American Fiction: So true, it's scary

American Fiction (2023) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated R, for brief drug use, sexual references, fleeting violence and pervasive profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.29.23

This is as scathing a slice of social commentary as 2021’s Don’t Look Up ... and just as timely and relevant.

 

With his professional life taking an increasingly chaotic turn, Monk (Jeffrey Wright)
finds joy in his slowly developing relationship with Coraline (Erika Alexander).

But director/scripter Cord Jefferson’s new film — adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel, Erasure — also is a deeply personal drama about a family in crisis, with memorably sculpted characters superbly played by a talented cast.

These two qualities seem wholly at odds with each other, and yet Jefferson makes it work. The result is enthralling — by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, sensitive and blistering — from the first moment to the last.

 

And very, very clever.

 

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a respected author and professor of English literature, with several thoughtful, critically acclaimed books to his credit. Alas, they’ve not sold well, much to his disappointment, and that of his agent, Arthur (John Ortiz, making the most of a small part). Worse yet, his newest manuscript has collected nothing but rejection letters.

 

The carefully worded reason, from each potential publisher? The book “isn’t Black enough.”

 

“They want a Black book,” Arthur sighs.

 

“They have one,” Monk snaps back. “I’m Black, and it’s my book!”

 

This fuels Monk’s ire over — to quote Jefferson, in the film’s press notes — American culture’s tunnel-visioned fascination with Black trauma, typified by the fact that books and films almost never portray Black doctors, professors or scientists, preferring instead to focus on Black rappers, drug addicts, gang-bangers and slaves.

 

Because that’s what sells to the white audience.

 

Monk also is impatient when it comes his students’ cultural sensitivities, insisting that only snowflakes would be bothered by a course in early fiction of the American South, which includes coverage of Flannery O’Connor’s The Artificial N- and Other Tales. This attitude doesn’t endear Monk to his departmental colleagues.

 

But the absolute worst comes when Monk’s presence on a Boston literary festival panel draws a pitifully small audience, because almost everybody is in the much larger hall that features Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), whose newly published first book, We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, has become a smash best-seller.

 

Her read-aloud excerpt makes Monk wince, since the content and fractured English clearly panders to readers seeking stereotypical stories of Black misery.

 

Watch Wright’s expression, in this scene, as Monk stands at the back of the hall. He slowly takes in the room, his gaze becoming ever more despondent, as he sees the audience hanging onto Golden’s every word. It’s a masterful moment of silent acting.

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.

Frozen II: Shouldn't have been thawed

Frozen II (2019) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.22.19

I want to know what this film’s writers were smoking.

Granted, this sequel to 2013’s Frozen has its moments, almost exclusively those involving Josh Gad’s hilarious supporting performance as the relentlessly loquacious snowman, Olaf.

Having just penetrated the strange mist that conceals an enchanted forest, Elsa (foreground)
continues to hear a mysterious voice, although her companions — from left, Sven, Olaf,
Kristoff and Anna — do not.

The rest, however, is a mess.

Folks with a chronic aversion to musicals — and their numbers are legion — generally don’t shun classics such asThe Wizard of Oz, Singing in the Rain or West Side Story, or later genre refinements such as Cabaret and La La Land. No, such folks hate bad musicals: 1969’s Paint Your Wagon, 1975’s At Long Last Love, 1982’s Grease 2 and many others too numerous to mention.

Musicals with wafer-thin stories that usually make no sense, and which are interrupted constantly when the orchestra swells, an actor or two pauses in mid-sentence, stares heavenward, and we recoil with a sotto voce “Oh, gawd; they’re gonna sing again.”

Musicals with truly atrocious songs, not one of which is memorable enough to linger beyond the end credits.

Frozen II is a bad musical. A very bad musical, with genuinely awful, unmelodic and instantly forgotten tunes. Some of which are heard (endured?) more than once.

Songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez clearly felt they had to match the success of “Let It Go,” their inspirational, Academy Award-winning ballad from the first film. Ergo, most of these seven new tunes are similarly overcooked and overwrought power anthems, not one of which comes within shouting distance of “Let It Go.” The absence of musical variety — particularly during the film’s second half — becomes unbearable.

You could hear the clanking of eyeballs rolling in their sockets, during Monday evening’s preview screening, each time viewers muttered, “Oh, gawd; she’s gonna sing again.”

There’s such a thing as trying too hard.

The Predator: A bloody good time

The Predator (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for strong bloody violence, gore, relentless profanity and vulgar sexual references
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.14.18

Revived sci-fi action franchises have done pretty well lately.

Chris Pratt and a fresh team breathed welcome new life into the Jurassic Park series, and now director/co-scripter Shane Black has done the same with an updated Predator. He and co-writer Fred Dekker acknowledge the 1987 original, while cleverly welding their story to a can’t-miss formula that hearkens back to 1967’s The Dirty Dozen.

