TRACK STAR

Opening this weekend:

Bullet Train--Brad Pitt plays one of several professional assassins riding the title vehicle on an overnight zip from Tokyo to Kyoto. Dubbed "Ladybug" by his dispatcher (Sandra Bullock), he's a lethal fellow with mad fighting and weapons skills, but he regards himself as a magnet for bad luck, and he's weary of his career and wants more positivity in his life.

This is Pitt in frumpy, glamor-debunking mode, decked out in a bucket hat, drab jacket and sneakers, with horn-rimmed nerd glasses. His manner is pleasant and unassuming; a central joke of the movie is that Ladybug clearly has no wish to hurt anyone. Pitt is very good company here, in the way that only a veteran movie star can be, and as a model for action movie heroes to come I heartily approve.

There are other strong actors here--Aaron Taylor-Young and Brian Tyree Henry as a team of bickering Brit killers, Hiroyuki Sanada and Andrew Koji as father-and-son assassins, Benito A Martinez Ocasio as a vengeful Mexican hit man, Zazie Beetz as a deadly concessions peddler, Joey King as a schoolgirl type with secrets, all chasing a briefcase McGuffin and trying to avoid the wrath of a shadowy Russian gangster known as "The White Death," not mention a pesky (if rather sweet-faced) boomslang snake on the loose. A few big names turn up in amusing cameos.

Yet all of this creditable work doesn't quite add up to a satisfying movie. Directed by David Leitch from a script by Zak Olkewicz adapted from a Japanese novel by Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train feels like an exercise in nostalgia; it's like one of the innumerable '90s-era knockoffs of Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez or (especially) Guy Ritchie, full of savage yet "ironic" facetious violence and whip pans and cute but bloody flashbacks and characters engaging in detailed discussions of pop culture (Thomas the Tank Engine in this case).

It's well-crafted and perfectly watchable, as long as you aren't too squeamish. But for me, it lacked any real emotional stakes, and the homestretch grows overblown and tediously overextended. Compare it to 2018's underrated Bad Times at the El Royale, another faux-Tarantino throwback that had the same tongue in cheek, but a bit of heart in its chest as well.

Now on Prime  Video:

Thirteen Lives--It's the story of a rescue mission with the number thirteen in the title, and it's directed by Ron Howard. That's a pretty solid recipe for success.

In June of 2018 twelve members of a youth soccer team and their coach went on an outing into a cave in a provincial mountain park in northern Thailand. An unexpected early monsoon hit after they went in, the paths quickly filled up with water, and the boys were trapped, more than two miles into the narrow, twisty passages. The rescue efforts that followed over the next three weeks included participants ranging from Thai Navy Seals to U.S. Military to Brit rescue divers to a Bangkok-based engineer who figured out how to divert rainwater from sinkholes on the mountain, into the agricultural fields below. The movie asserts that more than 5,000 people from 17 countries pitched in.

Howard focuses on the Brits, nicely underplayed played by Colin Farrell, Viggo Mortensen and Tom Bateman, and an Australian diver, played by Joel Edgerton, who was called in because of the specifics of his medical background. Like Howard's best film, Apollo 13, this is a fairly deep dive (sorry about that) into the technical difficulties of the operation, and this attention to detail adds to the suspense rather than dragging on the pace.

The movie's a bit of a harrowing ordeal at times, especially for those of us with a claustrophobic streak, but it's just about impossible not to invest in it emotionally. And while it's inspiring, it may also leave you a little exasperated with our seeming inability to work together for the common good when it's not such an obviously urgent crisis. What a pity it's so hard for us to remember that, in the end, all humankind is one big Thai soccer team, hoping to get out of our respective caves.

JUNGLE ALL THE WAY

Opening in theaters this weekend:

The Lost City--In old movies, lost cities and worlds and civilizations were often destroyed by a volcano at the end, as the explorers just barely escaped. It was as if, in the tradition of such storytelling, once westerners had laid eyes on an exotic unknown place, its destiny was fulfilled and it had no need to carry on existing.

This new adventure comedy, starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, is so old-school that it employs the venerable volcano device. Here, at least, it doesn't come out of left field, but is integrated into the plot; Bullock plays Loretta, a romance novelist who has been kidnapped and taken to a tropical island by a rich nutcase (Daniel Radcliffe) who believes she has the archeological translation skills to help him locate a treasure in a lost city he's unearthed. A nearby volcano, about to erupt, provides the urgency.

