A most salient portrait of evil

Beatriz at DinnerWhen Miguel Arteta and Mike White started filming Beatriz at Dinner last August, I doubt they could have predicted how salient the film would be when it was released ten months later. The biting, mostly comic commentary on class, race and manners is particularly unsettling because Trump won, because what may have been written as satire a year ago is naked reality now. It’s a tragicomedy, but in our country’s current predicament, its more tragic, making the film’s bleak ending creepily logical. Arteta and White are known for their awkwardly brilliant collaborations Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl (among other things), and Beatriz, while not achieving the levels of those two films, is another affecting, often very funny cringe-fest.

Salma Hayek is Beatriz, a Mexican immigrant healer who specializes in various forms of massage and mysticisms. After working on her very rich longtime client Cathy (Connie Britton) in Newport Beach, her car won’t start, and Cathy asks her to stay for dinner. Cathy and her husband Grant (David Warshofsky) are hosting billionaire Doug Strutt (John Lithgow), his wife Jeana (Amy Landecker), and a younger couple Shannon and Alex (Chloë Sevigny and Jay Duplass). Beatriz is wildly out of place, not just because she’s working class and a recent immigrant, but rather because she’s not a toxic capitalist, like the hosts and their friends. Strutt is Trump crossed with Rupert Murdoch, a real estate mogul who thinks that because he owns valuable things he is a more valuable person than anyone else. He delights in hunting endangered wild game, tells his wife she’s “well-compensated,” and thinks it’s appropriate to interrogate the one non-white person at the dinner over her method of immigration. (It was legal, by the way.)

Beatriz has a few too many glasses of wine and does not behave as the rich folk think poor Mexicans should: she slyly snarks back at Strutt’s rude questions, interrupts her hosts inane conversation with her own substantial stories, and, worst, tells people that their behavior is immoral. Most of the humor comes from the appallingly petty cocktail chatter uttered by Shannon, Alex and Jeana, but it seems that before Trump’s election Strutt’s amoral arrogance would have also seemed satirical and funny. Now it feels simply evil. As White has done throughout his career, he takes conversations and monologues much further than most writers would dare, and Strutt’s monologues, expertly delivered by the great Lithgow, are chilling, both believable and discomfiting. Beatriz’s reactions evolve, unnervingly, from witty to wanton.

Arteta’s grainy, naturalistic shots work well for the Newport estate where most of the film takes place, exposing both the blemishes of the seemingly sanitized wealth and its enviable beauty. His ensemble is perfectly cast and they all do great work. Duplass and Sevigny are hilariously dreadful, both clearly delighting in saying White’s more scathing lines. Britton, playing the only sympathetic rich person, achieves the balance of cluelessness and kindness with seeming ease (an ease we’ve come to expect from her in any role). Hayek’s performance is one of her best; calm and wise, sad and pointed. But Lithgow’s performance is truly great in its representation of truly banal, utterly unsurprising evil.

Beatriz at Dinner
Directed by Miguel Arteta
Written by Mike White
Starring Salma Hayek, John Lithgow and Connie Britton
Rated R

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

|           

Terrific, radiant, humble superpig

Okja and MIja (Ahn Seo-hyun)I think the best reason to applaud the ascendance of the Netflix and Amazon TV and film studios is their willingness to fund the ambitious projects of artists like the Wachowskis (Sens8), Jill Soloway (Transparent), and Aziz Ansari (Master of None) — and now Bong Joon Ho, who directed the insane, groundbreaking Snowpiercer, as well as the modern Korean classics Memories of Murder, Mother, and The Host. His latest, produced and distributed by Netflix, is Okja, a scathing sci-fi satire about greed, family, factory farming, and a giant mutant pig with a heart of gold. By Bong’s standards, it’s a lesser film, but better than the vast majority of films available in theaters: hilarious, sad, horrifying, poignant, and daring.

