'Pillion' dominated by sex and power

 

 We live an age of initials -- from MAGA to DEI to BDSM. BDSM? BDSM, in case you didn't know, involves bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism, and masochism. Director Harry Lighton's Pillion may put those initials into slightly wider use, although a movie that makes sexual dominance and submission part of -- or perhaps the entirety of its concerns -- isn't likely to transcend niche viewing.

   Some have seen Pillion as a subcultural romcom, which seems a stretch to me. It has also been called a Domcom, which is too clever by half.

   To begin with, some background: The word "pillion" refers to the person who sits on the back of a motorcycle, playing second fiddle to the driver and clearly acknowledging his subordinate position.

   The movie centers on Colin (Harry Melling) and Ray (Alexander Skarsgard), the duo that lives through Colin’s drama of sexual self-discovery. Colin lives with his mom and dad, works as a parking lot attendant, and sings in a barber shop quartet. Minus his sexual explorations, he’d be one more nonentity living in a dreary London suburb, a person of little or no distinction.

   Ray spots Colin at a local pub and begins instructing him in the ways of submission. Ray obviously knows that Colin, practically a poster boy for loneliness, is an easy mark and will do his bidding. Ray, on the other hand, is cool, handsome, and composed; he’s everything Colin isn’t. 

    But here’s the twist: Colin doesn’t aspire to be Ray. He aspires to serve Ray.

   As it turns out, Ray is a cruel taskmaster. I won’t describe the demands he places on Colin, except to say that they begin when, after an early sexual encounter in an ally, Ray asks Colin to lick one of his boots. In his sleekly tailored leather outfit, Ray looks ready should anyone ever make a comic book movie that needs a superhero who’s into sexual dominance.

   As the movie progresses, the two become a couple, with Colin sleeping on the floor of Ray’s bedroom (Ray won’t allow him in his bed), shopping and cooking for Ray, and changing his appearance so that he can blend into the gay biker culture in which the nomadic Ray has taken temporary root. Ray gives Colin a chain with a lock attached, an obvious symbol of subordination.

   Colin’s parents — a befuddled dad (Douglas Hodge) and a mom who’s dying of cancer (Lesley Sharp) — accept Colin’s gayness. But Mom craves the relief of knowing that her son will settle down with a “nice” boy. Fat chance. Still, the movie gives Sharp a strong moment as a mom who fears for her son's future.

   Scenes of psycho-sexual dominance are more explicit than you might expect and aren’t easy to watch, although some see them as darkly funny. Lighton, who wrote the screenplay based on the novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, plays Skarsgard’s aloof indifference against Melling’s addled subservience. Their relationship contains the seeds of a deadpan comic burlesque.

   It’s possible to see Ray as a typical literary figure, the mysterious outsider who schools a less-sophisticated student in the ways of  life, in this case, the BDSM life, which Colin willingly enters. He’s not a prisoner. As current parlance would have it, he’s a consenting adult.

   Obvious questions evolve. How much can Colin take? Will he ever tire of watching Ray polish his motorcycle while he pines for attention? Is there a point at which Collin will want more from the lopsided power relationship to which he seems to have become addicted?

   Lighton takes us to that point and contrives for Colin to exercise a bit of self-assertion, a minor triumph but one that might be seen as the movie's redeeming raison d'etre.

   Pillion isn’t 50 Shades of Grey, another movie about dominance. Nor is it easily compared to Nicole Kidman’s Babygirl, which coated its kinky core with a glossy veneer. Let's just say that Lighton leans in the opposite direction, and leave it at that.  

   And unlike either of those movies, Pillion makes little attempt to go much beyond the world Colin and Ray inhabit, aside from Colin's impossibly awkward attempt to please his mother by bringing Ray home for dinner. 

   Melling makes a convincing schlub who begins to discover a sense of belonging, and Skarsgard conveys Ray’s intelligence, hauteur, and insistently expressed authority. 

  But with or without Colin's consent, Ray’s behavior tips close to sadistic abuse, and Lighton's unwillingness to flesh out Ray’s character presents us with a conundrum. It makes him a man of mystery, but also raises questions. We have no idea how Ray sustains himself or how became the man he is.

   Lighton and his cast surely knew that Pillion wouldn’t be everyone's tub of popcorn. Yes, there’s humor here, and yes, the performances are well-adapted to the material, but I don’t know how much can be gained from its collection of abuse and degradation, even if the movie's characters are eager to immerse themselves in it. 