Tatum plays Loretta's cover model Alan, who engages a cool ex-Navy Seal mercenary (Brad Pitt) to rescue her, and tags along. Soon enough it's just Loretta and Alan, bumbling through the jungle on their own, struggling to elude the rich guy's goons. And, of course, bickering.

Directed by the brothers Aaron and Adam Yee from a script by a gaggle including Seth Gordon, Oren Uziel and Dana Fox, this film's pilferage goes beyond the volcano bit; it draws, directly or indirectly, on everything from Romancing the Stone to the Hope-Crosby Road pictures. It isn't necessarily all that much dumber than any of those movies; nonetheless it's pretty dumb.

Even so, it sort of works. Bits of the dialogue show flashes of wit, and Brad Pitt, employed to send up the sort of hypercompetent man of action that only exists in the movies, probably constitutes the flick's best joke, although the filmmakers can't resist spoiling it at the very end.

Above all, Bullock never sucks. She's been a movie star for three decades now, and she knows what she's doing; she can be silly without going shrill or cartoonish, and can modulate seamlessly from broad schtick to sweet, delicate moments. Even when a movie serves her poorly, she's consistently good company, and Tatum, with his amiable, logy-minded delivery, pairs well with her. It's also refreshing that, for a change, the leading lady is more than a decade and a half older than her love interest.

THE CAPER CHASE

Opening this week:

Ocean's Eight--The Ocean this time is Debbie, sister of Danny Ocean. Just paroled, Debbie, played by Sandra Bullock, starts assembling a crew for a modest little heist: The Met Gala in Manhattan.

Cate Blanchett plays some kind of shady bar manager, Mindy Kaling is a jeweler, Sarah Paulson is a fence turned suburban mom, Rihanna is a hacker, the rapper known as Awkwafina plays a hustler and pickpocket, and Helena Bonham Carter plays a dotty Irish fashion designer. An eighth member, neurotic movie star Anne Hathaway, is unwittingly drafted into the crew.

Near the beginning, Debbie tells her pal that she's run through the caper again and again in her head while she was in the joint, working out the bugs, and that she's confident it's foolproof. What director Gary Ross, who wrote the script with Olivia Milch, then unfolds for us is quite possibly the silliest, least-likely-to-go-smoothly criminal plot I've ever seen depicted in a movie. The circumstances required to come together serendipitously would seem optimistic not only in the earlier films in the Ocean series, but in a Gilbert and Sullivan musical.

This may have been intentionally part of the joke by Ross and Milch; in any case it doesn't much hurt the film. Ocean's Eight is about eight beautiful, commanding actresses striding around swanky settings in dazzling outfits, and getting the better of skunky men. It's lavishly yet slickly made, and devoid of any significant emotional or intellectual content. I found it thoroughly undemanding and enjoyable.

None of the stars are remotely asked to stretch themselves, and that works to the movie's benefit, too--everybody's low-key and relaxed, and their interplay is droll without any straining. All eight shine for at least a scene or two, but unsurprisingly the standout is the bedraggled but game Helena Bonham Carter. Her theft of the movie is by far the most efficient heist we get to see.

American Animals--This is a far more plausible caper movie than Ocean's Eight. Indeed, it's based on a true story.

Or is it? At the beginning, the legend "THIS IS NOT BASED ON A TRUE STORY" appears, then the words "NOT BASED ON" vanish. As with the disclaimer at the beginning of last year's I, Tonya, it's an ingeniously ambiguous ploy that can be read several ways, but in any case acknowledges the unreliability of "true stories."

The story in question is the 2004 plot by four college-age numbskulls to rob the rare books room in the library at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, after subduing and tying up the librarian. Their targets included an original Audubon folio and a first edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (the title phrase comes from a line in Darwin referencing Kentucky).

Although the books were worth millions, the crime, at least as interpreted here by the British writer-director Bart Layton, doesn't seem to have been principally about money. None of these guys are depicted as destitute; one was rich, another a promising art student. The motive, rather, seems to have been to break loose from the banality and drudgery of their lives as they perceived them, to be more like movie characters. They openly reference The Shawshank Redemption and Reservoir Dogs, and even use Tarantino's "Mr. Green" and "Mr. Pink" alias system (pointlessly, since they all know each other). (Note: after this review posted I was reminded that the same system was earlier used by the robbers in the original Taking of Pelham 123, but I'd guess that these clods were thinking of Reservoir Dogs; I doubt their movie memories went back to 1974.)

The four actors who play the robbers (Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters, Blake Jenner and Jared Abrahamson) were unfamiliar to me. They're all terrific, and are well supported by some vets like Ann Dowd as the hapless librarian and Udo Kier as (of course) a dubious character.

