Worth (2021)

 Score: 4 / 5

The rare biographical/historical movie more concerned with theme than with plot, Worth debuted on Netflix this month just in time for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. I've rewatched movies about that terrible day recently, and I'm struck by how few actually dramatize the events of it; perhaps it would be in poor taste, or perhaps none of us who remember it want to relive it. United 93 and World Trade Center are perhaps the only ones that capture the reality of what happened. Others tend to use 9/11 as a touching stone, exploring what happened after in politics (The Report, Lions for Lambs), international war (Zero Dark Thirty, Redacted), or even on a personal level (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close). Then there are those that try to recreate the sensations of that day on a metaphorical level (Cloverfield, and just about any disaster movie that involves skyscrapers collapsing). Worth belongs to the family of political aftermath, though its thematic questioning takes a slightly different track, all the more weighty as the last twenty years have caused much suffering for the surviving first responders.

As its title indicates, Worth questions the value of human life. Specifically, that's what its lawyers are trying to accomplish while setting up the 9/11 Victims' Compensation Fund, a congressionally mandated effort to help the families of those who died during the terrorist attacks. Michael Keaton and Amy Ryan play Kenneth Feinberg and Camille Biros, respectively, the partnered lawyers selected to define the goals and functionality of the fund and then facilitate its rollout. Shortly after the early establishing scenes, which primarily introduce Feinberg as the practical, logically-minded numbers man, the government asks him to head up this sticky project. His cool rationality belies some relative enthusiasm in fulfilling what he sees as his duty, though he knows it will be a thankless task; he repeats his aim for "objectivity," removing emotional baggage from the proceedings. But it bears a hollow ring. After all, how do you set up a single formula -- one that is "fair" -- to ameliorate the losses of loved ones across the board?

Director Sara Colangelo and writer Max Borenstein work hard to demonstrate for us the complex nature of the protagonists' task. They constantly reference the different kinds of people directly affected: can you compare the worth of a CEO and a school child? A custodian to a lawyer, a pilot to a firefighter? The insurance companies certainly will try to contrast those price tags, to say nothing of grieving families. Speaking of which, what about single parents to multiple children, or gay lovers who were unable to marry, or primary providers to elderly or ill parents? The unbearable nuances of these vastly different situations all need to be explored and calculated before the fund's two-year deadline hits. Our filmmakers use a clever shorthand in building these questions and raising our awareness by splitting up the legal team and having them interview potential recipients of the fund.

It's a fascinating and moving film for many reasons, but its greatest strength lies in letting its starring cast -- which it balances very well -- take a backseat during the long middle section, focusing our attention on the interviews with victims' families and on their heartwrenching stories. And while these scenes get everything right on their own, they serve a dramatic purpose less humanitarian: they exist mostly to show the development of Feinberg's character from Mr. Scrooge-y Objectivity to an ex-Mr. Grinch whose heart has grown three times its size.

And then there's Stanley Tucci as Charles Wolf, the husband of a woman who died on 9/11, who plays a sort of popular populist arguing against the bureaucracy and red tape inherent in the fund's formula. His trope, a wise man on the fringe, acts as devil's advocate and mentor to Feinberg, but I wanted more understanding of him as a character. The film's deus ex machina is in fact delivered by Wolf, whose ultimate public approval of the fund got it to surpass its goal only in the eleventh hour. But the film skates over exactly why, turning it into a rather silly dramatic moment when Wolf meets with Feinberg and decides, quite arbitrarily, that he's a good person. It's a baffling misstep in a movie that gets so much right. Thankfully, though, it's not nearly enough to sink the ship, and Worth is more than worth bringing up again when September rolls around.

