Review: Short Term 12

An abridged version of this review was previously published in my column at Towleroad

The movies that hit us hardest can be the toughest to talk about. Sometimes that's because they're personal, striking you right where you live. Sometimes it's more intangible than that, showing you something you needed to see about a less familiar world just to the side of your own, while never forgetting to move and entertain you. Short Term 12 will surely be one of those movies for many, either way.

This rich drama from the Hawaiian filmmaker Destin Cretton, is based on his short film of the same name and concerns a very private young woman named Grace (Brie Larson) the supervisor at a Foster Care facility. Grace is an expert at navigating the emotional chaos of the kids she watches over but less adept at meeting her own emotional needs or opening up to her friends and co-workers about her own secrets. She's got at least two of them weighing her down. Short Term 12 refers to the setting, a temporary shelter for troubled or abandoned kids as they await their next foster home assignment.

I have no personal experience with the foster care system or abusive birth parents or mentoring kids -- Hell, I was never even a babysitter (Youngest Child Escape Clause) -- but within minutes the foreignness of it all slips away. [more...]

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Review: White House. Golden Oprah. Lee Daniels' The Butler

This review was originally published in my column at Towleroad

Somewhere in the vast middle of LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER, a movie about a White House butler who served US Presidents from the Eisenhowers through the Reagans, there's a terrific agitated scene in which we leave the butler behind to check in on his wife Gloria. Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) and Howard (Terrence Howard), the neighbor she's turned to from loneliness, argue on a couch. Howard is trying to sweet-talk his way back into her bed. Gloria, guilt-ridden, distracts herself with chain smoking, occasionally side-eyeing him as if he were a buzzing nuisance and, damn, where is her fly swatter? Slick Howard begins spinning two of her clothes hangers in the air to visualize their parallel worlds. Gloria reacts with extreme annoyance to the comic pleasure of the audience -- Oprah gets one laugh after another, all of them blessedly intentional, in her rousing return to the big screen. 

It's a weird but lively domestic hothouse scene that feels, at first, largely divorced from the movie containing it, a somewhat duller "greatest hits" tour of America's civil rights journey. But in its own peculiar way it's also the movie's key scene. [more...]

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Review: "Elysium"

This review was previously published in my column at Towleroad

Matt Damon has a gym membership but no health care in ElysiumIn the future everyone has trouble finding good healthcare, there is no middle class, and Los Angeles is a cesspool. So far, so believable. By the future you mean next week, right? Dystopian fantasies work best when they prey on current fears and exaggerate like a mofo. ELYSIUM knows just where we hurt, aiming squarely for our 'have-not' wounds. Though there is no direct talk of politics in Neill Blomkamp's action flick / sci-fi allegory, this 22nd century Earth is a place where the Right Wing have obviously long since won the political wars. The Koch Brothers and Friends, the "Corporations are People!" set, have vacated the filthy planet altogether to rule from afar and horde their wealth. They orbit the earth in mouthwatering luxury aboard the titular space station Elysium which spins like a pricey slo-mo hamster wheel (think 2001: A Space Odyssey. Add bling, swimming pools and golf courses), though it's undoubtedly the 99% who are powering it with their sweaty manual labor.

One such laborer is Max DaCosta (Matt Damon) who is foolishly hoping to 'work his way up' and buy a ticket to Elysium. He's an ex-con, though, and delusional about his future prospects. Even his childhood love Frey (Alice Braga), a stand-up citizen and steadily employed nurse can't afford to move there. In the future good health care is only available to the 1% despite technology so advanced that anything this side of death is instantaneously curable (think magic not medicine) and Max and Frey are out of luck. Socioeconomic mobility is as extinct as the weird animals that Max and Frey look at in picture books as children in flashbacks -- what the hell is a giraffe?

And also: why is Jodie Foster so pissed off???  

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Review: Blue Jasmine

This review was originally published in my column at Towleroad

Cate Blanchett can't shut up in Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen's latest dramedy which added more cities this weekend for its platform rollout. We join Jasmine (real name "Jeanette") in medias res on a flight to San Francisco as she's chattering away with, no, at an older companion. She goes on and on (and on some more!) about her love affair with her husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) all the way through to baggage claim.

But Jasmine is a liar or at least a half truth-teller. We will immediately discover that her great love affair ended in ruin. Hal was a criminal, a financial con artist who pampered Jasmine with other people's fortunes and ruined everyone including Jasmine. She's moving in with her estranged adopted sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), also ruined by Hal's crimes, now that she's destitute. Jasmine hasn't adjusted to her new facts, though, treating her cabbie from the airport like a personal chauffeur, and leaving him a big tip considering she's supposed to be penniless.Jasmine isn't always "in the now" as it were. She never is actually, talking or bragging or obsessing over the past. [More...]

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Review: The Wolverine

When Marvel Comics first introduced Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four to the world in the 1960s, they sparked a comic book revolution. No longer were superheroes the new gods, indestructible and unfailingly heroic Others from distant planets, lands, times (see: Superman, Wonder Woman, Captain America) or mysterious 1% recluses (Batman) but something closer to heightened neighbors. Your classmate or coworker or mailman might be a mutant. You might stumble into capes or spandex yourself, should you cross paths with gamma rays or a radioactive spider. The Silver Age heroes had to hold down jobs, keep secrets, and navigate angsty romances or complicated family dynamics. If superheroes were real they'd be hounded by the tabloid press and paparazzi.

In other words... "Superheroes - they're just like us!"

But some super powers are far from relatable. This summer indestructibility has raised its dull head again as the chief power of both the Man of Steel and The Wolverine. This power lacks the proxy pizazz that comes with cooler mutations like flying, telekinesis, web-slinging, flaming on, and so on. Indestructibility just isn't inherently interesting, or at least not visually rich, good only for sticking around. And Wolverine, the world's favorite furry angry Canadian sure does, loitering about the cinema and historical signposts of the ages, too. [more...]

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