“Joe Bell” has its heart in the right place. It’s also one of those movies that very much wants you to know it has its heart in the right place, and insists you feel good about the rightful placement of said heart.
Based on the true journey of the titular character, Mark Wahlberg plays a man walking across America to raise awareness after his gay son is mercilessly bullied. The film has a lot of admirable qualities, but also feels like it’s trying too hard. It seems less like storytelling and more cinematic virtue-signaling.
Bearded, creased and scraggly, Wahlberg gives a solid performance that nonetheless contains no surprises. I knew every step of this guy’s journey, both geographically and emotionally, before each heel hit the asphalt.
If “Bombshell” looks like a bunch of Hollywood liberals teaming up for a vicious takedown of Fox News, the hated epitome of right-wing media, that’s because it is.
That doesn’t make it any less delicious or entertaining. And it’s as good a cinematic exploration aw I’ve seen of how sexual harassment is tolerated and even condoned.
Director Jay Roach’s last two films were a hagiography of lefty screenwriting icon Dalton Trumbo and a send-up of Republican congressional candidates. Screenwriter Charles Randolph won (deservedly) an Oscar for writing “The Big Short,” an angry and hilarious look at the housing lending crisis that set off the Great Recession.
And yet, “Bombshell” possesses layers and subtleties. It treats its characters as living, flesh-and-blood creatures full of complexities and contradictions. You may even be shocked to hear some of the Fox News women come out looking brave, even a little heroic.
You may have seen that freaky trailer where Margot Robbie, playing an ambitious up-and-comer at the network, is riding in an elevator. Then in walk Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson. They warily study each other through sidelong glances, the tension palpable, and you wonder how the hell the studio convinced Kelly and Carlson to portray themselves.
Except they didn’t. Kelly is played by Charlie Theron, and Carlson by Nicole Kidman. I’m not sure what kind of makeup or even possibly CGI effects were employed, but they look so much like the women they portray you’d swear there was some DNA swapping.
The voices are really good, too. Theron sounds so much like Kelly, with her upstate New York accent and odd word emphasis, it’s downright eerie. Kidman is great, too, though Carlson doesn’t have as distinct a speaking style to emulate.
These are showstopper performances that I’m sure will be remembered during the awards season.
The story follows along in 2016 during the last months of the tenure of Roger Ailes, the notorious political fixer-turned-news-mogul who ran Fox News from its inception. He’s played by John Lithgow in a naturalistic fat suit and facial prosthetics. You’d never call it a sympathetic portrait, but Lithgow manages to find the humanity inside the ogreish exterior.
Ailes believed in giving the audience what it wants, or at least what he’s convinced they wanted, which was right-wing opinion segments, short skirts and lots of yelling. He helped create Donald Trump as a viable candidate and then found himself tied to his yoke, as have so many others.
Robbie’s character, Kayla, is an amalgam of women used and abused by Ailes and a corporate culture that openly treated its on-air talent as sex objects. She begs Ailes for advice to launch her career, and they share a scene of pressure and submission that’s just devastating to watch.
Kate McKinnon plays Jess, a producer who befriends Kayla and has a brief romance with her. Jess is a liberal lesbian who hides her identity because she couldn’t get a job anywhere else but Fox News, and now no other network will hire her.
An excellent supporting cast includes Allison Janney, Connie Britton, Mark Duplass, Rob Delaney, Malcolm McDowell, Stephen Root and Liv Hewson.
The best part of the film is the middle section, where the word is out about Ailes’ disgusting behavior and the lawyers are circling. Rather than the walls closing in, the newsroom breaks down into a cheerleading squad led by Jeanine Pirro and a few others, handing out “Team Roger” T-shirts and insisting people wear them.
The #MeToo movement has sparked a lot of good things and also some predictable overreaching and backlash. This is basically the first mainstream movie to deal with the issue head-on, and it’s both chilling and exhilarating.
Many of us who haven’t been affected sit in our privileged perches and wonder how anyone could commit this kind of behavior, or why anyone puts up with it. “Bombshell” is a bravura portrait of how ambition, fear, lust and hypocrisy can combine in the most awful ways imaginable so that people feel trapped.
"American Ultra" is a quirky take on an old saw. This action comedy stars Jesse Eisenberg as a seemingly normal guy who discovers one day that he has amazing skills, including the ability to take down armed assailants with his bare hands. He wasn't even aware he could do this, until he does it.
We've seen this idea before with "The Bourne Identity," "The Matrix" and countless other flicks. The notion holds appeal because maybe anyone of us could be revealed as the badass chosen one, too.
