Review: Bugonia

Bugonia is a film about two people who have two extremely different views of the world - so much so that only one of them can be right. Fortunately, one of them is a raving nutcase with a worldview he seems to have pulled from the internet's most insane depths. Unfortunately, he's also the one with a gun.

Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his trusting cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) live on a run down farm in the shadow of a tragic incident that left Teddy's mother (Alcia Silverstone) in a vegetative state. It's understandable that he'd want revenge on the corporation responsible, but what he's planning isn't about revenge: he's trying to save the planet from aliens sent here to doom us all.

Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is a high flying executive at a large corporation. She's a polished operator, well versed in corporate speak: her current push is to encourage employees to leave on time, unless they still have work to do, in which case they should get their work done but also feel free to leave on time just so long as their work is getting done. You know the type.

It's not enough for Teddy and Don to kidnap her and tie her up in their basement; they also shave her head and smear her with antihistamine cream because she's an alien (an Andromedan, to be specific) and her hair is how she communicates with the mothership that'll be arriving in a few days during a lunar eclipse. The clock is ticking if Teddy wants to persuade her to take him with her so he can negotiate for the survival of the human race- or just demand they leave Earth alone.

Much of what follows is a back-and-forth between the two as he explains his conspiratorial world view and she tries to lead him to a place where he lets her go. Both of them seem roughly in agreement that the world is in trouble environmentally: he blames the aliens, she suggests humanity might be responsible all on its own but hey, at least her corporation is trying its best and they could try even better if he let her go.

And meanwhile a famous executive is missing so there's a bit of a search going on, which has Casey (Stavros Halkias), a local cop and also Teddy's former babysitter (which seems to be a story with a bit more to it than we're getting) sniffing around. Is Don fully on board with all this? And what's the deal with the bees?

This adaptation of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet largely rests on the performances of its two leads - well, that and director Yorgos Lanthimos' sense of the absurd - and Stone and Plemons are in excellent form. They both find the humanity in characters that are often little more than debating points, giving the offbeat mix of environmental concern and unhinged conspiracy some much-needed grounding.

As for that debate, the back and forth is often entertaining, and there's just enough going on outside of it to keep this from feeling like a filmed play. The substance of the debate isn't really connected to the real world - especially when we get the occasional hint that maybe Teddy might somehow be onto something - but again, it mostly works dramatically as a power struggle rather than a real attempt to discuss anything authentic.

Which becomes a real problem towards the end, when this takes a big swing dramatically that it honestly hasn't earned. The result is a conclusion that's easily the most powerful and memorable part of the film - it just doesn't feel like it develops emotionally from anything that came before no matter how many clues were scattered around.

The view of humanity here isn't exactly rosy, and despite Teddy's wacky views this is not much of a comedy either. He's put someone in peril in an attempt to deal with his own pain and loss, and the film respects that; while the tone occasionally swerves towards the manic, anyone after something that will lift their mood - or just reflect a generally positive take on human existence - may want to look elsewhere.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

There are two possible audiences for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, and they want very different things from this biopic. As befits the story of the making of Springsteen's classic album Nebraska, one audience wants a deep dive into the details, a case of history brought to life - or at least, heavily referenced. The other wants a movie about who Bruce Springsteen is, a character study that brings the man to life instead. The big problem here is that it tries to do both.

At first it seems like this often moody and introspective film has sidestepped one of biopics usual potholes. Rather than covering the entire sweep of his life, Springsteen - here played by Jeremy Allen White - is just recording Nebraska while struggling with undiagnosed depression. So by focusing in on the small details of one of his biggest artistic triumphs (he's also recording tracks like 'Born in the USA' at the same time), we get the big picture? 

Well, no. Thanks to a powerhouse performance from White, Springsteen is a compelling figure throughout, getting at emotional truths even when it's obvious the film is fudging details. And the parts where the story is happy to just present elements without explanation - Springsteen, despite being a massive star, seems to like blowing off steam by playing guitar with a bar band in a local dive - we rapidly get a sense of what kind of man he is.

But then there's a bunch of reductive flashbacks to his childhood where his boozy dad (Stephen Graham) is bad news but means well, turning a bunch of Springsteen songs into mysteries to be solved (who knew or cared that there was a literal 'mansion on the hill' that inspired the song of the same title). At least his doomed relationship with local single mother Faye (Odessa Young) has the benefit of not being used as direct inspiration for some well-known song.

Unfortunately, despite decent chemistry between the characters, pretty much every scene with Springsteen and his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) is a leaden clunk of exposition, where everyone is utterly supportive of Springsteen while being in theory a little worried about the massively non-commercial direction his new album is taking. 

