Lives swept away by major changes

 

   

   Although I didn't grasp every detail in director Jia Zhang-ke's Caught by the Tides (more familiarity with China's emergence into the 21st Century would have helped), the gist of the movie is clear enough to make it worth exercising the patience Jia’s movie demands. 

    The title suggests the film's meaning. Jia follows two characters whose lives unfold against a backdrop of social upheaval. Shot over a 23-year span, the film begins in Datong, a city dominated by coal mining. 

    No main character emerges until we meet Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao), a young model whose lover Bin (Li Zhubin) leaves her to find something beyond the life he's living. Eager to cash in on the new world that's dawning in China, Bin promises to send for Qiaoqiao once he's settled. Fat chance.  Eventually, Qiaoqiao sets out to find Bin. 

    Jia's characters age through years that include some of China's major developments, notably the construction of the massive Three Gorges Dam. 

   By the end of the film when Bin returns to Datong, robots can be found in the city's department stores and development has obliterated much of a past where entertainment once consisted of women gathering to sing.

  The film is anchored by Zhao's performance, which takes her from gamin-like playfulness to a settled middle age, not quite resigned but self-sufficient — and, yes, alone.  

    Backgrounds shot in documentary fashion almost consume the characters, which might be part of Jia's point. Transformation can devour communities and the people who rely on them. The tides of modernization may roll, but their undertow will drag some down and not everyone will land on the bright new shores of a re-imagined future.

Love vs. money in a modern romance

 

   Director Celine Song’s Past Lives (2023) was a small wonder,  a movie about fated love untracked by time and circumstance. In Materialists, Song dips her toe into Hollywood waters, employing a name cast — Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans — as she flirts with and sometimes ignores rom-com cliches.

   Johnson's Lucy works for a matchmaking service called Adore. She's good at her job. For Adore, matchmaking extends an algorithm mindset. Before dating begins, the matchmaker obtains a list of requirements. Perhaps a lasting union will occur.

    Set in Manhattan, the screenplay, also by Song, creates a triangle. Harry (Pascal) is the rich brother of one of Lucy's clients. Charming and self-assured, Harry sees Johnson’s Lucy as a potential match. A superior strategist, she'll make a great helpmate, and it doesn't hurt that she's attractive.

   A match with Harry may make sense for Lucy, as well. She broke up with her struggling actor boyfriend (Evans) when she got sick of being down-and-out in Manhattan, a place where the good life comes with price tags that exclude wannabes. 

   Lucy meets Harry at the wedding of one of her clients. Conveniently, Evans John happens to be working the same wedding as a waiter for the company that's doing the catering. It seems apparent that neither John nor Lucy has totally moved on.

   Materialists outsmarts the average rom-com, which doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been even smarter. Enjoyably satirical when it comes to elucidating the impossible demands of a privileged generation, the movie doesn't commit to a rom-com blueprint nor does it rip it to shreds. 

   Song occupies a middle ground that sets up the movie's major problem: Should a marriage make sense in much the same way as a business merger? Is it a bad bet to surrender to love, which can't be reduced to a series of boxes one checks? 

    Considering the charm and posh surroundings in which Harry effortlessly moves, he’s playing with a clear advantage. But Song doesn’t turn Harry into a jerk; he’s sensitive and considerate, a man of taste and intelligence.

     John, on the other hand, is a 37-year-old actor who's close to the point where he may have to accept that his life as a cater waiter isn't as temporary as he once hoped.

     Moreover, Lucy seems to have abandoned the idea that two people can survive on love and a dime. When Harry takes Lucy to his apartment for the first time, she responds to his amorous advances, but also manages to eagerly eye the richly appointed surroundings. 

    In a flashback, we see the incident that drove Lucy from John. Short on funds, he couldn’t pay for parking before a dinner marking their fourth anniversary together. She called it quits.

    A pivotal incident occurs when Sophie (Zoe Winters), one of Lucy’s clients, experiences a terrible outcome on a date. Lucy's conscience is tweaked. For her, Sophie had been a lingering failure; in other words, Sophie was a tough sell in the dating market.

     Materialists leaves it to us to decide what to think about a world in which money has become the most meaningful metric and where few seem to regard virtue or decency as an asset.

     It’s not possible to make a rom-com, even a self-aware one, without some contrivance. Although Materialists has its share of them, many are easy to overlook. A law suit brought by Sophie against Adore receives short shrift, and Song ties up a variety of loose ends -- not all of them neatly.  