Blood Red Sky (2021)

 Score: 2 / 5

Nadja is a single mother and fighting a debilitating illness that appears to be terminal. When we first see her, pale and bald in a restroom, she looks to be battling leukemia; she's a woman of few words, so we never fully get a glimpse of her inner life. A German widow, she's shuttling her son into a red-eye flight across the Atlantic to a doctor in New York who might be able to help her out. Her son, Elias, who can't be more than ten or twelve years old, gazes knowingly at her as though he has matured far beyond his years while seeing his only parent suffer. As we might expect, the flight is doomed: shortly after taking off, a group of terrorists kills the air marshals and pilot, hijacking the plane until their ransom is paid. Surely this will be a Flightplan meets Air Force One scenario, and show the triumph of family and guts over greed and ambition.

And yet, as the terror sets in amongst the passengers, we realize that Nadja is hiding something far more horrifying. Played by a very physical Peri Baumeister, Nadja undergoes a transformation, revealing herself to be a vampire on the rampage. Having taken a drug earlier to suppress her bloodlust and pallid, batlike appearance, the sudden violence on the plane brings out the worst in her. Literally. Almost immediately, she's draining corpses of their fluids, and the terrorists realize that they picked the wrong plane to hijack.

Blood Red Sky belongs to the genre-mixing, bizarro family of From Dusk till Dawn, Snakes on a Plane, Cowboys vs. Aliens, or Train to Busan. Mash up two unlikely character types and see what happens, just for fun; throw in some schlocky gore and a few loud guffaws, and you've got a really fun time at the movies. Given the last decade or so, we've gotten to like antihero stories, and so watching a woman rip a bunch of white male terrorists up should be an exciting new prospect. It helps that she's a mother -- and a good one -- although her relationship with Elias takes far too much time to establish and develop. Is it necessary, to build what little we know of her character? Of course, but this sentimentality should support the ridiculous story rather than fight it for thematic dominance.

Then again, the chemistry between Baumeister and the little boy who plays Elias is one of the only things the movie gets totally right. Instead of making her vampiric revelation a fabulous midway centerpiece of the film, writer-director Peter Thorwarth makes it a fairly bland part of the expository setup. It would have been so fun to watch the terrorists make bloody discoveries and to learn with them, in horror, that the person killing their mercenaries isn't a hidden Harrison Ford or Jodie Foster, but rather a sharp-fanged, pointy-eared creature that looks like Stephen King's nightmares a la 'Salem's Lot.

Even with the hijacking, the movie takes a long time to pick up its own pace. Once Nadja goes full monster mode, complete with flashbacks to her initial infection and transformation, Thorwarth finds his intended pacing in close-quarters action. Unfortunately, the action is often fairly obvious; uninspired, these scenes take place in flourescent-lit cabins and holding decks. Movies cramped in claustrophobic spaces work best when individual scenes are in easily-differentiated locations, adding a sense of movement and momentum to the shots, even if the plot isn't advancing much. This movie can't quite escape what feels like visual doldrums, locking us into a bloodbath in which I cannot remember the sequence of events because of the lack of visual cues or development of unique sequences. It also doesn't help that the movie is longer than two hours. 

And speaking of time, the filmmakers almost completely sideline the easiest, most compelling part of pushing this plot! The simple fact that, due to the terrorists' rerouting of the plane, the sun might shine through at some point and destroy the only hope these passengers have. Beyond that, the film introduces ideas such as anti-Muslim fears, motherly sacrifice, and even the nature of the vampire in question, and only barely follows through on any of these interesting ideas, choosing instead to focus on the repetitive bloody action. I guess it was a fine enough distraction for a quiet night at home, but I certainly have no interest in taking this flight again.

Malignant (2021)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Much will be made of James Wan's "return to form" here, in his latest horror movie since forays into the DC and Fast & Furious franchises. And yet those discussions, I fear, may largely ignore his first feature films; his name has become synonymous with the big franchises that (along with Oren Peli's films) revamped the haunted house and possession subgenres over a decade ago. But Malignant, the most aggressively weird horror movie of the year, feels more like Wan doing his original work, finally with studio financial support and a big budget to burn. I make this connection right away, here, because it helped me appreciate the movie more; its flouting of genre and style was enough to initially put me off in the screening, and based on the conversation I overheard afterward, not many people were able or willing to dig deeper than a superficial bewilderment or dislike.