These scenes alternate between infodump speeches - Landau's wife (Grace Gummer) has a hilariously thankless role as the silent sounding board for his semi-regular updates on what stage the plot is currently up to - and the kind of "we're doing this The Boss' way or not at all!" confrontations that sound like Landau (who's still Springsteen's manager) had his lawyers go over the script to make sure he was presented in exactly the right light. 

And yet, the scenes where Springsteen tries to record 4-track demos in his bedroom for what would become Nebraska, and then decides he wants to put the demos out despite the sound being sub-par - re-recording them only made them worse in his opinion - are amongst the films best, simply by setting up a real problem and showing how it was solved.

If this could have somehow left out the history (do we really need to know 'Cover Me' was originally intended for Donna Summer?) and just focused solely on how someone puts together a record as memorable as Nebraska, it might have been something special. At least the music - of which there is plenty - is always ready to lift things up

Especially when The Boss is just chilling at home listening to Suicide's first album, which here seems to be nothing more than a bunch of inhuman screaming.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: Tron: Ares

The big gimmick with the latest Tron movie is that it takes the various glowing computer-generated - as in, creations from inside the computers inside the movie, not just the usual unlikely CGI effects - out into the real world. Which sounds promising, but the results only occasionally impress. That's a problem, as that's pretty much all this has going for itself.

The plot largely revolves around a quest for the "permanence code" a line of computer code never before mentioned but was somehow created during an earlier installment that will enable a computer generated character or object to exist on a permanent basis in the real world.

While it's bad news for the evil Dillinger Corporation that their cool tanks and super-soldiers - most notably Ares (Jared Leto) - crumble to dust and vanish after 29 minutes, it's great for the movie, as this timer provides most of the tension in the action sequences. 

Dillinger - led by CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), with his mother and former CEO Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson) not doing much in the background - can send out Ares and his 2IC Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) on superfast motorbikes that can release knife-like walls of solid light behind them as often as they like, but when the clock counts down the chase is over.

Only they can't even keep on sending Ares out because he's staring to dislike the way they openly call him expendable and don't seem to care that he's constantly dying in the real world. So when he finally does catch up with the Permanence Code - don't worry, there's been a whole plot about that going on as well, only it's amazingly forgettable - in the form of rival company boss Eve Kim (Greta Lee), he's open to offers.

With seemingly every blockbuster aimed at 12 year olds it's easy to forget that Disney is a company that makes movies for children, and Tron: Ares is for the most part a kids movie. Well, the half-baked story is for kids: the glowing visuals and Nine Inch Nails soundtrack is for adults looking to zone out and no drug use is implied let alone required to achieve that effect.

Unfortunately it only rarely hits the heights of the previous (and not really that great either) installment Tron: Legacy, which combined Daft Punk and a lot of inside-the-computer visuals to become a not-so-secret stoner hit. The shift to the real world does allow director Joachim Rønning to create some decent action scenes - and one ominous sequence towards the end does generate some actual awe-slash-fear - but ironically it's all too grounded to really work purely as visual escapism.

Still, that side of things works better than everything else: Leto does fine early on when the only emotion going on with Ares is vague dissatisfaction, but he never brings the character to life beyond that - most of his latter scenes require you to imagine a better actor in the role for them to make any sense. 

The story throws a bunch of new characters in like we've already met them - we haven't, so no need to rewatch the previous film - and aside from Peters' chewing the scenery none of them make any real impact at all. 

Is Jeff Bridges back? Well, yes, but he's firmly in "The Dude as Yoda" mode for his brief appearence. Usually a movie with zero engaging characters would be in trouble; in the world of Tron, the computers have always been the stars.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: Play Dirty

The latest in a long line of attempts to bring Richard Stark's armed robber Parker to the big screen, Shane Black's Play Dirty feels a lot closer to the books Donald Westlake (the man behind the Stark pen name) wrote starring bungling thief Dortmunder. Superficially similar on the surface, world's apart in tone.

Parker (Mark Wahlberg) is once again motivated by revenge when the score from a mid-level racetrack heist he was part of is stolen by a fellow thief (Rosa Salazar) who leaves him for dead. By the time he catches up to her, she's spent the money to finance a much bigger heist. To recoup his losses, he deals himself in.

Westlake started writing the much more lightweight Dortmunder novels after he tried writing a Parker novel but it kept slipping into comedy, and that's pretty much what happens here. The story holds together (just), but it's the usual run of heist after heist with a few twists and surprise reveals as things repeatedly turn out to be not what they seemed without ever becoming all that interesting.

