Alluring surfaces enliven ‘Blink Twice’

 

  Actress Zoe Kravitz makes her directorial debut with Blink Twice, an energetic, often entertaining variation on a theme in which luxury-hungry women suddenly find themselves living lavishly on an island owned by a tech billionaire played by Channing Tatum.

  Kravitz, who co-wrote the screenplay with E.T. Feigenbaum, understands the need to seduce an audience before letting the other shoe drop. Kravitz optimizes the pleasure offered on a tropical island, where the point is to have a good time with fine food, carefully curated drugs, and no money worries.

   Blink Twice is about being captivated by surfaces that promise ease and pleasure, while ignoring indications that something sinister looms.

   Naomi Ackie, who gave a strong but overlooked performance in Whitney Houston: I Want To Dance With Somebody, plays Frida, an ambitious woman who works for a catering company that's running a fund-raising gala for Tatum's Slater King. 

   King says he's stepping down from his company to reflect. He also wants to atone for an offense that presumably went public but which the film never defines. 

    Laying on the soft-spoken charm, Tatum presents Slater as a model of newly acquired consideration and empathy that he attributes to a recent therapeutic epiphany.

    Posing as a partygoer rather than the help, Frida embarrasses herself when she stumbles. Slater puts her at ease.

     Before you can say "glitz," Frida and pal Jess (Alia Shawkat) are elevated from the ranks of servitude. They find themselves on Slater's private jet, living a fantasy of style and privilege.

      Ackie’s performance also suggests that Frida may have found someone who cares about her. If he owns an island, so much the better. It beats the hell out of gig work.

      Other women have been taken on the trip. Slater is also accompanied by a posse of fun-loving male loyalists, played by Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, Christian Slater, and, later, Kyle MacLachlan.

       Geena Davis portrays Stacy, Slater's assistant, the woman who tends to the details that are supposed to make everyone happy while the women compete for Slater's attention. Stacy also makes sure to collect everyone's cell phone upon arrival on the island, where the women are given the same white outfits to wear. 

        Adria Arjona plays Sarah, a woman who begins to suspect that something terrible may be happening, particularly after Shawkat's Alia disappears. Several of the women can't even remember that Alia had been there. 

      Another sign that there's a dark side to paradise arrives in the form of a stern maid (Maria Elena Olivares), whose forbidding look makes it seem as if she might have dropped in from a horror movie. 

        In some sense, Blink Twice needs the audience to be ahead of its characters. We've been schooled to go along with such things as we wait for Slater's true intentions to emerge.

        Despite its upbeat tempo and sustained glamor, the film eventually must deliver what we know is coming -- a serving of horror that steers Blink Twice into the choppy waters of revenge.

        Kravitz could have done more to modulate the movie's propulsive rhythms, and she takes the movie's  opulence beyond the point of diminishing returns. A concluding coda seems as tricky as it is meaningful.

        Still, Kravitz’s increasingly nasty tropical shenanigans glide through a lively one hour and 42 minutes that suggest a career behind the camera may take Kravitz far beyond Blink Twice's island.

A fading porn star returns to Texas

     Director Sean Baker has made movies that explore parts of American life Hollywood usually neglects. 

    Tangerine, a 2015 movie shot entirely on iPhones, dealt with transgender life on the fringes of Los Angeles. The Florida Project (2017) followed a six-year-old girl who lived in a motel with her mother and, at least for me, represents the film in which Baker’s interests and his aesthetic approach were most successfully blended.

   In Red Rocket, Baker tells the story of a fading porn star (Simon Rex) who returns to his hometown on Texas’s Gulf Coast. Desperate and broke, Rex’s Mikey gloms onto his estranged wife and former co-star (Bree Elrod) and her flinty mother (Brenda Deiss).

   Mikey isn’t about to abandon his dreams. He believes he can re-lignite his award-winning porn career by moving behind the camera. He has confidence in his eye for talent. And why not? Wasn’t he the winner of an industry award in the oral sex category? He sees himself as a star-maker.

    Mikey tries to build up a stake by selling pot for a woman (Judy Hill), who lives with her son (Marlon Lambert) and her tough associate (Brittany Rodriguez), a young woman whose face seems never to have been bothered by a smile.

    He also befriends a neighbor (Ethan Darbone) who idolizes him.

    Baker spends screen-time capital establishing the milieu in which Mikey finds himself, along with characters mostly played by non-professionals. He makes frequent stops at the Donut Hole, a shop where he first meets a 17-year-old worker he calls “Strawberry” (Suzanna Son). 

    Mikey immediately senses Strawberry’s porn star potential and courts her with his charm, dubious offers to help with her SATs, and lots of sex, amplified by one of Rex’s major assets. You can guess which.

    Much of the story is played for humor. Sans car and funds, Rex must ride around Texas City on a bicycle. His massive self-delusion is fueled by irrepressible energy that he channels into non-stop verbal barrages.

   An editor once told me on a particularly rumpled day that I looked like I was running even when I was standing still. The same goes for Rex, who moves through his days with Road Runner speed, often spewing his own hype. 

    Bake makes no judgments about Mikey’s career and Strawberry is no naive innocent. We know that Mikey has no qualms about ruining her life but she’s fired by some of the same desire to escape the stultifications of small-town life that drove him. She's sexually eager.

   And despite all his maneuvering, Mikey seldom seems entirely contemptible. He’s still got his youthful zeal.

   So what does Baker do with all of this? That’s the film’s problem. Despite its humor and observational ease when it comes to its characters and their location, the movie must at some point find a way to wrap things up. About three quarters of the way through Red Rocket’s  two-hours and eight minutes, the movie begins to feel long.

    No fair telling more about what happens in the final going. but the movie wraps things up in ways that feel abrupt. Still, Baker makes good use of Rex’s ability to spin his way into a role that spills chaos all over the screen.