Layton counterpoints his painfully naturalistic dramatization with documentary footage--talking heads of all four of the chastened and contrite real-life conspirators, and others, and even some Brechtian intermingling of them with the actors playing them, something in the manner of the film version of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. It's expert moviemaking, one of the best-crafted films I've seen this year, but it's also emotionally intense: Even though it doesn't involve murder, the plot comes across as truly horrific and vile, from the outrage committed against the librarian to the simple fact that these guys were robbing a library.

And yet, here all four of these middle-class white boys are, long out of prison and carrying on with their lives, probably hoping that the publicity they get from this movie might give them a boost. One of them even pointed a gun at law enforcement officers during his arrest, and somehow didn't get turned into Swiss cheese. American Animals may make you want to take a knee.

Here are belated quick looks at a couple of other movies about formidable women, still in theaters:

Book Club--The title bibliophile's club consists of four affluent L.A. women: widow Diane Keaton, whose kids want her to move to Arizona; rich, perennially single hotel tycoon Jane Fonda; federal judge Candice Bergen, long-divorced and unable to move on; and married but romantically frustrated chef Mary Steenburgen. One month the assigned book (chosen by Fonda) is Fifty Shades of Grey, and it gets all four of them stirred up. Andy Garcia, Craig T. Nelson, Don Johnson, Richard Dreyfuss, Ed Begley Jr. and Wallace Shawn are the various men who enter, or re-enter, the lives of the ladies.

The script of this emeritus chick flick, by director Bill Holderman and Erin Simms, is pretty terrible, with banter and little heartfelt speeches linked together by some embarrassing physical shtick. But this, in itself, is a testament to the skill and charisma of these four magnificent women. Like Ocean's Eight, this movie is redeemed by a bunch of really good actresses--their committed delivery gives even the feeble college-playwrighting-class monologues here a degree of gravitas.

Probably nothing in the film is more mortifying than the idea that these powerful, worldly women would be so shocked and scandalized by the feeble Fifty Shades books. At one point, while reading, Keaton is heard to mutter "Give me a break." There's a solid literary judgement.

RBG--In Book Club, Candice Bergen's federal judge has a bobblehead of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on her desk. The suggestion is that even the Supreme Court Justice's peers might regard her as a heroine.

This documentary explains why Justice Ginsburg's current status as a cultural icon, on t-shirts and mugs and Saturday Night Live, isn't and shouldn't be just a fad. Those who, like me, were unfamiliar with her career as a lawyer will learn that even if she hadn't been named to the Court, she would still have a place in its history, having argued before it repeatedly, and mostly successfully, for gender equality when it was still an exclusive boy's club.

Directed by Betsy West and Julie Cohen, RBG is, as cinema, little more than a news special, though a deft, absorbing and graphically clever one. We're given a tour of her life, from her Brooklyn childhood to her college years all the way through to her improbable but seemingly heartfelt close friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia. The talking heads here range from Orrin Hatch to Bill Clinton, though some of the most intriguing interviews are the subjects of Ginsburg's cases, the real-world human faces for which she fought her abstract appellate battles.

Most of intriguing of all, however, is RBG herself, reserved and unpretentious, unmistakably partisan and passionate yet collegial. At a time when high-profile civility seems rare in American discourse, she comes across as a humbling example to us all.

(RE)LIVER & MINIONS

Lots of weird science opening this weekend:

Self/less—Ben Kingsley plays Damian, an ultra-rich New Yorker dying of cancer. A shady scientist (Matthew Goode) tells Damian that he can transfer his consciousness into a healthy young body grown in a lab. Damian agrees to this, and finds himself residing in the strapping frame of Ryan Reynolds. Relocated to New Orleans, he starts partying, but inexplicable recurring visions make him suspect that there are things the scientist hasn’t told him.

The ideas here are very familiar in sci-fi; in movies they go back at least as far as the 1936 Boris Karloff thriller The Man Who Changed His Mind, and there are also strong echoes of John Frankenheimer’s 1966 Seconds. But Self/less, directed by Tarsem Singh from a script by David and Alex Pastor, is a reasonably unpredictable and tightly-paced variation on it.

The opening quarter or so of the film is particularly strong, not only for the moral questions it raises but also for the fantasy fulfillment it offers, especially to aging audience members. Wouldn’t it be fun, the movie asks us, to suddenly find yourself several decades younger, healthy, rich, without attachments and looking like Ryan Reynolds?