Tilda Swinton plays Lucy Mirando, the CEO of a Monsanto-like corporation founded by her sociopathic father and recently run by her similarly amoral sister Nancy. Lucy has severe platinum blonde bangs and a cheery affect and determination tinged with a cynical worldview. At the beginning of the film, she also has a slight lisp from braces. She’s Karen Crowder from Michael Clayton (a role that won her an Oscar) after heaps of Prozac and a shot of adrenalin, probably synthetic. Lucy is trying to rehabilitate her company by raising superpigs who will feed the world, and in a less-than-believable way to publicize it, she’s hosting a contest to see which farmer can raise the best one. The contest is hosted by Johnny Wilcox, a deranged former animal show host played with bonkers abandon by Jake Gyllenhaal.

Ten years later in rural South Korea, young Mija (Seo-Hyun Ahn) and her grandfather (Byun Hee-bong) have raised their superpig Okja by letting it roam freely around their mountain home. Okja is Mija’s best friend, looking like a porcine hippo and acting like a cross between Lassie and Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web. Mija thinks that her grandfather has bought Okja from Mirando, but discovers he’d lied to her after Wilcox shows up with a camera crew and takes Okja away. Enraged and resolute, Mija travels to Seoul to save Okja but she’s met with Mirando’s paramilitary forces and an animal rights terrorist group headed by a soft-spoken, tie-wearing man named Jay (Paul Dano). There’s an epic chase scene, capitalistic machinations, and Okja ends up in New York, where multiple horrors await. But Lucy sees Mija as a way to stave off a public relations disaster, and Mija flies across the world for the unveiling of Okja as the winner of the super pig contest. Things don’t go as planned for anyone; the third act is outrageous, as action comedy and as horror.

Throughout his oeuvre, Bong has threaded trenchant political commentary into genre plotting, sometimes more obvious than not. While Okja has similarities to The Host, with a young girl protagonist and a collection of clueless professionals dealing with an impossible creature, most non-Korean viewers needed to have its political references and positions explained. Okja is an obvious and contemptuous attack on the soulless cruelty of modern slaughterhouse food production and the carelessness of genetic manipulation of animals. Most American films that might have similar politics would be serious-minded Oscar-bait, like Silkwood or Norma Rae. And most animal-child buddy teams appear in G-rated family films like, well, Lassie. Okja, despite its visual style, slapstick moments, and basic plot structure, is decidedly not a kids movie. The violence, to both humans and especially to animals, is nightmarish. No studio would have allowed it, but Netflix gave Bong control, allowing him to make something shocking and profound. Okja should’t be missed and Netflix should be thanked.

Okja
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
Written by Bong Joon Ho and Jon Ronson
Starring Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano, and Seo-Hyun Ahn
Rated TV-MA / R
On Netflix and in select theaters

 

|       

Finally, ‘Wonder Woman’ is here

Gal Gadot in Wonder WomanInfamously, since Warner Bros. decided to create a crossover-heavy “universe” with its superheroes, the studio’s comic book films have been at best wrong-headed and underwhelming (Man of Steel) and at worst incompetently made and pointless (Suicide Squad). The fear that they’d screw up a Wonder Woman film after waiting decades to greenlight it was justified. Thankfully, they didn’t screw it up at all. Instead, under the direction of Patty Jenkins, Wonder Woman is the studio’s best superhero film since 2005’s The Dark Knight, perfectly cast, funny, exciting and surprisingly moving.

The character is 75 years old and one of the most iconic superheroes ever created. But until last year’s last year’s inexorable Batman v Superman, which teased this new film, Wonder Woman hasn’t ever made an appearance on film. She hasn’t been seen in a non-animated form since the end of the campy, if delightful, series starring Linda Carter in 1979. Wonder Woman’s absence as the hero of a major TV show or film has been the subject of much consternation among fans, with most assuming film execs’ sexist views about what audiences want to see were to blame. When the Wonder Woman film was announced, fans rejoiced and got nervous: What if it sucked? Would it kill any female-focused future superhero films? It doesn’t suck, and we’ve already been promised a sequel.