The twist here is that Eisenberg is seemingly the last guy on Earth who could secretly be a trained super agent. It starts with the actor's small stature, unimpressive physique, soft features, trembly voice and disappearing chin. If you looked up "beta male" in the dictionary, it'd probably have his picture as an illustration.
Screenwriter Max Landis ("Chronicle") layers on the reinforcing characteristics. Mike Howell is an unassuming stoner who clerks at the Stop-n-Go, gets high with his girlfriend, Phoebe (Kristen Stewart), draws an amateur comic starring Apollo Ape and Chimp the Brick, and does little else. He's wracked with crippling phobias, including a violent aversion to leaving his town of Liman, West Virginia.
As the story opens, they are about to fly off on a Hawaii trip where Mike plans to pop the question. (Hawaii? Fancy ring? Must've been a lot of double-shifts at the Stop-n-Go.) But he's unable to get on the plane, and worries that he's just slowing Phoebe down. But then some big guys in black camo show up out of nowhere and try to kill him, and Mike easily takes them out armed with nothing more than a piping hot cup o' soup and a spoon.
Here we have the classic trope about the master spies deciding that a rogue agent who hasn't done anything to anybody in years needs to be eliminated -- even if it requires expending many more agents' lives and the entire operational budget to do it. Listen, spooks: if Jason Bourne decides he wants to retire on the beach, let him get fat on barbecue and piña coladas.
Topher Grace plays the maniacal young CIA chief who goes after Mike, and he's got a small army of his own twisted agents to do it. Of course, he always sends them against clerk-boy in twos and threes, instead of calling the whole gang in at once. On several occasions he's literally got a bunch of his "tough guy" spies sitting around doing nothing while he picks a pair to be the latest sacrificial lambs.
Lesson two, spooks: if you have 17 guys to dispatch against one, why in the world would you not just send all 17?
Connie Britton plays the good CIA gal who recruited Mike (unbeknownst to him) and is still looking out for him. Walton Goggins, so great on the "Justified" TV show, is the Laugher, one of the evil toadies. John Leguizamo turns up as your friendly neighborhood drug dealer, and Tony Hale plays a nebbishy desk agent caught between loyalties.
It's a fun ride, and director Nima Nourizadeh keeps things moving at a snappy pace. Eisenberg and Stewart have nice chemistry together in between all the chases and dismemberments. (Though I recommend the little-seen "Adventureland" if you really want to see some romantic sparks fly between them.)
"American Ultra" succeeds under the wallflower charms of Jesse Eisenberg and a clever script. Sometimes even pathetic losers can kill you with a spoon, so be nice.
It’s rare to see a film character as clearly drawn as Greg, the narrator and protagonist of “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.”
Most of the people we encounter in movies we instinctively recognize as constructs, things created for the purposes of telling a story. But Greg, who’s adeptly played by Thomas Mann, seems to step through the screen and sit down next to us, cracking jokes and infecting us with his geeky charm.
This Sundance favorite is based on the book by Jesse Andrews, who also wrote the screenplay, and directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. It’s the second feature as a director for Gomez-Rejon, who spent years as an apprentice and second unit director for the likes of Martin Scorsese and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.
Together they’ve crafted a film that is both very cinematic and un-movie-like. It pokes fun at some of the conventions of filmmaking, such as title cards that say things like, “The part after all the other parts.” Their main triumph, though, is in giving us a young man who’s such a confounding and interesting mix of flaws and virtues.
He’s like a 21st-century Holden Caulfield, though Greg’s ire is mostly projected inward rather than out at the world around him.
Greg is a 17-year-old floater. He wanders between the various cliques of Pittsburgh’s Schenley High School with friendly detachment, an emissary to all but a member of none. Insecure and self-effacing, he is so afraid of causing or receiving pain that he tends not to feel anything. Even his best friend since kindergarten, Earl (RJ Cyler), is referred to as a “coworker” because of the short films they make parodying well-known ones.
(Greg likes to brag about how awful they are, but they’re little 1-minute slices of brilliance. “A Sockwork Orange” is played out entirely with tube socks, while “2:48 Cowboy” emulates the seediness of a male gigolo attempting to ply his trade in the middle of the afternoon.)
His world gets thrown for a loop when Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a classmate in his class with whom he’s barely acquainted, is diagnosed with leukemia. Greg’s well-meaning parents (Connie Britton and Nick Offerman), who are friend’s with the girl’s mother (Molly Shannon), insist that he visit her and offer companionship.
Their first meeting is awkward -- that’s pretty much baked into all of Greg’s interpersonal relations -- but goes well enough to justify another, and then another. Soon they’re hanging out, watching movies, talking about teen stuff, and bonding. She gets sicker, they grow closer, and he and Earl embark on a mission to make movie just for Rachel.