After this promising set-up, the way the movie plays out is a bit disappointingly routine. Like a lot of popular sci-fi, it raises intriguing questions, then gives us car crashes and gunfights. But within the conventional format to which it aspires, Self/less isn’t merit/less.

Minions—This animated feature is an origin story for the little goobers who debuted in 2010's Despicable Me. Bright-yellow, bib-clad, goggled (sometimes two-eyed and sometimes cyclopean) and shaped like Tic Tacs, they were first seen as the aides to Gru, the super-villain from that excellent film, and as they giggled and chattered at each other in what sounded like some sort of sped-up Esperanto, they pretty much ran off with the movie.

I guess I had vaguely assumed that the Minions were meant to be some cybernetically-engineered creations of Gru's. According to this film, however, they've been around since prehistoric times, and their tendency, we are told by The Narrator (Geoffrey Rush), has always been to serve the most despicable master they can find.

These include, in early sequences, Napoleon Bonaparte, cavemen and a marvelously loutish Tyrannosaurus Rex. The meat of the movie, however, is set in 1968 and has them working for a chic super-villainess called Scarlett Overkill (voiced by Sandra Bullock). Their assignment: Steal the crown of Elizabeth II (Jennifer Saunders). In the course of the very silly, almost free-associational storyline, one of the Minions, Bob, gets crowned King of England.

Minions is an enjoyable film full of visual beauties—the title sequence splendidly evokes William Steig—and many hilarious episodes. It isn't the classic that Despicable Me is, to be sure, probably because the Minions are, as the name implies, born supporting players. Endearing though they are, they don't have the richness or complexity to carry a movie, and Scarlett Overkill and the handful of other characters bounced off of them really don't either. The Minions were designed to be scene-stealers, but you can't steal what already belongs to you.

GRAVE MATTERS

Opening this weekend:

Gravity—Sandra Bullock is a scientist from the Space Shuttle. She’s spacewalking, installing some sort of new gizmo, when a collision with some debris sends both her and hotshot astronaut George Clooney spinning untethered through the cosmos. It’s basically the same setup as Ray Bradbury’s 1949 short story “Kaleidoscope,” except the men flying away from each other in that tale knew they were lost, and their conversation was a poignant poetic elegy to life.

Gravity, however, is a no-let-up survival thriller. Clooney and Bullock struggle to get back to the wrecked Shuttle, and from there to the International Space Station. At some point they get separated, and Bullock must make a third extravehicular sojourn, this time to a Chinese space station with working escape pods.

Clooney has fun fitting his own persona into the archetypical squared-jawed, calm in the face of disaster astronaut, cracking dumb jokes and flirting with the terrified Bullock, partly to keep her spirits up, partly just because he’s a flirt. But it’s really Bullock’s movie, and she’s uncommonly touching as this melancholic woman with a dreadful tragedy in her past who still keeps fighting to survive.

The director is the excellent Alfonso Cuaron, of Y Tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter and the…well, I can’t keep those titles straight, but the best and spookiest of the Harry Potter movies. He keeps the tension pulse-poundingly high in Gravity, and the otherworldly atmosphere beautiful yet hostile—the dramatic irony of sailing through the boundlessness of space and at the same time being oppressively trapped is not lost on him.

Gravity is so exciting, so close to a home run, that it seems ungrateful to nitpick, but there’s no way around it—the picture gets away from Cuaron in the end. The movie begins with a frightening sense of plausibility and realism, but as the story progresses its action also grows steadily more comic-book corny and improbable. It’s still entertaining, but it moves more into the realm of Hollywood hokum. Then, in the final minutes, as Cuaron piles more and more peril and obstacles onto poor Bullock’s plate, her plight begins to seem a little funny.

Another small grumble: The concussions which tear the spacecrafts apart happen, appropriately, with no sound at all, and the effect is weird and chaotic and chilling. But the filmmakers can’t resist piling on Steven Price’s brooding, ominous music, to cue us that something terribly dangerous is happening—and also, maybe, to reassure us that the sound system in the theater hasn’t malfunctioned. I can’t help but wonder if complete cosmic silence might have made these scenes even more disorienting and scary.

Parkland—The title refers to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, to which John F. Kennedy was taken after his motorcade passed Dealey Plaza in November 1963. He was already a goner by the time he got to the emergency room, and that’s the oddity of this film, directed by Peter Landesman—it’s all aftermath.

