Blue Moon: Waning

Blue Moon (2025) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for frequent profanity and vulgarity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.26.25

Director Richard Linklater obviously loves the flow and rhythm of meticulously crafted dialogue, along with the challenge of a “talking heads” premise that involves very few characters, most memorably achieved in 1995’s Before Sunrise and its two sequels.

 

Lyricist Lorenz "Larry" Hart (Ethan Hawke) is foolishly besotted with the much younger
Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), who is kinder to him than he deserves.

He attempts the same with this biographical snapshot of a single evening in the ultimately tragic life of famed American lyricist Lorenz “Larry” Hart, who teamed with composer Richard Rodgers for 26 musicals during a collaborative relationship that lasted more than two decades in the early 20th century.

The result isn’t entirely successful, in part because it’s hard to endure the first half hour spent with this unpleasant, potty-mouthed narcissist, and also because it’s impossible to get beyond Ethan Hawke’s fake hair, and the trick shots employed to depict Hart’s shorter stature. Both are distracting.

 

That said, the film gets more interesting during its final hour, when the story expands to include several more characters equally adept at trenchant commentary and occasional bon mots.

 

Events take place during the late evening of March 31, 1943, following the debut of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (their first collaboration, and the first show the former created without Hart). The setting is the bar at the famed theater district restaurant Sardi’s, where the cast soon will gather, to await the reviews.

 

Production designer Susie Cullen and costume designer Consolata Boyle establish a persuasive sense of time and place.

 

Hart arrives first, having just watched the show. He pontificates to the mostly empty room, and also to Eddie (Bobby Cannavale, excellent as always), the tolerant, good-natured barman who will spend the next several hours trying not to serve drinks to Hart, who struggles with alcoholism. 

 

Hart’s stream-of-consciousness commentary is alternately witty, conceited, outrageously vulgar and self-deprecating. He waxes eloquent about the overall perfection of the 20-year-old Yale student with whom he’s currently smitten.

 

He also rails about the new play’s “corniness” and its clichéd presentation of old-fashioned American values, but — to paraphrase Shakespeare — the gentleman doth protest too much. It quickly becomes clear that Hart is both jealous and frightened: fully aware that he’s in danger of being replaced permanently.

 

(As we eventually learn, Rodgers was forced to write some of the final lyrics for their most recent collaboration, By Jupiter, because Hart’s alcoholism and terrible work ethic had become completely unmanageable.)

 

Frankly, these early scenes are quite tedious, because Hart is so unsympathetic and self-absorbed, and because he’s talking at Eddie, rather than chatting with him.

Motherless Brooklyn: The Big Apple's rotten core

Motherless Brooklyn (2019) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated R, for violence, profanity and drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.1.19

Fans of Jonathan Lethem’s award-winning 1999 crime fiction novel will be quite surprised by what director/scripter Edward Norton has done with it.

The spider and the fly: Thoroughly irritated by the persistent investigation mounted by
private detective Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton, right), rapacious New York City developer
Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin) demands a face-to-face, hoping to make an offer his
pipsqueak tormentor dare not refuse.

Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, although contemporary to its late 20th century arrival, has the attitude, atmosphere and plot stylings of 1940s and ’50s pulp detective thrillers. Revering that style as a jumping-off point, Norton has retained the primary character — and very little else — while bouncing him back to 1957, and dropping him into an entirely new story that blends fact, fiction and noir sensibilities in a manner we’ve not seen since 1974’s Chinatown.

In a word, the result is mesmerizing.

Chinatown scripter Robert Towne ingeniously employed a “simple” gumshoe case to illuminate the real-world corruption and power-mongering behind Los Angeles’ bureaucratic theft of Owens River water, as ruthlessly orchestrated by civil engineer William Mulholland (fictionalized by John Huston’s Noah Cross). 

Norton, in turn, dumps Lethem’s intriguing protagonist into the clandestine, Tammany Hall-style empire ruled by the even more powerful Robert Moses, the mid-20th century developer/builder who — by manipulating politicians behind the scenes — ruthlessly transformed New York City into his vision of a metropolis. It’s a fascinating slice of history, which Norton cleverly blends with the character that he also plays in this thoroughly absorbing drama … but it has absolutely nothing to do with Lethem’s novel.

