Spike Lee's vibrant 'Highest 2 Lowest'

 

   Not many filmmakers would venture into territory that requires reimagining a film by the great master Akira Kurosawa. Korosawa’s 1963 High and Low, based on a 1959 novel by Ed McBain, may not be the director’s best film but it’s marked by troubling ethical questions and a daring approach that kept star Toshiro Mifune off screen for much of the movie's second half.

  Working from a screenplay credited to Alan Fox, director Spike Lee takes the dare, creating a vibrant  work that has been given a catchy altered title, Highest 2 Lowest. 

   The central question remains the same in both films: Will a wealthy businessman pay a ransom for a kidnapped kid? I won’t say more about the twist that  heightens the question's ethical dimensions. Know, though, that Lee sets his movie in the record business, building a story around David King (Denzel Washington), a successful record producer who may be aging out of the business that gave him fame, wealth, and power. 

  Early scenes take place in King’s jaw-droppingly chic Brooklyn penthouse, where he lives with his wife (Ilfenesh Hadera) and teenage son (Aubrey Joseph). 

  King’s apartment, which features art by important  Black American painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kehinde Wiley, serves as a testament to Black cultural expression and affluence. It's a home, to be sure, but it's also King's palace, the place from which he rules.

  The lofty security of King's apartment is disrupted by the policemen who arrive once the kidnapping is reported. John Douglas Thompson, LaChanze, and Dean Winters play the cops who coach a sometimes reluctant King about how to proceed with a life and $17.5 million of ransom money at stake. King needs the money to keep his company, Stackin' Records, from falling into hostile hands.

    Mifune’s character, by the way, jockeyed to purchase a controlling interest in a shoe company he had run for years, a much less glitzy endeavor.

   Jeffrey Wright provides strong support as Paul, King’s chauffeur and confidant, a widower who has had his bouts with the law but is dedicated to providing stability for his teenage son (Wright’s real-life son Elijah Wright), who happens to be best friends with King’s son.

  The motives for the kidnapping are intriguing. The vengeful kidnapper in High and Low was after money. In the new version, the kidnapper (A$AP Rocky) is an aggrieved rapper who calls himself Young Felon and who feels snubbed by King. 

  Sure, he wants money, but he also craves fame and notoriety, the whole showbiz spotlight.

   When the screenplay contrives to leave King’s apartment, Lee takes an enthusiastic dive into New York, setting an important scene (delivery of the ransom money) on a fast-moving subway train and staging a chase through a Puerto Rican Day street crowd where the Palmieri is playing. (Note: Palmieri died recently, leaving a gaping hole in the New York music scene.)

   The movie opens on a far different note. An original cast version of Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ from the musical Oklahoma plays on the soundtrack, a choice that adds to the burnished glow created by cinematographer Matthew Libatique, whose camera masterfully explores Manhattan as seen from King's balcony.

   Washington, who hasn't made a movie with Lee in 19 years, commands the screen. Although a crucial   decision made by King feels underdeveloped, Washington's scenes with Wright are compelling. 

   Ditto for a late-picture scene with A$AP Rocky. King tries to establish his rap bona fides with a quick-witted younger man who isn’t buying. I'd see the movie for that scene alone.

  Highest 2 Lowest works best as a showcase for highly committed performances from the main cast and for Lee, especially when the movie hits the streets of New York. Few of the supporting actors are given stand-out moments, and third-act thriller tension doesn’t always match the gravity of the material's moral concerns.

   Shortcomings aside, The Highest 2 Lowest proves consistently engaging, and it stands as a work that Lee has made his own, smartly altering the story Kurosawa told to give it fresh spin. Lee makes the movie resound with the energy he finds in his characters and in the city that sets a big stage for their drama and dreams.

Tough women of the West

 

Set in South Dakota ranch country, East of Wall immerses itself in the lives of a real-life mother/daughter duo (Tabatha and Porshia Zamiga) whose daily routine centers on horses. Director Kate Beecroft employs a mostly untrained cast to bring authenticity to the language and hardscrabble values of her characters. Actors include Scoot McNairy as a horse trader who recognizes Tabatha’s talent and wants to buy her financially troubled ranch. Jennifer Ehle portrays Tabatha's hard-drinking. no-nonsense mother. Tabatha also provides a home for a group of unruly teenagers, all of whom are attracted to her free-spirited ways. Beecroft's somewhat scattered story touches on suicide, changing Western values and the ways in which sorrow and joy can occupy the same landscape. At times, I wondered whether East of Wall might have worked better as a documentary, but Beecroft blends fiction and non-fictional approaches for a movie that's best when dishing out local flavor — shots of the Badlands are stunning and the environment in which the story takes place feels grounded in reality. Beecroft’s movie represents the kind of independent-minded cinema that results from the passion of a filmmaker who believes in the strength of independent-minded women who live through hardship without shedding too many tears.  

