Marjorie Prime [2017]

MPAA (UR would be PG-13)  RogerEbert.com (3 Stars)  AVClub (B+)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (G. Cheshire) review
AVClub (I. Vishnevetsky) review


Marjorie Prime [2017] (screenplay and directed by Michael Almereyda based on the stage play by Jordon Harrison) is a fascinating low budget indie sci-fi piece with a SINGLE simple "special effect" sequence that could have been pulled-off by a 10th grader ;-) ...

Set in the near future, it's about a relatively wealthy family whose aging mother / matriarch Marjorie (played by Lois Smith) is slowly coming down with dementia.  To perhaps help her better remember (or to simply accompany her, as her world inevitably shrinks / slows down) her daughter Tess (played wonderfully by Geena Davis) and son-in-law Jon (played by Tim Robbins) decide to buy for her a new programmable gadget called a "Prime" ... Basically, a "Prime" is a programmable holographic companion, which, since it is programmable, could be programmed to resemble (in the case of this story) a deceased loved-one.  So they buy her a "Prime", which Marjorie decides to program as a 40-year-old ("in his prime" ;-) version of her deceased husband Walter (played with wonderful, somewhat stilted/programmed inquisitiveness by Jon Hamm). 

Now the trick here is that though perhaps his holographic physical appearance was no doubt designed through "uploaded photographs," his memory bank is programmed by conversation.  The more one talked to him, thus feeding him with information, the more he becomes "real."  To make Walter Prime "more real" Marjorie has to talk to him, sharing her memories of her times with Walter (her deceased husband).  That puts grown daughter Tess and her husband Jon off the hook as Marjorie spends most of her time now talking to a quite interested Walter "Prime," and Jon seems to have fun then talking to Walter "Prime" as well as he "corrects" some of Marjorie's memories to better fit his own recollections of things.

The concept of creating such a "Prime" who exists primarily through the memories of others is truly fascinating.  And the story starts to play with it ... Midway through the movie Marjorie dies and Jon buys another "Prime" (now Marjorie "Prime") to help his wife Tess cope with the loss of her Mother.

Then another character dies (presumably in some tragic accident).  And soon there are THREE "Primes", interacting now _primarily_ with _each other_ with only one human feeding the three with  memories.

It's just a brilliantly simple film, though very well acted: All the actors play their characters straight as an arrow, producing a fascinating vision of the future in which at least some versions of some people could live past their human lives in this world, based on the memories that others had of them.

It just makes for a brilliant, just brilliant sci-fi story... and WITHOUT any "car chases" or "starship battles" ;-)


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The Wound (orig. Inxeba) [2017]

MPAA (UR would be R)  RogerEbert.com (3 1/2 Stars)  AVClub (B)  Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing

AVoir-ALire.fr (F. Mignard) review*
CinEuropa.org (V. Petkovic) review
EyeForFilm.uk.co (A. Wilkinson) review

Los Angeles Times (R. Abele) review
RogerEbert.com (P. Sobczynski) review
AVClub (M. D'Angelo) review


The Wound (orig. Inxeba) [2017] (directed and screenplay cowritten by John Trengove along with Malusi Bengu and Thando Mgqolozana) a South African film built around the traditional Xhosa initiation rite called Ulwaluko.  In the rite young Xhosa men are separated from their families for a period of time, taken to a camp in the countryside, invited/forced to endure a circumcision-like wound and then in the days-to-several weeks in which the wound heals, are led by a group of somewhat older mentors into manhood.  The film, which in the United States premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival opened recently at the Laemmle Theaters across the Los Angeles area.

The film which has a particular, arguably propagandistic take on the Rite -- it plays like a South African / traditional Bantu-people rendition of Brokeback Mountain [2005] or Moonlight [2016] ... -- NEVERTHELESS the film offers viewers a fascinating opportunity to reflect on what exactly makes "a man" or more generally "an adult."

