to being a light-hearted story: two young brothers find a lost drug mule wandering the desert hills with headphones on its ears. Cutting back and forth with the older couple of men who cannot find the mule, the two brothers find packets of cocaine in the baskets draped on either side of the mule. This puts them in a potentially very dangerous situation, of course, but the amusing ending deals with the ultimate fate of the cocaine, as the older brother tries in vain to find locals to sell it to, and the younger brother finds an innovative use for it in his local soccer field, or more accurately in this country and on this terrain, football pitch.
Overall: B+

2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Animation

Hair Love: B+
Daughter: B
Sister: B
Mémorable: B
Kitbull: B+ [“Highly Commended"]
Henrietta Bulkowski: B
The Bird & the Whale: B+
Hors Piste: B
Maestro: B For some reason in the past I tended to expect to enjoy the animated batch the best out of all the Oscar-nominated short films, and yet, in recent years it's the genre that tends to have the weakest batch overall. This year is no exception, although several of them feature impressively unique animation styles I have never seen before. On top of that, this year they are uniformly melancholy in one way or another. Among the five animated shorts in this program that actually earned nominations, without exception they deal with either death, disease, or some kind of violence. Amazingly, not even the one short by Pixar Animation Studios artists (in this case still 2D animation) stands apart from this theme. It even extends to two of the four "Highly Commended" shorts that are included, just to pad out the overall run time and make it feel worth going to a theater to see them. The other two of those extras are the only ones of the total nine shorts here that evidently have no purpose beyond just being fun, and those are . . . fine. The first in this presentation is the 7-minute American short Hair Love, which is maybe the most light-hearted of all the five nominees, even though it features a woman (voiced by Issa Rae) who is a mother with cancer. It's because this woman is in the hospital that the story we see is of a man attempting to do his daughter's hair for the first time. Given that this is a black family, these are characters not often seen in animated shorts, and that alone makes it more worthy of attention. Overall I enjoyed this short film, even though the animation itself is not much better than adequate. The story is memorable and affecting, however, and once you see the other shorts it's up against, you see that this one is the most worthy of the award. Things just get sadder from there, although I must admit I found Daughter, a 15-minute short from the Czech Republic, the most difficult to follow. In this story, a grown woman is regarding her father apparently on his deathbed, and we get flashback memories from both of them. This film has by far the most impressive animation out of any of the nominees, with stop-motion animation captured with camera work that feels like live hand-held camera footage. I was truly impressed by how this short film was shot—I just couldn't quite glean a clear picture of the story, or any kind of plot. I spent most of its run time basically lost. Sister, an 8-minute short from China, presents a "what if" where the narrator imagines what it would have been like to grow up with a sister in a country that had a one-child policy for over thirty years. This is also stop motion but with what look like dolls made of fabric, and the issue it tackles is thorny at best: forcing women to have abortions is objectively a violation of human rights, but from the perspective of Chinese national pride, without the policy the country would not only not be nearly as prosperous as it is now, it likely would not be prospering at all. That's not an excuse by any means, and it's always good to consider the ramifications of a policy like this, and particularly the many misguided means of executing it. Mémorable is yet another short film about the frustrating effects of dementia in a person's old age, a 12-minute French film featuring a man losing his memory and his wife who is increasingly frustrated with him. The man is a painter, and thus the animation style here is a sort of stop-motion with 3D figures made out of brushstrokes of paint. It's hard to explain, but the animation here is sort of too good, paintings brought to life in a way that has a sort of "uncanny valley" effect that just gave me the creeps. The five Oscar nominees are rounded out by the 9-minute Pixar film about an unlikely friendship between a streetworn kitten and a pitbull, who we learn maybe halfway through is being used as a dogfighter. This film did indeed have the deepest emotional impact on me, as Pixar films often tend to do, but again, the animation here is almost shockingly rudimentary given the studio behind it. And who wants to be thinking about animal abuse when watching a Pixar short, anyway? Starting off the four extra "Highly Commended" shorts is Henrietta Bulkowski, a 16-minute American short that also has its own very distinctive kind of 3D stop-motion animation style. The title character is an airplane obsessed young woman voiced by Christina Hendricks, who cannot be the pilot she wants to be because of a hunchback. She builds a plane in a landfill, where she meets a police officer with stunted legs voiced by Chris Cooper. Rounding out the all-star cast is Anne Dowd as the narrator. The story has a nice message about loving every part of yourself as a whole human being, but its execution is still a little odd and meandering. The Bird & the Whale, a 7-minute short from Ireland, is animated entirely with oil paint on glass, and has arguably the prettiest animation of all these films. Once again though, the story is surprisingly sad: the chance meeting of a baby whale that has been separated from its pod, and a caged bird that is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Together they struggle to survive, and I suppose it could be said they only both manage to do so on a technicality. The way this one ends is meant to be uplifting, I suppose, and yet I still just found it to be a bummer. Hors Piste, French for "Off Road," is a 6-minute short and one of only two in this entire program that exists just for the viewer to have fun. The animation is slick and textured, the story amusing in a way that barely obscures the darkness of its humor. This is the misadventures of a couple clueless mountain rescuers attempting to bring an enjured skier down from the mountan, and basically finding countless innovative ways to injure him more in the process. Maestro, by far the shortest film in this series at all of two minutes, is a French short with spectacular CG animation rendering a bird, and many other animals, singing a short opera and being conducted by a squirrel. Now, I truly hate squirrels, but in this case I can tolerate one for two minutes, if he's conducting an opera performance of forest animals. Overall: B