Charli xcx's 'Brat' mockumentary

   In the summer of 2024, Brat -- an album by Charli xcx became a global phenomenon -- or so I've read. Look, I'm not a Charli xcx aficionado, fan, or even a casual listener. So, I approached The Moment, a "mockumentary" in which Charli xcx plays herself, with wariness. I may not be part of the target audience, but I figured the movie would, at minimum, clue me in about Charli xcx.

  I chuckled during The Moment, but was more interested in the dichotomy at the heart of a movie about a fast-rising star torn by a desire to extend her "moment" and wanting to destroy everything about it.

   That probably sounds deeper than the ways in which the movie explores issues of control and stardom, but The Moment deserves credit for raising such issues, even if they're punctuated by strobe-light explosions, flashing images, and pop-cultural frenzy.

  In the film, Charli xcx's career is pushed by the head of her record company (Rosanna Arquette), a no-nonsense executive who wants to sustain the eruption of cash Charli has unleashed.

  Among the absurd ideas that are floated and adopted without much thought: A Charli xcx credit card aimed at young queer people. It's an amusing jab at niche marketing, but the joke eventually leads to an awkwardly expressed plot development. (A word on that later.)

   Management also decides to film a Charli concert. Enter Johannes (a spot-on Alexander Skarsgard), a director who speaks the language of accommodation and co-creation but wants to control everything. He pushes aside Charli's creative director (Hailey Benton Gates) in an attempt to smooth out Charli's rough edges. His mass-appeal mind is put off by Charli's abbreviated skirts, bold show of panties, unabashed sexuality, and cigarette-smoking. In short, her act.

   Director Aidan Zamiri's hand-held cascade of images recreate the dizzying attraction of celebrity for a young woman who has come to represent the Brat ethos, which proposes something on the order of "I do me and don't give a shit what you think. I'm proudly imperfect and musically brash."

  A third act built around a catastrophe with Charli's credit cards seems too contrived for a movie that's best in its incidental moments, such as when Charli meets Kylie Jenner at a posh resort in Ibiza. 

  The Moment benefits from Charli's wild-child presence, but the movie's mockumentary, fly-on-the-wall approach can feel a bit old hat, and I would have appreciated a deeper dive into her music. 

   If Charli xcx has the adventurous talent many rock critics have praised, The Moment doesn't quite match it, which isn't to say that her fans won't enjoy it or that it can't be entertaining or that Charli xcx won't have a post-Brat life no matter how her movie fares.

To see or not to see? A critic's dilemma and two reviews: 'Ibelin' and "Lee'

 In the market where I work, two advance screenings sometimes happen simultaneously. This week's viewing dilemma arose when screenings The Wild Robot and Megalopolis were scheduled for the same evening. I chose Megalopolis because a Francis Ford Coppola opus seems a must for anyone who has been reviewing movies for nearly 40 years. Coppola invested $120 million of his own money in the movie and had been talking about it for decades. Never shy about out-sized ambition, Coppola's movie (reviewed on this blog) took precedence for me. Don't take that as any reflection on Wild Robot. As of this writing, Wild Robot boasted a 98 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I'll have to catch up with it.

  Now for the rest of the week: 

 

Ibelin, a documentary from director Benjamin Ree, surprised me. Generally, when cultural critics discuss gaming, they emphasize the way gaming can isolate young people and discourage personal communication. Ree presents an alternative view, telling the story of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man who died of Duchenne muscular dystrophy at the age of 25.  Lonely in reality and increasingly debilitated, Steen sought refuge in the World of Warcraft, where he assumed the identity of Lord Ibelin Redmore. Steen's body may have betrayed him, but online, he became a muscular character with a well-developed sense of compassion. Ree ably depicts the gap between role-playing and reality. Better, though, he shows how the gulf can be bridged, how two worlds ("the virtual" and "the real," for want of better terms) can nourish each other. Using animation to depict Steen's Warcraft journey, bits from Steen's blog, and interviews, Ree creates a moving story about a young man who couldn't beat the odds, but who did something meaningful with the hand he was dealt: He affected the lives of others.

