On a downslide in Hollywood

  Rosalind Eleazar, an actress familiar to Slow Horses fans, provides the best reason to see Misty Green, Chris Rock’s fourth film as a director. 

 Eleazar plays the title character, an actress and singer whose career has declined. Back in the day, Misty won an Emmy for her work in a hit series, but a younger generation knows her as someone their parents used to love. On top of that, Misty’s drug use and alienating personality have put a damper on a career that should be deep into its sweet spot.

  Instead, Misty does signing gigs and attends humiliating auditions. A winning smile can transform her face in an instant, but she can also be insulting and unpleasant. On the night before an audition, she’s likely to party hard enough to throw her attempts to land a role, even one that's beneath her talents, way off balance.

  If Hollywood weren't enough to deal with, Misty’s being tossed out of the luxe apartment a recently deceased lover said she could occupy. Her bipolar brother, an amazing Daniel Kaluuya, has just been released from jail. Needy and explosively childish, Kaluuya's Jay seems likely to derail in a burst of fury.

   Rock appears in the film as Jordan Green (no relation to Misty), a director who was embarrassed by Misty on a previous filming. She punched someone on the crew.

  Rock has scenes in which he’s sharply funny. A rant on why he hates civil rights movies sounds as if it could have been lifted from one of his stand-up sets. Overall, though, I wondered whether the part should have gone to someone else.

     Important to the story’s development, Jordan is set to direct a reboot of Dreamgirls. The lead role of Deena would be perfect for Misty. Will she even get a shot at it? 

    Misty deals with racial obstacles in Hollywood and goes toe-to-toe with those who dismiss her as abrasive. But she’s a complicated character, so much so that it’s difficult to tell where Hollywood’s insulting treatment begins and Misty’s self-destructive tendencies leave off. 

    The supporting cast includes Adam Driver, as a marginal Hollywood director whose life has become more about drugs and high-dollar pimping than moviemaking. Anna Kendrik plays Misty’s friend, another actress, but one who has her eye on a suitor who can provide financial security. 

  Amy Landecker bristles in a small role as the venomous widow who gives Misty a week to vacate her late husband’s apartment.

   Overall, Misty may not be the movie that delivers the definitive work on Hollywood's transactional ways. But it makes room for pungent moments about after-hours Hollywood, and it captures the way the odor of failure can drift into self-abasement.

     Misty Green threatens to shatter into disparate pieces, even as it operates in loose fashion, a ramble through Hollywood with a chip on its shoulder that gives Eleazar room to create a memorable character at a moment of peak anguish.

   

  

  

A disappointing second helping

   

       During the sequel, Another Simple Favor, Anna Kendrick's character, a stout-hearted supermom and online influencer, mentions Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diabolique (1958). Don't be misled. Another Simple Favor is no match for Clouzot's devious classic. Not that it needed to be.

    Kendrick, a gifted comic actress, and Blake Lively, fine here as a self-possessed schemer, generate the requisite love/hate sparks, but the movie goes too far in substituting acceptance of the preposterous for suspension of disbelief.   

   Complications begin to accumulate when Lively's Emily, newly released from prison, reenters the life of Kendrick's Stephanie, who was snared in Emily's web of deceit in first film and wrote a book about it.

    Stephanie, who should know better, agrees to serve as maid of honor at Emily's impending wedding. Apparently well rehabilitated from her time in prison, Emily is scheduled to marry a wealthy guy (Michele Morrone) who lives sumptuously in Capri. Turns out he’s a Mafia boss.

   Another Favor benefits from the Capri setting where the wedding occurs and where Stephanie and her literary agent (Alex Newell) are flown on a private jet full of hard-partying guests. Nothing like luxe surroundings to amp up escapist fare. There's a reason you can't imagine a season of The White Lotus in a budget motel on the Jersey shore.

  A heaping basket full of plot twists tends to mangle a talented supporting cast. Elena Sofia Ricci plays the mobster groom’s mom. Allison Janey portrays Emily's aunt, and Elizabeth Perkins earns chuckles as Emily's addled mom.

    Henry Golding briefly reprises his role as Emily's former husband, a character the screenplay contrives to bring to Capri along with his now teenage son Nicky (Ian Ho).

