The Devil All the Time (2020)

 Score: 1.5 / 5

It's at least the devil for two hours, and that was more than enough for me. The new Netflix drama The Devil All the Time dropped this weekend, and I was ready for Spider-man to go full Southern Gothic. As I sipped pinot noir, I was treated to a haunting opening sequence of WWII in which American soldiers come across one of their own sergeants crucified on a battlefield by the Japanese. To end his suffering, Willard (Bill Skarsgard) shoots him in the head. After his return home in Ohio, he gets married and has a son named Arvin, whom he raises in their rural Christian faith. But, thanks in large part to Skarsgard's shell-shocked and glistening eyes, we know that Willard has seen actual horrors every time he beholds his religious crosses. It's this sort of timeless reminder of the bloody basis of Christianity I expected from the movie, and it's one that would have more than satisfied me.

But then the movie almost immediately falters, and never recovers. We are suddenly thrust into the lives of other, seemingly unconnected characters, and we quickly lose track of whatever timeline we should be following. The film rockets us across time and place, from Ohio to West Virginia, from 1945 to 1965 and several times between, and through crucial moments in the lives of no fewer than eight people. It doesn't help that many of them look and act the same. I was quite lost well before the halfway point of the movie, which seemed to consist of episodic scenes depicting depravity, violence, and cruelty. In fact, the violence is often so sudden and so graphic that I wondered if this was meant as a straight-up horror flick. But the melodrama greatly outweighs anything, which renders these scenes grotesque and the whole of the film little more than poverty porn.

The main plot follows Arvin (Tom Holland, unexpectedly flexing his acting chops) as he comes of age. He fiercely protects his step-sister Lenora (Eliza Scanlen) from any and all evil but of course is unable to stem the tide of evil in the world. He then embarks on a journey of revenge that costs many more lives than necessary, and in his bloody wake the hounds close in, notably the corrupt Sheriff (Sebastian Stan) seeking revenge for his sister (Riley Keough). His sister, mind, is a serial killer who was killed by Arvin along with her hubby Carl (Jason Clarke) after they attempted to abduct and kill Arvin. Oh, and I can't forget that Lenora's mother (Mia Wasikowska) was killed by her preacher father (Harry Melling) who handles spiders instead of snakes and starts hallucinating after one too many bites, thinking he can resurrect the dead.

Sound crazy? It is, and this is only the first half of the damn movie.

Indeed, I can conceive of little reason this movie exists at all, except to say that the American heartland -- at least its Appalachian foothills -- is populated by a cast of stupid, violent people whose religious fanaticism has long been its only social standard and who escape the sad realities of their lives through violence and vengeance. It is increasingly difficult to make narrative or thematic sense of any of it, partly due to the bizarre editing and unremarkable production design, partly due to the unfocused and broad scope of its screenplay. We're not allowed into any character's psyche because we are yanked between characters too often. Even the most delicious performance in the film -- I'd say the performances are wonderful across the board -- is lost in the messy void: Robert Pattinson, whose crisp, clean preacher with a campy, overbearing personality is as delightful as it is surprising, and I'm not sure it fits within its context. Which may be the point, but as nothing else here compares to it in tone or delivery, I find his relative lack of consequence troubling.

Ultimately, the movie feels like a vicious fever dream, an uninspired attempt at Gothicizing rural America by demonizing its religious foundations -- which arguably deserve this kind of treatment, and more -- and exploiting the impoverished and uneducated lower classes. For example, we derive a certain pleasure in seeing the insane preacher pouring live spiders on his face, sure, and even seeing him get his comeuppance, but the film's question of stopping the cycle of violence is made irrelevant by the cruelty and stupidity of its protagonist. There is little worth watching in this movie, from its incoherent plot incomprehensibly strung together by a laughably bad voiceover narrator (apparently the author of the book that inspired this movie) to its squandered cast of A-listers, and finally to its celebration of the banality of evil in the heartland. What a damned waste.

