The Starling Girl: Doesn't quite fly

The Starling Girl (2023) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, and too harshly, for mild sexuality

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Although the setting is unconventional, writer/director Laurel Parmet’s quiet character study focuses on a familiar theme: the coming-of-age saga of a young woman caught between community and parental expectations, and her desire for individuality and self-expression.

 

Jem (Eliza Scanlen, foreground center) is happiest while dancing, even if it's merely a
chaste "worship performance" during her community church service.

But although Eliza Scanlen delivers a richly nuanced starring performance — she’s well remembered as Beth March, in 2019’s Little Women — Parmet’s film too frequently feels as flat, lifeless and colorless as the enclave in which this story is set.

Seventeen-year-old Jem Starling (Scanlen), the eldest child of parents Paul and Heidi (Jimmi Simpson and Wrenn Schmidt), has grown up in an insular fundamentalist Christian community in rural Kentucky. Under the strict guidance of Pastor Taylor (Kyle Secor), everybody practices extreme patriarchal values: Men’s words are the words of God, and women must submit to them.

 

The story begins with a church service highlighted by a “worship dance” performed by Jem and several other teenage girls. They’re barefoot, dressed in the purity of white; arm movements are minimal and reserved, always reaching toward heaven.

 

Pastor Taylor is pleased. Moments later, though, Jem is humiliated and embarrassed when one of the other mothers chides her for wearing “the wrong kind of bra” … because, apparently, people can tell that she is wearing a bra.

 

(Constant Companion and I exchanged a puzzled look. Seriously?)

 

It quickly becomes clear that dance is Jem’s sole outlet: the one thing that allows her to express herself, however delicately. But this sets up a struggle within her soul, as she worries whether pride, and a desire to stand out, are at odds with her worship of God.

 

The dynamic shifts with the return of Pastor Taylor’s elder son, Owen (Lewis Pullman), and his wife Misty (Jessamine Burgum), who’ve been doing missionary work in Puerto Rico. Owen takes over as the community’s youth pastor; he’s charismatic, a bit rebellious and dangerously flirty.

 

Jem, meanwhile, has assumed a leadership role in the dance troupe: a position that makes several of the other girls quite catty, with sidelong comments that imply Jem has become too full of herself. That, too, is not the proper way to worship God.

 

Surprisingly, Owen insists that God wants Jem to enjoy and love dancing; this encouragement prompts Jem to embrace her performance instincts, and teach the troupe more expressive choreography.

 

Then, disturbingly, Owen’s attention becomes too up close and personal: a dangerous dynamic that catches Jem at the worst possible moment, while she’s already struggling with her developing sexuality.

 

Nope: My sentiments precisely

Nope (2022) • View trailer

No stars (turkey). Rated R, for bloody violence and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.22.22

Jordan Peele, who won a well-deserved writing Oscar for his breakthrough hit — 2018’s Get Out — has succumbed to the M. Night Shyamalan curse.

 

Each new film tries harder, yet achieves less.

 

Having learned enough to realize that they're dealing with something quite nasty, our
heroes — from left, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya), Emerald (Keke Palmer) and Angel
(Brandon Perea) can't imagine what to do next.

In this case, much less.

Nope — a terrible title, just in passing — obviously began life as a 10-word elevator pitch (which I cannot speculate upon, due to spoilers). It might have turned into a decently chilling 20-minute short, but as a 135-minute vanity flop, the result is a dull, interminable slog.

 

Ten minutes into this bomb, it’s blindingly obvious that we’re dealing with a world-class stinker. And it doesn’t get any better. Worse, in fact.

 

Following two brief prologues — I’ll dial back to those in a moment — we meet siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer), who are struggling to maintain the legacy of their father’s specialty horse ranch, which provides animals for Hollywood shoots, theme parks and the like. Their operation, located in the isolated Agua Dulce desert in northern Los Angeles County, hangs by a thread.