LITTLE JOE

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

Little Joe is a modern riff on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or at least it clearly wants to be. In this case, though, instead of the plants being some sort of alien species, director and co-writer Jessica Hausner offers up another argument for paranoia about genetic engineering. In this script, which is repeatedly on the nose with its themes, more than once we are reminded of the dangers of a modified organism doing whatever it can to propagate itself.

To Hausner’s credit, she creates a visual palate rich with vibrant color, using fairly limited resources: most of the story takes place in either the large, sterile lab where all of these plants are being grown, or in the home of the lead plant breeder (or scientist, or whatever), Alice (Emily Beecham), where she has brought one of the plants as a gift for her teen son, Joe (Kit Connor). She names the plant “Little Joe” after him, and thereafter in this story, not just that single plant, but all of them, are referred to thusly.

Much like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, once a person is affected by the plant—in this case, infected, by inhaling its pollen—their personality becomes permanently, but almost imperceptibly, altered. All they care about is the safety of the plant, at the expense of all else. Hausner clearly wants us to feel as though people’s behavior becomes slightly odd once this happens. The problem here is that, the way Hausner directs every single actor in her film, they don’t act quite natural even before this change occurs, when we are supposed to think of them a “normal.”

Little Joe is one of those small “indie films” (in this case, also a British film) overly concerned with maintaining a quiet, eerie tone, from which it never quite deviates. The delivery of every single line is calm and muted; a raised voice only happens occasionally and for effect. This near-monotone way of speaking is adopted by everyone and is quickly established as the default. And this is what keeps Little Joe from quite working, because the characters rather feel like they have been “body snatched” from the start.

The story is also a gross over-simplification of things like genetic mutation. Sure, movies like this exist to take liberties with facts, but most science fiction at least convolutes things to the point that you feel like the “science” would be too complicated to understand either way. There’s just something off about the plausibility here, like this movie is just a “thinking man’s” version of M. Night Shyamalan’s notoriously bad The Happening.

It has other problems, most of which just amount to pretension. The camera work is occasionally baffling, the camera always sliding to one side at a slow, steady pace, but occasionally in a slow zoom, until the two people speaking to each other on either side of the screen go out of frame and then all you are looking at is the wall behind them. What? And then there’s the music. Bizarrely, I can find no music or score credit for Little Joe, even though the soundtrack is full of strangely erratic percussion, occasionally punctuated by what sounds like a tonal mix of multiple dogs barking.

And yet . . . I must admit, I did find Little Joe compelling. Granted, it also stars Ben Wishaw, one of the most beautiful actors working today. It’s not just him, though, that made Little Joe nice to look at: misguided cinematography notwithstanding, the production design is both stark and memorable, with lots of swaths of solid color and simple patters, all of which is lit impeccably. It’s an odd compliment to give, but the lighting is Little Joe’s greatest asset.

Still, even though I never found it dull or boring, there’s no escaping how Little Joe’s premise is just something dumb disguised as an intellectual exercise. It kind of pains me to give this movie the same rating as I have others that made me much angrier with how stupid they were, but I still have to be fair. In this case, it’s almost insidious, because too many people will be convinced this is something more “academic” in nature when in reality, fundamentally it’s just as stupid.

You better watch your back around those plants!

Overall: C+

BAD BOYS FOR LIFE

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

I was regarding Michael Bay with contempt before it was cool. This was the guy who directed common-denominator movies designed to pander to dipshits, from Armageddon (1998) to Pearl Harbor (2001) to the moronic and incoherent Transformers (2007) and its many sequels.

Before all that, though, in 1995, he directed Bad Boys (1995), and it was kind of fun, even with Téa Leoni as a walking stereotype. It wasn’t a great movie, but it was fun. And then Michael Bay returned to direct the 2003 sequel, which . . . wasn’t as good.