Rachel and Earl aren’t as focused as characters as Greg is, but that's intentional. The movie is about him, and they are realized only through his eyes. Other side players stroll in and out of his personal frame, each with the sort of distinct traits you only see in quality films.
For instance, Greg’s dad is a tenured sociology professor, which he translates as meaning he doesn’t have to work a lot, so he mostly stays home and experiments with strange culinary dishes. (When Earl comes over, he offers the boys a snack of dried cuttlefish.)
His history teacher (Jon Bernthal) is a strutting, tatted-up rock star who admonishes them to “respect the research.” Shannon is exquisite as Rachel’s mom, who drinks and flirts to hide her pain. Katherine C. Hughes shines as Madison, a pretty girl who unwittingly stomps on Greg’s heart on a virtually daily basis.
In his narration, Greg warns us repeatedly that this is not a sappy love story in which he and Rachel fall in love and then she dies. This is true and also not entirely true, but I’ll leave it to you to discover where verity lies.
Somewhere in this review I should mention that “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is also very, very funny. Andrews gives us all sorts of wonderful comedic situations and dialogue. (Of Rachel’s absent father, Greg says, “You need to apply for a dad refund.”) In one scene, Greg drafts his college application personal essay in the voice and perspective of Werner Herzog.
If you don’t know who Werner Herzog is… well, maybe it’s best if you just move along.
I'm not sure if "This Is Where I Leave You" is the most original film ever made, but what it lacks in freshness it makes up for with delectable actors and snappy scenes. The Altmans are borderline crazy, self-obsessed and narcissistic, but somehow 103 minutes with them feels like time well spent.
Directed by Shawn Levy ("Night at the Museum") from a screenplay by Jonathan Tropper, based on his own novel, the movie brings together the four adult children of the Altman clan after their father passes away. Mom Hillary (Jane Fonda) is a real piece of work, a showboating therapist who wrote a best-selling book, "Cradle and All," in which she spilled the intimate details of her kids' tumultuous upraising.
They have not, unsurprisingly, turned into well-adjusted adults. And they're none too pleased about their mom's insistence that they sit Shiva together for seven days, per their father's dying request. (This, despite being only partially and nominally Jewish.)
Judd (Jason Bateman) is the fulcrum, the character upon which all the others pivot. A successful radio producer and one of those guys who seems to have the perfect little life planned out, he's thrown for a loop when he catches his wife sleeping with his boss.
Sister Wendy (Tina Fey) is brittle and angry, mother to two young kids and married to an on-the-go businessman who can't put down the phone and work for even a few minutes, not to mention witness the miracle if his child's potty training.
Paul (Corey Stoll) is the oldest and most responsible, the one kid who stuck around in his hometown to take over the business from his father. He and his wife (Kathryn Hahn) have been trying without success to get pregnant, and the pressure and constant questions about their progress is like splitting a rail.
The baby of the clan is Phillip (Adam Driver), born years after the others and partially raised by them. A natural-born screw-up with an impish talent for needling others, Phillip is dating a much older woman (Connie Britton) who acts as his enabler and sugar momma.
The filmmakers essentially throw this grab-bag of resentment, sibling rivalry and neuroticism into a pot and set it to a slow boil. There are arguments, jokes, bonding, more fighting, and so on.
It doesn't sound like much, but the cast really drives the material to terrific heights. They click in a way that you rarely see large ensemble casts do; usually each actor is trying to accomplish their own goals for their character and sacrifice the group dynamic. This is the sort of movie that you can't imagine any other performers in those roles.
A few minor characters flit in and out of the foreground. Across the street is Hillary's dependable friend Linda (Debra Monk) and her son Horry (Timothy Olyphant), a former beau of Wendy's who suffered a terrible brain injury years ago. He sort of wanders around, helpful but forgetful, like a more verbally proficient Boo Radley.
Wade's estranged wife (Abigail Spencer) turns up, pleading for a second chance and with more drama to share. Penny Moore is a townie (Rose Byrne) who's stoked a long-burning fire for Wade, and he's at a low point where those glowing embers are looking pretty good. I also enjoyed Ben Schwartz as a young rabbi who can't outrun his horndog teen reputation and nickname.
Despite not a lot of screen time to spread around to every character's story, the film does a good job of making each of them distinct and relatable.
"This Is Where I Leave You" plays out fairly predictably, but I didn't mind the lack of surprises because the journey getting there is so caustically funny and unexpectedly heartwarming. When the Altmans aren't verbally punching each other -- sometimes physically, too -- you want to give them all a good squeeze.
