‘Backrooms’ isn't about making sense

   Backrooms, an addition to the growing list of self-consciously inventive horror movies, arrives with a pedigree that may impress aficionados. Produced by horror masters James Wan and Osgood Perkins, the movie also features performances by actors with hefty resumes: Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. 

  A bit about the movie's background: It springs from a movement called "creepypasta,'' i.e., horror stories posted and shared on the internet. Director Kane Parsons, now 20, began uploading Backrooms episodes in 2022, expanding  a previous "creepypasta" concept into 22 short films.

   I learned this from Googling and had no exposure to Backrooms before I saw Parsons' movie. I say this because Parsons' movie may have more appeal to those familiar with his online work than I am.

  On one hand, Backrooms can be seen as a creative immersion in a liminal world composed of endless rooms. Liminal worlds, by the way, are currently big in horror, bland, sometimes transitional locations that resonate with eerie emptiness.

   Set during the 1990s, Backrooms slips easily into its  off-kilter tale, partly because of the aural atmosphere the film creates, a mixture of unintelligible voices and synth music by Edo Van Breemen and Parsons.

    The movie has a story of sorts, which Parsons shows us is being watched by ill-defined researchers,  a conceit that adds more cause for apprehension. 

   Ejiofor plays Clark, a furniture store owner whose life is headed in the wrong direction. His wife recently left him, and Clark has been unable to launch his desired career as an architect.

    To get on the right track, Clark visits Mary (Reinsve), a therapist he hopes will open new doors for him. She's written a book conveniently titled The Window Within. 

    Displaced from his home, Clark has been relegated to sleeping in his store. He also appears as a peg-legged pirate in awful commercials made by one of his employees (Finn Bennett). We never see any customers in Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire, one more ploy that augments the sense of vacancy that permeates Backrooms -- absence that's meant to be felt.

    When Clark discovers a portal in the store's basement, he enters a weird alternate reality. Upon returning to "normal," he shares his discovery  with his therapist, who probably thinks he's delusional.

     To convince a skeptical Mary that his experience was "real," Clark convinces Bennett's Bobby and another employee (Lukita Maxwell) to pass through the portal with him. Clark wants Bobby to film their trippy experience so that he can prove the existence of the rooms that both frighten and attract him.

      It doesn't take long for Mary to visit the store, find the portal, and enter the weird dimension in which Clark has lost himself.

     Working from a screenplay by Will Soodik, Parsons includes flashbacks to Mary's childhood with a paranoid mother. Her childhood home was demolished by developers leaving only a shard, a handprint she saved from the rubble of a concrete driveway. It will come in handy.

    Parsons offers a variety of surreal sights: piles of discarded furniture, a stop sign with the word "stop" spelled backwards, and glimpses of figures who make us suspect that the place is occupied and dangerous.

     Parsons excels at alternate-reality building: rooms full of wall-to-wall carpeting and yellow walls, and, eventually, figures with distorted features. Are we seeing funhouse reflections of the reality of Clark and Mary's lives? Maybe.

      Not surprisingly, we're primed for the big reveal that will make sense of everything we've been watching. The movie, which functions as an inventive tease, has little interest in tidying up after itself, offering only the notion that we trap ourselves in behaviors we keep repeating, no matter how many times they lead us nowhere.

       Neither Ejiofor nor Reinsve has much to develop. Mostly, they react to the movie's increasingly alienating atmospherics. Mark Duplass turns up in a role that seems as if it's going to provide the explanation we've been waiting for, but his character doesn't seem to know much about what's happening,  either. 

        Blood and gore are in short supply, and some of the movie's twisted jokes, expressionless human figures whose insides can be scooped out and eaten, feel as if they've popped out of nowhere.

      There's talent on display in Backrooms, notably Danny Vermette's creative production design, but the found-footage quality and art-horror atmospherics only take the movie so far. Ambiguity  isn't a fatal flaw, but Backrooms begins to feel repetitive as it crawls inside our heads.

      Backrooms works like a maze. Homes and offices are creepy. Lives are empty. Something's always missing. Some will find all this intriguing. Others may just want out. 