    Materialists ultimately kneels at the altar of formula, although it tries to expand its reach with a prologue and an epilogue involving prehistoric romance. Did the movie need to introduce cave people to prove that love hasn't necessarily evolved? I don't think so.

    Still, I wouldn't discourage anyone from seeing Materialists, which is well-acted and engaging. I wish, though, that I felt the same way about it as I felt about Past Lives; i.e., that I had seen something truly special.

        

Can a wayward daughter be saved?

     

    In Echo Valley, Julianne Moore plays a mother whose life is crowded with stress. She's grieving the recent death of her partner (Kristina Valada-Viars) and trying to deal with her antagonistic drugged-out daughter (Sydney Sweeney). She's also worrying about keeping her Pennsylvania horse ranch afloat, and late in the movie, her daughter's drug dealer (Domhnall Gleeson) tries to snare her in an elaborate extortion scheme

     Director Michael Pearce, working from a screenplay by Brad Ingelsby, begins as if the movie is going to be a disturbing examination of the problems faced by a mother whose daughter constantly promises reform but never follows through.

     Lonely and desperate, Moore's Kate refuses to abandon hope, supporting her daughter despite ample warnings that the young woman has little interest in turning her life around. 

     Pearce has hold of a premise that, though familiar, offers an opportunity for a deep dive into problems faced by parents who feel helpless when their kids venture into dangerous turf.

     Despite an initially realistic focus, the movie soon turns into a thriller involving double crosses and schemes that pull Kate into a situation in which a far-fetched plot begins to dominate.

      Fiona Shaw signs on as another ranch owner and Kate's friend, and Kyle MacLachlan appears briefly as Kate's ex-husband, who in an early scene reluctantly gives Kate $9,000 to repair the roof of her horse barn. It doesn't take much guesswork to know that the $9,000 will be spent bailing Sweeney's Claire out of a life-threatening jam.

     Moore conveys the deep torment that Kate faces as she's overwhelmed by one problem after another. And scenes between Moore and Gleeson become a tense battle for control that pushes Kate to criminal extremes.

     Despite strong moments created by a well-chosen  cast, the movie can't balance its thriller elements with attempts to explore an agonizing question: When is it time to stop trying to save a wayward child from a life ruined by one betrayed trust after another? 

 

Walking in John Wick's footsteps

   

  If you've seen the trailer, you already know that Keanu Reeves appears in From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, a spinoff set at the same time as the third Wick installment took place. But true to its title, Ballerina brings a woman to its center. 

   Ana de Armas plays Eve, the woman destined to pick up the Wick mantle and perhaps carry the franchise forward. I wish the movie had done more to distinguish Eve from her predecessor, but Ballerina does well enough in setting the stage for more deftly choreographed violence. 

    Story-wise, director Len Wiseman keeps things simple. Eve wants to avenge the murder of her father. A member of the Ruska Roma assassins team, Dad wanted his daughter to live free of bloodshed. That being the case, he should have died in a different movie.

     Once Daddy's gone, Ian McShane's Winston Scott introduces Eve to the head of Ruska Roma, a role reprised by Anjelica Huston, who brings blood-red lipstick and sadistic relish to her job as head of an institution that combines ballet instruction with lessons in the assassin's art.  Eve becomes a trainee.     

       Early in her training, Huston's character tells Eve she must learn to fight like a girl. Eve must use her small size and limited power to advantage -- or some such. Despite the advice, much of the fighting resembles what Reeves has done in the Wick series -- although when comparing de Armas to Reeves, she comes in second. How could she not? 

     Still, de Armas proves convincingly serious; Eve displays no second thoughts about her job's brutal requirements. 

     A character called the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne) supplies the movie's villainy.  The Chancellor runs a snowy mountain town where his group of assassins try to live "normal" lives. Unlike Ruska Roma, Byrne's group doesn't kill for money. Its members murder for kicks.

     After the battle on the steps of Sacre-Coeur in Chapter 4 -- a mini-masterpiece of action -- it's difficult for the spinoff to come up with an equivalent, but Ballerina tries. Eve wields a wicked ice skate. And a battle involving dueling flame throwers makes no bones about lighting a big-time action fire.

      Before it's done, Ballerina introduces some old standbys (the late Lance Reddick's concierge, for example), and throws Eve into fight after fight.