I guess Michael Bay was busy this time around, because another 17 years later, we’re treated with Bad Boys for Life, now directed by “Adil and Bilall,” a relatively unknown Belgian director duo, who, incidentally, were 7 and 9 years old when the original Bad Boys was released. Surely a couple young, hip directors will breathe some fresh life into this old franchise, right?

Wrong. This movie has the feel of something directed by people who need a little more practice, and is written—by a team of three writers—with no trace of originality or genuine wit. Okay, I’ll admit I laughed a few times. That has less to do with the boneheaded action-movie writing than it does with the familiar chemistry between Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, who are now 25 years older than they were in the first one of these movies. The script is peppered with a good amount of jokes about their age.

Adil El Arbi and Bilal Fallah clearly want this movie to be part of Michael Bay’s legacy, with its refusal ever to traffic in subtlety. The villain is, I kid you not, a Mexican witch (played by Mexican actress Kate del Castillo). I guess each of these movies must have a different woman in a key supporting role. This one has two, the other one a fellow cop played by Paola Nuñez. Both are old flames of Will Smith’s Detective Mike Lowrey. Side note: Vanessa Hudgens also features in a part as one of a new “AMMO” squad staffed by younger people. I guess just because these movies are set in Miami, the villains always have to be Latino. Speaking of which, there’s a lot of wide shots of the Miami skyline, which I suppose is cool. Until it gets, like everything else in this movie, vastly overused.

For a lot of people, Bad Boys for Life will just be a fun return to the mindless nineties action movie aesthetic, and I get it. It’s just not for me. And too many of the plot turns are predictable—a notable thing for me to notice, as I am never looking to predict where the story is going. The script employs narrative devices that were overdone twenty years ago, like a fake-out meant to make us think Mike has died, even though the movie is less than half over. I’d have far more respect for this movie if they actually did kill him off forty minutes in.

So okay, sure, this movie is just harmless, dumb fun. I only found it sporadically fun, and mostly just dumb. And a movie like this doesn’t have to be so lazy in its execution. But, a time tested truth is that lazily executed movies with likable stars will always have an audience. I prefer a movie made by people making more of an effort.

They’re getting too old for this shit.

Overall: C+

LES MISÉRABLES

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

How one takes in this new French film Les Misérables, in U.S. theaters currently, will differ slightly depending on what context is at hand, what kind of literary as well as motion picture history can be drawn from, if at all—not to mention French history itself, both centuries back and a decade and a half back. Citizens of France and particularly Paris, with a working memory of the 2005 riots that occurred there, have no doubt had a unique point of view on this film.

My own background knowledge of all these elements is limited, to say the least. This Les Misérables is different from the 1862 novel by Victor Hugo (easily one of the most famous works of French literature ever written), or the stage musical adaptation by the same name that premiered in France in 1980, translated and expanded in English for a London premiere in 1985 and first premiered on Broadway in 1986, which I have also never seen. I merely saw the 2012 movie musical adaptation starring Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman, and although it was one of countless adaptations, with its live on-set singing, it stood apart.

This Les Misérables stands apart as well, but for entirely different reasons. This is not even close to a direct adaptation, although there are clearly thematic through lines. Fundamentally, though, its only connection to Victor Hugo is that it shares the title, and it is set in the same neighborhood Hugo lived in when he wrote the novel. These are very deliberate choices on the part of French director Ladj Ly, who uses subtle means to evoke national pride, history, injustice, and police brutality.

The police brutality is a particularly key element, and much of the film’s run time there is an expectation of violence that never comes . . . until it does. It never gets all that graphic, but it gets its point across. And it involves a reckless teenager caught in the crosshairs, who, much like the original Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s novel, receives punishment that is far out of proportion to his crimes.

After opening on scenes of national unity and celebration when France won the World Cup, crosscut with the opening titles, it takes a little while for a story even to take shape. We follow three police officers, one of them on his first day after transferring to the city to be closer to his child who lives with his ex-wife, making rounds in this gritty Paris suburb and generally puffing their chests and occasionally harassing people. They do a “police check” on a group of young girls just waiting for a bus at a bus stop, and when one of them tries to record them with her phone, the officer with the shortest fuse grabs her phone and hurls it at the sidewalk.

