It Ends with Us: Too dreamy to be true

It Ends with Us (2024) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for sexual content, dramatic intensity, and fleeting profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.11.24

Lily (Blake Lively) and Ryle (Justin Baldoni) share a marvelous meet-cute encounter shortly after this romantic swooner begins.

 

Allysa (Jenny Slate, left) eventually learns to love flowers just as much as her new bestie,
Lily (Blake Lively), who has long dreamed of owning a trendy flower shop.

She has perched on the roof of a tall, trendy Boston apartment complex, contemplating her life. He blasts through the door, frustrated by the events of a ghastly day. 

They notice each other. (How could they not? They’re both incredibly gorgeous.) They make an effort at chatting, at first warily. The mood turns combustible, their smiles grow teasing, their banter increasingly flirty. It’s a classic Hollywood moment, the likes of which we don’t often see these days.

 

Alas, circumstances prompt Ryle to return to work, so they part.

 

That aside...

 

We also watched, during the preceding prologue, as Lily returned to her home town of Plethora, Maine, to attend her father’s funeral. She made a point of not visiting shortly before he died; now, poised to give a brief eulogy — the church laden with people honoring this great man, this pillar of the community — she balks, and flees without a word ... much to the embarrassed consternation of her mother, Jenny (Amy Morton).

 

Fans of Colleen Hoover’s 2016 romance novel, on which this film is based, will know what’s to come; they’ll watch for little details that’ll probably slip past unsuspecting viewers. 

 

But seriously; with a title like It Ends with Us, things can go only one of two ways ... right?

 

Jenny wants her only child to remain in Plethora, but Lily — her full name being Lily Blossom Bloom, an obvious strike against her parents — is determined to remain in Boston. Her lifelong goal: to open (what else?) a flower shop. She rents a dilapidated building, begins the herculean clean-up process, and has a second meet-cute encounter: this time with passerby Allysa (Jenny Slate), who has long wondered what the inside of this place looks like.

 

The two women spar playfully; Allysa confesses that she hates flowers, “because they’re dead.” (Lily finds this amusing.) Allysa nonetheless needs a job, and Lily needs help; what could be more perfect?

 

Where Lily and Ryle had instant sensual chemistry, Lily and Allysa quickly become as tight as mutually devoted sisters. Slate is delightful: bubbly, spontaneous, outgoing and — we soon learn — sharply observant. Allysa is married to Marshall (Hasan Minhaj), a similar force of nature, and Ryle happens to be her brother. (What a coincidence!)

 

Ryle then mounts the world’s most persistent wooing campaign, but Lily resists ... sort of. She’s determined to find love, whereas he prefers casual relationships.

The Rhythm Section: Out of tune

The Rhythm Section (2020) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated R, for violence, profanity, sexual content and drug use
By Derrick Bang

It’s painful to watch a filmmaker sabotage her own work.

Cinematographer-turned-director Reed Morano appears to have impressed folks with a trio of episodes for TV’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but her big-screen feature record is nothing to write home about; both 2015’s Meadowland and 2018’s I Think We’re Alone Now were dead on arrival.

Required to liaise with an "information broker" who could supply a key lead, Stephanie
(Blake Lively) arrives early at the public rendezvous point, hoping to gain an advantage.

I therefore cannot imagine why market-savvy producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson — the driving force behind the phenomenally long-running James Bond films — would select Morano to helm a thriller with the franchise potential of The Rhythm Section. 

Author Mark Burnell’s Stephanie Patrick series is four books strong (although he hasn’t written another since 2005). The character and premise, as introduced in 1999’s The Rhythm Section, borrow heavily from 1990’s La Femme Nikita and its subsequent film and television sequels; that said, star Blake Lively certainly makes Stephanie her own.

Burnell adapted his own novel as this film’s sole scripter, so the core elements remain faithful. Unfortunately, he did a sloppy job of condensing his 448-page novel into a 109-minute screenplay; by the time we reach this film’s conclusion, it’s impossible to determine who pulled the strings, or why the ultimate double-cross takes place.

The film certainly isn’t boring, but sheer momentum can’t conceal the increasingly clumsy and confusing narrative.

More critically, The Rhythm Section is marred by all manner of directorial tics and twitches: jangly hand-held cinematography; relentlessly tight close-ups — particularly of Lively — at the expense of locale-establishing shots, and other essential characters who often should be in the frame; poor use of Steve Mazzaro’s admittedly dull score; bad editing by Joan Sobel, particularly during what should have been a suspenseful car chase; and a relentless use of the same bloody flashbacks.