      Whatever else it accomplishes, Ballerina proves fluent in the Wick language, ably using a vocabulary composed of bullets, grenades, axes, knives, fists, and swords. Now, let's see if it can expand what it has to say.

A Stephen King adaptation with heart

          

    Hardly a fright fest, The Life of Chuck -- a big-screen adaptation of a Stephen King novella --tells three interrelated stories in reverse order, beginning with the final chapter and working its way back to the start. 

    Life of Chuck might be classed with such big-screen King adaptations such as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. The Life of Chuck isn't as memorable as either of those, but it makes room for scenes with heart, even if it tends to wear its sentiments on its sleeve.

    The stories are connected by a character named  Chuck Krantz, a fellow who appears on TV and billboards during the first segment. "39 Great Years ! Thanks Chuck!," the ads read. Sounds important, but no one knows who Chuck Krantz is. A politician? A salesman? A banker? 

    Director Mike Flanagan, who directed King's Doctor Sleep, reveals more about Krantz as the movie progresses, but The Life of Chuck is less a mystery than a collection of small moments played against a doom-laden backdrop.

     Life of Chuck rests on a thematic cushion that includes stuffing from Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar (an encapsulation of the history of the universe in a single year) and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself.  The signature line from  Whitman's poem ("I contain multitudes") is introduced by a teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the character who anchors the film's opening chapter.

    Like everyone else, Ejiofor's Marty Anderson is puzzled by the Krantz billboards. Marty also tries to cope with an escalating variety signals that suggest a possible end to ... well ... everything: the demise of the Internet, abandoned cars lining the streets of vacated cities, and massive power outages.

    Blame a mixture of man-made issues and cosmic comeuppance for the fraught condition that threatens humanity. But causes matter less than the way characters behave in the face of impending doom.

    Ejiofor and his estranged wife (Karen Gillan) eventually share a tender scene under a vast night sky, two lonely people facing a looming finality neither can comprehend. 

    The second story features a lively dance number (no, I'm not kidding) in which Tom Hiddleston, as the title character, sheds Chuck's buttoned-up  demeanor. Contrary to what the opening suggests, we learn that Chuck is no man of mystery: An otherwise anonymous accountant, he serves as the film's everyman.

     While attending a convention, Chuck passes a street drummer (Taylor Gordon), a Juilliard dropout who lays down some infectious beats. Chuck begins to dance. Annalise Basso plays a woman who joins the dance, a stranger Chuck pulls from the small crowd of gathered spectators. She becomes his partner in what might be the crowning moment of his life.

    The movie becomes more King-like in the first chapter, really its last. We meet Krantz as a boy, played at various ages by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak, and Jacob Tremblay. Chuck's parents died in an automobile accident, leaving him to live with his grandparents (Mia Sara and Mark Hamill). 

    Not long after arriving in Chuck's grandparents' home, the movie introduces a mystery centered on the cupola that Grandpa, otherwise genial but a bit too fond of alcohol,  keeps locked. The cupola opens the door to a bit of supernatural woo-woo.

     In keeping with the film's more grounded aspirations, Grandma teaches Chuck to dance; later, he must overcome his inhibitions to take the floor at a school dance, the kind of triumph that recalls too many other teen movies.

     I don't want to oversell the Life of Chuck. An over-explanatory narration delivered by Nick Offerman sometimes falls short of eloquence, and the movie loses steam during its coming-of-age conclusion.

     Moreover, The Life of Chuck can't quite bring off its ambitious juxtaposition of cosmic-scale extinction and personal mortality. But in the movie's best moments, Flanagan wisely encourages us to accept the inescapable while still mustering enough spirit to dance.

        

Wes Anderson's grand scheme movie

 I use a notebook during screenings to keep track of specifics -- dates, locations, and colors. Things like that. If my handwriting were better these notes would be more useful, but even as they drift toward indecipherability, they serve as a memory aid.

  During the screening of director Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme, I reached a point where I stopped taking notes. I couldn't keep up with the surfeit of detail that cropped up in Anderson's carefully constructed sets, each of which becomes a kind of destination that can outweigh the importance of where the story might be headed.

    Anderson tends to indulge in detailed design, so much so that it's only a mild overstatement to call his scenes  dioramas with actors. There's world building and then there's world building that feels chiseled; movies such as the Phoenician Scheme flood the screen with their drolly express detailing.