     My reaction was mixed. I appreciated Parsons' willingness to experiment and was disappointed that the characters often play second fiddle to so many half-baked ideas that suggest more than the film is  able (or perhaps willing) to realize.

Bob's Cinema Diary: July 7, 2023 -- 'Joy Ride' and 'Biosphere'

 Joy Ride

     Who should we place at the head of the class when it comes to raunchy  movies? 

     Maybe you’re thinking white American men. But if you see Joy Ride, an ultra-bawdy comedy starring four Asia women, you might want to reconsider. 

     Director Adele Lim plays raunch for laughs when four women (Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Sabrina Wu, and Stephanie Hsu) travel to China. 

    The ostensible reason for the trip: Park’s Audrey, an up-and-coming lawyer, needs to close a deal in Beijing in order to land a partnership that will take her from New York to LA. 

     Once Lim dips her toes into ribald waters, she's pretty much obligated to try to outdo previous big-screen efforts. She often does. 

      Lim makes her mark with a major sight gag that's best discovered in a theater but which certainly fulfills the obligation to raise the movie's  off-color quotient, delivering the joke with in-your-face panache. 

     The movie also delves (skims is more like it ) into issues of identity. The women are attuned to stereotypes that have been used to diminish Asian Americans and know how to play them back while enriching them with sarcasm. 

     Sex almost always occupies center stage, some of it involving Audrey and a couple of members of a Chinese professional basketball team. Hsu's Kat works overtime to conceal an active sexual past from her strait-laced religious fiancé (Desmond Chaim). 

    I can’t say I found Joy Ride consistently hilarious, but Lim hits the high points square on, and her movie can't be faulted for lack of crowd-pleasing boldness. Joy Ride makes no bones about establishing its place in the world of aggressively impolite comedy.

Biosphere

    Billy (Mark Duplass) once was president of the United States. His best friend Ray (Sterling K. Brown) was his trusted science adviser. Some form of apocalypse has pushed the two men into a self-sustaining sphere that Ray designed. Billy and Ray seem to be the last two people on Earth. Biosphere doesn't want for ambition as it tries to tackle themes related toi gender, male bonding, and the unexplained doomsday that forced these two characters into claustrophobic isolation. Pay attention to the fish farm Ray has created; it holds the key to the survival of the two men and perhaps the entire human species. A twist involving rapid evolution taxes belief but serves as a way for director Mel Eslyn to explore issues revolving around manhood and its meanings. Bottom line for me: I found this two-hander a bit dull and a bit strained in the way it deals with issues involving gender. In the end, the screenplay by Duplass and Eslyn tries to endorse the idea that science and rational thinking sometimes must give way to the unexplainable. Magic would be another word for it, but the movie feels short of that elusive ingredient. It’s an odd mix: High stakes in a low-wattage drama.

Catching up with 'Language Lessons'

 Language Lessons

I had no particular interest in a movie in which two people exchange weekly Zoom calls. I've had enough Zoom calls in the last year and a half to satisfy any need I ever had to connect virtually with people -- not that I've abandoned the practice. Screen fatigue partly explains why it took me so long to catch up with Language Lessons, a movie in which a wealthy Oakland resident (Mark Duplass) communicates with his Spanish teacher (Natalie Morales), an engaging young woman who lives in Costa Rica. The language lessons -- a gift from Duplass's character's husband -- aren't exactly met with enthusiasm by Duplass's Adam. Adam already speaks enough Spanish to converse but because he has a couple of years of lessons pending, he goes along with the program. Then, a shocker. Will dies in an accident, and Adam's relationship with Morales’s Carina takes on a different character. It comes as no surprise that the boundaries between student and teacher begin to crumble.   Language Lessons can be viewed as a rom-com in which friendship rather than romance becomes the goal. Duplass and Morales co-authored the screenplay, which Morales directed. She tries to add visual interest by giving Adam a house that invites us to make some guesses about just how well off he might be.  Language Lessons can't entirely overcome the thinness the stems from a two-handed drama conducted via Zoom. For me, the key to the movie's success involves its sincerity, a quality I usually find off-putting but which, in this case, reflects the commitment of two actors who remind us not to overlook something we've been missing: our persistent need for others.