 

OJ is expressionless and taciturn to the point of somnambulance, throughout this entire story; he makes Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” — back in that actor’s 1960s spaghetti western days — look and sound Shakespearean. It takes genuine talent to guide an actor with Kaluuya’s significant chops into such a relentlessly dull and lackluster performance, but Peele — who wrote, directed and produced this turkey — somehow managed.

 

Emerald, in contrast, is shrill, profane, insolent, mean-spirited and — in short — absolutely intolerable. Palmer behaves as if she’s revved up on cocaine the entire time; her performance is unrestrained, unintelligible and unlikable. We loathe her character on sight, and Palmer isn’t helped by the stream-of-consciousness babble that Peele apparently believes passes for dialogue.

 

Rarely have two movie characters so effectively — and so quickly — turned an audience off. The very thought of spending more than two hours with them is unbearable.

 

First, though, we endure the travesty of prologue No. 1, as a TV family sitcom shoot goes awry when its star — a chimpanzee — suddenly attacks his human co-stars in a gory swath of blood-laden rage.

 

The notion that any filmmaker would be insensitive enough to mount such a tasteless spectacle — in our more enlightened, post-Jane Goodall era — is utterly appalling. It’s also an indication of unrestrained arrogance on Peele’s part, particularly since it adds nothing to his film.

I Saw the Light: Needlessly dim

I Saw the Light (2015) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang

During a remarkably prolific career, Hank Williams released 35 singles that reached the Top 10 in Billboard’s Country/Western best-sellers chart, 11 of which hit the coveted No. 1 spot. Many of the latter — among them “Lovesick Blues,” “Hey, Good Lookin’ ” and “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” — continue to be covered, to this day, by new pop and country artists.

Hank Williams (Tom Hiddleston) indulgently allows his wife Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen) to
join him at the microphone, during one of their live shows on radio station WSFA ... while
the members of his backing band, the Drifting Cowboys, try not to wince.

All the more remarkable, considering that Williams’ recording career was so brief. To paraphrase an old chestnut, when Williams was as old as Mozart, when the latter died at age 35, he (Williams) had been dead for six years.

Writer/director Marc Abraham’s biographical drama focuses exclusively on William’s professional career, from shortly before his first recording session, to the substance abuse and weak heart that claimed his life at age 29. But despite being based on the respected 1994 biography by Colin Escott, George Merritt and William MacEwen, Abraham’s film is a maddeningly superficial affair that devotes far too much time to Williams’ alcoholism and his prickly, on again/off again relationship with Audrey Mae Sheppard, at the expense of conveying even the slightest sense of the singer/songwriter’s creative spark.

Although I Saw the Light is laden with Williams’ songs — performed with impressive faithfulness by star Tom Hiddleston, who sings every note — they all arrive whole and complete, as if God simply dropped them, fully formed, into Williams’ head. We see no scribbled lyrics and crossed-out rhyme schemes; no late-night experimentation with guitar chords; no real-life incidents that bring a smile to Hank’s lips, and prompt him to sit down and pen a tune.

That’s simply nonsense.

By dropping us abruptly into the rising, post-WWII arc of Williams’ career, we also get no sense of back-story: the boy who took guitar lessons from Alabama blues musician Rufus Payne, and how that shaped what followed; the kid who was isolated from his peers because of spina bifida, which left him unusually gaunt. Abrahams opens his film with Hank’s marriage to Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen), thereby bypassing all sorts of essential details that would explain why she and his mother Lillie (Cherry Jones) despise each other so much.

Granted, the broad strokes are obvious: Both women want to control Hank’s career. But that alone isn’t enough to justify the obvious contempt Lillie shows for Audrey, and we’re left to wonder what went down before this movie begins.

Mostly, though, Abrahams gives us a thoroughly unflattering portrait of Williams, played to insolent, short-tempered and highly unstable perfection by Hiddleston. He’s an excellent actor, easily able to project the charisma with which Williams could light up a stage. But the unflattering emphasis on Williams’ flaws frequently feels like character assassination.