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." 

TOM MACHINE

A few days belated...

Mission: Impossible: Fallout--Secret agent Tom Cruise is given a retro-looking recorder informing him of his mission, which seems, quite frankly, impossible. The recording then self-destructs after five seconds. When the opening credits start on this sixth installment in the action series, they're accompanied by the image of a burning fuse and a montage of quick glimpses from the film we're about to see, edited to Lalo Schifrin's familiar theme music.

These nods to the format of Bruce Geller's classic TV show, which ran on CBS from 1966 to 1973, are very welcome. We get more: Improbably lifelike latex masks, for instance. Best of all, when Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg are transporting a captive villain through the sewers of Paris, we hear that insistent background music from the show: the snare drum, and that repeated phrase of "Da-DA-dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum-DAAAAA...[pause]...Da-da-da-da-DAAAA..."

But of course, these are just trappings. The hugely successful Mission: Impossible flicks long since abandoned the atmosphere of the old show, with its long, suspenseful sequences of minimal dialogue as the then-high-tech spies engineered massively convoluted, Murphy's-Law-defying scams to trick evil despots or gangsters. We very rarely learned anything about the personal lives of the "IMF Team," much less about the shadowy intelligence agency for which they worked. And there was rarely any sustained action.

The movies, by contrast, are all about the tortured personal lives of the characters, especially Cruise's Ethan Hunt. And they're built from one wildly overscaled action sequence to the next. They aren't a bit more ludicrous than the old show's theatrics, they're just ludicrous in a very different way.

Fallout has Cruise and a colleague skydiving right into Paris to infiltrate a soiree at the Grand Palais--one of the more flamboyant approaches to crashing a party we've seen in a while. Within minutes we get a savage martial arts brawl in a pristine men's room, not long after that we get a motorcycle chase around the Arc de Triomphe, and then it's off to London for a foot chase through St. Paul's, and so on. It all has something to do with stolen plutonium and a scheme by an old enemy of Ethan's to create an apocalyptic disaster.

And on its own terms, the movie, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie of The Usual Suspects, is relentlessly watchable. Cruise, absurdly boyish for a man in his mid-fifties, reportedly did much of his own stunt work, and it certainly looks like he did. I generally find it hard to take him seriously in hyper-competent man of action roles, but that's not a defect in a silly action fantasy like this, and there's no doubt that he has the energy and professionalism to carry a movie on this scale.

He's ably supported by Rhames and Pegg, along with juicy, hammy turns by Alec Baldwin, Angela Bassett, Vanessa Kirby and Sean Harris as the obsessed heavy. Henry Cavill, who makes a somewhat bland Superman for my taste, shows unexpected intensity and sexiness here as an arrogant CIA man assigned to keep an eye on Ethan. 

My one complaint about Fallout--again, on its own terms--is the same complaint I've tediously made about one big blockbuster after another over the last decade or so: It's too long, by twenty minutes to a half hour. It ends with an extremely protracted, crosscut scene involving different sets of characters trying to avert disaster. It's amusing in itself, but after well over two hours of shootings and beatings and knifings and crashes, we're so worn down we may want them to give up.

But that, of course, would be impossible.

NEO-FATAL

Opening this weekend is the animated feature The Boss Baby, with Alec Baldwin, currently busy playing another infantile boss on TV, providing the voice of the title role.

So...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's acknowledge the unusually cranky baby from Larry Cohen's 1974 It's Alive...

HEAD GAMES

Merry Christmas! Quickies on several Christmas Day openings: 

Concussion—Peter Landesman directed this straightforward drama starring Will Smith, who plays Dr. Bennet Omalu. This Nigerian pathologist came to the U.S. starry-eyed about the American Dream, and then learned what happens when you get between Americans and football.

While doing autopsies for the Allegheny County Coroner’s office in Pittsburgh, including one for down-and-out Steelers center Mike Webster, Omalu came to the conclusion that it might not be healthy for men to spend their careers bashing their heads into each other—he referred to the results of this as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. The NFL found his theory shocking and controversial.

After a while, it struck me that the film’s somber, brooding tone was less about the horror that befalls CTE victims and their families, and more about American angst over anything that challenges, complicates or interferes with the love of football. The best line, delivered by Albert Brooks, refers to the place the NFL has taken in America: “They own a day of the week,” he says. “The same one The Church used to own.”

