IMMIGRANTS, BOSSES AND BABIES

Opening this weekend:

I Carry You With Me--Ivan and Gerardo grow up gay and closeted in Mexico. They meet, fall passionately in love, have to keep it secret from their families, and eventually immigrate, separately and illegally, to the U.S. Over many years, Ivan finds success in the restaurant business; later the two of them reunite in New York.

The director is veteran documentarian Heidi Ewing, of Jesus Camp and other chronicles. She began this one as another non-fiction feature about two of her friends, but eventually decided the film had to dramatize their younger days. So various excellent young actors play the characters at different stages of their lives, and Ewing employs some of the initial documentary footage she shot of the real guys as well.

The result is a verite epic with the flavor of a good long novel. There are many powerful, even harrowing scenes, as when the child Gerardo is terrorized by his father, who already suspects the truth about him, or Ivan's and his friend Sandra's desert border crossing. Ewing's technique makes high drama feel lifelike, and more significantly, reminds us that real life is high drama. 

The Forever Purge--The Purge series, launched in 2013 by screenwriter and director James DeMonaco, is set in a theocratic near-future America in which, once a year, anarchy is sanctioned; for a twelve-hour period, nothing, including murder, is illegal. The idea, supposedly, is that this will purge people of our rage, and society will be stable the rest of the year.

There's been something vile all along about the way these movies offer this loathsome outrage for our delectation; they're also, alas, efficiently made and very watchable. This fifth entry has a western flavor; it's set in a small Texas town, and deals with Mexican immigrants and the suspicious, bigoted, affluent Anglos for whom they work.

This time, when The Purge ends, it...doesn't end. A faction of nationalists and white supremacists declares that the Purge is now permanent, and uses the opportunity to try to "cleanse" America racially. An anglo rancher and his family, attacked by the "Purgers" for being rich, band together with a few of their undocumented employees and desperately try, in what DeMonaco probably regards as blistering irony, to flee across the border into Mexico.

The movie is full of shaggy bikers out of a Mad Max film and nightmarish masked riders out of a spaghetti western fever dream. Seven months ago I might have still dismissed this as hokum, crude theatrics; now the "Purgers" look disgustingly but unmistakably like the January 6 rioters. It's hard to escape the conclusion that what The Forever Purge presents as horror is what these people want. Even though the movie's diverse heroes are the sort of people that reactionaries regard as the bad guys, this movie still might serve that audience as porn.

The Boss Baby: Family Business--Expanded from a children's book by Marla Frazee, 2017's The Boss Baby was a pretty laborious animated saga, but it had a hilarious character at its center: toddler Ted Templeton, who swaggered around in the persona of a corporate honcho. The diminutive tycoon spoke in the peerless silky growl of Alec Baldwin, tossing off lines like "I need upsies" as if he were asking an administrative assistant for a cup of coffee.

In this sequel Ted, now grown up, is transformed back into a baby, and his older brother Tim (James Marsden, replacing Tobey Maguire in the original) is transformed back into a little kid so that they can infiltrate the school for overachieving kids that Tim's daughters attend. Tim's younger daughter (Amy Sedaris) is, it turns out, herself a boss baby.

In short, it's even more laborious than the first film; I wouldn't recommend unless you need to kill a slow afternoon with a six-year-old. But if you go, you'll see gags referencing everything from Pulp Fiction to Norma Rae, and the movie still has Baldwin going for it, delivering quips like "I'm in the dum-dum holding tank!" with effortless authority. He gets to square off with another great Hollywood voice, Jeff Goldblum, as the oily, passive-aggressive headmaster.

Also, it has kind of a pretty song, called "Together We Stand."