    Once again, a series of murders pushes Stephanie into amateur-sleuth mode, providing formulaic echoes of the movie's predecessor.

   If you haven't seen the first movie, you probably needn't bother with Another Favor, which has been directed by Paul Feig, who also directed the earlier effort. 

    I was traveling when the original opened and only caught up with it recently. Hardly a classic, the first Favor was better than I expected; the second, worse than I had hoped. 

    *Another Simple Favor is now streaming on Prime Video.

'Alice, Darling' shows the impact of abuse

 

Alice, Darling -- a psychological study bolstered by thriller elements -- relies on the observation that not all abuse is physical. The story centers on Alice (Anna Kendrick), a successful young woman who lives with her boyfriend, an artist played by Charlie Carrick. The two appear to be happy, but Carrick's Simon continually gnaws at Alice’s confidence. The plot, such as it is, begins to unfold  when Alice agrees to spend a weekend with two girlfriends (Kaniehtiio Horn and Wunmi Mosaku). The occasion: Horn's Tess has arranged a women-only celebration of her birthday at an isolated cabin. Alice tells Simon she's taking a business trip because she knows he’d object to her spending time with women who will encourage her independence. Kendrick captures Alice's ably fears, which limit her willingness to make her own decisions. Her friends try to loosen her up, but she's still under Simon's control. Director Mary Nighy creates a mood of uneasiness as Horn and Mosaku push Alice toward assertion. They know their friend is being tyrannized. The story's final eruption verges on overstatement  — and at times, the movie seems to be straining, particularly with a story about a missing local girl that lingers in the background. Working from a screenplay by Alanna Francis, Alice, Darling works best as a well-observed study of the effects of abuse, and Kendrick’s complex performance as a vacillating, conflicted woman gives Alice, Darling some painfully real bite.

Survival choices on a voyage to Mars

 

   

            Stowaway, the latest space adventure from Netflix,  launches another flight to Mars, the planet where NASA just flew a robotic helicopter and where Elon Musk wants to start a colony.

               When it comes to Mars, maybe it's time to stop fictionalizing and watching the news. Still, Mars remains a prime destination for movies that need a deep-space destination.

        Operating in what seems to be the relatively near future, Stowaway mercifully avoids any sign of acid-drooling aliens, but slow pacing and a quartet of less-than-fascinating characters keep the movie from turning into the gripping survival story that must have been intended.

   The title tells you this is no ordinary voyage. A construction engineer trapped in the ship’s innards becomes an inadvertent stowaway on a three-person trip to Mars, a problem that can be described as a "mega-oops," to employ the scientific term for such catastrophes.

    When the equipment that cleans the ship's air of carbon dioxide is rendered non-functional,  the crew is threatened by a looming shortage of oxygen. Three people might make it Mars. Four? No way.

   Director Joe Penna plunges a diversified cast (Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim, and Shamier Anderson) into the most severe of ethical problems. Must one of them die so that the others can complete the already battered mission?

   The spaceship Hyperion generates its own gravity, which means the actors don’t need to spend the entire movie floating around — not literally at least. But they are left somewhat adrift by a script in which character depth seems in almost as short supply as sunlight.

   Collette portrays Marina, the commander of the flight. Kim plays David, the science officer charged with maintaining algae that will be used to test possibilities for colonization of Mars. Kendrick appears as Zoe, the ship’s cheerful doctor, and Anderson plays the title character,  a man who, as it turns out, is less a stowaway than a victim of a mistake the movie doesn’t adequately explain.

    Most of the characters can be described with a word or two: Marina, responsible. David, realistic. Zoe, humane; and Anderson, unhinged. 

    Not everything computes. Anderson's Michael worries about the needy sister he’s left on Earth for what promises to be two difficult years. But wait. The company that's paying for this trip will take care of the sister -- all expenses paid.

    This raises a question: Why did the screenplay give Michael a sister in the first place? Isn't learning that you'll unexpectedly be leaving everything you know and love for two years enough cause for anxiety.

   Credit Penna and production designer Marco Bittner Rosser with creating a realistic shipboard environment, as well as a convincing EVA episode (of course, there’s one) that shows off the ship’s exterior.