I write this Dear Readers because there's little doubt that this age-old Xhosa rite is meant sincerely to initiate its young men into the Responsibilities of Adulthood, AND YET ... since it is (by its _nature_) SECRETIVE ... it lends itself to ... corruption / abuse:

A couple of the mentors prove to be gay, and quite notably EVEN THOUGH traditional Xhosa society _looks down upon_ homosexuality (and arguably _persecutes_ it), the Elders of the Xhosa community seem to LET IT GO ON ... there ... in the context of said Rite.

What the heck is going on??

Yes, Dear Readers, WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? ;-)

MY take on this Rite is perhaps different from the intent of the film (which at least to some extent sought to expose the hypocrisy present in "traditional Xhosa society").  For my own reasons, I _don't_ particularly like my understanding of the film, but it makes for A FASCINATING UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT MAKES A MAN / ADULT:

IS AN ADULT ... one capable of "keeping one's mouth shut?" :-).

It's to me a fascinating question, and plays in a very interesting way on the theme of the recent Stephen King inspired film It [2017] (which also opened here this week).  That film was about a town in which ALL the adults were "silent" even as all kinds of horrors took place in the town, horrors that their kids saw, but NOBODY seemed to do anything about.

Be that as it may, by the end of the current film, most Viewers would find it clear that the Xhosa traditional Ulwaluko initiation rite lends itself to homosexuality.  (And like other secretive Rites, it would lend itself to various other kinds of corruption / abuse).  That said, what does, in fact, the Rite teach its initiates?  And arguably is that lesson necessary for a Society's survival?

Fascinating stuff!


ADDENDUM

To us, the Servite Friars of the United States Province, any film about the various native peoples of Southern Africa has a special resonance because since 1948 we have been responsible for the Catholic Mission in KwaZulu (Zululand).  While the Xhosa and Zulu peoples are naturally not the same, many of their customs are similar.  Another GREAT recent movie about the native peoples of the region is The Forgotten Kingdom [2013] about a young man who comes back to the mountain kingdom of Lesotho to bury his father.


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It [2017]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (L)  RogerEbert.com (3 Stars)  AVClub (B)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
Los Angeles Times (J. Yamato) review
RogerEbert.com (C. Lemire) review
AVClub (K. Rife) review


It [2017] (directed by Andy Muschietti, screenplay by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman based on the novel [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] by Stephen King [wikip] [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] [IMDb]) felt like a film that will probably be better in its "director's cut".  Not that the film was bad; it did its job, but ... I always feel sorry for film makers trying to condense "1500 pages" of a novel (and by an author with a fanatical cult following) into a reasonably sized film for the movie screen.  Either the film runs way too long (like the LOTR's Return of the King [2003]) or ends up like this one, where one feels that 10, 20 even 30 or 40 necessary minutes were sent to the cutting-room floor by nervous producers worried about contemporary attention spans.

Though transposed to the 1980s from the 1950s (presumably to make Part II be set in the current day), the film tells the story of middle-school kids in a small, random town, a fictionalized Derry, Maine, that's tormented by ... many things.  Its more "mundane"/day-to-day torments come from teenage bullies, both male and female, as well as parents of all kinds: pushy, emotionally absent/clueless, to physically and even (implied) rapey / sexually abusive.  Indeed, there is enough quite natural horror in these kids' lives that there would be no need to add any supernatural horror.  BUT ... this is a Stephen King story ;-),

SO ... in the midst of these awful day-to-day torments one of the kids, a somewhat portly "New Kid on the Block" (played by Jeremy Ray Taylor), who incidentally secretly loves listening to the boys-band New Kids on the Block [wikip], discovers that the seemingly sleepy little town seems to be hiding (or is unawares of) a dark secret -- Every generation (27 years or so), there's a spate of unsolved murders / disappearances, mostly of children.  Then there's an eerie silence for 26 years and in the 27th year the horror repeats itself again.