I swear, we see the soft-focus memory-image of Stephanie’s mother a dozen times, when twice would have been more than sufficient. We get it. We get it. We get it.

Such overkill is the hallmark of an inept director who trusts neither her cast nor the script.

Café Society: Order off the menu

Café Society (2016) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, for suggestive content, occasional violence and a fleeting drug reference
By Derrick Bang

Once or twice each year, I come across a film whose mere existence is baffling.

They’re not bad, at least not overtly; they’re simply bewildering. We endure them for somewhere between 90 and 120 minutes, and then the lights come up, and we frown at each other with the same unspoken question: Is that it? Seriously?

It's love at first sight, at least for Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg), when Vonnie (Kristen Stewart)
agrees to show him all the wonders of Hollywood's film colony. Alas, the course of true
love never is steady in a Woody Allen film.

And why, precisely? What was the point?

Woody Allen’s newest is just such a film.

The package is attractively wrapped: Production designer Santo Loquasto transports us back to 1930s New York and Hollywood with an opulent level of verisimilitude. The actors are luxuriously garbed by costume designer Suzy Benzinger, every member of the large ensemble cast well selected for each part.

Allen supplies narration throughout the film, often with the same passionate, poetic devotion that he displayed for the Big Apple in 1979’s Manhattan. The various characters seem reasonably interesting, the story’s unusual romantic triangle an intriguing hook on which to hang what we expect will be an homage to Golden Age cinematic classics.

Doesn’t work out that way.

Café Society is a textbook case of a movie being all dressed up, with nowhere to go. I’ve no idea what Allen intended us to gather from his bizarrely random script, unless it’s the oft-stated cliché that people are remarkably adept at screwing up their own lives. But even that doesn’t seem quite right, because several of these characters do get their heart’s desire.

With an oeuvre as lengthy and varied as Allen’s, we tend to categorize each new film on the basis of its many predecessors; this one feels like a clumsy blend of Crime and Misdemeanors and Radio Days, if the latter’s young protagonist were half a generation older. That’s a rather unholy mash-up, to say the least, and Allen doesn’t do anything remotely interesting with it.

Café Society also is burdened with far too many sidebar characters, many of whom don’t get the attention they deserve. Their various side issues don’t integrate well with the core narrative, leaving us to wonder why they were included in the first place.

The storyline, more or less:

Bronx-born Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), not satisfied with joining his father’s jewelry business, decamps for the much more exciting life he imagines awaits on the opposite coast, in Hollywood. Bobby has an entry of sorts: his uncle Phil (Steve Carell), a high-powered agent who drops famous names, like adjectives, into every spoken sentence.

At first blush, Phil seems a superficial, puffed-up phony who merely talks a great show, but no; turns out he really does know and represent everybody from Errol Flynn to Judy Garland. Even so, he’s too self-obsessed to waste much time with a nephew, and so hires Bobby as a glorified gopher and assigns his secretary/assistant, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), to look after the kid.

The Shallows: Awash with excitement

The Shallows (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, bloody peril, brief gore and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.24.16

Solo turns are demanding even for accomplished performers, and for the obvious reason: It’s not easy to emote in a vacuum. Actors draw a lot of energy from the dynamic shared with co-stars; remove the rhythm established with such a bond, and the challenge increases exponentially.

She may be injured — bitten by a shark, stung by numerous jellyfish, battered by undersea
rocks — but Nancy (Blake Lively) is not one to surrender in despair. One way or another,
she's determined to make it back to shore ... even though she knows, intellectually, that
she can't hope to out-swim her watchful attacker.

Several examples leap to mind: Tom Hanks, in Cast Away; Robert Redford, in All Is Lost; and — for much of the film — Leonardo DiCaprio, in The Revenant. Perhaps not coincidentally, all are survival dramas.

To their company we now add Blake Lively, in The Shallows. And while I wouldn’t presume to equate her acting chops with the three individuals cited above, she nonetheless delivers a credible, persuasive portrayal of a resourceful, level-headed woman who does her best to overcome a horrific situation.

Because, yes, this is another survival drama.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra’s tidy little thriller can be summed up in three words: Woman vs. shark. But scripter Anthony Jaswinski finds increasingly clever ways to expand upon that simple premise, building suspense via the careful establishment of character and detail. Jaswinski, bless him, obviously understands the dramatic principle of Chekhov’s gun: If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.

The Shallows is constructed very much in the style of a taut three-act play: the deceptively calm introduction; the explosion of danger, and explicit disclosure of overwhelming odds; and, finally, the struggle. Given that structure, Jaswinski deftly inserts trivial and incidental first-act details that later prove important.

