Review: "Vox Lux"

"Vox Lux" is a movie about... something. I'm honestly not sure what. It stars Natalie Portman in the second half as a Lady Gaga-esque pop superstar struggling in her relationships with her sister, daughter and manager. In the first half the character shows how she got where she is, parlaying a horrible childhood incident into a career.

The last 20 minutes is Celeste's big comeback concert -- though don't you dare call it that -- and we're treated to an elaborate stage show of lights, pyrotechnics and exuberant dancing as Portman warbles through various techno-tweaked tunes that could have been sung by, well, anybody.

The Celeste of the first half is a sweet kid of 14 tempted by the sparkle of fame and fortune, and in the second half she's a total rhymes-with-witch who seems decades older than her 31 years, resentful of all the attention she gets while not-so-secretly feeding off it to sustain her sense of self.

All of this is accompanied by flat, emotionless narration by Willem Dafoe. It's the sort of narration that doesn't tell you anything the movie doesn't, so you wonder why it's there.

Surprisingly, it's the second half that's hard to get through. Portman plays Celeste as a shrill, nasty harpy who somehow forgot she's supposed to be the nice girl. There's no emotional match with the wide-eyed kid she was, played by Raffey Cassidy. We wonder what happened in the in-between.

I'd have liked to have seen that movie.

We follow Celeste around as she has nasty encounters with the press, with a restaurant manager who asks for a photo, with her manager (Jude Law), her sister, Ellie (Stacy Martin), her teen daughter, Albertine (Cassidy again) and well, pretty much everybody. Celeste is estranged from Ellie, who writes her songs and takes care of her kid, but gets treated like dirt for her trouble.

The first part is more interesting, when a disturbed classmate shoots up Celeste's class, wounding her seriously in the neck. She wears braces and decorative collars for the rest of the movie. After she and Ellie come up with a heartfelt song for the memorial ceremony, it becomes a national anthem. The manager (never named) is brought in to guide her, which follows a predictable path of ear-candy songs, bizarro makeup effects and squirmy dance moves.

What's the point of it all? I dunno. Writer/director Brady Corbet seems to be trying to fashion a morality tale about how even the most earnest intentions can become twisted in the caldron of the celebrity-making machine. Sounds like a terrible bargain, but not an interesting enough one to watch for two hours.

Review: "Escobar: Paradise Lost"

"Escobar: Paradise Lost" tells a fictionalized, but compelling, tale about real-world Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar as seen through the eyes of a naive foreigner. It starts out a little too kiss-kiss and ends up with an overabundance of bang-bang, but it's a solid and engaging drama anchored by a top-notch performance from Benicio del Toro.

Josh Hutcherson, best known from the "Hunger Games" movies, executive-produced and stars as Nick, a young Canadian who comes down to Colombia with his brother, Dylan (Brady Corbet), to set up a little surf shop and waystation on the pristine beaches.

He runs into Maria (an effervescent Claudia Traisac), who's overseeing the construction of a new clinic in the nearby village, and they soon become a thing. Nick knows her uncle is somebody important, because he's paying for the clinic and has big Stalinist posters of himself all over town.

Maybe a politician, he figures.

Then he's invited to Escobar's massive hacienda, a beacon of Versailles extravagance amid the squalid villages, and asks Maria where the family money comes from. "Cocaine," she answers nonchalantly.

In her world, an economic system based on sending drugs to the U.S. seems perfectly respectable. The people all love Escobar for his good works, he's a dedicated family man, and even the police and local government officials go along with his seemingly benevolent will.

Slowly Nick gets swallowed up by the family business, until he realizes he's reached the proverbial point of "in too deep" and is asked to do some horrific things himself.

Del Toro is just mesmerizing in the title role. He plays Escobar as a quietly charismatic man, who treats family like royalty and employees like family -- until, that is, the danger they represent to him outweighs their usefulness. Then he and his minions could be capable of the most stomach-churning brutality.

For instance, when Nick and his brother first set up shop they're beset by the local toughs who want them to pay for protection. After Escobar becomes aware of their actions, something ... unfortunate befalls them.

With a padded midsection, sleepy eyes and a variety of disguises to hide out from the authorities when needed, Escobar is a chameleon in form and his emotions, too. All of his interactions are polite, he displays seemingly genuine concern for Nick and his niece -- but he never fails to make it clear who's in charge.