   Though interesting to ponder, the movie’s central issue doesn’t  translate into an exiting one-hour and 56-minute movie,  and Stowaway misses its mark as either brainy sci-fi or a visceral space adventure. 

   Members of the Hyperion crew face a horrible choice. Deciding how to deal with it may be working on the their guts, but that doesn't mean it's working on ours.

   

A homebody's best friend disappears

Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively play a snappy duet in A Simple Favor, a thriller with as much comedy as mystery.

In A Simple Favor, Anna Kendrick plays a woman who's determined to be an ideal mother. Kendrick’s Stephanie Smothers is a widow who immerses herself in her son's pre-school activities and in a cooking vlog that she begins with a trademark greeting that defines her vision of an audience. "Hi, Moms,' she chirps.

Stephanie is the kind of mother who brings out the resentments of parents who aren’t quite so gung-ho about pre-school. She drives less conscientious crazy.

Stephanie gives Kendrick an opportunity to go for laughs while keeping us guessing about whether there might be something less controlled under Stephanie's ultra-organized surface.

At first, I thought Kendrick might be overdoing Stephanie's diffidence, offering a near parodic version of a kid-and-kitchen obsessed suburban mom, but her performance grew on me.

Kendrick finds an able comic accomplice in Blake Lively, who plays Emily a woman whose confidence contrasts mightily with Stephanie's timidity. Director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) makes it clear from the outset that Emily qualifies as a career-obsessed woman who brings a take-no-prisoners attitude to everything she does. When it comes to being a mom, Emily is ... well ... indifferent to the point of neglect.

The movie opens with Stephanie telling her video blog followers that best-friend Emily has disappeared. Emily left her young son with Stephanie, who picked the kid up from pre-school along with her own son. Emily's husband is tending to his sick mother in London.

Once Emily goes missing, A Simple Favor turns into a jaunty, comic mystery built around events that unfold after Emily vanishes.

Enter Sean (Henry Golding), Emily's husband, a novelist who hasn't published anything for a decade but who lives with Emily in a sleekly modern home that evidently is supported by Emily's work as a high-power PR woman for a fashion firm and by ample amounts of debt. Fresh from Crazy Rich Asians, Golding once again is called upon to be handsome, emotionally vulnerable, charming and, in this case, perhaps a bit devious.

I wish the movie had made more time for Rupert Friend, who plays Dennis Nylon (great name), the taste-arbiter who runs the fashion firm at which Emily ruthlessly plies her PR trade.

In this case, though, it's the women -- Kendrick and Lively -- who give the movie its spark as Stephanie turns into an amateur sleuth. She searches for Emily, gradually learning that her friend might not be all that she seemed. Then again, Stephanie isn't all that she seems, either.

As a mystery, A Simple Favor doesn't always work. Feig offers a big reveal too early and an over-stuffed wrap-up threatens to tie the movie in knots.

But Feig keeps A Simple Favor marching to a snappy cadence. He also includes enough satirical garnish to heighten interest without cutting deep enough to draw blood. That's not a criticism. Feig points the movie in the right direction. Simple Favor never extinguishes its sparkle. It's a good-natured helping of venom.

Dysfunctional family, dysfunctional movie

Somewhere in the movie called The Hollars, a good family story might be hiding. Unfortunately, director John Krasinski, who also plays the lead role, didn't find it. This story of a dysfunctional Ohio family centers on the discovery that Mom (Margo Martingale) has a brain tumor. Dad (Richard Jenkins) can't stop weeping. One of the family's grown sons (Sharlto Copley) is mired in on-going tension with Dad, whose heating business verges on bankruptcy. Krasinksi plays the family's other son, the kid who left town to establish himself as an artist in the big city. Lest any stone of complication be left unturned, Krasinski's John Hollar and his girlfriend (Anna Kendrick) are expecting a baby. Sincere in its sentiments and including a few touching scenes, The Hollars nonetheless presents a symphony of false notes that even a cast featuring the wonderful Martingale and Jenkins can't bring into tune.

Jennifer Aniston's bitter piece of 'Cake'

An emotionally scarred woman tries to drive everyone else away.