Dolemite is My Name (2019)

Score: 4.5 / 5

In the 1970s, Rudy Ray Moore is working a record shop by day and a nightclub by night, hoping to make it in LA show biz. It's not going well. His boss won't let him perform a stand-up routine, even though he's the emcee, and his wistful manner is just begging for inspiration. Thankfully, the city of angels gives it to him when a homeless wino stumbles into the store entertains and spellbinds everyone within earshot with his boisterous storytelling. The slick rhymes and tight meter of his stories and jokes are as brazenly audacious as the crude and vulgar content. Soon thereafter, a hypnotized Moore takes to the streets by night and absorbs everything he can about this urban ghetto talk, and in a magnificent scene around a trash can fire, he fashions his future stardom from the most unlikely of sources. But, in vino veritas, and what appears to us a Shakespearean fool appears to Moore a muse.

Indeed, Dolemite is My Name is the story of the man behind the pop culture sensation, the popularly dubbed "Godfather of Rap." A biopic of rare insight and frenetic energy, it carries us along with Moore as he develops his stage persona, Dolemite, a wisecracking pimp with excessive charisma that manifests in braggadocio and rhyming syncopation and no small amount of profanity. "Dolemite is my name," he announces himself to anyone who will listen, "and fuckin' up muthafuckas is my game." He details his bizarre sexual exploits along with his impossible feats of heroism, criminality, and social prowess, all the while strutting along in suits of vibrant hues, bedazzled and glittering, with his hat and cane akimbo.

The role is a perfect match for the unique talents of Eddie Murphy, who has been largely absent from the silver screen for many years now. This is not as clearly a dramatic role as his in Dreamgirls, nor is it remotely child-friendly as many might have come to expect. This is Murphy in rare form, spitting out so many profanities you might think this was a Tarantino flick. But he's no Samuel L. Jackson, and Murphy is here making a bold reclamation of his talents as a serious artist. Other worthy players buttress the film, especially Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Tituss Burgess, and even Ron Cephas Jones in a single scene, but the movie only works because of its leading man.

Moore eventually decides he's going to make a movie about his alter ego, and suddenly the movie takes a drastic turn and feels more akin to Ed Wood or The Disaster Artist than I was ready to handle (Fun fact: the writers of this film also wrote Ed Wood and Big Eyes). We get plenty of slapstick to mirror the foul-mouthed blasphemies, hilarious sex scenes, and downright absurd effects. The madcap comedy boils over to a fever pitch both in terms of content (the movie's production is bedeviled with setbacks, conflicting characters, and financial turmoil) and in terms of execution: fierce editing, heightened music, and increasingly voluptuous production design raise the stakes in every frame. They take over an abandoned hotel as a soundstage, employ (or, rather, "employ") a group of white film students from UCLA as tech crew, and heartily enjoy the shoot. Well, everyone except the director, who ends up walking out when he can't Moore's campy artistry and flippant attitude any longer.

By the finale, which depicts the premiere of the troubled and troubling kung-fu blaxploitation film, we understand that for all his faults and failures, Moore is an admirable and even endearing man. Moreover, as the on-screen text describes before the credits roll, Moore is in many ways the catalyst and safe haven of a specific subset of American culture at a time when culture was breaking. His amazing ability to signify (more properly, signifyin') is the touchstone for much of what we now appreciate as rap music, sure, but also largely establishes a foundation for contemporary Ebonics or Black Vernacular English. The film's amazing insight into the creation of culture carries along its messages of cultural appropriation in heavy doses, but they are quite easy to take along with its main course, the surprisingly heartwarming story of a down-and-out hopeful who makes it big. At least, big on his own terms.

And, ultimately, isn't that what really matters?

The New Mutants (2020)

 Score: 3.5 / 5

It's difficult to talk about this movie in glowing terms, as it rings the tragic death-knell of one of my favorite film franchises. Post mortem knell, in fact, as The New Mutants is indeed released not by 20th Century Fox but by 20th Century Studios, the new name of the old company now under the Disney corporate umbrella. Much as Disney cancelled the four magnificent Marvel/Netflix Defenders superhero shows, here they have effectively put a stop to all productions not in line with their vision for the MCU. For better or worse (much worse, I fear), we'll not be seeing X-Men the same way again.