What's going on?  Well, sleepy, or at least silent Derry seems to be in the midst of yet another one of these spates of murders / disappearances.  Another one of the kids, Billy Denbrough (played by Jaeden Lieberher), whose little brother Georgie (played by Jackson Robert Scott) is among the town's first current "disappeareds", is convinced that someTHING,, "IT," lurks in the city's sewers.  But even his own dad, Georgie's dad, seems to prefer that Georgie's disappearance remain unsolved.  "He's dead Billy," he tells his son. "Don't further traumatize your mother." 

And this is how it is: NO ONE of the older generation wants to do anything.  They prefer to cower in silence.  And perhaps they KNOW that ... "IT'll go away."

But this band of little "losers," which includes Billy (who stutters), Ben (the somewhat chubby kid who finds that awful / evil pattern in the town's history), Beverly (a 1980s-era "Molly Ringwald" character played by Sophia Lillis) known in the kids' middle school as the "class slut" (and yet harbors a secret at home), a small Jewish kid (played by Jack Dylan Grazer) whos's preparing for his Bar Mitzvah and African-American Mike Hanlon (played by Chosen Jacobs) whose grandpa would just prefer that he "keep his nose to the ground", working (and "just his mouth shut") CHOOSE to "not shut up."  And ...

... the rest of the story ensues.

It's honestly AN INTERESTING TAKE on MY GENERATION (I was a teenager in the 1970s and college student in the 1980s) ... when a lot of "secrets" were still kept quiet, even as OUR GENERATION'S TEEN ORIENTED FILMS often dealt with Horrors (one thinks of the Halloween, Prom Night, Nightmare on Elm Street movies... of my time).

It's just that the characters in the story seemed to be reduced simply to their most basic elements.  Again, a 30-40 minute LONGER film that would have fleshed out some of these characters' stories a bit more would have produced a more satisfying film.

So over all, it wasn't a "bad job" here -- there are obvious homages in the film to late-1970s-80s era classics like Carrie [1976] and The Shining [1980] (both based on Stephen King novels [wikip] [GR] [WCat] [Amzn]) as well as ... Breaking Away [1979] -- I just honestly wish that THIS FILM was ... a bit longer / more developed.


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Trip to Spain [2017]

MPAA (UR would be PG-13/R)  RogerEbert.com (3 1/2 Stars)  AVClub (C)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (G. Kenny) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review


Trip to Spain [2017] (directed by Michael Winterbottom) becomes the third feature length installment of The Trip series, following actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing somewhat fictionalized versions of themselves (Readers think here of the wildly successful 1990s-era American sitcom Seinfeld) as they travel through _some place_, in this case Spain, eating wonderful food (American Readers think of Anthony Bourdain's CNN "Parts Unknown") and talk / joke about life as experienced by upper-middle class Anglo 50 year-olds (American readers think of _both_ Seinfeld's and Bourdain's projects ;-).

Readers here who enjoyed the previous Trip movies, I reviewed the second one Trip to Italy [2014], will probably enjoy this film:  As the two continue to banter about "Life the Universe and Everything" (from the perspectives of two 50-something upper-middle-class white Anglo men) they continue to do often (IMHO) wildly funny impressions of various pop-culture icons (in one the two imagining Mick Jaggar doing an impression of Michael Caine ;-).  On the other hand, those who haven't seen the previous films will probably get "lost" in this one and not understand the concept behind the film / series at all.

Having ended-up enjoying their Trip to Italy [2014], I enjoyed this third installment as well.

However, if any Reader here would wonder _why_ Britain would have chosen to leave the European Union in its infamous "Brexit" vote last year, this film, along with Trip to Italy [2014] gives a clear-as-day answer: Britains still largely see other Europeans as "foreigners."  As such, they were never really "Europeans" to begin with.

Be that as it may, the film (and the series) is enjoyable (to white Anglo-American upper-middle class 50 year olds men).  To others?  I don't know.  Still, since I meet a good number of the above mentioned qualifiers, I really enjoyed it ;-).