The main characters in Parkland are the likes of ER resident Jim Carrico (Zac Efron), or Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), who was shooting home movies when the motorcade passed, or FBI man James Hosty (Ron Livingston), who had gotten a threatening note from Lee Harvey Oswald weeks before the shooting, or Forrest Sorrels (Billy Bob Thornton) of the Dallas branch of the Secret Service—ordinary people remembered for their proximity to an iconic historical shocker. We also get a look at the Oswald family—maybe the two best of the film’s many strong performances are those of James Badge Dale as Lee Harvey’s brother Robert, and Jacki Weaver as their nutty mother.

While Landesman’s script is adapted from a book by Vincent Bugliosi that reportedly espouses the Oswald-acted-alone viewpoint, the movie takes no obvious position pro or con on the matter of a conspiracy. It sticks to what is more or less undisputed in the record.

This could legitimately lead to the question of what, exactly, is the value of one more retelling of this extremely familiar story. I‘d guess that the answer, aside from capturing uniformly fine ensemble acting, is to suggest that national hysteria, perhaps mixed with the celebrity worship of Jackie Kennedy, may have been more than sufficient to account for the irregularities in the case that, in retrospect, seem so suspicious.

The characters scramble around recklessly, and while the movie seems to suggest that they’re honestly doing their best, they’re too stunned to get it right. A coroner seems ghoulish when he demands that the President’s body be left behind for an autopsy, and the Secret Service agents seem goodhearted when, "for Jackie," they ignore his demand, but the result is that no autopsy was performed in the highest-profile murder case in U.S. history.

Whatever your view of that strange and indelible historical episode, nothing in Parkland is likely to change it. But I found the film absorbing from start to finish.

NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

Despite the title, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a mostly quiet movie, & for quite a while it keeps its emotional distance, too. The central character, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), the son of a Manhattan jeweler (Tom Hanks), speaks in a direct, declarative manner, even when, a couple of times, he raises his tone in anger.

He has plenty to be angry about. Oskar’s very smart & imaginative but obsessive, phobic, possibly Aspergers-afflicted. None of this gets any better after 9/11, on the morning of which his father is at a business meeting more than a hundred flights up in the World Trade Center. This, presumably, is the reference of the title—how New Yorkers perceived the attacks. The loss leaves Oskar even more confused & secretive, & opens a gulf between him & his gentle, shattered mother (Sandra Bullock).

Oskar’s Dad would send him on fanciful “reconnaissance missions” in Central Park, designed in part to force him to interact with other people, in search of artifacts of a mythical “Sixth Borough” of New York City. About a year after what Oskar refers to as “The Worst Day,” the boy is snooping in his Dad’s closet, & he finds a key in a small envelope with the word “Black” written on it.

Taking this as a posthumous reconnaissance mission, this strange, wounded kid ventures out into his strange, wounded city. He starts spending his Saturdays pestering people named Black throughout the Five Boroughs, sure that if he can find the lock that this key fits, it will reveal a message from his father. Really, of course, he just wants to keep his connection to his beloved departed parent alive.

I must admit that it took a while for me to respond to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The film is directed with precision by Steven Daldry & beautifully shot by Chris Menges, & it features another lovely, urgent score by Alexander Desplat. There’s no shortage of fine acting, either. But for almost the first half, the script, by Eric Roth from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, seems precious & self-consciously whimsical.

It’s also a particularly single-minded exercise in that relentlessly pursued theme in the American narrative tradition, the Search for the Father. For all the excellence of young Horn’s performance, when the supposedly sweet-natured & sensitive Oskar ignores, even exacerbates his mother’s sufferings, it becomes hard to like him, fairly or not.

But about midpoint, a character enters the story known only as The Renter, who lives with Oskar’s grandmother (Zoe Caldwell) & can’t or won’t speak. He & Oskar take to each other, & he starts to accompany him on his Saturday quests, conversing only through cryptic scribbles in his notebook, or through the words “Yes” & “No” written in the palms of his hands.

The Renter is played by the great Max Von Sydow, & the odd, somber rapport that he & Horn find in their scenes together makes the movie start to click. It might be too much to say that Von Sydow, with his alert, wary face, saves the movie single-handedly. But he’s a big part of its salvation, & he does it without ever speaking a word.

By its final stretch, when the mystery of the key was finally solved, & Oskar’s own terrible secret was cathartically revealed, I was fully drawn into the movie. Oskar’s flailing reaction to the tragedy becomes a proxy for his city’s, & his country’s, & if what he learns about himself & his neighbors is extremely heartbreaking, it’s also incredibly uplifting.