The lack of stakes extends to the cast. The crims are all just a little too over-the-top, and even Parker's buddy in crime Grofield (Lakeith Stanfield) - who is a character in the Parker novels - is played too laid back to have any real edge. Only Gretchen Mol, as the wife of one of Parker's dead friends, gives this fluff any real emotion.

Wahlberg is surprisingly not bad as Parker - at times it feels like he's the only one who's actually read a Stark novel. He's given way too much dialogue and way too many chatty / chummy scenes, but when he's given Parker business to do he comes off well (physically he's too small for the role but that's Hollywood). 

It probably helps that he's the only major character who isn't a comedy motormouth, as while everyone else is fine nobody else really stands out (even Stanfield, who's usually a winner, is on autopilot here). Black's had form in the past when it comes to combining comedy with enough edge to give his crime capers real stakes. Here? The whole thing is as weightless as the numerous CGI-heavy stunt scenes.

For fans there's a bit of business that initially seems like a fun bit of Parker continuity (it involves The Outfit), but then turns out to actually be a major part of the plot that's referenced so often you don't need to know Parker history (or have seen Point Blank / Payback) to get the point. 

Play Dirty isn't a failure as such, but it's hard not to feel let down seeing so many quality ingredients add up to something that's middling at best. Parker - under various names - has been fumbled by movie-makers time and time again; much as it'd be great to see a film that really captured the character, it might be time to let him enjoy his retirement.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: One Battle After Another

Just like its characters and the war they're fighting, writer / director Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film (loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon's Vineland) rarely slows down. Despite the title, it's a rare recent action movie that's all about the chase, not the battle: everyone is constantly running to or from conflicts that are over in seconds.

To balance this - there's only so much character and exposition you can get out while you're on the run, though this does better on that front than you might expect - One Battle After Another is a film where what you see is what you get. People are who they say they are, and if they're not then you see the change played out on the screen. The story is about what it's about, with subtext largely kept to the minimal-slash-accidental kind.

So while this is a film that hits hard in the current moment, it is at heart an entertainment. The priority here is to make a satisfying action thriller of the kind that changing priorities and special effects have largely rendered redundant, and in that it succeeds: this feels satisfyingly grounded and weighty throughout, despite the plot containing no hidden depths or startling insights.

As for that plot, in broad strokes: Fifteen or so years ago, terrorist-slash-revolutionary organisation The French 75 roamed the USA, freeing people from immigration camps, setting off bombs in corporate headquarters and robbing banks to pay for it all. Leader Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) combines revolutionary fervour and a straight-up sexual lust for destruction. Good news for her partner and explosive expert "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio); confusing news for military man, one-time captive and now sexually obsessed enemy Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn).

When circumstances required Perfidia to make a choice, she did; in the present Calhoun is Bob Ferguson, a burnt out stoner largely shambling around in a dressing gown who is raising their teen daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) as best he can. The world has moved on, what's past is past - until the now Colonel Lockjaw is offered a chance to join the secret white power organisation that runs America. The only thing that stands in his way is the possibility that Willa might be his daughter. 

Much running around follows as Lockjaw sends all the forces at his command into the Ferguson's home town in a massive crackdown that sends immigrants fleeing under the guidance of Willa's martial arts teacher Sensi Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) while her high school classmates are locked up and interrogated. Willa is in the wind thanks to her family's revolutionary contacts; Bob, who is somewhat past his prime, is left struggling to catch up.

The action, by current standards, is small scale: lots of running, a couple of car chases, a few people get shot. But Anderson wrings every drop of drama and excitement out of these scenes, keeping everything on the move and everybody - even comedy grotesque Lockjaw - firmly human. 

Jumping out of a moving car would be extremely dramatic if it was happening to you; this is a war where one side can bring the full force of the state to bear and the other just has the connections between people to sustain it. By keeping things at the personal level, Anderson makes it very clear whose side he's on.

It would probably help balance the scales a little if Bob could remember the password to contact his former comrades. This isn't quite a comedy but there's a lot of humour here. Killer nuns and ridiculous conspiracy chiefs get laughs, but most of the comedy comes in the form of the well-meaning Bob swinging between anger and a kind of baked exasperation at having to try to resurrect his old life in a world where everything but the bad guys seems to have changed.

It's north of two and a half hours but the whole thing just flies by. Some things might not change and some wars may never be won, but you're a lot harder to hit if you don't stop moving.

- Anthony Morris