Big violence erupts in a small town

 If you’ve been following the career of Bob Odenkirk, you already know that the star of Better Call Saul has become an unlikely kick-ass action hero. Normal, which follows 2021’s Nobody and its 2025 sequel, continues Odenkirk’s foray into big-screen mayhem with a story about the sheriff of a small Minnesota town called Normal.

  You needn't know much about irony to guess that the town of Normal won’t be anything like its name.  

  Clocking in at a brief (by current standards) hour and 30 minutes, Normal spins out a shamelessly improbable plot in which Yakuza gangsters use the town to store part of their American loot. The townsfolk profit, and the mayor (Henry Winkler) wants to keep the funds flowing.

  After a prologue set in Japan, director Ben Wheatley moves to Normal, where we meet Odenkirk’s Ulysses, a law officer with a troubled past that uprooted his life and disrupted his marriage.

    Having lost his bearings, Ulysses found work as Normal’s “interim” sheriff, an opening created by the previous sheriff's death.

   The residents of the small town immediately strike Ulysses (and us) as odd. Moira (Lena Headey), the town's bartender, seems a bit too straightforward. One of Ulysses’s over-eager deputies (Billy MacLellan) wears a leather jacket so squeaky, you can hear him approaching. Another deputy (Ryan Allen) wants to be the next full-time sheriff. Ulyssses also meets the late sheriff’s daughter (Jess McLeod), a troubled young woman.

    After about half an hour of goofing on small-town USA, Wheatley gets around to the movie’s point: comic violence that mixes laughter and revulsion. The slaughter begins when a couple of thieves (Reeana Jolly and Brendan Fletcher) try to rob the local bank.

     A twist that shifts rooting interests makes for a nice touch, but Normal isn't really about taking sides. No, Normal is more about watching the chaos, which is designed to play in a familiar jokey, gross-out key with enough armaments to fight a small war. But wait. That's pretty much what the movie becomes, a small war.

    Odenkirk gives his character a core of decency; the rest of the cast resembles cartoon creations, but no one goes to movies such as Normal for deeply explored character development. 

    Written by Derek Kolstad, who also wrote the Nobody movies, Normal makes no bones about what it is, but I've been down this road too many times to fully embrace another movie that can be likened to a fireworks display -- only with blood.

    And if Normal never seems particularly brainy, maybe it's because so many of the town's 1,890 residents have gotten their heads blown off.

    

Bob's Cinema Diary: 4/9/21 -- 'Moffie,’ 'In the Earth,’ and ‘The Truffle Hunters’

 Moffie 

When we think of South African injustice, we naturally (and appropriately) gravitate toward the apartheid era's cruel oppression of black South Africans. Moffie, a movie about a young gay man trying to survive the brutalities of South African military life, takes a harsh look at part of the system that supported apartheid, the military. It's not easy to look at the film without wondering why we should care about the struggles of one white man in a country that committed so many larger sins. But as the movie unfolds, it becomes clear that the two oppressions (hatred and fear of blacks and hatred of gays), though hardly equivalent, are bred from some of the same wellsprings of intolerance. Director Oliver Hermanus's carefully directed feature focuses on Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer), a gay man who's been inducted into the army during a time when South Africa fears of communist aggression and potential black uprisings was especially heightened. The sergeant who trains the recruits (Jacques Theron) specializes in humiliation and makes his beliefs clear: The recruits are the final barrier between civilization (white) and barbarism (black). During his training, Nicholas befriends a recruit named Stassen (Ryan de Villiers) who's also gay but whose unwillingness to conceal his sexuality lands him in a mental institution. Hermanus explores the meaning of manhood in South Africa’s military culture in revealing ways, all the while reminding us that we're watching kids being asked to risk and possibly lose their lives or suffer the lingering consequences of taking the life of another. 

In the Earth

British director Ben Wheatley mixes eerie atmospherics, graphic jolts, and a pandemic backdrop to create In the Earth, a story about researchers who encounter a variety of horrors as they conduct their work deep in a remote forest. Wheatley doesn't make much of the pandemic, opting instead to concentrate on what happens in the woods. Martin (Joel Fry) and Alma (Ellora Torchia) set about their business, which involves trying to find a fellow researcher who has gone missing -- or some such. They do this after being told about an inhospitable creature called Parnag Fegg that's part of the forest's lore. It doesn't take long for the duo to run into trouble when a mysterious force ransacks their camp. A reclusive loner named Zach (Reece Shearsmith) who lives in the woods offers help but eventually proves as big a danger as any paranormal forest phenomenon. The whole business feels a bit forced with Wheatley serving up some wince-inducing images, one involving amputated toes. In an escape attempt, Martin and Alma encounter the missing researcher (Hayley Squires). She also seems helpful and unlike Zach, appears to be sane. Or is she? Wheatley effectively sustains a menacing mood and the soundtrack echoes with spooky blasts and moans. But when In the Earth concludes, we’re left wondering whether we've  watched anything more than another "midnight" movie that’s better at creating a world than in finding something telling to do with it. 