Yet hope remained, while the company was true. Despite what some critics and fans might say -- given the ridiculous delays this movie's release has endured, and the studio's odd choice to have no socially distant options for press screenings or streaming -- The New Mutants is a lot of fun. It grants us a fresh take on a genre consistently on the verge of becoming boring. Keeping with its source material, the film works best when it fully indulges its idiosyncratic YA horror. The original three X-Men films featured notably older cast members and characters, and even young Rogue putting her boyfriend into a coma wasn't filmed as horrific, just sad and awkward. But put enough young people trying to understand and control their feelings, bodies, and minds in stressful enough situations, and horror is a perfectly logical way to branch out in this franchise.

Here, we follow young Dani Moonstar (played by Native American actor Blu Hunt), a Cheyenne girl whose reservation is destroyed in a freak storm that kills her family. She suddenly awakens in a remote hospital (or perhaps asylum), handcuffed to her bed and given the bad news by her doctor, Cecilia Reyes. Reyes is seemingly the only staff at this medical facility, and is played with austerity by Alice Braga. With Dani, we are quickly introduced to the other patients at this facility, all of whom seem to be the more sad, more rebellious, more angry versions of the students at Xavier's school. Their superpowers, we learn, have each been triggered by some trauma or dark secret, and Reyes tries to research them while helping them examine themselves. She also uses her own mutant powers to keep them locked on the premises, with the implied promise that once their "twelve steps", you might say, are completed, they can go to a better place under her superior's tutelage. It's gotta be the bald man in the wheelchair, right?

The very basic plot notwithstanding, we are mostly carried along by our understanding of these characters. In remarkably simple yet effective ways, the film twists a generic coming-of-age formula into troubling understandings of childhood trauma and its lasting effects. To give a brief rundown: a badass Russian girl who talks to her sock puppet and conjures magic, a hunky Brazilian boy whose sexual history isn't as hot as his powers, an abused sprite of a Scottish girl whose bite is far worse than her bark, and a battered and broken human torpedo from Kentucky. Then there's Dani who has no idea what her mutant powers could be, but she is plagued by nightmarish visions. After initial conflict with each other, the kids finally begin to band together and question the nature of their "treatment."

As a film, The New Mutants is nothing remarkable or groundbreaking, despite its depiction of a lesser-known branch of my favorite superhero team. Its editing leaves a lot to be desired, as does its leading actress; it relies as heavily on CGI and a dangerously vague screenplay as IT did, but is less effective in its scares and emotional depth (and nostalgia, but really there's no comparison to the two beyond the rising action of the plot). But as a work that finally gives me some of the Marvel mutant stories I've always wanted more of, I can't deny my absolute pleasure in having seen it. We finally -- finally -- get explicitly queer characters (in the most queer superhero comics) who aren't exploited by the camera, and whose queerness is as natural and organic as any trait of the other characters. Watching Magik and Sunspot and Lockheed and Wolfsbane and the Demon Bear come to life before my eyes was nothing short of awesome, even if the frame of the movie was less than spectacular. By the CGI-heavy finale, I was at once elated and exhausted, and even depressed that it was over.

This was supposed to be a spin-off trilogy of movies to buttress the already existing X-Men franchise. This was supposed to lead into the Essex Corp. plotlines, the rise of the Hellfire Club's Madelyne Pryor, and finally Mister Sinister (who was going to be played by Jon freakin' Hamm) bringing about the Inferno apocalyptic horror event. I'm devastated that won't happen now.

Underwater (2020)

 Score: 4 / 5

I hadn't seen many trailers for Kristen Stewart's latest outing amidst the flurry of the holidays and pre-awards season, but it's been a long summer and I finally got around to viewing it. Having forgot almost everything in the trailers, I only knew the plot revolved around her getting stuck in a research station at the bottom of the ocean. I didn't know that the disaster would happen in the very first scene. I didn't know that Stewart has turned into a very physical actress. I didn't know that this movie would be so technically accomplished. And I certainly didn't know I was going to really enjoy it.

Underwater takes place entirely under water; at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, in fact, so under a lot of water. Before we know anything about anything, Kristen Stewart's tooth-brushing is suddenly interrupted by an earthquake. The submerged station -- which seems to be a research facility as well as a drill -- is nearly destroyed, and the few survivors race against time to gather near the escape pods. But they're all gone. Knowing they will die in the facility, they don deep-sea suits and drop to the ocean floor (not without casualty), with the insane goal of walking a mile to another station. As if it weren't already a thrilling update to a disaster movie, we soon learn that they are being hunted in the pitch-black water.