Toward the end of last year, Jennifer Aniston's name began to surface as a possible Oscar nominee for her performance in Cake, the story of an embittered woman whose life is mired in grief and rage. Aniston didn't get the nomination, but the actress best known for rom-coms and her long-running stint in TV's Friends, shows the kind of range Academy voters often appreciate.

In Cake, Aniston plays a woman with a scarred face, an aversion to make-up and a pill-popping addiction to pain killers. Aniston's Claire clearly has suffered both emotional and physical wounds.

Director Daniel Barnz, working from a script by Patrick Tobin, takes his time letting us know precisely what happened to put Claire into such a miserable state.

And miserable it is.

Claire has been so impossible to live with that she's driven off her caring husband(Chris Messina). Only her housekeeper (Adriana Barraza) seems willing to tolerate Claire's abusive ways -- and, at one point, even Barraza's Silvana is pushed to the brink.

Claire is so difficult that she's kicked out of a therapy group, which she disdains anyway. After leaving the group, she's haunted by visions of Nina (Anna Kendrick), a former group member who committed suicide.

Presented in straightforward fashion, these hallucinatory encounters give Kendrick something to do, but don't add much to the proceedings.

Those who remember The Good Girl (2002) already know that Aniston can play against type. In Cake, she pours on cynicism and bile, but the movie loses credibility when Claire establishes a relationship -- albeit a halting one -- with Nina's widowed husband (Sam Worthington), a man who has been left with a child.

If you've seen a few indie movies, you won't have much trouble guessing what has driven Claire to near distraction.

I've not been a fan of Aniston's endless string of rom-coms, but acting in romantic comedies is still acting, and Aniston deserves praise for taking a chance on a small, indie movie in which she's required to keep the audience at a distance.

Let's hope Cake helps push Aniston out of the rom-com ghetto. But taken strictly on its own somewhat attenuated terms, Cake needed to be better, as well as bitter.

A musical trip 'Into the Woods'

Sure it looks great, but where's the magic?

It has taken 27 years for Stephen Sondheim's 1987 musical -- Into the Woods -- to reach the screen. I wish I could say it was totally worth the wait.

But under the direction of Rob Marshall (Chicago and Nine), this megaton Disney production arrives as a mixed blessing with highlights built around Meryl Streep's performance as The Witch, Anna Kendrick's turn as Cinderella, Emily Blunt's portrayal of a baker's wife and a couple of signature musical numbers.

A mash-up of a story incorporates fragments of various, iconic fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk.

Shards from these stories are united by the tale of a baker and his wife. The couple tries to gather ingredients needed to break a spell (cast by the witch, of course) that has left them childless.

Credit Marshall with getting the musical off to a rousing start. The opening introduces the major characters in lively, amusing fashion before all head for the woods on a variety of personal quests that sometimes turn sluggish.

For the most part, the movie is well cast. Under a ton of make-up, Streep brings life to every scene in which she appears. James Corden and Blunt are fine as the baker and his wife, and Kendrick makes for a somewhat different Cinderella, a young woman who isn't entirely star struck by the handsome prince (Chris Pine).

Pine, by the way, brings self-absorbed superficiality to the role of the prince, complementing the movie's desire to upend as many fairy-tale stereotypes as possible.

A high point arrives when Red Riding Hood meets the wolf (Johnny Depp made up like a predatory Zoot-suiter). The wolf leers after Red Riding, displaying a lecherous streak. Depp licks his chops, and then vanishes from the screen with a demonstrative howl.

Carefully designed by Dennis Gassner, Into the Woods has a lavish quality that Marshall supplements with special effects when necessary.

The singing -- a key in a musical without big dance numbers -- seems mostly up to snuff, although I have no standard of comparison, never having seen Into the Woods on stage.

The movie's screenplay -- by James Lapine -- reportedly includes a bit of compression and the filing down of a few rough edges, but I leave all that for Sondheim enthusiasts to sort out.

Into the Woods increasingly darkens as it goes against the grain of the original fairy tales. A faux happily ever-after ending is followed by a lengthy final act which goes to great pains to subvert expectations and which, alas, tested my patience.

I found myself longing for this one to conclude before it had worked its way through all of its 124-minute length, but -- in fairness - I'd have to say that Into the Woods seemed acceptable, if not a candidate for movie musical greatness.