     The Anderson aesthetic is richly displayed in Phoenician Scheme, but the movie also includes dull stretches that take us from episode to episode, some set off by title cards expressing variable amounts of wit.

      So what's The Phonecian Scheme about? A greedy tycoon named Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) aims to control the resources of a fictional region called Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia. Zsa-zsa's ambition sends him to a tour to raise funds for an intricate infrastructure project.

     Kate Winslet's real-life daughter Mia Threapleton plays Korda's daughter Liesl, the character who brings the movie's father/daughter theme into focus. Korda wants Threapleton's Liesl to take over his empire, choosing her over his nine sons, the equivalent of non-player characters in video games.

     The problem: Liesl is on the verge of taking her vows as a nun, an occupation that would limit her ability to play Zsa-zsa's ruthless game. To the extent that it's possible, Liesl adds moral fiber to Zsa-Zsa's project: Unlike her father, she refuses to use slaves to help with any required construction. 

     A scorecard might be needed to keep track of the actors who appear in small roles. Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston turn up in a sequence involving a strange H-O-R-S-E-like game of basketball. Anderson also makes room for appearances by Riz Ahmed, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mathieu Amalric, and Scarlett Johansson. 

     Michael Cera gets more screen time as Bjorn, an insect collector who travels with Korda and Liesl. He serves as Liesl's tutor and Zsa-zsa's "guy Friday."

     The performances fit into the Anderson's deadpan presentation of a playful weirdness that extends to costumes (a striking set of pajamas) or personal appearance (Cumberbatch's graying two-tone beard).  

     Set in the 1950s, Phoenician Scheme seems more subdued than previous Anderson efforts, although it begins with a plane crash that might be read as a commentary on the preposterous inhumanity of contemporary action sequences. Zsa-zsa we learn has survived many plane crashes. He's like man living on perpetual borrowed time. Perhaps that's why he seems a bit bored with himself.

      Anderson's devoted fans who wouldn't miss one of his movies. Should others venture into The Phoenician Scheme they may have to settle for quiet appreciation of the environments Anderson creates and his occasional displays of audacity -- e.g., the basketball sequence. 

       I'm not sure where to rank Phoenician Scheme

in Anderson's extensive catalog. The movie struck me as one more stop on a continuing journey, something like a restaurant with a forgettable main course, but lots of tasty side dishes.

Another creepy helping of horror

   The ever-expanding catalog of horror movies sometimes makes me wonder what the hell’s wrong with us —- or more precisely why we desire to be grossed out, fearful, and knocked about by jump scares. If nothing else, horror movies present us with dangers from which we happily walk away. After all, it’s not our entrails that are spilling onto the bathroom tiles.

   Bring Her Back, a dose of horror from the Australian twins, Danny and Michael Philippou, asks us to set aside any reservations we might have about putting children in danger of losing their lives at the hands of a crazed adult.

   Sally Hawkins plays a retired social worker who takes foster care children into her secluded Australian home.

Aided by Cornel Wilczek's throbbing score, the directors treat early scenes as manifestos of intent. We know horrible things will happen when two recently orphaned children (Billy Barrett and Sora Wong) are placed with Hawkins’s Laura.

  No one will be fooled into thinking that Laura’s welcoming facade doesn’t conceal rich veins of depravity. 

Barrett’s Andy, who will soon turn 18, plans to petition for guardianship of his sister ASP. 

  He believes that he and his sister have arrived at a way station en route to a better future. Younger of the two, Wong’s Piper falls under Laura' s sway. Why not? She’s too young to think she can survive with adult help.

   Grief permeates the proceedings. An inconsolable Laura lost her blind daughter when the child drowned in the now-empty swimming pool behind Laura’s home. That’s where we meet Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), a gaunt-looking boy who doesn’t speak and whose creepy presence suggests demonic possession. 

  Oliver, who functions as a kind of unnerving special effect,  serves to push the movie over the top when, at a three-quarter mark, he bites his way through various objects that shouldn't be chewed on (a kitchen counter, for example) or chomps on a knife that he’s put in his mouth. Bloody.

   Video segments of a weird ritual add an arty touch and build toward a reveal that attempts to explain their jarring presence.

   Attempts at providing psychological depth involve  tensions between Andy and his late father and a mother's twisted denial of mortality. Laura is driven by a crazy idea about how she can bring her late daughter back to life.