*Spoiler alert*

In the impossibly dark atmosphere (or lack of), the movie often looks and feels like a space movie. In fact, substitute just a couple of visuals, and we have what amounts to Ridley Scott's Alien. People are forced to travel between relatively safe spots where they can recharge and clean their suits; the pressure is exhausting and claustrophobic; we suspect they will all die. And then there's the humanoid monsters hunting them. I was a bit bewildered by this because I simply didn't expect it, and while the scares are mostly effective and well-designed, the horror of this movie felt increasingly gimmicky. It's just that we've seen it all before, you know? Throw the Xenomorph into James Cameron's The Abyss, and that's this movie, right?

Wrong. Because in Underwater's climax, Stewart and the last survivors have to navigate a hallway that serves as a nesting ground for these creatures. Hanging like bats, they seem to be dormant for the present, until of course one is awakened by the clumsy intruders (to be fair, they are wearing those unwieldy suits). Once Stewart extricates herself from being swallowed by a particularly hangry monster, she fires a flare gun into open water for a distraction and for, you know, a little enlightenment. And suddenly we see with her that a titan has emerged from the depths. No, this isn't The Meg. 

It's Cthulhu.

I know, I know, it's weird. But honestly the shock of that single shot was enough to bowl me over, and I still haven't quite recovered. It's the money shot of the year. We could talk about whether the movie deserves to be in Lovecraftian canon all we want, but that revelatory shot is the single coolest, most effectively horrifying shot in any movie inspired by the Lovecraft mythos. There are a couple passing hints earlier in the film that something strange was going on behind the scenes with the drilling company, including a pentagram drawn on a blueprint of the first drill site. There really isn't anything like xenophobia, paranoia, racism, madness, or cult worship, which may be why the reveal is so damn shocking.

Sure, it's probably even a cheap ploy by the filmmakers. But before that point, it was already an effective movie in its own right, derivative though it is. It's lean, it's mean; it drops us literally as the action explodes, and it never relents its horror until the credits start rolling. It has no pretense, no unnecessary fluff; it gives exactly what it wants and takes exactly what it wants. It's perfectly self-contained, mercifully brief in length, and doesn't even give you enough time to consider disliking what you're watching. It boasts some real technical artistry, too, especially in sound design and cinematography from the criminally underrated Bojan Bazelli (Hairspray, Burlesque, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Ring, Pete's Dragon, A Cure for Wellness, and Spectral, among others). And then to have that big bastard come clomping out, Underwater totally won me over. I can't exactly articulate why, but I just really had a blast with this flick. What a ridiculous delight.

Tenet (2020)

 Score: 3 / 5

There can be no denying that Christopher Nolan is a unique voice in the industry. For better or worse, he saved the Warner Bros./DC partnership and has revitalized cinematic noir for the twenty-first century. It's impossible to watch one of his movies and not instantly recognize his aesthetic, but his latest ultra-high-budget outing is a nearly perfect microcosm of a case study, showcasing why his visions are brilliant and often utterly inaccessible.

We begin with a SWAT siege on an opera house in Kiev. During the concert performance, our unnamed Protagonist (as identified in the credits) rescues an exposed spy and retrieves a bizarre-looking artifact. He is saved by a mysterious soldier before he is captured and tortured; after biting into his cyanide pill, he is resuscitated to learn that the pill was a fake, the mission was a test, and he passed. It really doesn't make much sense at this point, but it makes for a pulse-pounding opening sequence. Unfortunately, the movie makes less sense from here on.

The Protagonist, played by a beautifully dressed and skillfully underperformed John David Washington, is basically a stand-in for what we might imagine 007 to look and sound like under Nolan's directorial control. Suave and stoic, he infiltrates, races, fights, and of course shoots in his impeccably tailored suits. He travels around the world form Kiev to Mumbai, Tallinn to Oslo, meeting with powerful oligarchs and arms dealers while following his lead: a single word, "Tenet." He learns the shadowy organization has developed technology to reverse entropy, essentially "inverting" seemingly spontaneous, kinetic objects to travel backward through time.

