‘Ber’ months at the movies
Here we are, not quite Oscar season, not quite summer blockbuster season — it’s the movie “ber” months, which means a cavalcade of mixed pleasures and assorted nuts. Three of those arrivals now showing in cinemas are
It, Mother! and Logan Lucky. In the interest of nailing three birds with one stone, here’s a quick look: An unexpected box office smash, It takes us to Derry, Maine, Stephen King’s usual locale for bad thoughts, bad ideas and absentee parenting. Though clowns are only occasionally scary in real life, Pennywise, played by Bill Skarsgård in Andy Maschietti’s new adaptation, tries his damnedest.
It begins with little Georgie Denbrough (Jackson Robert Scott), being lured to a gutter drain by his floating paper boat, and by the gleaming eyes of Pennywise, who turns out to be a persuasive talker. If he weren’t so pervy looking, Pennywise would probably be a lot of laughs.
Like many movies since E.T., the absence of parents spurs a troupe of adolescents, The Only Kids In Town Who Know What’s Really Going On, to band together, a time-honored tradition in movies like Goonies and King novels that have led us to
Stranger Things — in fact, one of the motormouth kids from that Netflix series turns up here as part of the gang called The Losers.
Director Maschietti (Mama) mostly gets the job done, with the kids engaging in nonstop F-bomb banter, and there’s a wider assortment of faces than, say, Stand By Me. But once
we know there’s an evil clown in town luring kids to an underground fate, the film proceeds mechanically from shock to shock. The kids, smart as they are, seem incapable of understanding that most basic of horror tropes: Don’t split up. It soon grows repetitive, never really upping the ante from that first sewer grab in the opening sequence.
And though Skarsgård’s Pennywise is never as under-your-skin unnerving as, say, Heath Ledger’s Joker was, what is disturbing is the actual parental lapses of the adults in this movie — the bullying cop dad, the smothering mother, the creepy pedo-dad. These real horrors would come to occupy some of King’s later, more mature fiction, but It exists more to remind us that King, in his ‘80s mode, clearly recognized, much as Pennywise does, that one of his true talents was ferreting out the things that scare people most and shaping it into bestsellers.
You can’t really escape being called pretentious if you lock yourself in a room for five days (one day less than God took to create the universe, incidentally) and emerge with a finished script, as director Darren Aronofsky did in writing Mother!
Though early reviews have been divided, this allegorical home invasion shocker has its demented charms. Remember, this is the guy who directed Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream. Cray-cray is the order of the day. Adjust your cinematic antennae accordingly.
Jennifer Lawrence is a serene Earth Mother type who awakens in the old Victorian house she has been carefully restoring to find that her older hubby Javier Bardem, a blocked poet, has invited a couple (Ed Harris and a singularly bee-atchy Michelle Pfeiffer) to stay in their home for, well, as long as they like. They’re really the worst houseguests you can imagine: Harris smokes, Pfeiffer swills cocktails in the daytime, and Lawrence has her hands full puttering around rooms, cleaning up after them, while Bardem just seems invigorated by the arrival of his new “fans.”
The houseguests have two sons who arrive uninvited and get up to all kinds of mischief, and if J-Law referring to their home as “paradise” isn’t enough to clue us in to what’s going on here, then sorry, no more spoilers!
Poor Jennifer Lawrence. The camera follows her mercilessly as she reacts to every new piled-upon crisis in an increasingly wigged-out manner as the house is filled with the din of unwanted guests and “followers” and her paradise is reduced to a pile of smoking cinders. (The role was reportedly difficult for Aronofsky’s new GF Lawrence; she is said to have pulled herself back from the script’s “dark places” by watching episodes of Keeping Up With The Kardashians in her trailer.)
Underlying the relationship between Mother and Him (the characters’ names) is a parable of artist and muse, human and Mother Earth, man and woman: Aranofsky, like director Lars Von Trier, never tires in showing us the ways women suffer not only for their art, but for their very existence (see Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream).