Not much surprise left in ‘Nobody 2’

 In Nobody 2, an unsurprising and only fitfully entertaining sequel to the 2021 original, Bob Odenkirk revisits the role of a suburban dad who doesn’t seem to have much control over his life. 

   Did I mention that Odenkirk's Hutch is also an assassin and that he's still at it, mostly because he must pay off debts from the havoc he wrought in the first movie. That means more lethal assignments.

   Craving a break from killing, an emotionally battered Hutch proposes to take his wife and two kids to an amusement park where he vacationed as a kid. He has fond memories of the place and wants to create similar memories for his kids. 

   The idea of a suburban doofus wielding near invincible power still has promise, but under the guidance of Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto, the movie teeters dangerously close to one-joke territory: When and how will the hot-tempered Hutch explode?

    Setting the movie in a dated amusement park in the fictional town of Plummerville lends a funky feel to an action/comedy that brings back some of the previous cast, notably Connie Nielsen as Hutch’s wife, Gage Munroe and Paisley Cadorath as his kids, and a mostly waisted Christopher Lloyd, as grandpa Mansell. RZA reprises his role as Hutch’s sword-wielding stepbrother.

  Two additions add interest. John Ortiz (always interesting) appears as the corrupt local sheriff, and Sharon Stone portrays Lendina, a merciless drug lord who has set up her headquarters in Plummerville. The role gives Stone a chance to chew plenty of scenery; she takes full advantage of the opportunity.

  Looking gaunt and a bit depressed, Hutch seldom allows an expression to cross his face. He seems less interesting the second time around because we already know the fire that lies beneath the nondescript front he presents to the world.

  Tjahjanto choreographs much of the movie’s abundant violence for laughs, providing you like the wanton helpings of guns, knives, rifles, explosives, and fists. In a major sight gag, one of the villains has his head sliced in two. A battle on a theme-park boat serves as an illustration of the movie's strategy: to double down on the mayhem in every scene by offering an escalating series of flesh-mangling beats.

   Perhaps to add a bit of thematic weight, Hutch worries that his son will follow in his murderous footsteps. Think of the sequel possibilities that might arise if the series follows Hutch into his dotage and his kid takes over the family business, which began with Hutch’s father.

   Or don’t. For me, one amusing Nobody movie was enough Two struck me as one too many. A possible third? I hope not.*

*Updated to correct two names. Apologies, dear readers.

 

'Weapons' fires one weird shot

 

   Part fairy tale, part horror movie, part social satire, and part expression of unbridled lunacy, Weapons stands as a weird hybrid that stakes out its own eerie turf.

   Writer/director Zach Cregger (Barbarians) begins as if he's making a hard-boiled, socially observant thriller revolving around the unexplained disappearance of 17 kids from the same third-grade class in a small Pennsylvania town. 

   The kids were pupils in the class of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), a teacher with an alcohol problem in her past. At a town meeting, one of the fathers (Josh Brolin's Archer Graff) accuses Gandy of complicity in what appears to be a bizarre crime. The parents are livid.

   We already know that at 2:17 a.m. on a Wednesday, the now-vanished kids ran out of  their homes, their arms spread out like wings of airplanes. Their flight was captured on home security cameras, fleeing youngsters who may have fallen under a malevolent spell.

   Rather than following a linear path, Cregger focuses on six characters caught up in the mysterious drama. He begins with Garner's Justine and follows with the stories of five additional characters, each elaborating different aspects of the story.

   But this isn't Rashomon, a Kurosawa classic about contrasting, often opposing renderings of the same story. Instead, Weapons reveals the emerging fury of the town's residents: a uniformed cop (Alden Ehrenreich), the school's principal (Benedict Wong), a drug-addled young man (Austin Abrams), and the only student in Justine's class who didn't vanish (Cary Christopher's Alex).

   Abrams, by the way, dishes out a classic helping of dopey, stoned behavior. I never expected to find that kind of character amusing again. I was wrong.

   The movie's six tales build toward a Grand Guignol of a finale, which Cregger presents with the same controlled precision that marks the rest of the movie.

  Horror fans needn't worry. Cregger includes enough gore to satisfy bloodthirsty horror appetites, but many of the scenes, particularly in the movie's second half, bristle with macabre humor, much of it attributable to Alex's visiting Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan as a strange woman whose presence is alternately funny and horrifying). 

   Not everything about Weapons makes sense, and a couple of jump scares seemed too cliched for a movie that's more original than most. But why complain? Weapons provides the kind of viewing experience that may  leave some saying, "Wow, that was one crazy movie," and mean it as a compliment.