Much like Nolan's last foray into theoretical physics, Interstellar, this movie manages to impress us with its Big Ideas but utterly fails to convey the science involved. Unlike that film, though, at least Tenet can boast of plenty of exciting action between the messily contrived, exposition-heavy scenes of dialogue. But for a movie that runs 150 minutes, you'd think Nolan could have included a concise, simplified description of just what the hell is happening. While the science of inverted movement is bizarre enough -- I mean, entropy itself is insanely complex -- Nolan further complicates it by allowing humans to invert themselves in time, and suddenly we have a particularly bizarre version of time travel in what is otherwise an already twisty spy thriller. He's basically showing off his dubious understanding of theoretical physics (he consulted with the same physicist on Interstellar) but in such a way that he doesn't let us in on his masturbatory fantasies. In fact, he lets one of his characters early on -- a scientist, no less, played by Clemence Poesy in a single scene -- tell the Protagonist, "Don't try to understand it; feel it." It's really a shame Nolan didn't take that advice, either.

The Protagonist learns that a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (played by a deliciously wicked Kenneth Branagh, doing his best Bond villain impression) supplies the inverted bullets that started this whole mess, and he attempts to infiltrate through Sator's wife. The art dealer Kat, played by a cool Elizabeth Debicki, is unfortunately as underwritten as she is transparent, and is easily the weakest element of the movie (again, a common criticism of Nolan's work, this one of female roles). In a truly mind-numbing series of dialogue, we learn that she is being blackmailed by the husband she loathes for selling him a forged painting. Instead of giving her a character, the movie gives Kat a son, whom Sator dangles as incentive for her to not simply leave. The Protagonist seemingly cares for Kat and his attempts to help rescue her result in a parallel plot that often intersects with the espionage/heist mess.

To discuss the plot any further will surely confuse me, so I'll leave that to the hordes of YouTube "explainers" who get off on that sort of thing. My takeaway here is that the plot often makes just enough sense if you just let it take you along for the ride, but the more I try to understand the physics the worse my comprehension fails me. This is Inception on steroids; at least that film had a fairly simply vertical structure of levels of artificial dreams. This film is a web of time-travel like we've never seen before and hopefully will never see again, draped in Nolan's slick style and carried along by a series of fabulously realized action scenes. Of course, many of these are also commonly criticized in his flicks, which boast high concept themes but rely heavily on car chases, heists, and hallway combat to entertain. There's really not much that's groundbreaking in those, despite his fans' loudest praises.

And, frankly, the film might make more sense upon a repeat viewing. Specifically one in which I can use closed captions. Ludwig Goransson's hypnotic, pulsing, drone of a score may be effective, but it is also deafeningly loud. The sound editing, too, often drowns out the voices of the cast in key scenes -- I'm thinking of the characters behind their breathing masks a la Bane (in The Dark Knight Rises) or Kenneth Branagh whispering into a walkie-talkie during the climax. Some might call this technique immersive, but struggling to hear took me out of the moment in ways that were, at that point, irreversible. An immersive experience like Dunkirk this most certainly is not.

Finally, and just because this is the kind of thing I'm interested in, I became aware of attempts at palindrome in the script in ways that I'm desperate to hear Nolan discuss. Not only is the back-and-forth visual dynamic key in the film -- in ways that sometimes occur in the same scene, or are visited later in the same scene from a different perspective -- but specific names reminded me of the Sator square, which the credits confirmed for me with the spelling of the villain's name:
SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

I would love to know what the square means for Nolan, and if it helped serve as his inspiration. Actually, I'd just like to know what the hell this movie means to him, generally, because I'm just at a loss. You could discuss the briefly-mentioned impetus for the plot as climate change; you could discuss the problematic female lead; you could discuss the thematic implications of inverted time. Even the basic plot is sure to spark some bewildered after-screening discussion; my group stood in the parking lot and some fairly basic plot points were topics of some contention and consternation. Ultimately, there is too much going on in this movie to really make any concrete sense of, well, anything. Which is fine, for some viewers.

This viewer preferred to enjoy the vibrant chemistry between Washington and Robert Pattinson, and their incredible habiliments that were never less than impeccably ironed. My God.