   

Then there's Lee, a movie about the great World War II photographer Lee Miller, played by Kate Winslet. Directed by Ellen Kuras, Lee tells the story of a woman who began her career as a model and fashion photographer for Vogue before convincing the editor of the magazine's British edition to turn her into a war correspondent. You'd think that by now, filmmakers would have tired of structuring films around interviews. Lee doesn't help itself by tying a chronologically presented story to an interview in which Lee answers questions from a character played by Josh O'Connor. The movie begins with Lee's pre-war days in France, where she spent time as part of an avant-garde circle that included the editor of Vogue Paris (Marion Cotillard). In France, she also met English painter Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard) with whom she developed a long-term relationship. The heart of the movie involves Lee's struggle to gain access to the fighting and later, to German death camps, where she took a career-defining series of photographs. It wasn't easy for a woman to break into the war correspondent ranks. When the Brits refused to give Lee combat credentials, she used her American citizenship to access the fighting. On the French and German fronts, Lee traveled with another American photographer Andy Stamberg's David E. Scherman, who worked for Life magazine. Difficult either to pan or praise,  Lee sheds light on an important career, but a cumbersome structure weighs it down. Winslet goes all in on playing a tough, sexually uninhibited woman who refuses to be deterred, but the movie underlines its themes and feels stuck in a biopic ghetto where its story too often feels locked in the past.

A finely realized look at blurred racial lines

 

Based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing takes a clear-eyed look at a delicate racial issue. Set in the 1920s, Passing focuses on two women who had been teenage friends but haven't seen each other for years. Tessa Thompson plays Irene, a Black woman living a middle-class life in Harlem with her physician husband (Andre Holland). Clare (Ruth Negga) is a light-completed woman who has been passing for white. She’s married to a racist banker (Alexander Skarsgard) who, of course, has no idea that his wife is Black. The two women reunite accidentally in cafe in a New York hotel where Irene is trying to escape the heat. After the meeting,  Clare begins to discover that she’s tired of posing. She wants to rekindle the spark of Black life that promises to release her from stultification. Filming in black-and-white and employing an old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio, Rebecca Hall makes her directorial debut with a carefully calibrated (but never lifeless) depiction of a world that’s vanished but still relevant.  The movie gains in complexity as Clare begins to spend more time with Irene and her family. The actors are asked to convey a host of subtleties and ironies and they more than rise to the occasion. Passing leaves us with much to unpack: the constraints of propriety on the Black bourgeoisie, the longing not only for equality but of freedom of cultural expression, questions about the images that people construct to insulate themselves from harsh truths. An ambiguous ending may frustrate some viewers, but Passing approaches a host of volatile subjects with nuance, delicacy, and some of the year's most beautifully realized performances. Available on Netflix and in some theaters.

‘Godzilla vs. Kong’: Who’ll win? Who cares?

      The final battle between Godzilla and Kong takes place in Hong Kong, where the two behemoths wreak what appears to be billions of dollars worth of collateral damage, smashing high-rise after high-rise as they crash into buildings and exchange blows.

     With protesters filling the streets of Hong Kong and many of the city’s residents trying to stave off restrictions Beijing wants to impose  I couldn't help thinking that the city had enough trouble without two imaginary monsters stomping it into rubble.

    So, no, I wasn’t amused by Godzilla vs. Kong, the latest movie to bring the two classic monsters to life — or, in this case, digital life.

     The only interesting character in this blaring, disheveled movie is Kong, the sensitive but powerful mega-ape who, in this installment, displays affection for a Jia, (Kaylee Hottle), a child who can’t hear or speak.

     The movie’s human characters are reduced to gaping spectators by a negligible excuse of a plot.  As near as one can tell, the story involves an evil corporate czar (Damian Bichir) who attempts to harness an energy source, a trip to Kong’s home in Hollow Earth, and the tag-along efforts of a couple of adults --Alexander Skarsgard as a scientist and Rebecca Hall, the woman who has adopted Hottle's Jia and who presides over Kong's synthetic eco-system, the place where the movie begins.

     It’s possible, I suppose, to argue that acting, plot, and even clarity of storytelling hardly matter. What most folks want from a movie that pits a giant ape against a towering sea monster is rampant destruction.

   Mindful of that, the filmmakers not only ravage Hong Kong but an entire Navy fleet that's escorting Kong to Antarctica so that he can dive into the hole that will lead him to Hollow Earth and the much-coveted energy source.

    The movie's plot seems so preposterous that I half expect to find it being advanced by one or another of the various groups that currently specialize in bizarre conspiracy theories.

    A parallel story that seems to have been added for youth-appeal introduces a teen-age girl (Millie Bobby Brown),  her nerdy companion (Julian Dennison), and a podcaster (Brian Tyree Henry) who specializes in conspiracy theories related to the plot.

    The movie begins with Kong awakening in the artificial environment where he seems to have resided since his last big-screen appearance. Kong yawns, rises, scratches his butt, and showers under a waterfall. 

     The opening gave me hope that the filmmakers, under the direction of Adam Wingard, might be on the verge of delivering a comic take instead of the usual monster mash in which Kong celebrates his victory over various creatures by ripping off their heads and raising them as trophies. 

