Trapped in an alienated life

 

  Director Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow offers an impressionistic view of what it means for a disaffected teenager to become obsessed with a single TV show.     

   Beginning the movie in the 1990s, Schoenbrun -- a trans* director who says the movie is personal but not specific to her life -- introduces us to Owen, a character who's consumed by a weekly TV show called The Pink Opaque. Owen lives more in the show's world than in what we generally, and often casually, refer to as "the real world.”

      Played as a seventh grader by Ian Foreman and later by Justice Smith, Owen discovers the show when he meets Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a sardonic gay ninth-grader whose self-imposed isolation bristles with defiance.

    I Saw the TV Glow leans away from trans issues, opting for a broader display of adolescent dysphoria as experienced in the conformist-driven climes of suburbia. 

 You’d think by now, artists might have gotten past using suburbia as a metaphor for stifling conformity but Schoenbrun makes an unnamed suburb ground zero for a woozy exploration of memory, time, and alienation.

  The movie wallows in uncertainty. Significantly, Owen has latched onto a YA-oriented program aimed at girls, an interest that earns his father's derision and suggests that Owen might be standing on shifting gender sands.  

  "I like TV shows," Owen says, when asked if he likes girls, an answer that’s both revealing and evasive.

  The Pink Opaque, by the way, centers on two teens (Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan) who form a psychic bond, whatever that might mean. 

  The acting is purposefully flat, and, aside from a screeching scene near the movie's end, mostly, uninflected --  "zombie cool” tempered by a plaintive quality Smith brings to the role of Owen.

   If you see the movie and are puzzled by it, you won't be alone. As for me, I can’t say I much cared about the characters Schoenbrun creates, although Owen’s vulnerability can be touching. 

    Maddy is Owen's major connection to others. She eventually disappears, leaving a burning TV in her backyard as a memento of abandoned adolescence. She'll return a decade later, only to increase Owen's abiding confusion.

    I Saw the TV Glow may speak most clearly to those who already share Schoenbrun’s view of the deracinated quality of contemporary life or who overdosed on TV during the 1990s. Maybe it will speak to  those who fear, as happens in the TV show within the movie, that some form of monster inhabits every story. 

   After an amusing beginning, the movie drifts into what struck me as a string of self-conscious attempts to avoid a conventional storyline. Rather than following a narrative-driven map, the movie offers a flow of images that resemble dreams or memories, which, I’d argue, is just another kind of trap. 

  At one point, Owen says he doesn’t look inside himself because he’s afraid of what he might find, maybe nothing more than the TV images he's digested. He shows few signs of emerging from the estranged shallows of his existence.

  Schoenbrun plays with many themes but I Saw the TV Glow seems less interested in involving us in the experiences of its characters than in looking for a language in which to express how they experience the world. 

   By showing Owen’s marginal jobs, the movie makes a clever comment about the cultural shift away from movie screens to the kinds of screens you might find in a game-filled arcade where stimulation proliferates at punishing levels.

  Overindulgence in fantasy may block obsessives from seeing themselves but you wonder whether they can see anyone else, either.  

   So much for I Saw the TV Glow. What some will see as an affecting exploration of alienated spirit also can look like an advanced case of millennial tunnel vision. 

    All I can say is that the movie increasingly struck me as a dreary jumble of ideas and impressions to which I said, "no thanks." Not my cup of depression.

*I mention "trans" only because Schoenbrun talks about it in interviews and, I think, equates the state of emotional indeterminacy that we find in the movie to her own experiences prior to making a decision to transition. More simply put, Schoenbrun talks honestly about her experiences prior to becoming a trans person.

Guess what? ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ isn’t bad

 

   Any review of a movie with Dungeons & Dragons in its title should begin with a personal statement about the famous game. Here's mine: I couldn't care less about a role-play game that has captivated so many since its release in 1974.

  After reading that a second Dungeons & Dragons movie was on the horizon (the first was released in 2000), I wondered whether the game still could command interest.

  Or maybe it was me. Maybe I was out of touch; maybe Dungeons & Dragons hadn't become a pop-cultural relic.

  Judging by the audience at a preview screening of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, the game still has plenty of devotees, the kind who show up at screenings wearing costumes and who are well attuned to the intricacies of D&D. 

  OK, that's my confession. Dungeons mania aside, a movie should, like a mythological dragon, breathe its own fire. That's how I approached Honor Among Thieves. 

   I can't say I loved every minute of Honor Among Thieves, but I found myself watching a reasonably entertaining movie that features a well-cast Chris Pine in a lead role and gives him Michelle Rodriguez as a tough sidekick and Hugh Grant as a villainous foe. 

   The rest of the cast proves equally able. Sophia Willis augments the team as a shapeshifter with a very useful set of skills. Justice Smith portrays Simon, an endearing sorcerer who has yet to develop full confidence in his conjuring powers.

   The plot begins with Pine's Edgin and Rodriguez's Holga escaping from prison where they're serving time for theft. Edgin wants to reunite with his young daughter (Chloe Coleman), a girl who has fallen under the sway of Grant's Forge Fitzwilliam, once a member of the felonious gang to which Edgin and Holga belong.

   An aggressively amiable chiseler, Forge tries to convince Coleman's Kira that he has her best interests at heart. Edgin is a self-centered thief who has no genuine concern for his daughter. Why else would he leave her in Forge's care? So goes Forge's spin on the story.