The dangers of online scamming

 

If you're an online scam artist, it's best that you cover your tracks. That's a small part of what we learn from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud, an elusive, tone-shifting movie that begins with the same sense of detachment found in its main character. Yoshii (Masaki Suda) works in a factory but supplements his income by buying cheap goods and reselling them online at inflated prices, sometimes present them as designer merchandise. Cloud can be read as a cautionary tale about the internet or as a critique of unscrupulous capitalism. But part of the movie's allure is the mystery Kurosawa creates about his intentions. He plunges us into a world in which Yoshi reveals little of his interior life, even as he relates to his sometime live-in girlfriend (Kotone Furukawa). After quitting his job and suspecting trouble, Yoshii moves with Furukawa's Akiko to a rural town outside Tokyo. There, he hires Sando (Daiken Okudaira), an assistant who'll play an increasingly important role in the plot. Yoshii's victims eventually try to hunt him down. No point telling more except to say that Kurosawa builds toward a bullet-riddled finale that takes place in an abandoned industrial site that evokes memories of other revenge sagas. Kurosawa's refusal to dot every "i'' or cross every "t" may provide patient viewers with more than they bargained for in a movie that wisely leaves us wondering where to place our sympathies -- or whether we should place them at all.

More body swaps in a lesser movie

    During the first 15 minutes of Freakier Friday, a sequel to the popular 2003 movie, a food fight disrupts a high school bake sale. As the sloppy mayhem unfolded, I surrendered any hope that this broadly played cinematic reunion tour for Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan would bubble with Wildean wit.

  Working from a screenplay credited to a trio of writers, director Nisha Ganatra doubles the number of characters involved in body swaps from two to four, but that that doesn't make her movie any better than its predecessor. Sadly it's probably not as good.

  This time, the body-swapping adventures of Curtis and Lohan are joined by Julia Butters, as the daughter of Lohan's now-grown Anna, and Sophie Hammons, as Lily, a teenager who'll be blended into a new family should Anna go through with her plan to marry Lily's father, a widowed British restaurateur played by Manny Jacinto.

  Ganatra keeps things peppy as she builds toward the inevitable body swaps, this time resulting from the unwanted help of a faux psychic (Vanessa Bayer). 

   The idea behind the plot goes something like this: Both teenagers (Butters and Hammons) despise one another and have no desire to become stepsisters. Once they find themselves in different bodies, they follow a sitcom playbook, scheming to derail Anna and Eric's impending wedding. 

    Lohan and Butters do well, with Curtis' broader performance adding dashes of slapstick.  Hammons ably fulfills her obligations as a conceited London-raised teenager who hasn't gotten over the death of her mother. Lohan's Anna, by the way, opted for single motherhood long before the story began.

    All of this rattles on for one hour and 51 minutes while the characters learn how to resolve their problems.

    Look, because there's no suspense about how the movie will end, I don't consider it a spoiler to tell you that a truly freaky movie would have put Butters' 15-year-old Harper in her 36-year-old mother's body indefinitely, skipping the end of adolescence for the entrapments of middle age. 

   Too freaky? I suppose so.

   The movie has other things in mind as it works to generate  feel-good spirit, culminating with a showy musical production number involving Lohan, Butters, and a singer (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) Anna manages. Anna, we learn, became a talent agent after abandoning performing ambitions she displayed in the earlier movie, partly to concentrate on being a mom.

     Perhaps to provide connection points for those who loved the 2003 movie, the filmmakers contrive small roles for additional returnees, notably Stephen Tobolowsky, as an aging teacher, Chad Michael Murray, as Anna's old high school flame, and Mark Harmon, as Tess's husband.

    The movie's end credits feature outtakes that suggest the movie was fun to make. The performances capture some of that giddy flavor, but Freakier Friday wraps its family-oriented sentiments in a package that 22 years of aging hasn't done much to improve.*

    *For the record, I haven't seen the 1976 version of Freaky Friday that starred Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris.

     

A sobering look at architectural decay

 

Sometimes it's intriguing not to know exactly what you're looking at. Documentary director Victor Kossakovsky (Aquarela, Gunda) is a master of decontextualization. Kossakovsky knows how to present images that make it seem as if we've arrived in an altered state where nothing seems ordinary. Architecton, Kossakovsky's latest documentary, makes points about the impact of architecture and the sustainability of building with concrete. But when you watch stones tumbling downward,  you may ask yourself whether you're witnessing a rock slide or the movement of industrial-strength detritus through a quarry. You'll also see ancient ruins, but the best way to watch Architecton is to allow the movie take you where it will. Italian architect Michele De Lucchi serves as a kind of guide and provocateur, inviting us to consider the kind of environments we're creating for ourselves. The bombed-out ruins of Ukrainian apartments and earthquake devastation in Turkey point to the unsettling impermanence of our physical environment. At one point, De Lucchi and a few laborers make a circle of stones on his property. The stones outline a small patch of land void of human intervention. If you live in a city that's in the midst of massive development, Architecton may increase your dismay about the endless look-alike apartment buildings that seem to crop up everywhere. What will they be in 40 or 50 years? Will the generation that learns the answer to that question be happy with what they've inherited?