   But, no. 

   The case of Godzilla vs. Kong may triumph in the supreme court of movies otherwise known as the box office. But the movie sacrifices any hint of mystery and suspense for noisy displays of blunt force that leave us with only one question: Is this a movie or a demolition derby?

Examining the climate for a war crime

The Kill Team takes its cue from a 2013 documentary of the same name. The story deals with a platoon in which the staff sergeant (Alexander Skarsgard) takes a view of combat that doesn’t distinguish between frightened civilians and dangerous foes. In the role of the soft-spoken but dangerous sergeant Deeks, Skarsgard shows us how his character ingratiates himself with his men. He creates a tight-knit atmosphere that fosters a climate of secrecy and allows the sergeant to function as a kind of free agent in an Afghanistan war zone. Building blocks of brotherhood create a fraternal environment that tests the conscience of one of Deek's soldiers, the dedicated Andrew Briggman (Nat Wolff). Briggman is no softie when it comes to warfare, but his qualms about killing civilians put him at odds with the rest of the group. If you’ve seen the documentary, you pretty much know what’s going to happen, but a committed cast brings a level of tension to the proceedings. And the increasingly antagonistic duet played by Skarsgard and Wolff gives the movie a solid if troubling center. When bullets are flying and explosive devices are going off, figuring out how to behave isn’t easy but director Dan Krauss, who also directed the documentary, raises a deeply vexing question. What happens when killing in war becomes murder?

She's beautiful; he's a schlub

Long Shot goes for laughs by teaming Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron. It probably will be a hit -- but not with me.

The Long Shot, an improbable romantic comedy starring Charlize Theron (beautiful) and Seth Rogen (schlubby) likely will score with audiences, more for its comedy than its romance. Directed by Jonathan Levine (50/50), the movie plays to the expectation that someone who looks like Theron -- and who does a better job of looking like Theron than Theron herself? -- possibly could fall for someone who looks like Rogen, who, as far as we know, never has been mistaken for Bradley Cooper.

To make the movie even more ludicrous, Theron portrays a Secretary of State with presidential ambitions and Rogen has been hired to play a rogue journalist who has little respect for anything that might be described as the "official" world. It's reasonable to wonder how Rogen's Fred Flarsky would even know someone such as Theron's Charlotte Field.

We quickly learn that the relationship traces back to Fred's teens. The slightly older Charlotte babysat for Fred, who expressed his fondness for her with an erection that caused his pants to bulge. Evidently, the moment was so important that Fred never forgot it.

When Fred and Charlotte meet as adults -- if that's what the character played by Rogen can be called -- they strike up a relationship. They meet, by the way, at a party at which Boyz II Men makes an appearance. Turns out they're both Boyz II Men fans. What are the odds?

Charlotte is impressed with Fred's candor as a supposedly fearless and funny journalist who works for a Brooklyn newspaper. As luck would have it, Fred is newly unemployed having quit his job when his paper was taken over by a right-wing tycoon.

Field hires Fred as a speechwriter and ... well ... I don't have to tell you that one thing leads to another and an unlikely romance blossoms between the Secretary of State and this slovenly Secretary of Sate. (I know, "sate" isn't a noun, but I couldn't resist.)

The movie plays a bad-taste card early. In his effort to infiltrate a meeting of neo-Nazis, Fred agrees to have a swastika tattooed on his arm. That way, the skinheads will believe he's one of their Jew-hating brethren. Sure.

I suppose all of this could have worked had the screenplay, credited to Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah, found a comic tone that could accommodate both meathead humor and something slightly more sophisticated.

If Long Shot scores with audiences, it may be because Levine's understands that all successful comedies require a couple of major moments that have been engineered to elicit the always desirable Big Laugh.

At one point, Field's advisors (June Diane Raphael), tries to embarrass Fred, who has been told that he should shed his neo-hippie attire and find a suit he can wear to one of Field's appearances at an international conference. They find him a suit that would look out-of-place at a Scandinavian folk festival, but the joke is undermined by a question: Would Fred really be stupid enough to wear this ridiculous outfit?

If you're going to hire Rogen, it's probably fitting to work masturbation into the story and if you can find a way to include a masturbation joke with ejaculate, you've struck gold. Levine does both. I'll say no more.

If you've seen any Rogen performance, you already know that he'll punctuate the proceedings with wisecracks, some of them clever. Theron gives a reasonably adept comic performance as her character is put in the position of having to defend Fred against those who believe that he's too much the irredeemable slob to qualify as a romantic partner for someone who aspires to the nation's highest office, currently held by a self-involved fool played by Bob Odenkirk.