   For its skillful atmospherics and amped up weirdness, Bring her Back seems to unfold without generating either fear or intense emotional involvement. Despite an all-in performance from Hawkins, Bring Her Back struck me as a moody muddle.

A light and sketchy 'Karate Kid'

  Notes about Karate Kid: Legends, a movie that's much like a book you skim rather than read.

 -- Jackie Chan, who appeared in 2010's The Karate Kid, has been cast as a kung-fu master who travels from Beijing to New York City (no tariffs involved) to bolster the spirits of one of his former students. At 70, a graying Chan shows his age but still holds the screen.

-- The filmmakers found an engaging young man -- Ben Wang -- to play the lead role of Li Fong, a kid who moves to New York City because his physician mom (Ming-Na Wing) has landed a job at a New York hospital. Li is free to roam the city with one caveat: Still shaken from an earlier family loss, Mom insists that Li not fight. Not fight? Yeah, right.

-- The movie quickly provides Li with a nemesis. Enter Connor (Aramis Knight), a tough kid and winner of The Five Boroughs Karate Contest. Connor seems to possess no redeeming qualities that might blur the sharp conflict on which the movie depends.

-- Director Jonathan Entwistle provides Li Fong with a guide who's meant to introduce him to New York City. Sadie Stanley plays Mia, the daughter of the owner (Joshua Jackson) of the neighborhood pizza shop Li frequents. Teen love blooms.

-- Chan's character passes along occasional wisdom, mostly at fortune cookie levels: "Chinese say, 'Friend's problem is my problem.'"

-- Eventually, 63-year-old Ralph Machio appears. The original Karate Kid is almost eligible for Social Security, but his character, Daniel LaRusso, still has moves.

-- A subplot in which Li trains the pizza shop owner to return to the boxing ring turns the tables on the formula:  The kid becomes the mentor.

    To summarize: The filmmakers try to freshen the formula with new faces and references to previous movies, including an early shot that includes the late Pat Morita, who played Mr. Miyagi in the 1984 original and in subsequence sequels.

     I don't know whether marital arts enthusiasts will take the movie seriously. The screenplay is based on Li's need to blend his already substantial kung-fu knowledge with the rigors of karate in what's referred to as the "two branches, one tree" school.

     Speaking of schools, Li is enrolled in a New York City school which the movie mostly ignores, aside from giving him a nerdy calculus tutor (Wyatt Oleff) who provides good-natured comic relief.

     The only thought I had about any of this is that the movie seems to make thought irrelevant as it builds toward a climactic final fight on a Manhattan rooftop.

      At 94 minutes, Legends doesn't overstay its welcome, but a weak script puts too much pressure on Wang's engaging performance. As it unfolds, the movie becomes increasingly reliant on whatever affection the Karate Kid formula still generates.

     

     

An orphanage hosts a mysterious boy

 

  

 The New Boy tells the story of an Aboriginal boy who’s sent to a Catholic orphanage to master the civilizing rigors of religion and society. This brief description might lead. you to expect a message movie about the abuses Australian culture has inflicted on indigenous people.

  Set during the 1940s, The New Boy meets some of our expectations but winds up taking a more ambitious look at the innate spirituality of a boy (Aswan Reid) who upsets life at an isolated Christian school run by Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett).

 Writer/director Warwick Thornton mixes straightforward drama (the new boy adjusting to life in an orphanage) with mysterious events that dip into the  supernatural. The unnamed boy heals wounds. He also summons light by rubbing his fingers together.

  The unnamed boy also develops a strange fascination with Jesus. At one point, a wooden carving of Jesus on the cross  winks at him from the altar of the orphanage's modest church. To further underscore the suggestion that the boy and Jesus may be kindred spirits, the boy also develops stigmata. 

  Blanchett, working again in her native Australia,  effectively makes it clear that Sister Eileen doesn't know what to make of any of this. Neither, for the most part, do we — or perhaps I should refer only to myself. 

   Thornton mixes Christian imagery with a primal poetry that makes it seem as if a film full of period detail might be taking place in an indeterminate and timeless zone. Thornton may be trying to tap into the wellsprings of spiritual experience, which -- in western societies - can be lost and which the boy seems to possess naturally.

    It's an interesting enough idea but American viewers may feel culturally distanced from an odd and sometimes mysterious film that can leave us puzzling over what it's trying to say.