'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.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 6/12/19 -- Amerian Woman and Halston

American Woman

Grating in the early going, Sienna Miller's performance as an abrasive single mom and grandmother trying to scrape by in a small Pennsylvania town eventually finds its rhythm. American Woman provides Miller with an opportunity to play a woman who faces a cascading series of problems. When we meet Miller's Deb Callahan, she's having an affair with a married man (Kentucker Audley and trying to be a mother to her daughter (Sky Ferreira), a 17-year-old who already has a child of her own. Constantly at odds with her family (an older sister played by Christina Hendricks and a disapproving mother Amy Madigan), Deb faces a life-changing tragedy. Her daughter vanishes. Fearing the worst, Deb blames Tyler (Alex Neustaedter), the irresponsible teen father of her daughter's child. The movie then leaps ahead -- eventually by at least a decade -- to find Deb trying to take care of her grandson (her daughter remains missing) and living with an abusive lout (Pat Healy) she must get out of her life. Deb eventually takes up with a younger man (Aaron Paul) who seems really to love her and who makes a fine surrogate father for her now-teenaged grandson. Director Jake Scott gives the cast plenty to work with, as the movie moves toward its inevitable conclusion: Deb's emergence as an independent woman. Miller's roller-coaster performance hits strong notes. Hendricks does well as a loving but sensible sister who's married to a man (Will Sasso) who provides the one thing that Deb's life always seems to lack: continuity. Nicely rendered moments of reconciliation have an impact, but overall American Woman suffers from an overload of woe. Moreover, its title suggests ambitions that never are quite fulfilled.

Halston

Director Frédéric Tcheng's documentary follows the career of a fabled fashion designer whose work dominated nearly three decades: from hot pants to evening dresses sculpted from a single piece of fabric. Halston benefits from the arc of the designer's high-profile life. Born Roy Halston Frowick, Halston turned himself into a single-named icon who made a remarkable ascent. He began as a hat designer at prestigious Bergdorf Goodman and eventually created a brand of his own. Making use of interviews and footage from the glam world Halston inhabited, Tcheng brings us into Halston's orbit, which includes models and celebrities such as Liza Minnelli. Every story of a remarkable ascendance needs a steep decline. Halston has a doozy. Late in his career, the designer decided to enter the world of mass-marketing, partnering with J.C. Penny to open the doors of fashion to ordinary women. Feeling abandoned, Halston's high-end followers began to desert him. A variety of corporate maneuvers followed and Halston's empire eventually crumbled. When he died of AIDS in 1990, he was 57. In the whirl of success, drugs, and achievement that Tcheng shows us, Halston remains something of a mystery, a galvanizing figure who never fully emerges. But if you're a sucker for a rise-and-fall story or you're interested in fashion, Halston won't disappoint.

A musical set in a subway car

A group of strangers stuck between stations in a New York City subway car seems an unlikely premise for a musical on film. But that didn't stop writer/director Michael Berry from trying. The result is Stuck: A mixed bag of a musical that has its moments, thanks mostly to a game cast. Giancarlo Esposito anchors the show as a homeless man with a philosophical bent. Joining Esposito are Ashanti, as a young woman with a chip on her shoulder; Arden Cho, as a dancer who walls herself off from contact with the other passengers; and Amy Madigan, as a sad woman who can't find the right key for talking with her fellow riders. Omar Chapparo plays an angry construction worker who can't afford to miss a day's pay, and Gerard Canonico portrays a young artist who has created a comic book about a disabled superhero named Maggie. Each character is given a musical number -- with Canonico's song affording Berry an opportunity for the addition of special effects that fit the generally modest nature of the enterprise. Before the train restarts, each character offers a glimpse into his or her true self. It doesn't take a genius to know that this serviceable collection of musical numbers and dialogue will result in mutual understanding, a conclusion the movie reaches within a reasonable 90-minute running time.