The film opens at a sprint: Lionel Essrog (Norton) and colleague Gilbert Coney (Ethan Suplee), both operatives of a small-time detective agency run by Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), accompany their boss when he arranges a meeting with shadowy figures left unspecified. The acutely perceptive Lionel knows that Frank is up to something, and likely something dangerous; this hunch proves accurate in the worst possible way, when Minna winds up dead.

Frank was more than merely a boss to Lionel; he also was mentor, friend and protector. Indeed, all four agency operatives — including Tony (Bobby Cannavale) and Danny (Dallas Roberts) — emerged from the same Catholic orphanage, back in the day, where Minna became their father-figure. 

His murder therefore hits Lionel quite hard, particularly since he is far from “normal.” Lionel is obsessive/compulsive and also suffers from an uncontrollable tendency to erupt in nonsense speech: often punning, rhyming and “clanging” against what somebody else has just said. He’s constantly forced to apologize for the “glass in the brain” that prompts such spontaneous outbursts; we recognize this as Tourette Syndrome, a designation not at all familiar to the characters in this re-imagined 1950s version of Lethem’s novel.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle — Fast-paced fun

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for fantasy action, mild profanity and considerable blue humor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.22.17

When it comes to the action comedy genre, the pitfalls awaiting careless directors and scripters are far more dangerous than anything faced by the characters in this film.

Too many dumb jokes. Relentless mugging by unrestrained cast members. Too much slapstick. Eye-rolling vulgarity. Gratuitous property damage. The list goes on.

Conquering one difficult task merely leads to a harder challenge, as this saga's reluctant
gamers repeatedly discover: from left, Dr. Sheldon Oberon (Jack Black), Jefferson
"Seaplane" McDonough (Nick Jonas), Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan), Dr. Smolder
Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson) and Franklin "Moose" Finbar (Kevin Hart).

Happily, director Jake Kasdan sidestepped all those miscalculations, which is a surprise — frankly — given that his résumé is littered with disposable junk such as Sex Tape, Bad Teacher and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

Much-deserved credit also goes to writer Chris McKenna, whose initial story was deftly fine-tuned with help from Erik Sommers, Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinkner. And, of course, they all borrowed a bit from the 1995 Robin Williams version, which in turn was adapted loosely from Chris Van Allsburg’s popular 1981 children’s picture book. (Got all that?)

However the gestation played out, this new film is a very welcome surprise: droll, clever, fast-paced, exciting and laden with enough gender-based humor to fuel the next half-dozen relationship comedies. I can’t quite call the result family-friendly, because the PG-13 rating is well earned by risqué one-liners ... but they’re all quite funny, and crisply delivered by a quartet of practiced scene-stealers.

This’ll be a popular repeat-viewing experience, because half the fun is zeroing in on everybody else’s expression — not possible, the first time through — as each verbal zinger is unleashed.

While it’s true that veteran video gamers will most enthusiastically embrace (and understand) the core premise, the learning curve is gentle enough for uninitiated mainstream viewers, who will return home well-versed in jargon such as “game lives” and NPCs (non-player characters).

As those familiar with Van Allsburg’s book know, Jumanji is a “haunted” board game with the disorienting ability to amaze — and endanger — players by bringing actual jungle environments and animals into the real world. No surprise, then, that such a game would adapt to changing times — in order to remain seductively enticing — by re-inventing itself as a late 20th century-style home video game.

The new roster of unsuspecting victims, initially associated solely by their presence in the same high school, includes Spencer (Alex Wolff), a smart but neurotic hypochondriac; Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain), an overly cocky jock too “busy” to do his own homework; Bethany (Madison Iseman), the school’s condescending, self-obsessed queen bee-yatch; and the outspoken but socially awkward Martha (Morgan Turner). Only after-school detention could bring this quartet together, at which point a make-work assignment to clean up an unused classroom takes a sinister turn, when Spencer finds a dusty, long-unused video game console.

With you-know-what stuck in the game slot. Which we already know is dangerous, thanks to an intriguing prologue set 20 years early.

Ant-Man: A huge disappointment

Ant-Man (2015) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for action violence and some rather nasty peril
By Derrick Bang

Well, it was inevitable: Mighty Marvel finally stumbled.

This film’s problems are numerous, but the largest issue is one of tone; director Peyton Reed, apparently adopting 1989’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids as his template, has emphasized slapstick sight gags and comic relief supporting characters to a point that pretty well destroys any of this story’s potential drama.