Bardem behaves like a self-absorbed egomaniac, desperate for love and attention from the masses. He pens a second poetic missive (after being inspired by his “muse,” J-Law) that becomes such a huge hit, he can’t turn the multitudes away, even as they misbehave and wreck the place, twist his words and contort his meaning. (Stick around for that final meal, though, it’s a real kicker!) There are nods to the kind of insane celebrity worship that goes on in today’s world, as well as environmental warnings aplenty. No wonder Lawrence looks increasingly distressed and displeased. All she can do, before coming completely unhinged, is wander around the house in bare feet, accosting rude strangers and yelling “Hey!” In fact, Hey! might have been a better title for Aronofsky’s not-so-subtle biblical allegory.
Yet still, if you’ve managed to sit through all 18 episodes of the recent Twin Peaks, this might be right up your alley. And in truth, I kind of liked Mother!, as bananas as it was, though it suffers from an overwrought third act (and the term “overwrought” faces a lot of stiff competition here) that’s unnecessarily graphic. Imagine what it might have become with a second draft!
Set in Trump’s America, Steven Soderbergh’s heist comedy Logan Lucky seems to embrace #resistance values, as it pushes a band of thieves known to media as “Ocean’s 7-Eleven” into desperate action.
West Virginian construction worker Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) is laid off with a “preexisting condition” (because of a limp — hello, Trumpcare!) and forced to Plan B to save his brother, sister and daughter from economic plight.
Brother and bar owner Clyde (an amusing Adam Driver) signs on to Jimmy’s plan to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway during a big NASCAR race, a scheme that’s so elaborately concocted, not even Wile E. Coyote could wrap his Acme-enhanced mind around it.
The plan involves busting disgruntled munitions expert Joe Bang (a very entertaining Daniel Craig) out of prison to help tap into the place in the Speedway where all the collected dollars flow in pneumatic tubes. Such a scheme involves laser-point precision and ample resources that would no doubt challenge even Mission: Impossible’s Ethan Hunt. But as with that Tom Cruise franchise, Logan Lucky is more concerned about us getting behind these characters and their loony plan, suspending our disbelief in midair as easily as David Blaine. And in that, it succeeds.
The ensemble crackles like a tuned-up straight-six, including dimwit brothers Sam and Fish Bang (Brian Gleeson and Jack Quaid), a brow-furrowing prison warden (Dwight Yoakam) and a dogged FBI investigator played by Hillary Swank (“I hate airtight alibis!”).
Logan Lucky, far from the potent social message we thought it might be, turns out to be a Looney Tunes escapade in which things just turn up conveniently — like fireman outfits, color-coded cockroaches and gummy bear bombs — because the story (crafted by Rebecca Blunt) calls for it. We are expected to believe that Jimmy is such a criminal mastermind that every possible contingency is thought out far in advance, with no room for error. (A reminder: we’re talking about Channing Ta tu m here.)
What Soderbergh apparently wanted to do was an “anti-glam Ocean’s Eleven,” perhaps reflecting the more desperate straits of actual down-and-out Americans. If only digging yourself out of bad economic times was this easy — and fun!
One thing you can’t accuse Soderbergh of is talking down to his audience, even if they’re not actually the NASCAR lovers he thinks he’s addressing. There’s no direct call-out to Trump voters, for or against; Soderbergh seems to cleave to the belief that there are “good people” on “both sides” (though in his case he’s not referring to neo-Nazis and their critics, as a certain US president repeatedly does). From its semi-grotesque but ultimately sympathetic take on young girls in beauty pageants, to its depiction of a prison “riot” that’s about as realistic as Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock, Soderbergh is doing playful cinema here, not Oscar bait social commentary.
You want these characters to ultimately succeed not because they’re likable or morally right, but because they’re clever enough to beat the system. Which, arguably, also describes Donald Trump.