When a captured Predator regains consciousness and realizes that it's about to become a
laboratory experiment, it reacts with understandable fury. (Unfortunately, our heroes
won't get their act together for several more scenes.)

The result is 107 minutes of skillfully paced suspense, divided into distinct “chapters” that involve audience-pleasing characters, all played well by an ensemble cast that blends familiar faces with several newcomers. The dialogue is sharp, the action frequently laden with droll banter: no surprise, coming from the guy (Black) who made his mark with 1987’s Lethal Weapon and, more recently, ensured that Iron Man 3 was far better than its sophomore-slump predecessor.

Too bad Black undercuts all this good stuff by making his new Predator so unrelentingly gory. 

We’re talking splatter-porn levels of abattoir grue more appropriate to trashy zombie flicks. Black signals such sensitivities right out of the gate, when an early human victim — suspended upside-down from a tall tree limb, as befits Predator custom — is sliced in half, after which the camera lingers needlessly on his entrails, as they slowly drip and slide to the ground below.

Seriously?

That’s merely the beginning. Black and Dekker gleefully succumb to all manner of slicing, dicing, severed limbs, eviscerations, disembowelments, decapitations and more, often depicted via grody-to-the-max close-ups. I fully appreciate that a Predator entry must be violent, but there’s such a thing as too much … particularly when such excess damages an otherwise shrewdly assembled thrill ride.

That aside, there’s no denying that Black hits the sweet spot that blends macabre humor, fast-paced thrills and edge-of-the-seat suspense.

The film opens with a space battle between two small fighters; the targeted ship escapes and crash-lands on Earth, right where retired Special Forces army ranger-turned-mercenary Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) is leading a clandestine op against some Mexican drug cartel baddies. He alone survives the subsequent assault by the ferocious whatzit that emerges from the craft; better yet, McKenna escapes with the alien’s helmet and weapon-laden armband.

Suspecting a potentially hostile de-briefing back in the States, McKenna ships the alien tech home, where it unintentionally winds up in the hands of his adolescent son, Rory (Jacob Tremblay, well remembered from Room). He’s a spectrum child, on the border of autistic, and also — thanks to Tremblay’s gifted performance — one of the film’s strongest assets.

Due to Rory’s insatiable curiosity and savant-like talent for pattern recognition and puzzle-solving, he begins to figure out how this strange stuff functions.

Hotel Artemis: Make a reservation!

Hotel Artemis (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for violence, profanity, sexual references and drug use
By Derrick Bang

Back in the era of double features — when dinosaurs roamed the earth — a prestige “A-picture” frequently was accompanied by a low-budget companion pejoratively known as the “B-picture.”

The Nurse (Jodie Foster) and her newest patient — the local crime lord known as
Wolfking (a bloody Jeff Goldblum) — argue "politely" over chain of command, while the
latter's hair-trigger son (Zachary Quinto, center) watches with mounting impatience.

But a studio’s more modest units often were a training ground for gifted, up-and-coming talents, and it wasn’t at all unusual for a B-film to be more entertaining than the bloated, top-of-the-bill “spectacular” that brought folks into the theater.

Given Hollywood’s current obsession with over-hyped franchises and brain-dead popcorn fare, we’ve once again entered a time when unpretentious indie productions can be far more interesting than their mega-budget cousins. We simply don’t call ’em B-films anymore.

Case in point: Hotel Artemis, which marks an impressive directorial debut by writer/producer Drew Pearce, best known — up to this point — as part of the scripting teams on Iron Man 3 and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. Pearce’s first solo effort as writer/director is a smart, savvy “what if” thriller set in the near future, with an intriguing premise that makes excellent use of ornately moody surroundings and a solid ensemble cast.

The setting is downtown Los Angeles, late on an average evening in the year 2028. (“It’s a Wednesday,” one of our primary characters wearily repeats on occasion, shaking her head each time.) The most violent riot in L.A. history has entered its third night, with the privatized police force pummeling blue-painted protestors whose only demand is clean water ... because the city’s water supply also has been privatized. Those who don’t pay get their bills cut off.

(As has been noted on numerous occasions, the best science-fiction is that which takes place in a near future that doesn’t seem far removed from reality. Frankly — given the degree to which today’s privileged one percent works so aggressively to disenfranchise the rest of us — I find Pearce’s notion disturbingly prophetic.)

One outwardly decrepit building stands undisturbed amidst a chaos that includes police helicopters being blasted out of the sky by weaponized drones: the imposing Hotel Artemis, seemingly a dilapidated relic of a long-ago past, when it might have been filled with movie stars, high-rollers and local aristocrats.