The Woman in the Window: Draw the curtains

The Woman in the Window (2021) • View trailer

2.5 stars. Rated R, for violence and profanity

By Derrick Bang

This one should have been a slam-dunk, because the premise is irresistible.

 

And classic.

 

(Alfred Hitchcock certainly thought so, back in the day.)

 

Jane (Julianne Moore, right) proudly shows Anna (Amy Adams) a photo of her son,
which she keeps in a locket.

Consider the elements: Author A.J. Finn’s best-selling 2018 thriller, adapted for the screen by Tony- and Pulitzer-winning playwright Tracy Letts; a top-flight cast headed by Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore and Jennifer Jason Leigh; and director Joe Wright, whose striking visual sense has propelled terrific films such as Pride & Prejudice, Atonement and Darkest Hour.

 

Trouble is, we’ll likely never see the film this team created.

 

The Woman in the Window became an orphan when its studio parent, Fox 2000, was absorbed by Disney in March 2019. (In a demonstration of childish behavior akin to Nature at her cruelest, takeover studios rarely embrace projects birthed by the vanquished “parent.”) Bowing to unfavorable test screenings, Disney demanded re-shoots and new material scripted by an uncredited Tony Gilroy.

 

What now has hit the screen is awkward, to say the least. And I can’t imagine this version is superior to what Wright and Letts delivered the first time.

 

New York City-based child psychologist Anna Fox (Adams), crippled by a severe case of agoraphobia, has been unable to leave her Manhattan brownstone for nearly a year. She’s trying to work this out via frequent sessions with her visiting psychiatrist, Dr. Landy (Letts, in a solid cameo).

 

He has put her through an ongoing cocktail of prescription drugs; the most recent, Elevan, comes with a strict warning not to mix it with alcohol. Which doesn’t stop Anna from drinking a lot of wine.

 

She’s estranged from her husband Ed (Anthony Mackie) and their daughter Olivia (Mariah Bozeman), although they chat daily on the phone. Anna also has the company of a tenant: aspiring musician David Winter (Wyatt Russell), who lives in the basement, runs errands for her, and handles odd jobs throughout the house.

 

Anna passes the time by watching classic film noirs — a brief clip from Hitchcock’s Spellbound is a bit on the nose — and observing the comings and goings in the buildings across the street, from the safety of her front windows. She therefore notices when a new family, the Russells, moves in directly opposite her brownstown. She’s charmed when 15-year-old Ethan (Fred Hechinger) pays a visit, to give Anna a “hello” gift from his mother.

 

Anna immediately senses that Ethan is oddly uncomfortable, perhaps distracted, for some reason he’s much too shy to share. They nonetheless part as friends.

White Boy Rick: Not worth the bother

White Boy Rick (2018) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for profanity, drug content, violence, sexual candor and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang

The point of this film — the reason for its existence — eludes me.

The press notes proclaim it a “moving story” of a blue-collar kid who “enters into a Faustian bargain” and ultimately is “manipulated by the very system meant to protect him” and “betrayed by the institutional injustice and corruption that defined Detroit, the home they loved.”

The hook is planted: Ricky (Richie Merritt, left), not wanting his father to be arrested,
reluctantly agrees to a dangerous undercover scheme proposed by FBI agents
Snyder (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Byrd (Rory Cochrane).

Like, wow. Lay it on a bit thicker, could you?

Makes me wonder if these folks watched their own film.

At no time can the narrative in White Boy Rick be considered “moving” to any degree, nor is there room for an ounce of sympathy for any of these individuals. It’s impossible to chart a fall from grace, when somebody hasn’t any to begin with.

Nobody in director Yann Demange’s film is likable:  not for a nanosecond. Nor are they interesting/captivating in the manner of characters in a Martin Scorsese crime film. These are just mopes,  and spending 110 minutes with this gaggle of amoral scumbags and opportunists is a bewildering waste of time. 

We reach the conclusion and wonder, okay … to what purpose?

Demange’s filmmaking skills are acceptable, and several performances are noteworthy. Screenwriters Andy Weiss, Logan Miller and Noah Miller adhere respectably to the real-world facts, and Tat Radcliffe’s grainy, gritty cinematography gives this saga the feel of a documentary; there’s a sense that these events are happening in real time, and we’re granted access as invisible observers.

An argument can be made that law enforcement officials shouldn’t take advantage of ingenuous minors, but Ricky Wershe Jr. was hardly a poster child for exploited innocence. He was a seasoned delinquent without a trace of conscience long before the FBI came calling; blame for that undoubtedly falls on the shoulders of his low-life father, who cheerfully schooled his son in a life of crime.