What's missing? Goosebumps and a sustained sense that we're watching something that gets beyond its ever-present cleverness.

A giddy, girly a cappella movie

Pitch Perfect is a purposefully silly, sometimes giddy musical about a women's group that enters (and desperately wants to win) a collegiate a cappella competition. As someone far outside the target audience -- whatever that might be -- I'm not inclined to say much about a movie that comes on like the big screen equivalent of a giggle. Anna Kendrick leads a cast of characters that includes a snooty and ultra-annoying blonde (Anna Camp). Another woman calls herself Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson), but might as well refer to herself as the character who most resembles Melissa McCarthy's Megan from Bridesmaids. (Wilson, by the way, appeared in Bridesmaids; she played one of Kristen Wiig's apartment mates.) Wilson's mouthy Amy contrasts with a whispering Asian girl played by Hana Mae Lee. The women's group -- called The Bellas -- squares off against a rival male group known as The Treblemakers. Director Jason Moore piles on the music, not all of which sounded purely a cappella to me. Kendrick's Becca is the nominal main character, a young woman who wants to bring fresh, mixed-tape energy to the Bellas, who seem stuck doing the same numbers again and again. I've liked Kendrick in other movies (Up in the Air and more recently, End of Watch). Here, she's in tune with the movie's loopy spirit, although I can't say I was. What I can say is that every time I see a movie as preposterously energetic as Pitch Perfect, I wonder why I spent my college years hanging around the library. Maybe it's only in movies that the college experience seldom gets anywhere near a book.

A gut-wrenching LAPD drama

Two cops patrol the hood in tense End of Watch

In End of Watch, director Robert Ayer pours on lots of gritty, convincing resolve as he takes us inside the world of two Los Angeles police officers. This mostly episodic look at patrolling partners (Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena) covers a variety of tensely portrayed situations and makes it clear that these young cops are as hooked on the excitement of the streets as the gang bangers they frequently confront.

With his head shaved and eyes glaring, Gyllenhaal plays Brian Taylor, a former Marine who provides the movie with an opening narration that establishes these cops as guys who brook no nonsense when they put on their uniforms. Meet them in a bar, you'll like them. Meet them in an alley, and you may be sorry.

Pena, a terrific actor who finally gets a major chunk of screen time, plays Mike Savala, a Mexican-American cop whose wife (Natalie Martinez) is pregnant. Pena creates a tough, likable working-class hero.

When Taylor and Savala aren't battling crime or helping people in trouble, they're bantering in their black-and-white. They're comfortable trading ethnic jibes, cops who are more loyal to each other than to any outside group.

At one point, Taylor tells Savala that he finally has met a woman with whom he can talk, something he's been craving. Enter Anna Kendrick as Janet, the woman who steals Taylor's heart.

Ayer doesn't spare us graphic violence, and some scenes in End of Watch are super-tense. When the cops enter houses with their guns drawn, they have no idea what they might be facing. At such times, End of Watch works on the gut.

Perhaps for leavening, Ayer introduces us to a bit of off-duty life when Taylor joins Savala at a quinceanera, and there are obligatory scenes at the station house where the men receive their daily assignments. Taylor and Savala also get crosswise with an older cop (David Harbour).

At some point, Ayer needs to introduce a story line. Dropped into all the action is a tale in which Taylor and Savala stumble into the world of Mexican drug cartels and become targets for a hit.

Some of the action is seen from the viewpoint of a mini-documentary that Taylor is filming. There's also footage supposedly taken by gang members. By now the use of feigned amateur video has become as stale as the average car chase. Ayer just as effectively could have employed an edgy, hand-held style without putting video cameras into the hands of his characters.

The looming presence of the drug cartels leads to a bullet-riddled finale marked by a level of violence that goes way over the top. I don't know if it's realistic, but it feels too much like an attempt to further juice the already juiced proceedings, making us wonder whether Ayer, who wrote the script for Training Day, isn't more interested in visceral excitement than authenticity.

Still, End of Watch holds you in its grip. It does a good job convincing us that the cops who work in gang-dominated neighborhoods aren't all that different from soldiers in a war zone. Had the movie gone a step further and done more to remind us that the same goes for most of the residents of those same neighborhoods, End of Watch would have been even better.