Wonder Woman is the nom de guerre of Princess Diana (Gal Gadot) of the Amazons, the only daughter of Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen). The Amazons are an all-female race of stellar warriors created by the Greek Gods (in this version) to fight the war god Ares. Ever since the defeat of Ares, the women have lived on a magically hidden island and trained for his inevitable return. Hippolyta fashioned Diana out of clay, and Diana grew into a willful but powerful young woman. One day, a plane crashes off the island and Diana rescues the pilot, an American spy fleeing the German military. Steve Trevor (a charming Chris Pine) is handsome and dashing, and his stories of the mass death and destruction of the Great War inspires Diana and others to think Ares has returned. Against her mother’s wishes, she leaves with Steve and, amongst a series of feminist fish-out-of-water jokes, they plan to stop evil Germans (Danny Huston and Elena Anaya) from deploying a hideous chemical weapon. Diana is convinced she’s going to find Ares and be able to kill him and thus end all war, while Steve – and their Scooby gang of sidekicks – are unsure Diana is divine or just damn good with a sword and lasso.

There are three reasons Wonder Woman works. Gal Gadot is chief among them, doing the seeming impossible by seamlessly transitioning from tough to sweet, empathic to avenging, naïve to wise, irascible to magnetic, ethereal to funny. Jenkins, who directed Charlize Theron to an Oscar for Monster in 2004, beautifully manages Gadot’s star-making performance alongside those of a tremendous supporting cast that includes Robin Wright, David Thewlis and Ewen Bremner. Her skill at the quiet moments would never have been in doubt, but the effects-laden action set-pieces were as thrilling and occasionally awe-inspiring. And finally, Allan Heinberg’s screenplay does the requisite origin story work while also addressing the meanings of and reasons for good, evil, war and love without the cheese that usually accompanies action film philosophizing.

When I left the movie, I was happy for Wonder Woman, finally done justice in the theater after decades of delays. I was also uplifted by Heinberg’s script, Gadot’s charisma, and, most importantly, by the exhilarated and beaming teenage girls, young women, their mothers, aunts, and sisters who were sitting around me. I wish they hadn’t waited so long for this kind hero, but I’m glad that when it arrived, it was this Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman
Directed by Patty Jenkins
Written by Allan Heinberg
Starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine and David Thewlis
Rated PG-13
Originally published in LGBT Weekly

|      

Stomach-bursting, face-sucking Fassbender fabulousness

Michael Fassbender in Alien: Covenant

Alien: Covenant is the eighth movie in the 38-year-old sci-fi horror Alien franchise. Following 2012’s Prometheus, the financially successful but fan-loathed prequel, Covenant tries to walk a fine line: The film throws enough red meat to ravenous Alien fanboys with stomach-bursting, face-sucking, don’t-go-in-the-basement grotesquery to get away with continuing Prometheus’ much-maligned, but wildly ambitious origin story of both the aliens and the human race. But while I appreciate the bloody legacy of Alien, I’ve seen those monsters be monstrous in the same manner, seen the humans make the same dumb fateful mistakes, now eight times. The only thing new is the mythology, and thankfully the great actor Michael Fassbender is the one making those myths.

Covenant starts 10 years after the end of Prometheus, when Elizabeth Shaw, last survivor of a research vessel, and her team’s android David (Fassbender) fly off into space in the spaceship belonging to giant human-looking beings dubbed the Engineers. The Engineers had both created life on Earth and created an alien-incubating virus that, it seems, they wanted to use to destroy humanity, and Shaw and David were traveling to find the Engineer’s home world and ask them why.

The new film begins with a totally unrelated ship named Covenant in the middle of a many-year trip to colonize a distant planet. Walter, an android that looks exactly like David, is watching over 15 sleeping crew members, 2,000 sleeping colonists and dozens of drawers of frozen human embryos. A random neutrino burst damages the ship and wakes the crew (killing the captain played by James Franco). While they’re repairing the ship, they hear a bizarre radio transmission, which they determine comes from a planet even more hospitable to life than their original destination, as well as seven years closer. Over the objections of Daniels (Katherine Waterston), new captain Oram (Billy Crudup) changes course.

This is the first of many, many mistakes this crew makes over the next hour and forty-five minutes. You can’t have a horror movie without careless or dumb characters doing something death-wishy, but the crew of Covenant seemed to have lost a substantial number of brain cells while they were asleep. Only Daniels and Walter have a healthy suspicion of the planet, but that’s not enough to prevent the snowballing doom when they arrive and we discover they’re on the planet Shaw and David had been looking for.