Scott Lang (Paul Rudd, center) listens attentively as Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) explains
the many hazards likely to be encountered during a clandestine assault on his own
company's research labs. For these reasons and many others, Hank's daughter, Hope
(Evangeline Lilly), believes Scott wholly wrong for the task.

The nadir is a climactic duel to the death between miniscule characters, which takes place within a child’s tabletop train set: a sequence that absolutely, positively doesn’t work on any level. And then, just to make a bad idea even worse, Reed punctuates this clash with an unexpectedly gigantic Thomas the Tank Engine, its enormous plastic eyes bouncing back and forth in dismay.

Just as mine were doing.

Reed’s sledge-hammer efforts at comedy are bothersome, but — in fairness — he can’t be blamed for trying to make the best of a bad situation. Ant-Man has been a troubled production for years, during a lengthy gestation in the hands of British writer/director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End, among others), whose sly, subversive brand of humor certainly would have been better than what we wound up with here.

But the project was ripped from his hands at the last moment, the script subsequently re-written by Adam McKay and star Paul Rudd. McKay is responsible for numerous Will Ferrell projects, notably Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and its sequel, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and this year’s Get Hard. I submit that Ferrell’s favorite scripter can’t, by definition, be right for anything taking place in Marvel’s ambitious film universe.

So: What were Marvel and Disney thinking?

Rudd’s meddlesome hand is equally evident. The star clearly shaped the script to fit the insufferable smugness that has become his go-to screen persona, rather than — as always should be the case — modulating his performance to suit the character’s needs. But the latter undoubtedly would require a level of acting beyond Rudd’s capabilities, and thus we’re stuck with his usual lackadaisical swanning from one scene to the next.

Rudd simply doesn’t seem to care about this character, or indeed the entire film. Ergo, why should we?

The core story follows the broad strokes established during several decades in the Marvel comic book universe, with genius scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) having perfected a process that allows him to shrink to ant-size, while maintaining his molecular density in order to (among other things) deliver full-strength punches. Along the way, he also developed the means to communicate with ants, and thus can command massive insect armies to help take out nefarious villains in his guise as Ant-Man.

But all that was years ago. Wary of the military applications contemplated by Howard Stark (John Slattery) and his weasel corporate associate Mitchell Carson (Martin Donovan, suitably smarmy), Pym retreats into seclusion. And since Ant-Man’s brief “career” remained under the public radar, the very notion of such a superhero has become little more than an urban myth.

Spy: Should have been kept under cover

Spy (2015) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for violence, gore, fleeting graphic nudity, and relentless profanity and coarse dialogue
By Derrick Bang 

Only in Hollywood could somebody get paid big bucks to write this sort of puerile swill.

Only in Hollywood could several levels of (presumably) savvy studio execs have seen any merit in this limp-noodle secret agent spoof.

With another mission behind them, debonair CIA agent Bradley Fine (Jude Law) and his
desk-bound handler, Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy), enjoy a celebratory dinner. Alas,
Bradley has no idea how much his colleague secretly pines for him ... even thought her
overtures couldn't be more obvious.

Only in Hollywood could a reasonably talented comedian have been “promoted” from successful supporting status, and stuffed into a string of starring roles, where she flails helplessly.

Only in Hollywood would such an individual keep getting additional shots in the barrel, abusing her fans with junk such as Identity Thief and Tammy.

And, just to spread the blame evenly, only in America would such fans continue to reward her efforts by buying tickets. An overall U.S. gross of $84.4 million for Tammy? $134.4 million for Identity Thief?

Seriously?

I guess H.L. Mencken’s 1926 observation remains even truer today: No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

Or, to quote Walt Kelly’s comic strip character Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Melissa McCarthy has been a valued member of ensemble productions such as Bridesmaids and television’s Gilmore Girls. She and Billy Gardell continue to be a great team on television’s Mike & Molly. She was refreshingly sympathetic in a straight supporting part, in last year’s St. Vincent.

But a little of McCarthy goes a very long way, which is why she’s best used in measured, intermittent doses. When forced to carry an entire film, her extremely narrow acting range becomes glaringly visible; she huffs and puffs from one scene to the next, angrily spitting out her lines, as if daring us to find her anything less than hilarious.