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Ingrid Goes West [2017]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB ()  RogerEbert.com (3 1/2 Stars)  AVClub (B)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB () review
Los Angeles Times (J. Yamato) review
RogerEbert.com (S. O'Malley) review
AVClub (K. Rife) review


Ingrid Goes West [2017] (directed and screenplay cowritten by Matt Spicer along with David Branson Smith) is a cutting but wildly entertaining (in a feel-sorry-for sort of way) late-teen-to-early-20s-young-adult-oriented dramedy about Ingrid (played wonderfully / almost always convincingly by Aubrey Plaza) a young late-teen / early 20s "loser-ish" woman from the Midwest with "some issues."

SOME issues??  Okay, she had no real friends, was addicted to Instagram and had clearly become a Stalker.  But part of the film's charm (and arguably _its point_) is that while she's clearly "gone off the edge," she's clearly _not that far_ from said "edge" and the various "cool" / "have it together" people that she so admires are not necessarily that far from said "edge" either.

It's just that, once one "goes over the edge," all that there is ... is AIR ... and a long, inevitable (and painful) FALL down.  So going "over the edge" does have ... CONSEQUENCES even if those of us who haven't _yet_ "gone over the edge" ought to not be THAT PROUD because ... we could be close to said "edge" ourselves.

Very well... we meet Ingrid as she crashes the #Blessed #Perfect wedding of ... some girl she barely knows (but is a friend of on Instagram), spraying her with mace because ... she wan't invited to said #Blessed #Perfect wedding.  That lands her, well, in a local psychiatric institution ... for a few months.

When she gets released, she goes back to the empty home that her mother left her (mom died sometime back ... yes, Ingrid does have a story too ...) and after an afternoon long binge on Instagram finds a new Insta-lebrity, a Taylor Sloane (played with wonderful #Blessed ditziness by Elizabeth Olsen) who Ingrid decides she's now going to FIND and ... _model her life_ around.

Taylor lives in Venice Beach, CA, Ingrid's somewhere in the snow-bound Midwest.  No problem.  Ingrid goes to the bank, _cashes_ her inheritance (about $65,000) left her by her mother (stuffs said bills into a school backpack and ... heads California-way.

And thanks to Instagram ... she soon finds Taylor.  Okay, she kidnaps Taylor's dog (in order to "rescue it" for her) and ... with $65,000 ... that can make for a pretty pleasant life ... for a while.

Sigh, it's hard to say that Ingrid was evil.

All she wanted to do was to be Taylor's BFF.  And she _kinda does_ until ... Taylor gets introduced by Taylor's _psycho_ / sociopath brother Nicky (played wonderfully in mob-style user fashion by Billy Magnussen ... seriously, he "gets by" by befriending and then "knife to throat" extorting rich young people) to a model named Harley Chung (played again in even more #Blessed ditzy fashion by Pom Klementieff) who now TAYLOR would like to imitate ;-)

Poor Ingrid ... all she ever wanted to do is to be #liked by someone as popular and wonderful as Taylor and ... Taylor now wants to be #liked by someone else.

Much ensues ...

Again, Ingrid is #psycho.  But to say that she was _hugely_ more #psycho than most of the people that she wanted to be around and admired would not be fair.

It all makes for one funny / sad cautionary tale of our times.

Honestly, quite great job!


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Leap! (orig. Ballerina) [2016]

MPAA (PG)  CNS/USCCB (A-II)  RogerEbert.com (1 1/2 Stars)  AVClub (C-)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. McAleer) review
Los Angeles Times (K. Walsh) review
RogerEbert.com (M. Zoller-Seitz) review
AVClub (J. Hassenger) review


Leap! (orig. Ballerina) [2016] (directed by Éric Summer and Éric Warin, screenplay by Éric Summer, Laurent Zeitoun and Carol Noble, original story by Éric Summer and Laurent Zeitoun) an French / French Canadian (Quebecois) animated film, along with the Japanese animated film In This Corner of the World [2016] also recently released in the United States, offers American audiences a glimpse into another culture (in this case French), its humor and its (artistic) priorities.