Fassbender was the best thing about Prometheus; David is one of the creepiest androids in science fiction, resourceful like Star Trek’s Data but also wily and unhinged like Westworld’s Maeve. As both the less problematic later model Walter and as David, Fassbender gets to act with one of the best actors in the world, himself. And he has a lot of fun, particularly as the effete David slowly reveals himself to the crew of Covenant and to the audience to be more than just a little over-programmed.

The rest of the cast, which includes Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo and Jussie Smollett, does a good job being fierce, scared or determined. Aside from Fassbender, only Crudup and Waterston have complex emotional and intellectual lives, which is a shame. McBride and Bichir are too talented to be wasted as simple cogs in the narrative machine. But to make a sci-fi epic, director Ridley Scott needs those cogs, the mandated conventions, and overdone tropes. Still, Scott makes genre films that are gorgeously shot, art directed with inspiration and never boring. But whether the Alien fanboys will give credit where it’s due is less predictable.

Alien: Covenant
Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by John Logan and Dante Harper
Starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston and Billy Crudup
Rated R

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

|          

The family that fights mercenaries and fascists together stays together

Rocket Raccoon and Baby Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2

Part of why people loved Guardians of the Galaxy so much when it came out in 2014 was how surprised they were: The Guardians are not well-known characters outside of diehard Marvel Comics fans; no (at-the-time) major starred in the movie and few knew of writer-director James Gunn beyond his screenplay for Scooby Doo.

There was not much to expect. But Guardians of the Galaxy was a massive hit because it was thrilling, funny, nerdy and it featured Chris Pratt’s arrival as a major star. It’s considered by many to be the best or at least one of the best Marvel movies. So, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 had a lot to live up to. And while I couldn’t be pleasantly amazed again, I was still impressed by how much fun I had. The movie does all the things tent-poll comic book movies are supposed to do while doing something very few of them manage: be completely character driven.

The Guardians are comprised of their wise-cracking, Earth-born captain Peter Quill, or Star-Lord (Pratt), green-skinned and humorless warrior Gamora (Zoe Saldana), rascally racoon-looking Rocket (voice by Bradley Cooper), oafish strongman Drax (Dave Bautista) and the tiny, talking tree toddler known as Groot, whose only words are “I am Groot.” (The phrase can mean anything and only Rocket knows how to interpret it.) The film begins with the Guardians killing a space monster for a gold-skinned race of fascist humanoids called the Sovereign in return for a prisoner of theirs: Nebula (Karen Gillan), the angry, blue-skinned sister of Gamora .

But as the Guardians leave the planet, the Sovereign attack; they are enraged when they discover Rocket has stolen a few of the Sovereign’s super-powered batteries. The Guardians escape but only because a mysterious, absurdly powerful man named Ego (Kurt Russell) incinerates the Sovereign ships. It turns out Ego is Peter’s long-lost father – who is also a millions-of-years-old god-like being called a Celestial. As Peter bonds with his dad, Gamora and Nebula fight, Drax has hilariously deep conversations with Ego’s empath companion Mantis (Pom Klementieff), while Rocket and Groot deal with the bounty-hunters and pirates called the Ravagers and their erstwhile leader and Peter’s former guardian Yondu (Michael Rooker).

There are a lot of characters and a lot of plot threads, and Gunn handles them expertly. He develops each character, giving them motivation, conflicts and almost complex emotions. The plots are created by the characters working to resolve these emotionally oriented problems, almost all of which revolve around how they create and sustain their families. In each case, these tough and rough heroes are resisting the connections right in front of them and seeking out the wrong goal, and they confront this error when they must fight a bunch of bad guys all at once. It’s a surprising moving and surprisingly sweet plot for a movie full of space explosions and weird-looking aliens.

The soundtrack is full of hits of the 1970s (ostensibly all found on Peter’s cassette tape Awesome Mix Vol. 2), and they are not used as ironic background noise but as commentary on the action: from “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” by Looking Glass to “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens, from “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison to “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac. “Brandy” is used particularly powerfully, with Ego explaining that he is like the sailor in the song: “But he made it clear he couldn’t stay / No harbor was his home.” It’s a romantic notion, but it’s also a sad one.

By the end, Peter realizes that nothing can replace the loss of his father, not even a God. But a family of space swashbucklers might come close.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2
Written and Directed by James Gunn
Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana and Kurt Russell
Rated PG-13

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

|