The supporting cast includes Alexander Skarsgard as the Canadian Prime Minister, a suave, good-looking fellow who's supposed to make an ideal companion for Charlotte, aside from his creepy pretensions and a fingernails-on-blackboard laugh. O'Shea Jackson Jr. shows up as one of Fred's buddies, a guy who's successful in business. Andy Serkis, looking strange as ever, plays the media mogul who's trying to gobble up the entire media world.

I know from the reaction of a preview audience that enough folks will find Long Shot hilarious to make it into a small hit. To wit: There's even a scene in which the Secretary of State, uncharacteristically high on drugs, must deal with a national security crisis.

But I'm not casting my vote for a comedy that, like a long-winded political speech, goes on for two hours, and which too often seems more interested in packaging gags than in taking on political hypocrisy or, heaven forbid, something audiences truly hold sacred: the romantic comedy. Rather than challenging the form, the movie can't resist capitulating to it.

Racing the clock to build a data pipeline

The excitement of obsessive ambition leads us to a familiar place in The Hummingbird Project.

The Hummingbird Project takes aim at obsessive ambition, in this case, the drive to gain the upper hand when it comes to buying and selling stocks by using high-speed data transmission to win milliseconds of advantage over the competition. For a while, the movie barrels along with dizzying urgency.

In addition, the movie gives Alexander Skarsgard (familiar from HBO's True Blood and Big Little Lies) an opportunity to shave his head to play a bald computer geek who can code his way out of just about any problem. Skarsgard’s Anton isn’t much when it comes to socializing, though. His stooped slouch of a walk makes you wonder whether, all things considered, he wouldn't be happier if he could simply disappear.

He can't. Skarsgard's Anton Zaleski must find a way to shave minuscule amounts of time off high-speed fiber optic transmission from Kansas to New York. The idea originated with Anton's cousin Vincent, played by Jesse Eisenberg in another avid performance.

You don't need an advanced degree to know that the movie is going to find ways to critique the driven world of high finance, but along the way, you'll find nice work from Salma Hayek, her hair turned stylishly gray, and Michael Mando, familiar from Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. Mando portrays the manager of the construction firm charged with building the data-carrying pipeline.

Although we've seen it before (principally in The Social Network), it's fun watching Eisenberg play a wheeling, dealing character.

But acting and character development isn't the problem here; the excitement generated by Vincent's scurrying personality eventually wears itself out, and we know from the start that the movie wants us to understand that there's more to life than making money.

Director Kim Nguyen, who also wrote the screenplay, finds himself a little behind the curve when it comes to tackling hollow, soul-destroying ambition, a theme that's spelled out so clearly that one of Vincent's conflicts pits him against an Amish elder (Johan Heldenbergh) who doesn't want to sell drilling rights on his land because he doesn't give a damn about speed.

The scene emphasizes a point that doesn't need underining: Speed can kill.

Trying to make Tarzan relevant

Nothing legendary about the latest look at the King of the Apes.

Filmmakers tackling a Tarzan movie face a variety of problems -- not the least of which are the racial attitudes that tinge Edgar Rice Burroughs' hopelessly dated fantasy.

Obviously aware of such pitfalls, director David Yates tries to cleanse The Legend of Tarzan of offensive elements, putting an anti-colonial spin on a movie that becomes a kind of CGI zoo. What, you thought they'd be using real apes?

For all the digital effort, Yates, who directed the final four Harry Potter movies, can't entirely liberate The Legend of Tarzan from Hollywood imperialism. He's still dealing with a story in which the white Lord Greystoke, a.k.a. John Clayton (Alexander Skarsgard), leaves the comforts of Great Britain with his wife Jane (Margot Robbie) to rediscover his animal self and save Congolese tribesmen from being enslaved by Belgian mercenaries.

You needn't look past Christoph Waltz's name in the credits to know who's playing the bad guy. Waltz's Leon Rom makes deals with a fierce chief (Djimon Hounsou), captures Jane and generally makes it clear that he's indifferent to all forms of African life.

Waltz, who has been menacing innocent lives since his breakthrough in Inglourious Basterds, may not seem particularly enthusiastic about his jungle-bound villainy, but at least he's well dressed.

Rom wears a white suit and tie in even the most remote locations. He carries a rosary that he uses to strangle people. A less-than-wry comment about possible connections between Christianity and the exploitation of Africa's abundant resources?