We meet 14-year-old Ricky (Richie Merritt) as he helps his father (Matthew McConaughey) out-hustle a bent dealer at a Detroit gun show. It’s immediately apparent that Rick Sr. is a blue-sky dreamer who flits from one unlikely get-rich-quick scheme to another; his current “occupation” involves selling illegally enhanced AK-47s to local thugs.

Ricky, his older sister Dawn (Bel Powley) and their father eke out a lower middle-class existence in a predominantly African-American eastside neighborhood, roughly seven miles from downtown Detroit. Ricky’s grandparents — Ray (Bruce Dern) and Verna (Piper Laurie) — live across the street, grimly hanging onto their memories of a time when the area was booming, and filled with Chrysler employees and their families.

Annihilation: Slow death

Annihilation (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for violence, gore, profanity and sexuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.23.18

Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice.

Author/editor/literary critic Jeff VanderMeer apparently prefers cellular madness.

After narrowly surviving an encounter with an unexpectedly oversized alligator, cellular
biologist Lena (Natalie Portman) is disturbed to find that its mouth contains far too
many rows of teeth.

His Nebula Award-winning 2014 novel, Annihilation, is — to say the least — a challenging but thoroughly fascinating read.

Director/scripter Alex Garland’s big-screen adaptation is thoughtful, absorbing, unsettling and even scary. For a time.

Unfortunately, he lets everything go to hell in the third act. And I don’t mean that in a positive way.

Certain science fiction films suffer from this problem: a terrific premise and suspenseful development, with — ultimately — nowhere to go. Garland’s take on Annihilation reminds me strongly of 1974’s Phase IV, a low-budget little flick that began with a similarly captivating premise but concluded with a nonsensically metaphysical climax (literally) that only could have been concocted by somebody on mind-altering substances.

The major problem here is that Garland was hell-bent on delivering a resolution that’s wholly at odds with VanderMeer’s novel ... which is only the first book in a trilogy. Garland’s “solution” to this dilemma isn’t merely unsatisfying; it makes total hash of what takes place during the first two acts.

Garland is best known as the writer/director behind 2014’s brilliant Ex Machina, a deliciously unsettling sci-fi saga that holds together superbly, up to a disturbing final scene that perfectly enhances everything that has come before. Too bad he couldn’t bring that rigorous logic and plot coherence to this one.

Former soldier-turned-cellular biologist Lena (Natalie Portman) has mourned the loss of her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), for a full year. Flashbacks and passing remarks reveal that he’s active military, subject to abrupt special-ops missions that he’s not able to share with his wife. Now long missing after having deployed on ... something ... Lena reluctantly believes him dead.

Until he turns up in their bedroom one day, disoriented and with no apparent memory of how he got there, or where he has been, or who he was with, or ... anything.

Anomalisa: A conundrum wrapped in an enigma

Anomalisa (2015) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for profanity, graphic nudity and strong sexual content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.22.16

This may not be the most pointlessly weird movie ever made, but it’ll do until that one comes along.

Everybody in the world sounds exactly the same to Michael, until a chance encounter with
Lisa, who speaks in a voice that is uniquely her own. Alas, this film makes very little use
of this intriguing notion, and devolves into an incomprehensible mess.

Charlie Kaufman has built his reputation on strange, way-out-of-the-box projects ever since he scripted the deliciously wacky Being John Malkovich for director Spike Jonze. Kaufman was less successful with Human Nature, alongside director Michel Gondry, but once again delivered the goods — and earned an Academy Award nomination, alongside his “fictitious twin brother” Donald — after re-uniting with Jonze for Adaptation.

Kaufman’s magnum opus, however, came with 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s bizarre, challenging and at times self-indulgently irritating, but it’s also ferociously clever, poignant and, in its own unusual way, one of the most insightful love stories ever written. (To give credit where due, Kaufman based his script on a story co-written with Gondry and Pierre Bismuth.)

The past decade, however, hasn’t been nearly as kind to Kaufman. His directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, is an unwatchably pretentious slog; and I’m not certain anybody even saw his 2014 TV movie, How and Why.

Which brings us to Anomalisa.

To be fair, it isn’t really long enough to be boring. But it’s nonetheless inane and meaningless, and an utter waste of the gorgeous, replacement/stop-motion puppet animation that has been employed to bring this story to the big screen (and which just earned the film an Academy Award nomination).

If this film hoped to duplicate the success of Wes Anderson’s similarly animated Fantastic Mr. Fox, Kaufman needed a much sharper script: for openers, one that could sustain its 90-minute length. Anomalisa offers about 15 minutes’ worth of story, along with a few trivial (and rather sexist) observations about human mating habits. 

Yes, Kaufman tries for some social analysis, but you’ll go crazy trying to determine the point he’s attempting to make.