Carlos Bardem, brother of Javier, is terrific and terrifying as one of Escobar's chief henchmen, who eventually gets sicced on Nick. The last third or so of the movie is him on the run, and while the chase is pulse-pounding at times, it goes on for way too long.

Writer/director Andrea Di Stefano is a veteran Italian actor stepping behind the camera for the first time. While he shows some jitters in terms of pacing, he certainly seems to know how to elicit sincere performances from his cast.

This cinematic version of Pablo Escobar is so frightening precisely because del Toro makes him seem so disturbingly plausible.

Review: "While We're Young"

Writer/director Noah Baumbach makes movies that often seem lightweight at first glance, even frivolous, but creep up on you with their hefty themes and cerebral contemplations.

The newest from the filmmaker behind “The Squid and the Whale” and “Frances Ha” is “While We’re Young,” about a married couple in their 40s (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) who fear life has passed them by and want another shot at youthful liberation. They do so using another couple who are about 20 years younger as surrogates, befriending them and absorbing their carefree lifestyle.

“Young” is simultaneously very funny and very thoughtful. The movie is trenchantly observant about how we live today as individuals within a changing society, especially how evolutions in technology have affected the ways in which we communicate with each other and tell stories – for good or ill. (Mostly ill, in Baumbach’s take.)

Baumbach visited some of these same themes in “Greenberg,” which also starred Stiller as a Generation X guy trying to fit in with the Millennials, and looking poorer for the effort.

Josh (Stiller) is a formerly successful documentary filmmaker whose career has been swallowed by his latest project, 10 years in the making and not any closer to completion, or even coherence. It’s something about power in America, but not only is Josh incapable of summing it up in an elevator speech for potential financial backers, he couldn’t even do it if they took the stairs.

His wife Cornelia (Watts) is a producer for her father (Charles Grodin), a storied documentarian – think Pennebaker or Maysles -- who used to be Josh’s mentor until they diverged on aesthetics. Josh promotes the idea of the “personal documentary,” in which the filmmaker is an active participant in shaping a narrative.

Cornelia and Josh get along seemingly well. They’ve got their work, they don’t seem to want for money, and they have a small circle of acquaintances their own age. But there’s an undercurrent of regret there.

They have no children (after failed attempts years ago), and feel estranged from their closest friends, Marina and Fletcher (Maria Dizzia and Adam Horovitz, both terrific), who just had a baby that their lives now revolve around. And Cornelia sits in the middle of the schism between her husband and father.

Things change when they meet Jamie and Darby, played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. They’re 25-ish hipsters, married but otherwise seemingly untethered to adulthood. He’s an aspiring filmmaker who attends one of Josh’s classes, and she makes her own ice cream. In very short order the two couples have glommed onto each other, with Jamie seeking professional help from Josh and Cornelia finding emotional support from her counterpart.

This section contains quite a lot of laugh moments, such as Cornelia’s horror after being roped into her friend’s baby music class, or Josh pathetically copycatting Jamie’s slouchy fedora and vinyl obsession. There’s also a great scene in which they attend a New Age-y session where people drink ditch water to inspire hallucinations and purge the soul (and stomach). Stiller ponders dizzily, sounding like Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now.” And the shaman, who rides a hip Vespa, frets about his charges purging onto his carpet.

But things get more somber, and smarter, as time goes on. Jamie, played assuredly by Driver, proves to be a sly manipulator, affecting too-cool nonchalance while quietly directing events in his favor. Josh begins to resent his young pupil/guru and his film methodology, especially regarding a project about a disturbed Afghanistan veteran (Brady Corbet).

If the film has a weak spot, it’s that the female characters start out as full partners in the storytelling process and gently recede into the background. The movie becomes more and more focused on Jamie/Josh, with the Grodin character as the third leg.

My objection is a mild one, based not on political correctness but regret for missed opportunities for insight. At 97 minutes, this is the rare film these days that could stand to be longer.

In many ways, “While We’re Young” is Noah Baumbach’s most mature work to date. For a little while I thought the movie had simply forgotten to be funny, but it was deliberately morphing into a second half that is decidedly less jovial but inarguably more profound. Such is life, and moviemaking.