I like smart scripts, and this is a smart script.

We meet Nancy Adams (Lively) as a passenger being driven to an isolated beach somewhere along the Mexican coast (actually Lord Howe Island, approximately 600 nautical miles east of Sydney, Australia). As we gradually learn, via brief flashbacks and phone calls, she’s making a cathartic pilgrimage of sorts, to the place where family lore says she was conceived.

Nancy is a skilled surfer; so was her mother, in her day. Nancy’s driver, Carlos (Óscar Jaenada), doesn’t quite believe any of this saga, but he recognizes that the trip is nonetheless important to this perky American. Their skillfully sketched conversation, lasting only a few minutes, tells us everything we need to know about Nancy. Jaswinski’s dialog is economical; the casual, spontaneous bond between Nancy and Carlos is well developed by the two actors. It feels genuine.

The Age of Adaline: Refuses to grow up

The Age of Adaline (2015) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and much too harshly, for a single suggestive comment
By Derrick Bang

I’m a sucker for romantic fantasies.

I may be the only person in the country who fell under the spell of last year’s Winter’s Tale, which remains woefully under-appreciated. Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan still work their magic during the fourth (fifth?) viewing of 1998’s City of Angels, and the 2009 adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife — although not perfect — captivates nonetheless.

Despite decades of cautious, low-profile activity that has kept her safe, and out of public
view, Adaline (Blake Lively) allows herself to fall in love with Ellis (Michiel Huisman),
thereby granting him tacit access to the carefully guarded details of her life. We can't
help thinking that this is unwise...

As for the 2007 adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust? Simply delightful.

All of which makes me one of the ideal target viewers for The Age of Adaline ... and, therefore, one of many doomed to disappointment.

This is an extremely difficult and delicate genre. One false step — a contrivance too many, a tone too maudlin, a tragedy too melodramatic — and the whole endeavor collapses like an improperly cooked soufflé.

Scripters J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz definitely have a clever premise here. Their execution, however, leaves much to be desired. Director Lee Toland Krieger isn’t much help either; his oeuvre centers around snarky, modern-era gender battles such as The Vicious Kind and Celeste & Jesse Forever. Krieger, apparently operating outside his comfort zone, hasn’t the faintest idea how to make this eccentric drama work.

Which is a shame, because stars Blake Lively and Michiel Huisman are very good together. Their line deliveries sparkle, the tension between them crackles, and — despite the overwhelming odds against — we genuinely want their star-crossed relationship to catch fire and endure.

But Krieger, Goodloe and Paskowitz keep getting in their own way. Every time we succumb to Lively’s melancholy charm and radiant incandescence, we’re yanked out of the moment by a particularly tin-eared line of dialogue, or another load of pseudo-medical gibberish from the off-camera narrator.

Let’s start with that narrator.

Never has a film been less in need of off-camera commentary. Apparently unable to perceive any of the gentler, more satisfying ways of conveying essential information, Goodloe and Paskowitz have their omniscient observer (Hugh Ross) bury us beneath paragraphs of laughably technical codswallop.

Perhaps they were inspired by Jim Dale’s wonderfully arch commentary throughout each episode of TV’s lamentably short-lived Pushing Daisies. Trouble is, that show’s tone is overtly whimsical and deliberately exaggerated, whereas Adaline exists in the real world. And in the real world, pedantic explanations are boring and inappropriate.

Green Lantern: Slightly diminished glow

Green Lantern (2011) • View trailer for Green Lantern
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for action violence and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang 


Forget about the ring; Green Lantern’s greatest super power may be the ability to save his own movie.

Which is to say, Warner Bros. owes a huge debt to Ryan Reynolds, whose charisma and cheerful, naughty-boy charm masks several sins.

After being transported across the universe and slapped into his slick green suit,
Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds, right) hopes that the compassionate Tomar-Re, left,
will be his new "ring instructor." But no, that assignment falls to the much
larger and intimidating Kilowog.

The biggest problem is a clumsy script that tries to accomplish too much, and winds up with too little: too little emotional resonance, too little time spent with plot chapters that should have been given more weight. Too many secondary characters treated casually; too many details handled sloppily.

Savvy credits watchers will raise a skeptical eyebrow at the presence of four screenwriters — Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg — which invariably points to a script that has been fine-tuned by committee and target demographics, rather than narrative clarity and artistic consistency.