When motherhood becomes a nightmare

Charlize Theron and Mackenzie Davis play an entertaining duet in Tully, a comedy about the staggering burden of motherhood.

For Marlo, three is definitely not the charm.

We’re talking about Marlo’s third pregnancy, an event that has added much weight to her otherwise well-proportioned frame. Tully -- the latest collaboration between director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody -- introduces us to a very beleaguered mom, played by Charlize Theron. Theron reportedly gained 50 pounds for the role. I leave it to you to decide whether such body stress is justified in the pursuit of one’s art, but Theron never has been one for half measures.

As Aileen Wuornos in Monster, Theron obliterated her beauty to portray a serial killer, the most notable example of the actress's willingness to undergo a physical transformation at the expense of her movie-star looks.

Marlo, whose size and temperament separate her from those who surround her, struggles with issues that pit her sense of well-being against the kind of physical exhaustion and emotional depletion that are fueled by tending to an infant and two additional siblings.

Because her prepartum life isn't exactly wonderous, Marlo carries a weight that’s more than physical. Marlo's marriage has lost all traces of romance. Marlo's bystander of a husband (Ron Livingston) would rather play video games in bed than snuggle up to his wife. It's not that he doesn't care about his wife and kids; it's more that he's lost in his own world.

To further complicate matters, Marlo already has two children, one of whom (Asher Miles Fallica) taxes her patience because of extreme emotional problems that find him terrified by the sound of flushing toilets or relentlessly kicking the back of mom’s seat while she’s driving.

There’s a daughter (Maddie Dixon-Poirier), as well. The daughter seems to pose no out-sized problems, but still ... she's another kid with needs.

Every over-taxed movie mother needs a contrivance to move things along.

Tully's arrives in the form of a gift from Marlo’s affluent brother (Mark Duplass). He offers to pay for a night nanny, a young woman who'll take care of the newborn's overnight needs, thus allowing Marlo to get some much-needed sleep.

At first, Marlo resists, but she becomes so frustrated that she calls in a night nanny.

Enter Tully, the movie’s title character. As played by Mackenzie Davis, Tully is a dream-come-true. She has a great personality. She's in her 20s, but totally understands Marlo and encourages her to take advantage of the service in ways that Marlo hadn’t anticipated. She not only brings the baby to Marlo for night feedings but cleans up the house and ... well ... eventually even awakens Marlo's husband's slumbering libido.

Credit Davis with a showcase performance: She gives Tully such a major helping of verve and savvy that it begins filtering through the entire movie.

As he did in his best movies (Thank You for Smoking and Up in the Air), Reitman wraps Tully's social and psychological interests in a glossy entertainment package. Cody, who previously worked with Reitman on Juno and Young Adult, has been known to produce snarky one-liners but here she leans toward the dark side of Marlo's anger and depression without quite toppling into either.

When Marlo visits her son’s school she initiates an ugly confrontation with the school’s principal over her son’s behavior; Marlo flips onto the dislikable side of the ledger. She’s belligerent with the principal, a woman who genuinely seems concerned about her son's ability to fit into the environment of this private school. Marlo isn't always a joy to be around.

Tully may speak loudly to women who can appreciate the overwhelming tsunami that has smashed on the beaches of Marlo's middle-aged life, a point at which the door has all but slammed shut on her youth.

To make that point, the movie eventually offers a throwback scene in which Marlo and Tully return to Marlo’s old stomping grounds in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn for a night on the town, a foray into the kind of nightlife for which Marlo has become decidedly too old.

It’s difficult to say more without introducing major spoilers, so I’ll simply say that the movie’s ending wraps things up a little too neatly — and, dare I say, with just a hint of a cop-out.

Tully can be seen as another look at a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a popular enough movie theme and one that still has plenty of life in it -- even if, in Tully, it doesn't produce a conclusion that's as convincing as Theron's performance.