So okay, Melissa; I took that dare a few films back, and I’ll take it anew. You’re still not funny. Your go-to movie persona has become a mean-spirited, potty-mouthed shrike. Your recent work isn’t merely un-funny; it’s sad and pathetic. I cannot imagine why you don’t demand better material, but hey: As long as the money keeps rolling in, I guess it doesn’t matter, right?

Granted, you’re not wholly at fault in this case. Most of the blame for this new film belongs to writer/director Paul Feig, who apparently did this work all by his widdle self. I’m sure he spent at least 15 minutes concocting this twaddle. Strip away the profanity from every character’s lines, remove the juvenile vulgar humor — the sort of coarse one-upsmanship exchanged by 12-year-old boys while surfing for porn behind closed bedroom doors — and we’d be left with a mostly silent movie.

Which would have been a vast improvement.

Danny Collins: A truly delightful tune

Danny Collins (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity, nudity and drug content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.10.15

You have to admire a fact-based film that’s candid about not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Danny Collins opens with a disclaimer that reads “Kind of based on a true story a little bit.” Gotta love it.

Disgusted by the sell-out, media-hungry clown he has become, Danny (Al Pacino, left)
seriously contemplates ending it all ... little realizing that a most unusual birthday present
from manager and longtime friend Frank (Christopher Plummer) is about to change his life.

As it happens, writer/director Dan Fogelman’s charming dramedy merely “borrows” a minor incident as a jumping-off point for the wholly fictitious saga of an aging rock/pop star who undergoes a life-changing epiphany.

Or so he hopes...

Fogelman has sharp writing sensibilities: an eye for engaging character dynamics, and an ear for the sort of intelligent, witty badinage that we don’t get often enough in today’s movies. After script assists on animated fare such as Cars and Tangled, and an endearing solo turn on the under-appreciated TV movie Lipshitz Saves the World, Fogelman made an impressive big-screen writing splash with 2011’s delightful Crazy, Stupid, Love.

His immediate follow-ups — The Guilt Trip and Last Vegas — were somewhat disappointing, in comparison, but Fogelman has kicked back into high gear with Danny Collins, on which he also makes a respectable directing debut. The result is a thoroughly entertaining, character-driven melodrama that grants Al Pacino his best role since his turn as TV journalist Lowell Bergman, in 1999’s The Insider.

He stars here as Danny Collins, a one-time rock wunderkind whose debut album, way back in the day, demonstrated the poetic grace of a Bob Dylan ... but who, during the intervening four decades, has succumbed to the drugs, alcohol and circus-style pomp of his rock-god image, up to and including his hilariously overdone, George Hamilton-style tan.

I hope Neil Diamond has a good sense of humor, because the typical Danny Collins concert extravaganza with which Fogelman opens his film — during which the star belts out his signature anthem, “Hey, Baby Doll,” to enthusiastic audience participation — looks and sounds just like the love-fest that occurs whenever Diamond does “Sweet Caroline” during his shows.

Backstage, the ennui has taken its toll, the years of identically vacuous performances deeply etched into lines of discouragement on Danny’s face. And while he may have more money than God, and all the trappings that wealth can buy — including a sexpot girlfriend half his age (Katarina Cas, as the rarely dressed Sophie) — Danny has become cynical, miserable, bored ... and desperate.

Desperate enough, that the notion of another birthday is giving him thoughts of ending it all.

Blue Jasmine: Superb study in self-delusion

Blue Jasmine (2013) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity, mature thematic material and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.9.13

From the first scene, we can’t take our eyes off her: an unholy cross between Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara and Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond, layered with the bland contempt that comes only from Manhattan socialites.

During a visit to New York, working-class Ginger (Sally Hawkins, right) encourages her
husband, Augie (Andrew Dice Clay, center right) to seek investment advice from the
wealthy and privileged Hal (Alec Baldwin), an aggressive Wall Street shark married to
Jasmine (Cate Blanchett). Ginger figures there's no downside; after all, Jasmine is her
sister, and nothing is more important than family ... right?

Cate Blanchett’s title character in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine is a frightening creature: a woman so accustomed to aristocratic excess that she cannot fathom existence among the 99 percent. Yet she’s also a figure to be pitied, and that’s the hypnotic magic of Blanchett’s performance: We simultaneously loathe and feel sorry for her, wondering how somebody who once was an ordinary little girl, could have grown into an adult so cut off from her humanity.