Okay, now we're entering spoiler territory. Yes, already. We'll try to avoid them, because a primary pleasure (or source of discontent, perhaps) of this film is its really wild plot twists, of which there are several, evenly spaced apart. But, then, this movie is so tightly wound I fear any discussion will lessen the impacts of its nasty shocks and creeping cruelties. So move forward with the knowledge that I'll not be discussing specifics of plot or character beyond the first few scenes, which is pretty much what we gleaned from the trailers.

Basically, the movie begins with Madison Lake (Annabelle Wallis from Annabelle, The Tudors, and Peaky Blinders) pregnant and living in Seattle. Feeling ill at work, she returns home and we learn from her discussion with her husband that they've been unable to have a child for some time. At one point, he maliciously asks her "How many times do I have to watch my children die inside you?" During their argument, he attacks her and hits her head against the wall before she retreats to the bathroom and locks herself in. After a disturbing dream in which a man enters the house and kills her husband, she wakes to find her husband murdered. The intruder then appears and attacks her. She awakens in the hospital, informed that her child did not survive. It's all a grimy, dark, and depressing start to what will be a disturbing story; it's about loss, to be sure, but also about what can take root when we succumb to our own pain. In that, this movie has a lot on its mind.

Since this inciting incident, Madison keeps seeing visions of people being murdered. Also, her head keeps bleeding where it was injured in her domestic scuffle. Now she's under investigation as a suspect. Once we learn the name of the killer stalking through her vivid, violent daydreams, "Gabriel," we learn that she has a disturbing connection to a Gabriel, namely her childhood imaginary friend. But the Gabriel we see is a gaunt male in a trench coat, a dark silhouette with long black hair obscuring his face, surely not the stuff of a kid's playtime. He's a seedy, urban Gothic serial killer with an unaccountable ability to swing around like a ninja. Why, we ask? Why not, Wan counters.

The connections begin to pile up, and before long -- because of the breakneck twists, there's hardly a dull moment -- the full reality of Madison's situation is made clear. Ish. Like I said, it's an aggressively weird reveal that is as much a game-changer as it is a flamboyant throwback to those awkward '80s horror-thrillers that skipped proper theaters and were dumped into VHS displays in local rental stores. Even the title font is in that vein, to say nothing of the lurid red and thickly evocative marketing materials (below). With its heavily synthesized music and emphasis on female suffering (or is it empowerment?), more than once I wondered if this film was meant to be an homage to giallo movies from Dario Argento or Mario Bava. While watching, often unsure whether to grimace or chuckle, I tried keeping track of all the clear homages to Cronenberg and his imitators but soon realized it was fruitless, if not impossible.

Wan is doing his own thing, as he always does. This feels as raw and inspired as Dead Silence and Death Sentence, movies so unapologetic in their brazen freakiness that they too polarized critics. While Malignant won't be remembered as a "great" horror film in the way Saw and Insidious are, and frankly I hope this one won't inspire a franchise, I do hope that it gains a cult following. Its plot holes and thin characters won't win new fans to Wan or the genre -- whatever the genre might be! -- but it's a fascinating view into an auteur whose instincts are still some of the most wickedly entertaining in the business.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Shaun seems happy enough, working as a valet on the famous hills of San Francisco. He clearly takes care of himself physically, and he has cultivated a strong social life with his best friend and co-worker Katy. So when they are attacked on the bus by martial art henchmen, it feels as shocking and violent as it might in real life. An extended sequence follows, much longer than I expected, in which Shaun heroically fights back as if he's been trained as a ninja; the sequence has some of the most eye-popping and beautifully choreographed fighting in any MCU movie. It's also bubbling with humor, gliding past the nihilistic violence of other, similar movies in the genre. By the time it ends, we have a burgeoning hero casting off his urban alter-ego, his friend eager to join him on a globe-trotting adventure, and the threat of an emotionally complex big bad. All the makings of a proper installment in the franchise.