A look at a marriage -- with a twist

A therapist (Ted Danson) suggests that Sophie and Ethan, a troubled California couple played by Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss spend a relaxing weekend at an isolated rural retreat in The One I Love, a mind-stretching look at a marriage. The therapist believes a short time away from routine will help get the couple's relationship back on track. Figuring they don't have much to lose, Sophie and Ethan embark on a weekend that's destined to change their lives. Working from a script by Justin Lader, McDowell takes the movie in an unexpected direction, pushing the story into territory that's best discovered in a theater, not in a review. With help from Duplass and Moss, McDowell mostly sustains a guessing game in which marital issues are explored along with questions of identity. The movie revolves around an intriguing enough gimmick, but McDowell can't quite make the story gel. Still, Moss -- staking out new territory after her long run on Mad Men -- brings a sense of playful independence to her work, and McDowell earns credit for almost getting a novel movie across the finish line.

Two sisters, one guy = complications

Three characters search for ... well ... something in Your Sister's Sister, an engaging indie.

Going in I was leery. Your Sister's Sister has all the trappings of the kind of small-stakes indie movies that have been glutting the art market of late. My attitude was formed in part by the movie's bona fides: Your Sister's Sister was directed by Lynn Shelton, who previously directed the painfully contrived indie comedy Humpday, and it includes a performance by indie regular Mark Duplass. Credited as the movie's executive producer, Duplass -- who comes out of the so-called mumblecore movement -- was last seen in the indie romance Safety Not Guaranteed, which arrived fully stocked with the usual array of unhinged characters.

Your Sister's Sister does share a kinship with some of its indie counterparts: Duplass's character, for example, seems stuck in an all-too-typical directionless limbo. But Your Sister's Sister goes against the grain of expectation to become an involving character study built around complex emotional entanglements.

And instead of being annoyed by these characters, we're often engaged by them -- at least, I was.

After a less-than-gracious speech at a memorial service for his late brother, Duplass's Jack is invited to spend a weekend at a cabin owned by the family of the late brother's former girlfriend. Said girlfriend (Emily Blunt) -- Iris by name -- thinks Jack needs a little time alone

When Jack arrives at this cabin on the Washington coast, he quickly learns that he's not going to be alone. Hannah (Rachel DeWitt), a lesbian, a vegan and Iris's half-sister, already has sought the solitude of the cabin to recover from the dissolution of a long-term relationship.

After an awkward start, Jack and Hannah spend the night sitting around the kitchen table, talking and downing tequila shots. They wind up in bed together, less driven by passion than by a bit of alcohol-induced experimental daring.

To further thicken the story's stew, Iris shows up the next day. She, too, was unaware that Hannah had been conducting her own emotional retreat at the cabin, but she's happy to see her sister and ready to pursue her as-yet-unexpressed feelings for Jack.

Being cooped up with three characters in a cabin can be disastrous, but the actors know how to win us over, as Jack and Hannah struggle to decide whether to tell Iris about their fling.

If I had to pick one actor of the trio as the movie's stand-out, I'd opt for DeWitt, who's smart, vulnerable and attractive as Hannah, a woman with a trick or two up her vegan sleeve. Blunt is winning as an equally vulnerable young woman, and Duplass is amusing in the self-consciously smart way we expect from a bright young man who has yet to figure out much of anything.

Together this threesome creates an amusing couple of days in the woods, where they learn something about one another and about themselves, bringing us along for an entertaining ride.

Love, time travel and a shabby motel

If American independent movies get any smaller, they may disappear entirely. I thought about this cinematic vanishing act, a mini-epidemic among the indie crowd, while watching Safety Not Guaranteed, a deadpan charmer that serves up an offbeat romance in a style so unadorned it appears to be no style at all.

The movie's central conceit involves time travel. Mark Duplass, a mumble core veteran who also served as one of the movie's producers, plays a Washington state recluse who claims to have invented a time machine.

Sci-fi mavens need not apply: Safety Not Guaranteed isn't really about traveling through time; it's about lives that seem to be marking time.