She’s Marie Antoinette or Eva Braun: a woman who can’t precisely be described as evil, because she really don’t know any better. Morality, integrity, loyalty, simple kindness ... these are qualities suited only for the common herd. Jasmine swans above such flawed behavior; she lives only for her own tightly compartmentalized pleasures, and for the attention lavished upon her by a doting and über-wealthy husband.

Allen has written really close to the bone this time, with an unflinching dissection of the privileged, often vacuous wives who proudly stand alongside the Bernie Madoffs, as they blithely screw the rest of us. Do these women even perceive, let alone understand, the monsters they take to their beds each night?

Allen has resurrected his career, phoenix-like, more times than I can count, and he’s once again on a roll: perhaps the best thus far. Midnight in Paris was both clever and delightful: an adult fantasy that brought him another well-deserved Academy Award. Blue Jasmine, in turn, will do the same for Blanchett. I don’t care what comes out between now and Dec. 31; nobody will top her bravura performance in this film.

She’s nothing short of amazing, and Blue Jasmine stands among Allen’s finest works.

We meet Jasmine during a plane flight from New York to San Francisco, where she has arranged to live with her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), while attempting to pull her life back together. Jasmine’s personality is revealed during this airborne prologue, for she has trapped a seat mate — an elderly woman too polite to object — into enduring a litany of self-centered justification.

We don’t get many pertinent details, merely enough to understand the sheer torture that the oblivious Jasmine is inflicting on her temporary companion.

Win Win: Quiet triumph

Win Win (2011) • View trailer for Win Win
Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity and teenage smoking
By Derrick Bang


Actor turned writer/director Tom McCarthy concocts marvelous little ensemble pieces that are populated by disparate characters trying to connect with each other. They might be lonely, frustrated or somehow incomplete, but they’re always familiar and engaging: the sort of folks who could live next door, possibly as good friends in need of an emotional lift.

With bills piling up and his career circling the drain, Mike (Paul Giamatti, left)
yields to an ill-advised impulse ... and suddenly, weirdly, finds that things
start to go right in his life. But the knowledge of his misdeed eats away at his
soul, threatening all the new joy in his daily routine ... including a delicate
but genuinely loving bond with a lonely teenager, Kyle (Alex Shaffer).

McCarthy came to our attention back in 2003, with The Station Agent, a whimsical saga about a man (Peter Dinklage) who moves to rural New Jersey to mourn the loss of a friend, and winds up having to deal with an equally lonely woman (Patricia Clarkson) and an uncommonly chatty hot dog vendor (Bobby Cannavale). You can’t watch this charming film without smiling repeatedly; at the same time, McCarthy demonstrates an unerring sense of the way people reach out for each other, even while insisting they’re doing no such thing.

McCarthy’s next film, 2007’s The Visitor, upped the ante in terms of content and dramatic heft. Richard Jenkins garnered a well-deserved Academy Award nomination as a bereft college professor who, still missing the wife who died young, discovers that his New York City apartment has been, ah, “occupied” by squatters. But this young man and woman aren’t low-lifes; they’ve been tricked into believing the apartment genuinely was available. The subsequent narrative puts a human (and refreshingly nonjudgmental) face on the plight of illegal immigrants, while demonstrating how helping others can teach us how to help ourselves.

All of which brings us to Win Win, which nestles somewhere between McCarthy’s first two films, with respect to tone. Although not as charged as illegal immigration, this story’s underlying premise — the tantalizing lure of situational ethics — still prompts us to confront our own behavior. As is so blindingly true in the real world — more so than ever these days, it seems — mistakes themselves aren’t necessarily the end of one’s relationship, career, whatever; we’re judged by what we do after the lapse in judgment.

Disheartened elder care attorney Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) has watched his one-man business slide deeper into financial crisis for some time now. He seems genuinely drawn to his trusting clients, but lacks enough of them to make ends meet. He shares an office — actually a converted house — with Stephen Vigman (Jeffrey Tambor), a CPA similarly stressed by economic woes. Both men have been reduced to their own ill-equipped handyman repairs, whether dealing with a blocked toilet or a basement boiler/water heater that sounds like it’s auditioning for a role in Stephen King’s The Shining ... and is, in the words of a plumber, “ready to blow” at any moment.

Mike also moonlights as a high school wrestling coach; Stephen is his assistant. Their team is a hapless, listless, dispirited bunch; they’ve have to dig up to reach the cellar. In other words, Mike also derives no joy from this extra-curricular activity.