   But what of Kira's mom? Oops. I mean her late mom.

   Edgin’s to-do list includes another item: He wants to revive his deceased wife (Georgia Landers), a task that requires possession of the Tablet of Reawakening. Good luck finding that, not to mention a helmet that has its own important powers.

   The world Dungeons creates includes a lot more complexities but there's no point turning a review into an annotated glossary of Dungeons lore, which I couldn't do anyway.

   Know, though, that a character called Xenk (Rege-Jean Page) eventually joins the group. Sincere and literal to a fault, Xenk can't  understand irony, a trait the movie rightly plays for laughs. In the end, the joke's on us, though. Xenk proves a worthy fellow.

   The screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, and Michael Gilio presents its characters with an on-going series of challenges, some accompanied by nice effects work and action that’s neatly staged by co-directors Goldstein and Daley.

  Honor Among Thieves probably isn't destined to make my top-10 list of 2023 movies, but much its two-hour and 14 minutes passed easily. Besides, the actors, notably Pine and Rodriguez, gave the movie enough heart, grit and humor, to ward off negative vibes.

   What else can you ask from a movie that takes its cue from a game that's nearly 50 years old?

More big-screen con games

 

Contrived and not always credible, Sharper tells a story that drops con atop con. Although the movie's  structure -- focusing on five characters and introducing each one with a title card -- feels familiar, Sharper picks up steam when Julianne Moore shows up as a schemer with an eye for rich men. You'll have to wait for Moore's arrival because Justice Smith and Briana Middleton kick things off as young people who meet at the New York City bookstore run by Smith's Tom. Tom falls hard. But in true noir fashions, Middleton's Sandra isn't all that she seems. Secrecy and deception open a door for director Benjamin Caron, working from a screenplay by Brian Gatewood and Alessandra Tanaka, to twist the story into knots that aren't particularly difficult to untangle but still offer some fun. A solid cast earns its pay, including John Lithgow in a smaller role as a wealthy hedge fund manager who's dating Moore's Madeline. Middleton has a nice turn, initially telling Tom she's a graduate student working on her doctorate. Sebastian Stan takes on the role of Max, a master manipulator with a mean streak, and Moore adds smarts and sexual spice. At the heart of all the maneuvering: money -- billions in fact. You'll probably see the conclusion coming and the movie doesn't pack a gleeful Sting-like wallop. OK, so Sharper is no groundbreaker -- but it's always difficult, at least for me, to resist a movie about con artists that plays the game well enough to sustain interest, even if it's not a genre classic.

'Paper Towns,' not so easy to believe

A low-impact drama about a teen's romantic delusions.

Despite heavy reservations about the towering importance movies usually assign to adolescence, I still can be suckered into a good teen drama.

Sorry to say, but Paper Towns -- the latest movie to dip its toe into teen waters -- doesn't quite make the cut.

Based on a novel by John Green, Paper Towns is constructed to teach 18-year-old Quentin (Nat Wolff) a life lesson: Reality doesn't often confirm the fantasies that young men have about young women.

Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but Paper Towns's semi-appealing characters and thematic ambitions aren't matched by a credibly developed story.

Paper Towns is based on a novel by John Green, who also wrote The Fault In Our Stars, a "YA" (as in young adult) story that last year became a popular movie by bringing mortality into the mix.

This year's adaptation of a Green novel revolves around Quentin (Nat Wolff), a character whose voice-over narration can be heard throughout the movie.

As a kid, Quentin fell for Margo, a girl who moved across the street from him and immediately caught his eye.

By the time Quentin reaches high school, Margo (Cara Delevingne) has become a free-spirited but exceptionally popular girl. The two have drifted apart.

The film also supplies Quentin with a couple of obligatory buddies (Austin Abrams and Justice Smith). One's a nerdy white kid; the other's a brainy black kid whose parents own what might be the largest collection of black Santas in the western world, a bit of pointless quirkiness.

To his credit, director Jake Schreier pays a bit of earnest attention to each of Quentin's pals, allowing them to emerge as real characters.

The story is set in motion on a night when the adventurous Margo climbs through Quentin's bedroom window, and enlists him in a revenge plot against a boyfriend who cheated on her.

Yes, it's once again theme time: Can Quentin learn to take risks? Will he live fully or dutifully work his way toward college and med school, the plan he says he's made for himself?

As a result of joining Margo on her revenge spree, Quentin believes that he has rekindled the spark that once existed between them, but Margo quickly disappears from school and from Orlando, the town where all this is taking place.

Quentin's search for Margo propels the rest of the story; he's motivated by love and guided by clues Margo has left for him concerning her whereabouts.

A road trip Quentin takes to find Margo -- with his pals in tow -- isn't engaging enough to overcome a plot that never credibly explains why the elusive Margo leaves all those murky, complicated clues in the first place.

The clues and the search they launch feel like contrived bits of business that undermine what had been a reasonably believable effort.

Wolff gives the film an engaging center, and Delevingne is good enough as the movie's wild child, but Paper Towns remains a low-impact entry into the ever-growing, coming-of-age genre -- intermittently amusing, but not much more.

If you don't already know (and I didn't), paper towns are fictional spots that cartographers put on maps to ensure that copyrights aren't violated. That might be the movie's biggest revelation.