The Hateful Eight: Insufficiently nasty

The Hateful Eight (2015) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, for strong bloody violence, gore, profanity, graphic nudity and racist behavior
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.31.15

Quentin Tarantino’s best films are highlighted by deliciously snarky dialog, scene-stealing — and sometimes career-reviving — performances by delectable character actors, and twisty scripts that build tension to the screaming point.

Every time somebody enters Minnie's Haberdashery, those already inside — in this case,
John Ruth (Kurt Russell, left), Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and a wincing
Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) — have to yell for the door to be nailed shut, lest the
blizzard blow it open again.

The Hateful Eight gets two out of three.

Tarantino’s tough-talkin’ homage to classic Westerns — complete with an awesome new orchestral score from 87-year-old Ennio Morricone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), his first Western score in 40 years — simply doesn’t have enough story to justify its butt-numbing 182-minute length. The set-up is rich with potential, and it screams for the multiple back-story treatment that made Kill Bill so engaging ... but no; aside from two brief flashbacks, we and the cast are stuck in the same claustrophobic cabin for three interminable hours.

Granted, the actors do their best to hold our attention. Ultimately, though, the posturing and narrow-eyed ’tude can’t make up for a script that doesn’t kick into gear until after the intermission (roughly 100 minutes in).

Tarantino makes us wait much too long for the good stuff, and by then things are rather anticlimactic.

And yes, I’m fully aware that the “good stuff” is the enfant terrible filmmaker’s gleeful dollops of blood and gore. But even here, it feels like Tarantino is only half-trying; having teased us with a cabin laden with hammers, shovels, iron spikes and all sorts of other implements of potential mayhem, he settles for gunfire. Which, tasteless as it sounds, is quite disappointing.

As he did with Kill Bill, Tarantino divides this saga into chapters, starting with “Last Stage to Red Rock.” The setting is post-Civil War Wyoming, with a six-horse stagecoach doing its best to outrun an approaching blizzard. The driver is forced to halt after coming upon former Union soldier-turned-bounty hunter Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), perched in the middle of the road atop three of his sanctioned kills.

Warren’s horse has given out on him; he’s hoping for a lift to Red Rock. But that’s a problem; the stage has been chartered exclusively by fellow bounty hunter John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell), who is handcuffed to his prisoner, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and escorting her to a date with the hangman at Red Rock.

The wisely suspicious Ruth views any strangers as either a) somebody trying to steal his bounty; or b) somebody trying to rescue Daisy. But it turns out that Warren and Ruth know each other, if only vaguely; the requested ride is granted, if grudgingly.

The Spectacular Now: Dangerous Liaison

The Spectacular Now (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for profanity, alcohol abuse and some sensuality, all involving teens
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.23.13

We must be our own best advocates.

It’s a difficult, often bitter lesson. Sometimes we get lucky, and somebody comes along who believes in us wholeheartedly, unreservedly.

Aimee (Shailene Woodley), never having enjoyed the thrill of romance, falls heavily in
love with Sutter (Miles Teller), despite knowing full well that he's bad news. Indeed,
everybody in school knows about Sutter's self-destructive tendencies. The question,
then: When he goes down in flames, will he take her with him?

Sometimes that isn’t enough.

At first blush, 18-year-old Sutter Keely (Miles Teller) seems the life of every party: vibrant, good-natured, aggressively spontaneous. He enjoys a relationship with Cassidy (Brie Larson), one of the most popular girls in their high school; they’ve obviously been intimate for awhile.

But Sutter’s glad-handing exterior masks uncharted depths of pain and uncertainty that he has absolutely no desire to confront. He’s a smart kid who doesn’t bother to study, much to the dismay of a concerned math teacher (Andre Royo). Sutter is left on his own too much, because his single mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh, as Sara) often works double-shifts just to keep a roof over their heads.

And Sutter drinks. Far too much, far too often. He is, in fact, a teen alcoholic, rarely seen without the shiny hip flask that he regards as a badge of ultra-coolness. He’s cheerfully on the fast-track to nowhere, a road he has traveled for several years. Doesn’t bother him a bit: If confronted, he smiles broadly and extols the virtues of living solely for the moment, for the “spectacular now.”

Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who did such a marvelous job with 2009’s (500) Days of Summer — their own original script — have done some equally sensitive work with this adaptation of Tim Tharp’s 2008 novel.

The Spectacular Now stars off as a hip, flip teen saga, displaying the raunchy language and earthy behavior we’d expect from something shallow like the American Pie franchise ... but that similarity fades quickly. Sutter Keely is badly damaged goods, and Teller throws himself into the role with a reckless abandon that his character would recognize.

Before we know it, director James Ponsoldt has taken us into dangerous waters; we realize that things can’t end well. The only question is how much collateral damage will be involved.