Simu Liu plays the newest hero in the MCU with panache and heart, proving himself an action star who can also navigate the conflicts of his inner life. A cursory summary of his character -- even the film itself -- reveals little of note, because it's about as standard an origin story as Iron Man. But Liu is no Stark, and his own daddy issues prove to be the beating heart here. His father Wenwu (Tony Leung) is a power-mad warlord who has toppled armies and kingdoms for a thousand years, with the help of ten magical "rings" he wears as bracelets. His own force, called the Ten Rings, we might remember from that first MCU movie as the terrorists who attack and abduct Stark in Afghanistan. He once fell in love with a mystical woman and raised a family with her, but after she is killed, a grieving Wenwu forces his children to become killers before the family breaks apart.

The film, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (Just Mercy, Short Term 12, The Glass Castle), knowingly jumps across space and time to give us the story we need to get to know Shaun better from the inside. We are organically shown flashbacks that flesh out darker parts of their family history as we need them, avoiding pitfalls of chronological doldrums. And it helps that the excellent cast are able to economically utilize acting shorthand to jump right in and show us the history -- often non-verbally -- without lots of expository ado. This is the rare MCU flick that manages to wow us into silence from the action, and then let us sit in the silence for a while as the characters come to term with emotionally shattering revelations. Nowhere is this more clear than near the end, as Wenwu single-mindedly launches an attack on his late wife's homeland in a desperate attempt to get her back. As the news settles in, Shaun (now embracing his real name of Shang-Chi) sits by a lake with Katy and the two are comfortably, if sadly, silent.

And then the film shifts into high fantasy, not unlike the Thor movies but still fresh, particularly in style. Wenwu's goal is the dark side of Ta Lo, a magical land that holds a dark secret in its mountain; Wenwu thinks his late wife has been hidden there, but everyone else knows that a giant soul-sucking demon has been imprisoned there. As Wenwu and his army break it open, tentacled spawn emerge and turn the tide of battle. The intentionally excessive climax leads into even greater giddy energy when a dragon magically explodes from the lake to aid our heroes. While it's a little hard not to think of this water-dragon in terms of Raya and the Last Dragon, and it's certainly an unexpected move from the filmmakers, Cretton's direction and an emotionally gripping screenplay keep you rooting for more. It doesn't even entirely feel like an MCU movie at this point, and that's actually a good thing.

In what is otherwise a novel and delightful film, I find myself returning to one annoyingly sticky spot time and again. Shang-Chi's sister, Xialing, is a really interesting character who gets disappointingly little screen time. In flashbacks, we see her training herself to be as good  -- no, better, I think is the word she uses -- a fighter as anyone else in the Ten Rings. Though Wenwu seems determined to destroy the world because he can't move on from his wife's death, his children seemed content enough to simply disappear into other worlds. Xialing's criminal enterprising has led her to a place of power and secrecy, and while she puts it on hold to help stop her father's death march, the movie leaves her in a shocking and fascinating place. If only we had more time to appreciate her growth and experiences before the film reminds us that a sequel will surely be on its way.

But, then, why deny the far more numerous pleasures of this movie? Michelle Yeoh plays Shang-Chi's aunt and a guardian of Ta Lo with her usual grace and beauty. Benedict Wong pops in a few times as what will hopefully become the new Agent Coulson-type comic relief in the franchise. Ben Kingsley utterly steals the movie from under everyone's feet as soon as we hear his first off-screen dialogue as Trevor Slattery, the intoxicated actor hired by the Ten Rings to act as the terrorist "the Mandarin," who is now clean and excited at the opportunity to not be Wenwu's court jester. And what review or discussion of this movie would be complete without a single mention of the awesome skyscraper melee on scaffolds above a Macao nightscape? As the MCU works to rebrand itself after Endgame, Shang-Chi offers refreshing new visions of a cinematic future. We can hope this helps to curtail the onslaught of shows and miniseries on a streaming service, but let's take things one punch at a time.