Carol—The latest from Todd Haynes is this impeccable adaptation of the 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt. As in Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett is a rich lady in trouble. Carol is an affluent, elegant New Jersey housewife and mother, in the process of divorcing her husband. She’s out shopping when she meets Therese (Rooney Mara), an aspiring Manhattan photographer, working in a department store. The two are immediately riveted by each other, and as they get acquainted, eventually taking a road trip together, their relationship grows from yearning infatuation to a genuine bond. It need hardly be said that all does not go smoothly for them.

This is sort of a companion piece to Haynes’ Far From Heaven, his lush, Douglas Sirk-ish ‘50s soap opera in which Dennis Quaid struggled against his sexuality as if he’d been diagnosed with low blood sugar or anemia. But because the lead characters in Carol aren’t trying to overcome their identities, it’s probably a more enjoyable movie. It’s also probably better made—the period detail is rich but not fussy, and the acting bristles, both erotically and emotionally.

Blanchett is daringly mannered, both in her look and her delivery—at first she seems lacquered and campy, almost a little gothic. But as the movie progresses her grand style starts to blend perfectly with Mara’s touchingly unaffected, natural directness. Very simply, the two of them seem lucky to have found each other.

Daddy’s Home—Will Farrell is the square, trying-too-hard stepdad, and Mark Wahlberg is the cool absentee Dad with the motorcycle and the treehouse-building skills. They stupidly one-up each other for the love of Linda Cardellini and her rather unlikable kids, and the result is self-consciously “transgressive” slapstick of the kids-in-wheelchairs-getting-knocked-over style in vogue since The Hangover.

It’s fairly terrible, though I suppose it gets a smidge better in the homestretch when Farrell and Wahlberg aren’t competing anymore. My only other comment is: I can no longer see Mark Wahlberg without being reminded of Andy Samberg’s Saturday Night Live impression of him.

FROST HIT

Given his abstract-impressionist’s brush on window glass, you might imagine Jack Frost would be the artsy, snooty sort. But according to Rise of the Guardians, Jack’s a friendly, mischievous boy, eager for acceptance, dismayed that the kids who have him to thank for snow days and sledding fun can’t see him.

Jack, voiced by Chris Pine, is the hero of the computer-animated flick, conflated from William Joyce’s series of children’s books. The title characters are the legendary or allegorical figures who watch over childhood wonder, hopes and dreams. The others include Santa Claus, voiced like a radio-comedy Russian by Alec Baldwin, the Tooth Fairy, a winsome half-woman/half-hummingbird voiced by Isla Fisher, and the tough, Aussie-accented Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), who comes armed with a boomerang, but also has the tendency to leave a blooming flower in his burrow’s wake.

Best of all, maybe, is the Sandman, a roly-poly sort who doesn’t speak, but communicates by shaping his thoughts in sand over his head. They’ve all received their commissions from the omniscient—and thus, of course, highly enigmatic—Man in the Moon, and now it’s Jack Frost’s turn. If he becomes a full-fledged Guardian, then the kids may actually believe in him like they do Santa or the Bunny, and thus be able to catch a glimpse of him.

The menace is Pitch Black, aka the Boogeyman, given a nicely ironic, tut-tutting voice by Jude Law. Pitch is a simply pale figure in a brown robe, attended by a stamping herd of terrifying black horses—nightmares, of course.

Nostalgic for the Dark Ages, the salad days of terror and despair, Pitch looks to make a comeback, and he’s no minor adversary. So the Guardians must put aside their egos and grudges—even the Bunny, who resents Jack for the “Blizzard of ‘68” on Easter Sunday—and unify to defend childhood wonder.

Like last year’s fine Arthur Christmas, among other kid movies, Rise of the Guardians plays with the childhood desire to literalize and reconcile the difficult logistics connected to the duties of these symbolic figures, and does it in funny and imaginative ways. It also features an exciting action finale and many good jokes and some thrilling images, like the Sandman’s good dreams—sand-cast dinosaurs and sting-rays and dolphins—trooping to the rescue down suburban streets. That it’s not the best animated movie of the year testifies not to its weakness but to the genre’s strength these days.

RIP to the excellent Larry Hagman, passed on at 81, and to lovely Deborah Raffin, passed on at 59. More about the redoubtable Hagman, and his contribution to Monster-dom, in the next edition of Monster-of-the-Week.