The current film is set in France of the late 1870s-1880s.  Felicie (voiced by Elle Fanning) along with her fellow orphan BFF Victor (voiced by Dane DeHaan) flee their timeless, ancient (and presumably Catholic) orphanage by the sea in rural Brittany to pursue their dreams in Paris of the Belle Époque, that is when Gustave Eiffel was building the famous tower that would become the city's emblem and when the Statue of Liberty was being built as a gift to the United States.  Felicie wants to be ballerina, Victor an inventor.  Many difficulties / adventures await them when they make it the City of Light ...

The plot is quite predictable and thin: Felicie is after all a poor orphan from Brittany and here she wants to "make it" as a ballerina (and without any previous formal training) in probably the most class (and certainly _form_) conscious city in the world at the time.

But France had had a number of tastes of "Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité" over the course of the century that followed its Revolution.  So she is not without hope.  She finds people who do come to help her, notably a 30-something cleaning lady named Odette (voiced by Carly Rae Jeppson) who could both empathize with the aspirations of the barely teenage Felicie and _could actually help her_.  Even the otherwise impossibly strict ballet instructor Mérante (voiced by Terrence Scammell) at Paris' premier Ballet, perhaps because he was sooo impossibly strict, has learned to put aside mere consideration of class and has instead focused _his attention_ on his charges' actual output / performances.  (Yes, he demands nearly impossible perfection, but at least it's perfection that he's after and not merely keeping "class privilege" in tact.  In his new world view, a poor person with drive / talent finally "has a chance...").

Still the humor of the film, _very French_, expresses if with a smile, the previous reality when one's lives had been largely predetermined, indeed all but "set in stone," right from birth (and Dear Readers remember here that Felicie was left as a baby in front of an orphanage out in the middle of "nowhere" that is to say, Brittany).  "Oh come on, smile, it's not hopeless," one of Felicie's young ballerina companions tries to reassure her.  "No, no, no, this may be exactly one time when it still is," another tries to "bring her down to earth" / "crush her" but _gently_ ;-).

Contemporary viewers (and particularly Americans) may wince at the seemingly cruel put-downs, but are then invited to better appreciate the times.  We live in a time when almost everything seems possible.  Back then, that was just _starting_ to become the case.

Anyway, though the story is wafer thin, the art and its overall message -- don't give up -- are not.  Viewers are treated to a lovely if exaggerated view of Paris of the 1880s, and the ballet / dance animation is almost photo-realistic.  As such, the film will not necessarily be for everyone (ie not for those who would have perhaps wished for more plot, nor for those who simply don't like the French or find their (often gallows) humor / way of saying things to be surprisingly cruel).

But if one were interested in how a non-Anglo culture would tell a story aimed at inspiring young children, especially young girls, ... well ... this is not necessarily a bad film to see.

Over all, pretty good job!


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The Hitman's Bodyguard [2017]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (O)  RogerEbert.com (2 1/2 Stars)  AVClub (C+)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (S. Wloszczyna) review
AVClub (I. Vishnevetsky) review

The Hitman's Bodyguard [2017] (directed by Patrick Hughes, screenplay by Tom O'Connor) is a surprisingly current and perhaps prophetic comedy that reminds us that sometimes it really requires a court jester to warn "the powers that be" that something is deeply awry.

In the film, a fictionalized thug named Vladislav Dikhovich (played by Gary Oldman) ex-president of a midsized post-Soviet/post-Communit State, nominally Belorussia but he could have been from any number of post-Soviet / post-Communist States across Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucuses finds himself on trial at the International Criminal Court at the Hague for War Crimes / Crimes Against Humanity.  Yet eye witnesses to his crimes tend to die or "change their stories" for fear of death or the death of their loved ones.