Candyman (2021)

Score: 5 / 5

As is now in vogue, we've been blessed with another remake that's actually a sequel but uses the same name and ignores previous sequels in its franchise. This time, it's Candyman, and it's bloody terrifying. Beginning twenty-seven years after the original 1992 film, we're introduced to Troy as he tells a spooky story. Bringing his audience -- including us -- up to speed on the lore, he recounts the events of the first film, when Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) lost her life in an evil night of blood and fire; in describing her as mentally ill and wicked, we see right away the power of folktales and urban legends. As Lyle studied the phenomenon of an urban legend, she herself has now become one. Interestingly, her story is entertainingly retold around an upper-class apartment in Chicago proper, giggled over by wealthy young black adults whose own upbringing in a gentrified district makes them skeptical of the horrors of what was once Cabrini-Green.

Troy is not the main character of this Candyman, though Nathan Stewart-Jarrett plays him very well; I worried for most of the movie that this lovely and flamboyant man or the man-candy on his arm would end up gutted. Horror doesn't usually allow the gays to be happy, and Candyman doesn't usually allow anyone else to be happy. The main character, rather, is Troy's sister's boyfriend: Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II from Aquaman, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and Watchmen), an artist whose mindfulness of the gentrification of his home neighborhood informs his art. Thankfully, his girlfriend Brianna (Teyonah Parris from If Beale Street Could Talk and WandaVision) is successful and mostly supportive of his work. As they hear the story from Brianna's brother, they discuss the central problems plaguing that particular historical context in the same way commentators and scholars have since Bernard Rose's original film came out. Brianna pointedly says, "White people built the ghetto and then erased it when they realized they built the ghetto."

Anthony wanders Cabrini-Green looking for inspiration for his next work. Once poked by his muse -- a bee, which of course is more than just a bee -- he creates violent works of the deaths of Black people in the neighborhood. Once put on display in a gallery run by a man named Clive (surely a nod to the short story source material by Clive Barker), things really get scary. Could the blatant capitalist commodification of Black lives and livelihoods have caused the bloody onslaught that takes two white people's lives in the gallery after hours? Or could it have been their flagrant disrespect of legends and a people group they know so little about? Either way, Candyman appears and blood is spilled.

Anthony learns a lot in a short amount of time, and it's in his scene with William (a deliciously sinister Colman Domingo), an older man who knows a little too much about the urban legend. But he's deeply endearing, and says lines that were surely penned directly by Jordan Peele, who serves here as writer and producer. Describing the perseverance of the myth, he notes that many men have died and been caught up in the Candyman story, as if a new horrific death of a Black man is needed to remind people about racism and police brutality. But, he says grimly, "one white woman dies and the story lives forever." William even provides Anthony his own origin story for Candyman, based on a run-in he had with a seedy figure as a child. My favorite line 

And herein dovetail the thematic elements, any of which are fascinating but, altogether, make the film an angry bonfire of an experience. This movie deepens and widens the monster's myth from the original film by carefully situating the intensifying violence on Black bodies by whiteness as its center point. Saying the name of Candyman -- literally the tool of his conjuring -- by the end of this movie becomes a sort of rallying cry for vengeance; it's also the rallying cry of current movements against abusive and deadly police tactics against Black people. Candyman becomes a sort of vindicator whose horrors might be a force for good if the endless cycle continues. In this way, Candyman radically makes use of the explicit fact that the real world is more horrifying than things dreamed up in supernatural fiction. There's a reason Lovecraft Country was recently popularized by HBO.