I recognize the problem: The first entry in any superhero franchise arrives with the burden of necessary back-story ... often dialogue-heavy, and at odds with the cataclysmic battles that viewers desire. That problem is magnified here, because Green Lantern has more back-story than most: a complicated and cleverly devised reason for why a cocky Earth man gets tagged to join an elite force of inter-stellar space cops.

All this must be explained, before our hero’s actions can be placed in the proper context. Unfortunately, in an effort to present all this information, sidebar character development gets abandoned.

But that’s not the sole issue. Although director Martin Campbell has plenty of action epics in his résumé — two James Bonds entries, two Zorro adventures — he’s clearly not as comfortable with the quite different nuances involved when heroes and villains owe most (all?) of their existence to special effects. Most of the skirmishes here are little more than rock-’em, sock-’em slug-fests involving plenty of ring- or telekinetically manipulated furniture, lab equipment and handy military hardware, vehicles and planes.

At times, you’ll wonder if we’ve slipped into an installment of the X-Men film franchise.

James Newton Howard’s score doesn’t help; it’s all loud-loud-loud orchestral crashes and smashes, with few nuances to help sell quieter scenes.

Finally, the film suffers from a major casting hiccup: Blake Lively is simply wrong as Carol Ferris, the on again/off again girlfriend and full-time colleague/sorta boss of brash test pilot Hal Jordan (Reynolds). For starters, the notion that she, too, is a test pilot ... is utterly laughable.

Additionally, Lively’s line readings during the first argument between Hal and Carol are atrocious, and the lines themselves are pretty dismal. Lively is too much a product of the breathy melodrama she handles so well on television’s Gossip Girl and the two Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movies. For that matter, she also delivered a persuasive job as the desperate, dead-end gal pal in last year’s The Town.

But Lively never seems to really believe the role she inhabits here; one gets the impression that she retreats to a corner, after every take, and snickers over the idiocy of the line she just spoke. A quick comparison to Natalie Portman (Thor) or Gwyneth Paltrow (Iron Man) reveals just how much Lively pales in comparison.

Anyway...

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2: Still a good fit

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (2008) • View trailer for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for some sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.7.08
Buy DVD: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 • Buy Blu-Ray: Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 [Blu-ray]


Earlier this summer, plenty of fans couldn't wait to be re-united with Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda.

I'm just as pleased to spend more time with Carmen, Tibby, Lena and Bridget.

As the summer following their first year at college draws to a close, events bring
these four best friends — from left, Tibby (Amber Tamblyn), Lena (Alexis
Bledel), Carmen (America Ferrera) and Bridget (Blake Lively) — to the
swooningly romantic Mediterranean island of Santorini, where Lena spent such
a pivotal time with her Greek grandparents in the first film.

The young heroines of Ann Brashares' Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants novels made an engaging leap to the big screen in 2005, in a sweet little film that featured respectable work by rising young stars America Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn, Alexis Bledel and Blake Lively.

At the time, Bledel and Tamblyn were the ones with highly visible careers, on TV's Gilmore Girls and Joan of Arcadia.

Interesting, then, how things change in three years. Gilmore Girls is no more, and Bledel's face has become a bit less familiar; Tamblyn, perhaps the quartet's strongest actress, remains quite busy with indie film projects. On the other hand, both Ferrera and Lively have become the stars of the moment, thanks to Ugly Betty and Gossip Girl.

All of which makes this reunion even more special, because it's unusual for a sequel to attract all its major and supporting players.

I'm also pleased with the approach adopted by new director Sanaa Hamri, taking over for Ken Kwapis. (Screenwriter Elizabeth Chandler worked on both films, although she solos here, having shared credit with Delia Ephron on the first.) Kwapis' approach was a bit too light and frothy, as perhaps was more suited to the first film's focus on flirtations and first love.

The tone is somewhat more serious this time, as established relationships hit the skids and the girls' diverging personalities threaten to destroy the closely knit bond that has held them since childhood. Hamri respects these more serious elements; her film is not marred by (for example) the frivolous and frequent pop song montages that Kwapis employed to excess.

One could argue that this is a revealing distinction between how a male director views young female relationships, and how this same concept is treated by a female director.

Hamri, making her big-screen film debut, is to be congratulated; her approach is noticeably more mature.

The only niggling problem is the relentless forward march of time. All four actresses looked just barely right in the first film, as 16-year-olds (and it was a push for at least two of them). But now they definitely look a bit too old to play 19.

Ah, well. Nothing new in Hollywood. And putting that issue aside, it's remarkably easy to once more become immersed in the lives of these characters.