What to do?  Well there is one possible witness, an incarcerated African American contract assassin named Darius Kincaid (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who along with his Mexican wife Sonia (played by Salma Hayek) are rotting away (separately) in maximum security prisons in Britain.  Sonia is by all accounts "a small fish."  She's being held by the authorities to provide pressure on Darius.  Why?  Because of the circles in which he operated, he could provide information on, and here, in a pinch, even testify against such thugs as Vladislav Dikhovich.

Obviously, the authorities would have preferred to use more meritorious witnesses to testify against Dikhovich but ... as I already mentioned, they tended to find bullets in their heads or be so credibly threatened by Dikhovich's henchmen that they tended to "walk away" from their previous statements.  So all the prosecutors at the ICC were left with was ... the testimony of someone like Darius Kincaid.

But even getting this clearly less than ideal witness from England to Holland proved to be frighteningly difficult.  Dikhovich's henchmen ambushed Interpol's heavily armed convoy escorting Kincaid from his prison somewhere near Manchester, England to the Hague.  Clearly, with the stakes this high, even Interpol's security was compromised.

What to do?  Well certainly motivated / tough as nails but still relative rookie Interpol officer Amelia Roussel (played by Elodie Yung) who had been, quite surprisingly, given the task of getting Kincaid to his destination, recognizes that she can't trust her own people to complete this mission.  So she calls on an American ex-boyfriend named Michael Bryce (played by Ryan Reynolds) who runs a low-key private security firm to get Kincaid across still much of England, across the Channel and then to the Hague.  Bryce's operation is "low key" because he had had a terrible mishap in his work (lost a client) some years back, a mishap that he blamed on Roussel.  Roussel knew that she was not at fault, and thus continued to trust Bryce's capabilities in "getting the job done" even as Bryce himself seemed to feel (bitterly) that he was destined to work "small potatoes" jobs.

Of course Bryce's "low key" security operation was exactly what was needed to get Kincaid to the Hague _largely_ "under the radar."  Yet, of course, much had to ensue ...

Yes, dear Readers, one could dismiss this film as Mission Impossible / Jason Bourne-like pulp.  Yet, this film is arguably more serious than the MI films and more current than the Jason Bourne ones:

This current film asks some very sharp questions of the very project of the International Criminal Court: To get even the Serbian war criminals Radovan Karadžić, Ratko Mladić and the biggest fish
Slobodan Milošević required years of waiting (for arguably the overthrow of the government in Serbia).  To get someone like the fictionalized Vladislav Dikhovich (from a far larger state than the statelets of former Yugoslavia) to the Hague at all would be _really difficult_.  Further, given that a former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was, in fact, poisoned as a candidate (by dioxin) by presumably Russian FSB agents because he was running then on a platform opposed to the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin, IT IS ENTIRELY POSSIBLE that the arrest of pro-Putin strongmen leading pro-Russian states and stateless across the former Soviet Union for War Crimes / Crimes Against Humanity COULD PRODUCE THE KIND OF CARNAGE envisioned in the current film as they, like the fictionalized "Belorussian" strongman Dikhovich in this film could well choose to defend themselves, their interests and those of their friends by truly _any_ means necessary.  (This film seems to predict a very ugly and violent future awaiting us ... if we take seriously the I.C.C. and its mission.  A true drive to "clear the swamp" could produce a real bloodbath... This MAY prove necessary as unchecked corruption only makes things worse, but let's go into such a project with eyes open...).

Then Kincaid has a back-story and his first brush with Terrorism was _not_ with bearded olive skinned Middle Eastern types but rather with white racists who murdered his preacher father in Alabama...

So all in all, this "court jester" of a film points out some really unnerving stuff:  (1) True "big fish" war criminals aren't exactly easy to apprehend and their networks of henchmen and hidden kingpins could very well choose to fight back, and (2) to people of color and minority religions in the U.S. don't necessarily have "Middle Eastern" terrorists to fear.  White men with hoods over their heads or wearing Nazi armbands scare just fine.

One surprisingly unnerving "comedy"


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