Then there's George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson), an American Civil War veteran who wants Tarzan to accompany him to Africa to see whether Africans really are being enslaved. If they are, Tarzan can expose this crime to the world. Who, after all, wouldn't believe Tarzan, a man with impeccable jungle cred?

Yates also offers flashback to Tarzan's youth. After his widowed father is beaten to death by apes, baby Tarzan is snatched by the same apes, one of whom raises him with motherly affection.

As the adult Tarzan -- bare chested and in britches rather than loincloths -- the Ape Man swings through trees, leaps off cliffs, and fights the apes who thinks he deserted them.

I haven't said much about Skarsgard's Tarzan because he isn't exactly loaded with personality. Tarzan's hands are swollen and a bit deformed because he spent much of his youth running on all fours. He knows how to speak to animals and regards them as friends.

Still best know for playing a vampire in HBO's True Blood, Skarsgard mostly displays his abs and looks noble.

As for Jackson? He has seen better days, and, I hope, better hairpieces.

Robbie's character takes no guff, but this Americanized Jane seems like another product of authorial engineering, one more strained attempt to accommodate contemporary sensibilities.

It takes more than an hour for Tarzan to deliver his trademark yell, and this rumble in the jungle may not fool audiences who've seen too many digitally created animals to suspend much disbelief.

Legend of Tarzan doesn't exactly die on the vines that Tarzan uses to swing from tree-to-tree, but did the world need another Tarzan movie? If so, it should have been one that didn't make the mistake of delivering its most exciting moments in the short prologue that precedes the rest of the movie.

A familiar helping of sci-fi

Another adaptation of a popular young adult novel.

When a society seems perfect, it's probably time to start worrying.

That's part of the warning delivered by The Giver, an artful if slightly bland adaptation of a 1993 young adult novel by Lois Lowry.

Carefully assembled by director Phillip Noyce and boasting strong adult participation from Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Alexander Skarsgard, and Katie Holmes, The Giver serves as a well-made -- if too familiar -- cautionary tale about the perils of an over-controlled society that has tried to eliminate all knowledge of the past.

You needn't have read the book to know that someone -- in this case a young character named Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) -- eventually will challenge the prevailing order.

The story begins when young Jonas is selected as the Receiver of Memory, the one person who'll learn the real history of humanity prior to its imprisonment in this apparently idyllic world.

Jonas is introduced to memory -- and the pain it brings -- by The Giver (Bridges), a grizzled fellow who's allowed to know all of human history.

Because he possesses such knowledge, The Giver occasionally is called upon to advise the ruling elders about potential dangers that need immediate redress -- or something like that.

The Giver also has the power to transmit images from the past simply by grabbing Jason's arms and establishing a mind link, thereby saving his charge the trouble of having to read any of the many books in The Giver's vast library.

The movie opens at a ceremony in which Jason graduates into his adult role. His two best friends: Fiona (Odeya Rush) and Asher (Cameron Monaghan) are assigned their tasks, as well.

Jason's parents (Skarsgard and Holmes) watch the proceedings along with the rest of the parents, who aren't biological parents but adults selected for parenting roles.

Streep plays the Chief Elder, a woman with a school principal's smile and a hair style that looks as if it were borrowed from Cher. The chief elder keeps order by eliminating most of what we regard as human impulse.

Noyce shoots segments in the movie's sterile, smiley-faced utopia in black and white, introducing vivid color as Jason begins to see a more flavorful but dangerous world under The Giver's tutelage.

Of course, the colorless world in which all homes are the same and in which daily injections suppress both positive and negative emotions harbors hidden dangers. Babies judged "inferior" are killed, as are some of the elderly.

Looking like The Dude after a weird makeover, Bridges -- also one of the movie's producers -- adds gravitas, and Streep avoids Cruella de Vil cliches in a role that isn't likely to be pressed into her book of memories.

The young actors give serviceable enough performances. Skarsgard and Holmes are short-changed by the fact that they're playing characters with minimal personalities.

The movie unravels a bit during an ending that underscores the story's implausibilities, and the tale's main issues hardly qualify as startlingly original.

The Giver comes off as a well-intended helping of sci-fi built around a moral lesson: The problem with eliminating all of our worst tendencies is that it also does away with the best. That, of course, proves little aside from demonstrating that The Giver has a firm grasp of the obvious.

'The East' poses difficult questions

Acting and intrigue help elevate this thriller about eco-terrorism.

The eco-thriller The East deals with the often-fraught relationship between conscience and action, inviting us to ponder whether the two ever can be brought into complete agreement.