It’s relevant to note that two of these cops are white, one of them black, and when a confrontation with a group of kids escalates to a dangerous degree, it’s the black cop who goes overboard and injures one of them, also a black kid. I know nothing of class, immigration issues, or race relations and the many nuances thereof that are no doubt specific to France, but it is almost curious that director Ladj Ly puts no obvious element of racial tension in his film—only tension between native French citizens and immigrants (though most of the latter are Muslim and black), and particularly between the residents of this suburb and law enforcement. A story like this would absolutely play out differently if made in the U.S., but here, the otherwise most-hotheaded cop is all about protecting the other cops on his “team,” and the story that proceeds from here is about retrieving the memory card from a drone they notice hovering overhead, having recorded the entire incident.

We see that drone earlier in the film, controlled by another young black boy in the neighborhood, using it to peep into the windows of teenage girls in one of the wide, blocky high-rise apartment buildings. It therefore comes as no surprise that the drone becomes a key figure in the plotting to come. There is a bit of a clever trick to the cinematography here, though, because instead of just being yet another movie with obvious drone shots for nice effect, these camera angles actually serve the story. It doesn’t hurt that the shots also happen to work very well on an aesthetic level.

This all builds to a predictably violent confrontation, after some odd asides including the kidnapping of a local circus troupe’s lion cub. Ly stops the story short in the midst of an individual standoff, leaving us to decide for ourselves where it goes from there, but making it clear that all parties involved have created an untenable situation that cannot possibly end well for any of them. The richness of history, both long ago and recent, very much informs the action here, but this Les Misérables offers plenty of food for thought either way.

Misguided police tactics: they’re everywhere.

Overall: B+

JUST MERCY

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

Just Mercy is an inspiring story that feels very much like the movie version of that story, “based on” the truth but sprinkled with contrivances to make it work as a story told over the course of a couple of hours. Within those confines, though, it works quite well. The average movie-goer with an interest in movies of this sort will quite like it.

More than once I found myself thinking of the 1995 film Dead Man Walking, which was even more pointed in its anti-death penalty message—and had also been based on a true story. And although that story was about a specific case, the implications were still about the broad morality of capital punishment without sociopolitical context. That context is what Just Mercy provides, shifting the setting to Monroe County, Alabama, and highlighting the systemic racism that led to the wrongful murder conviction of Walter McMillian.

Just Mercy includes this statistic in the midst of much information about its characters just before the end credits, but it bears mentioning here: for every 9 death row executions in the U.S., one person on death row has been exonerated—”a shocking rate of error.” Indeed. And this movie uses McMillian to put a face on how senseless capital punishment is. Even for those who believe in its effectiveness in theory have to admit our system is not equipped to implement it efficiently.

I happen to believe capital punishment is morally wrong whether the person is guilty or not, but that’s a conversation for another space—although Just Mercy makes pretty clear it has the same message: when McMillian’s death row neighbor, who suffers from PTSD and should actually be in a hospital, feels genuine guilt for a woman who did die because of him, McMillion tells him that doesn’t give anyone the right to do the same to him.

This is all not to say that Just Mercy is particularly heavy handed about its messaging; it really is not, and makes for a compelling story on its own merits. The cast is top notch, with memorable performances by Jamie Foxx as Walter McMillian; Michael B. Jordan as Byran Stevenson, the idealistic lawyer trying to help; and Brie Larson all but disappears into the part as Eva Ansley, the Operations Director of the Equal Justice Initiative she co-founded with Stevenson. We’re also treated to the dependable Tim Blake Nelson as a key witness who also happens to be a convicted felon.

Ansley is handled well in the film, but I have more mixed feelings about a couple of the other white characters, who have a kind of “moral awakening” by the end of the story, including a prison guard, as well as the Monroe County District Attorney. To be fair, the latter character may have changed his mind only when he realized he could no longer win this fight. But the prison guard feels a little like a character thrown in to make white people feel better about all the widespread racism and bigotry, a thread of redemption that likely was not so easily found in the real struggle of proving McMillian’s innocence.

And of course, the story beats are familiar, with the requisite, climactic rousing speech in a courtroom near the end. At least the gathered crowd didn’t erupt into applause. More realistically, the gathered community breathes a collective cry of relief when they finally get what has been fought for in the face of insane obstacles spanning several years.

It should come as no surprise and is thus not a spoiler to say Just Mercy has a happy ending. But boy, was it a difficult road to get there. And that road includes the execution of one of McMillian’s fellow inmates after a request for a stay is denied. The inclusion of this scene, which is very difficult to watch and maybe the most heartbreaking in the film, is necessary. It only becomes easy to tolerate the inhumane when the practice has no human face associated with it. Just Mercy is a tale of persistence and resilience, a textbook case of overcoming adversity. Its telling may be patently conventional, but that in no way diminishes its impact.

He got by with a lot of help from a friend.

Overall: B+