The Truffle Hunters

I've always been a sucker for narrowly focused movies that bring us into worlds governed by obsession -- or something close to it. Such is the case with The Truffle Hunters, an engaging documentary from directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw. The truffles referred to in the movie's title grow in northern Italy. They are sniffed out by dogs that lead their human partners to their bounty. These white truffles, by the way,  sell for lots of money and are part of a trade governed by merchants and connoisseurs who seem far removed from the rough rural life lived by the truffle hunters. One hunter -- an angry poet -- has given up the hunt because of the greed that he says has consumed a once noble pursuit. Consider him a truffle purist. Dweck and Kershaw introduce us to a group of idiosyncratic elders, men whose strongest relationships seem to be with their beloved dogs. Aurelio, for example, treats his dog Birba like a real partner, the companion that keeps him from solitary loneliness. Another hunter ignores his wife's admonitions and goes truffle hunting at night, a presumably risky endeavor. Without forcing any conclusions, Dweck and Kershaw explore the conflict that can arise between traditionalism and commercialism. Those with favored hunting spots don't share them with others, but their lives take us off the beaten track of familiarity, as much a source of the movie's pleasure as the contemplation of having one’s pasta enhanced by expensive slivers carved from rare truffles. 

You may not want to move into this 'High-Rise'

J. G. Ballard isn't an easy novelist to adapt. Want proof? Try High-Rise, a big-screen adaptation of Ballard's 1975 novel about the chasm between Britain's upper crust and the country's rude-and-scoffing multitudes. Set almost entirely in a caste-oriented apartment building, the novel puts the privileges and savagery of wealth on display. In the hands of director Ben Wheatley, High-Rise becomes a chaotic satire whose main points survive, but whose minute-by-minute achievements are so muddled that you're left with little to admire -- aside from a couple of performances, notably from Jeremy Irons as the building's overlord and Tom Hiddleston as a physician and the movie's main character. Working with gifted cinematographer Laurie Rose, Wheatley also cooks up some compelling images, forbiddingly modern interiors or a roof-top garden where a white horse roams. We also get lots of sex and violence among the building's tenants as they're forced to grapple with oh-so-metaphoric power outages. Playing a recent arrival to the building, a burdened Hiddleston provides the glue that holds the tumult together, even during a scene at a costume party in which everyone dresses as if auditioning for a movie about the excesses of Versailles. Watching High-Rise leaves us with little to do but long for a moment -- any moment -- that even half-resembles normalcy. Some will see the movie's massive display of chaos as a valid artistic choice: Others -- quite understandably -- may find themselves streaming toward the exits.

A couple takes a bloody road trip

In the exceptionally dark British comedy Sightseers , a nondescript couple takes its first trip together, traveling the British countryside while having sex, bickering and, oh yes, committing a series of murders. If Terrence Malick's Badlands springs to mind, let it spring right out again. Sightseers is one of those strange comedies in which a sense of uneasiness is accompanied by chuckles and in which audaciously violent acts are committed by two people who look as if they might find participation in a cribbage game a bit too stressful. Working from a screenplay by Alice Lowe and Steve Oram -- who also star in the movie -- director Ben Wheatley adds a perverse wrinkle to the idea that it's impossible really to know someone until you make a long car with them. Wheatley presents this journey in a flat, uninflected style that enhances its humorous aspects, but he doesn't skimp on showing us the murders, one of which is carried out when a man is repeatedly and viciously beaten with a stick. The couple's victims -- a litterer, among them -- are guilty of some of the annoying things that irk many but drive few to violence. The generally unimpressive Chris instigates the rampage as he and Tina make stops at northern British attractions that fall a tad short of wondrous, a pencil museum, for example. It's possible to see Sightseers as an extreme look at what happens in a relationship as people reveal themselves, and if Oram and Lowe seem comfortable in these oddball roles, it's probably because they've played these characters before, once in a rejected sitcom pilot. Wheatley builds toward a mordant punchline that puts a fitting topper on this weird road trip, but if you step back from Sightseers, it may reveal its own slightly discouraging truth: The better you get to know it, the more it seems like a limited, one-joke movie.