The movie has the right team to consider such a question. Actress Brit Marling co-wrote The East with director Zal Batmanglij, who directed Marling in Sound of My Voice (2011), an effective and involving drama about life inside a cult.

Marling, who stars in The East and who also starred in the haunting Another Earth, is an unusual actress; she seems to play characters who are both doers and observers, projecting a divided sense of self that's full of puzzle-like complexity.

In The East -- a thriller that focuses on a committed band of eco-terrorists -- Marling portrays Sarah, a woman who works for a company that provides security services to corporations that are fearful of becoming targets for environmental extremists.

Headed by a no-nonsense boss (Patricia Clarkson), the firm seems as concerned about profits as it is about protecting lives and repuations. Not a client? In danger? Too bad.

Ambitious and calculating, Sarah leads a double life. She lives with a boyfriend who doesn't know exactly what she does. He believes she's on a business trip to Dubai while she's actually infiltrating The East, a band that conducts trageted anti-corporate operations called "jams."

Benji (Alexander Skarsgard), the quietly magnetic leader of the group, presides over sessions featuring lots of hugs, some of them dispensed during an oddball game of spin-the-bottle. The group lives in a burned-out shell of house in the protective seclusion of a forest.

Two members of The East stand out. Ellen Page proves entirely convincing as Izzy, an eco-ideologue who wrings all feeling out of her decisions. Toby Kebbell portrays Doc, a disillusioned physician with first-hand experience about the perils of Big Pharma.

The members of The East are smart and not entirely unsympathetic. When they're not "jamming," they attempt to live by authentic communal values, and they seem to care about one another.

They're also Freegans, part of the culture that lives on food discarded before it spoils. They seem to have the courage of their dumpster-diving convictions.

The screenplay pulls Sarah in and out of the group, occasionally returning her to corporate headquarters where she reports on activities of The East.

Predictably, Sarah begins to develop personal relationships within the group, attachments that further fragment her already divided life. We know that Sarah eventually will grapple with confounding moral questions: Where do her sympathies lie? Can she accept extreme measures in pursuit of morally defensible ends? Can harming people -- even obvious corporate villains -- ever be justified? Can there be "revolutionary" action without collateral damage?

Think of The East as a better-than-average political thriller, though not a perfect one. The "jams" conducted by The East aren't always credible, and it would have been interesting to know a little more about Marling's character. Still, The East qualifies as a drama with something important on its mind. That, strong performances and a fair measure of old-fashioned tension separate The East from a crowded thriller pack.

Missteps sink this 'Battleship'

It looks like a video game. Too bad you have to watch it instead of playing.

Terrible dialogue, ear-splitting noise, an uninspired premise, patriotic pandering, booming close-ups and an ocean full of cornball sentiment help sink the action movie Battleship not long after it leaves port. Derived from a Hasbro board game, Battleship is one of those lamentable movies that seem to have been assembled from spare parts taken from other movies. You'll find the cacophonous metal-on-metal abrasions of the Transformer movies, the fist-pumping bravado of movies such as Top Gun and a sic-fi premise that could have been lifted from any number of aggressively commercial entertainments from director Michael Bay. You know the drill: An alien force is about to invade the Earth. It falls to a slacker hero (Taylor Kitsch) to save humanity by finding his emerging manhood and leading the charge against the aliens. A large cast features several highlighted performances: Alexander Skarsgard of True Blood fame == plays Kitsch's older brother, and Brooklyn Decker portrays Kitsch's love interest. She's the daughter of an admiral (a little seen Liam Neeson). Director Peter Berg piles on the heavy action, much of it built around chaotic camera movements and frenzied editing. The aliens, once revealed, are disappointing creatures. Maybe it doesn't matter because most of the time, we can't' see them anyway: They're hidden by armored suits that make them look as if they were conceived as action figures long before there were jammed into this orgy of destruction. Berg takes a bow toward The Greatest Generation in an effort to blend contemporary war heroes with those from our more glorious World War II past, but the whole business comes off as rigid salute to the kind of courage found only in movies, bolstered, of course, by a megaton barrage of CGI. Did I say the movie is loud? Think of it this way: Experiencing Battleship is like listening to a symphony composed entirely of cymbal crashes.

Von Trier hears the sweet call of doom

The provocative Danish director outdoes himself with a gloom-shrouded epic of annihilation.

Anyone familiar with the work of Danish director Lars von Trier knows he specializes in movies so bleak they hardly allow for even the slightest expression of faith in humanity.

