'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.

'First Steps' revives the Fantastic Four

   I'm not sure what it means, but if you look at the photo above, the blue and white outfits worn by the Fantastic Four may remind you of pajamas you'd expect find at a kiddie sleepover. I mention it because it's not easy to take Fantastic Four: First Steps, the movie from which this photo was taken, too seriously. Consider that a good thing.

  This fourth Fantastic Four movie represents an upbeat improvement over its three predecessors, which may be enough to kick it into recommendable territory -- provided you have any interest in another Marvel movie.

 Given a 60's aura by director Matt Shakman and recast with Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby in pivotal roles, First Steps has a welcome low-tech quality in which a robot looks more clunky than sleek. Sci-fi elements such as teleportation operate at rudimentary levels, as does a story that expeditiously introduces the Four while taking care of world-building.

  Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach complete the Fantastic quartet. A ton of CGI effects turn Moss-Bachrach into The Thing, a powerhouse who can lift a Volkswagen bug as if it weighed no more than a pebble. Quinn's Human Torch blazes his way through numerous action scenes.

   I'm to going to waste space describing all the superpowers of the Four, but it's important to know that when we meet them, they're living as a family in a New York apartment that has a mid-century garnish.

   For the record, Pascal's Reed Richard (a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic) and Kirby's Sue Storm (a.k.a. Invisible Woman) are married and expecting a child, which leads to scene in which Sue gives birth aboard a spaceship while dealing with a zero-gravity environment.

   The newborn, a mixture of CGI and a real infant, becomes an important plot element. The world-devouring villain, Galactus (Ralph Ineson), offers to spare Earth if Sue gives him Baby Franklin. When Sue declines, the failure of the Four to stave off doom raises the ire of the world's populace. Sue chooses the one above the many.

   Looking like a sleek statue inspired by an awards show, Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) serves as Galactus's reconnaissance specialist. She surfs to new worlds, identifying planets that will feed her overlord's voracious appetite, although he's a bit tired of roaming galaxy after galaxy in search of nourishment. 

   The effects employed in the movie's finale are effectively realized, and Galactus's ominous-looking space ship reinforces the sense of doom facing Earth's inhabitants.

    Happily, First Steps doesn't overdo the interconnections that burden many Marvel films. You won't need a glossary to follow a plot designed for efficiency.

   I can't say that I was emotionally invested in First Steps. The movie's comic-book artifice makes it difficult really to fear for Earth's future, but a bit more than tolerable beats the heck out of terrible.

   On that level, First Steps satisfies.

When sexual abuse is normalized

The Assistant takes us inside a movie production company where the boss is a sexual predator.

If you’ve followed Harvey Weinstein’s New York trial, you’ve read about women who say they were sexually assaulted by the former movie mogul. You’ve also probably seen plenty of stories that deal with the #MeToo movement in other areas; sadly, we’ve grown accustomed to a steady stream of news about women who’ve suffered sexual abuse at the hands of powerful men.

With The Assistant, director Kitty Green dives into the MeToo pool, but with the kind precision that only can be bred by minute observation. Unlike the splashier star-driven Bombshell, which looked at the women who helped bring down Roger Ailes at Fox News, The Assistant marries its larger themes to the quotidian details of life on the job. Green sets her story in the modest offices of an independent but evidently successful movie company.

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It's clear from the start that the boss's authoritarian demands have been incorporated into the psyches of his employees. He expects his assistant (Julia Garner) to arrive early, turn on the lights and do menial chores designed to remind her of her lowly status. Green doesn't have to say it, but the message is clear: People will put up with a lot to feel as if they're part of the movie business.

Garner brings a sense of unease and palpable uncertainty to the role of a character who's trying to keep her head above water. When Garner's Jane finds an earring on the floor of the boss’s office, she can't ignore the fact that she’s working in a place where women may be expected to do more than recite lines when they audition for parts. Moreover, the boss’s lusts aren’t confined to actresses with aspirations.

When a young woman from Boise (Kristine Froseth) shows up to become another assistant, she’s taken to a fancy Manhattan hotel. Garner’s Jane knows that the newcomer is prey.

A pivotal scene finds Jane meeting with the company’s head of human resources (Matthew Macfayden) to express her fears about the safety of the newly arrived employee. Initially sympathetic, he twists Jane's perceptions and uses them against her. He’s supposed to help — but it’s the boss’s interests that he serves.

Green wisely keeps the boss offscreen. The choice makes sense because it’s clear that the other employees, including two men (Jon Orsini and Noah Robbins) who share space with Jane) are well-schooled in the company ways. The boss isn't really the movie's subject anyway; it's the impact of the warped office atmosphere on an impressionable young woman that matters.

There’s a downside to Green’s narrowly focused approach. By covering a single day in Jane's life, the story can feel constricted, but Green deserves credit for skillfully exposing the go-along, get-along atmosphere that the boss requires. The Assistant isn’t a story of great transformation; it’s a story about the ways in which a powerful man can create an environment in which everyone understands the unwritten rules.

You want to play, you'd best look the other way. Complicity becomes a job requirement.

This is not your grandma's 'Grandma'

Lily Tomlin plays an acerbic grandmother on a quest.

It's difficult to think of any actress who more deserves center stage than Lily Tomlin. Tomlin has had a memorable career in movies, television and in one-woman shows. At 76, she's still a force.

In director Paul Weitz's Grandma', Tomlin plays Elle Reid, a poet whose moment in the sun long ago was clouded by the shadows of obscurity. A lesbian, Elle recently lost her long-time partner, and has turned even more sour than she might have been before.

The movie opens with Elle dispatching her much younger girlfriend (Judy Greer) by cruelly announcing that Greer's Olivia has been nothing more than a "footnote" in Elle's increasingly miserable life. Ouch!

Elle is drawn out of embittered solitude when her granddaughter (Julia Garner) turns up asking for money. Garner's Sage is pregnant and needs money for an abortion, a procedure she's scheduled for later that same afternoon.

Without shedding her snide side, Elle, who's newly broke, travels around Los Angeles in search of friends that might loan her the $600-plus needed for Sage's abortion.

The day long journey brings Elle and Sage into contact with a transgender tattoo artist (Laverne Cox of Orange is the New Black) and an ex-lover (Sam Elliott), the guy who she left years ago after acknowledging her gayness.

Both Sage and Elle are trying to avoid asking Sage's successful but angry mother (Marcia Gay Harden) for financial assistance.

The movie gives Elle space for a stream of rude encounters, one in a coffee shop, another at the apartment of the kid (Nat Wolff) who got Sage pregnant.

Elle's definitely a well-oiled mean machine, and she's played with no trace of vanity by a disheveled and massively cynical Tomlin.

But the truth is that we know that Elle really has a heart -- if not entirely of gold, at least of gold plate, and Grandma is sometimes hampered by both the modesty of Weitz's filmmaking and the predictability of his screenplay.
Weitz (About A Boy and American Pie) may have wanted to make a little, emotionally affecting movie -- and, but the end, it is.

Although it grapples with issues involving abortion and abiding unhappiness, Grandma proves a minor success, notable mostly for the way in which Tomlin, Garner, Harden and Greer all come to grips with a resolution wrought by the urgent pressures of the present and the sadness of the past.

Could the movie have been deeper? Sure. But because of Tomlin and her the movie's fine supporting cast, we probably should be grateful for what we've gotten.