But that's not to discount the body horror here. The original was scary because of its gory content back when gore was becoming silly; this one fully embraces its skin-ripping, blood-gushing realism and more than once elicited groans and yelps from the auditorium in which I sat. Director Nia DaCosta (Little Woods and the upcoming MCU film The Marvels) harnesses a unique and deeply confident visual style that shook me to the core, one that knowingly and gleefully gooses the audience with morbid humor and jump scares before bulldozing us with existential dread. Her opening sequence, which features Sammy Davis Jr. singing "Candy Man" over reversed studio and distributor logos, leads into chilling shots of a foggy Chicago at twilight, shot upside-down and backwards from the street level. 

And then there's the story itself, which is so profoundly intelligent and unexpected that I gasped often out of sheer viewing pleasure. DaCosta's work is pitch-perfect, as is her direction of an excellent cast. The disgusting sound mixing and riveting cinematography clearly work toward DaCosta's intended vision. And the audacity of this screenplay in humanizing and communalizing the monster we've feared for three decades, while making him so much more horrifying through a wealth of real history that spans centuries, is nothing short of devastating. “Candyman isn’t a he,” William tells Anthony before warning him to stay away, “he’s the whole damn hive.” And if you had told me a sequel that we all thought was just a remake would be able to make the original make more sense rather than add a bunch of crazy new stuff, I'd have laughed at you. Five times. Maybe into a mirror.

Respect (2021)

 Score: 3.5 / 5

Jennifer Hudson makes me feel like a natural woman. Or at least she does when she sings it as Aretha Franklin in the new biopic Respect, which chronicles the life and music of the late legend. The story goes that Franklin personally approved of Hudson playing her, which is enough to tighten anyone's vocal cords. This isn't the first time recently that a big name played Ms. Franklin; the third season of Genius on National Geographic, starring the incomparable Cynthia Erivo, is still on my watchlist. There will always be movies about famous singers, but some just hit a little different; the story of Franklin's life hits a little differently these days, and thankfully Respect is big and bold enough to make its mark.

The film works hard to dramatize a twenty-year period of Franklin's life, from her youth in 1952 to her biggest album Amazing Grace in 1972. Played as a young girl by an awesome Skye Dakota Turner, she grew up with a lot of music in her life until the sudden death of her mother (Audra McDonald, too briefly in the movie but utterly haunting in delivery) shocked her into silence. Her home life left a lot to be desired, and the film briefly suggests that her father (Forest Whitaker) is abusive and possibly alcoholic; she is further raped and impregnated twice by a young man in her father's house, and was a mother of two by her late teen years. The movie never really explores the effects of these traumas on Franklin's art or life, apart from repeated references to her "demons" taking control of her, which is a massive and separate spiritual/religious abuse absolutely ignored by the screenplay.

But Franklin rose majestically above the troubles of her young life and managed to make multiple jazz albums early, establishing her career even as her father managed her business affairs. He also manages her personal life, or tries to, as he strongly objects to her relationship with Ted White (Marlon Wayans), probably because he sees too much of himself in the younger man. No musical hits, though, for Franklin, and that bugs her to rebellion. She decides to demand "Respect" and, after an all-night writing session in her living room, she and her girls record the hit number. Watching Hudson channel -- rather than imitate, although you can tell her voice is not, totally Hudson's own -- the legendary singer is nothing short of transcendental, and the filmmakers know it. Director Liesl Tommy, whose stage credits are really interesting, works best in highly theatrical scenes of female intimacy and musical performativity. So the drama of the movie, effectively, only serves to string together Hudson's almost-nonstop singing to the point that the film reads more like a musical than a biopic.

Few of the other actors matter, and few nuances of the screenplay matter much in the end. Whitaker pops in and out as a charismatic caricature of an abusive father and dangerous man of faith; Tituss Burgess briefly blesses us as musician James Cleveland to heroically help Franklin create her Amazing Grace recording. The movie rolls through all-too familiar tropes in its turns, and its treatment of the heavy drama in its subject's life is so vague and noncommittal that I don't even remember most of it. But just seeing Hudson take us all to church repeatedly, tirelessly, and as intensely as her character did is more than worth the price of a ticket. She was great in Dreamgirls. Here, she's godly.