After 1996's Breaking the Waves , von Trier became a regular on the festival circuit, sometimes connecting (Dogville) and sometimes missing the mark (Antichrist). Those, of course, are my assessments. Von Trier enthusiasts will have their own favorites, and nothing he does ever will please his many detractors.

Last May, von Trier may have bitten the festival hand that feeds him. He was barred from the Cannes Film Festival after making ridiculous comments about Hitler, Naziism and Albert Speer. He was attempting, I think, to position himself in the land of outrageous opinion. He also seemed to be making a joke, the humor of which eluded just about everyone who heard him. Von Trier clearly would be better off letting his movies speak for him.

And in his latest movie -- Melancholia -- the director speaks loudly and with no small amount of pomp, delivering a message steeped in romanticized doom. No slouch when it comes to pessimism, von Trier imagines not only the destruction of individual characters, but of the entire planet. He seems to think that this might not be such a bad thing. After all, life -- with its pointless rituals and stupid striving -- doesn't amount to much anyway.

Melancholia uses a kind of sci-fi backdrop to enlarge the scale of its inquiries. A planet 12 times the size of Earth is heading directly for our tiny planet. If this approaching planet -- bearing the metaphoric name Melancholia -- doesn't change course, it's a total wipeout for Earth and its creatures.

The opening of Melancholia boasts some of the most astonishing images of the year, sights on a par with the great work that Terrence Malick did in the cosmic segments of Tree of Life. Most of the von Trier's best imagery occurs in this prologue, a series of images that summarize the entire movie in graceful slow-motion, all to the strains of Wagner's prelude to Tristan and Isolde.

In the first half of Melancholia, von Trier takes us to the wedding of Justine (Kristen Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgard). The couple becomes late for their very elegant reception when their limo gets stuck in the forest. Watching a massive white limo trying to negotiate a tiny wooded road clues us to von Trier's comic sense of absurdity. What could be sillier than celebrating a new beginning as the cosmic wrecking ball approaches? Like the limo on that impossible road, it's a bad fit.

As is often the case, the director offers some stiff competition for the all-too-familiar irritations of his hand-held camera. The bride's mother (Charlotte Rampling) makes sneering comments about the futility of marriage. She's divorced from Justine's father (John Hurt), who drinks too much and seems to wallow in warm sentimentality. The bride's boss (Stellan Skarsgard) proves to be an obnoxious ad man who insists that Justine invent an advertising slogan before the reception concludes.

Justine's sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) bravely tries to keep things going while her husband (Kiefer Sutherland), the sap who's paying for the nuptials, complains about the bride's irresponsibility. In conventional terms, he's absolutely right: At one point, the bride abandons the groom to make love to a stranger on the golf course surrounding the lavish estate where the wedding reception is being held.

That’s pretty much the pattern. The reception – punctuated by all manner of small social hostilities – takes place under the shadow of the irresistible doom to which Justine finds herself drawn. Justine has fallen under the spell of melancholia (with a small "m"). Try as she may, she can't make herself conform to what she probably sees as the frivolous demands of the wedding. (I guess she didn't trust her doomy instincts enough to forgo the whole thing in the first place.)

Dunst keeps the audience off guard as a deeply disturbed woman who's obviously suffering from powerful inner turmoil. Dunst gives one of those courageous, all-out performances that looks as if it probably left her spent.

Part II -- named for Claire -- involves the opposing ways in which the two sisters -- Justine and Claire -- cope with what they think will be the end of the world. Having had her erotic flirtation with death, Justine seems increasingly ready to consummate the affair. Beset by fear, anxiety and concern for her young son, Claire resists.

For his part, Sutherland's John attempts to reassure his wife and young son (Cameron Spurr) that the approach of the planet should be regarded as a scientific adventure, not a portend of doom. In a von Trier movie, he's a walking demonstration of the failure of rationality.

Unfortunately, the movie's second half slows down considerably. By the time von Trier's apocalyptic denouement arrives -- and I found myself rooting for it -- you'll either have yielded to Melancholia or you'll have headed for the exits. I was alternately entranced, bored and dubious.

It falls to Justine to sound what could be von Trier's motto: "All I know is life on earth is evil." I don't think even the obnoxious behavior of the wedding guests justifies such a sweeping conclusion, but von Trier never has been one for cinematic restraint, and his final images are as compelling as those that opened the movie.

I can't give this one a clear yes or no. If nothing about Melancholia sounds alluring, stay home. I wouldn't think of arguing you out of your easy chair. Otherwise, cue the Wagner, try to keep from smirking at the movie's more ridiculous parts, and, by all means, let the apocalypse rip.