Duplass's Kenneth comes to the fore when a writer for a Seattle city magazine (Jake Johnson) notices a classified ad in which Kenneth seeks a partner for his time-travel adventures. Johnson's Jeff rounds up two interns (Aubrey Plaza and Karan Soni) and sets out to find the would-be time traveler.

Safety Not Guaranteed is another film about characters who appear to be damaged goods, and -- as befits the movie's taste for dreary locales -- our traveling trio checks into a shabby motel in rural Washington, cramming into one room in order to save per diem money for other pursuits.

Adrift in grief over her mother's death, Plaza's Darius also seems to be grappling with a non-existent love life and an ingrown tendency toward cynicism. Darius gradually begins to take over the story. She makes contact with Kenneth, pursues the time-travel story and begins to fall for her subject.

For his part, Soni's Arnau buries his head in his computer, and Johnson's Jeff pursues an old flame (Jenica Bergere).

The story creates a bit of uncertainty about whether Kenneth is crazy or whether he may actually have stumbled onto something momentous. He tells Darius he wants to return to 2001 to prevent the death of a former girlfriend. And, no, Sept. 11th isn't on the movie's agenda.

Director Colin Trevorrow tends toward comedy with a dour flavor, but Safety Not Guaranteed isn't always as funny as it probably wants to be. Within its narrow parameters, tough, the movie hits more than a few winning notes.

It's not physical safety that's at risk here, but emotional safety -- and although the world offers little protection in that area, Safety Not Guaranteed reminds us that people still sometimes take big leaps toward one another, and that such leaps always are a bit of a gamble.

When bad movies happen to good people

Great cast -- and not much else in Darling Companion.

I hate when this happens.

About a month ago, writer/director Lawrence Kasdan visited Denver with his wife Meg. They were on the road promoting Kasdan’s independently produced Darling Companion, which they co-wrote, which Kasdan directed and which opened the Boulder International Film Festival. (See interview below.)

Kasdan, of course, has had an estimable career, co-writing the screenplays for great populist fare such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and distinguishing himself on smaller movies such as Body Heat and The Big Chill.

So what’s to hate about any of this?

Only this: I liked Kasdan and enjoyed meeting him, which makes it all the more difficult to report that his latest movie struck me as thoroughly mediocre.

See what I mean? I hate when I like the filmmaker, but not the movie. But in the case of Darling Companion, that's what I'm stuck with.

Put another way, if a director has a cast that includes Kevin Kline, Diane Keaton, Richard Jenkins, and Dianne Wiest and still comes up short, it’s a good bet that the material is to blame.

Darling Companion isn’t funny when it wants to be, and it's not dramatic enough to be taken seriously as a sobering look at family frictions. It's strictly middle of the road.

Kline and Keaton play Joseph and Beth, a Denver-based husband and wife mired in a stale marriage. After their second daughter (Elizabeth Moss) marries at the couple's mountain retreat, the family hangs around for a little R&R.

Beth and Joseph are joined by Joseph's sister Penny (Wiest) and her obnoxiously friendly boyfriend (Jenkins). Penny's son Bryan (Mark Duplass) serves as a youthful add-on. Like Joseph, he's a doctor.

A lost dog puts the story in motion. Freeway -- so named because Beth found him on the side of a road -- races off, creating relationship tension between Joseph and Beth and setting off a variety of searches, one of them prompted by the family’s supposedly clairvoyant housekeeper, a preposterous character played by Ayelet Zurer.

Kasdan allows our perceptions about at least one of the characters to change as the movie progresses. Jenkins' character, whose life-transforming idea involves opening a British pub in Omaha, turns out to be less horrible than he initially seems.

Look, Darling Companion is small potatoes, a pallid misfire from Kasdan and his stellar cast.

Enough. I think you can tell where I'm coming from. I had more fun talking to the Kasdans than I did watching their movie. And I hope the fact that Darling Companion hasn't exactly been lighting critical fires -- as of this writing, the movie had earned an unfortunate 15 on Rotten Tomatoes -- doesn't dissuade them from trying another small, personal drama -- only one that works.