Baby Driver (2017)

Poor Edgar Wright – he’s made his first film since The World’s End in 2013, and all anyone wants to talk about is why he famously walked away from 2015’s Ant-Man. Never mind that Baby Driver is in a sense the anti-Ant-Man, a sharp, original, standalone action flick with nary an Avenger in sight (though Jon Bernthal, soon to grace Netflix in a Punisher series, does turn up for the film’s first heist), or that star Ansel Elgort is a kind of anti-Paul Rudd, terse-lipped and fairly fresh to audiences who sat out young-adult fare like The Fault in Our Stars or Divergent. For my money, Baby Driver is the anti-Fury Road, an automotive action film that gets the audience to care about the characters and their world without once repeating a trick from its arsenal amid a series of high-octane, motor-revving driving sequences.

Ansel Elgort stars as the eponymous Baby, a getaway driver in the employ of heist meister Doc (Kevin Spacey), who’s teeing up the trademark “one last job” for Baby. Baby has driven for bank robbers with the unlikely names of Buddy and Darling (Jon Hamm and Eiza González) and for manic muggers like Bats (Jamie Foxx), but his true passion is his music – piped through his iPod and a standout soundtrack – and his girl, waitress Debora (Lily James).

Baby Driver starts out with a bang-up bank robbery, the particulars of which are never seen; Wright instead focuses his cinematic eye on Baby grooving to his tunes and scoping out the landscape before throwing the car into gear and speeding away to the tune of “Bellbottoms” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. It’s a clever approach to the scene, which most other directors would have set inside the bank, but Wright wisely takes this moment to introduce us to our protagonist, his methods and movements, before opening up his cinematic toolbox and showing us just what he can do with a barrage of edits, practical driving effects, and some first-rate sound design. It’s an opener that aligns us both with Baby and with Wright; having seen the ample capabilities of both, the audience is primed to care about what they do next.

Wright has always been a master of characterization; Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz created exceptionally memorable characters (aided, I grant you, by the superfluously talented Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), and even Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, though I didn’t much care for it, had a cast of strange rangers that I’ve had difficulty forgetting altogether. The good work continues in Baby Driver, with each “debut” giving us a very clear sense of who the character is and how they’ll fit into the larger world of the story. The exception, though, is Debora, who’s put into a kind of trope role of the pretty love interest until she takes a more active role in the film’s third act; I’d love to see Wright make a film that passes the Bechdel Test, for one, because it’s just about the only thing missing from Baby Driver.

One thing that isn’t lacking in Baby Driver is surprise and the visceral charge that goes with it. The screenplay takes a few unexpected turns, such that my plot summary above only scratches the surface of the places Baby Driver goes. Like the sharpest scripts, Baby Driver winds its pieces back together at the end in surprising ways, resurrecting plot elements long forgotten in order to throw the conclusion into sharper relief, and as we might have come to expect from Wright, lines of dialogue recur and accrue meaning, even if it’s just a sly wink to the audience as characters catch up to the references.

I watch a lot of movies; I tend to like a good deal of them, and I’m perhaps too forgiving of ones too close to my heart. As much as I loved Guardians, Vol. 2 and Wonder Woman, Baby Driver is probably the first must-see movie of the summer by sheer dint of its originality; a superhero movie is almost always kin to every other superhero movie, but Baby Driver feels fresher by being unfettered of any genre conventions. Like La La Land, which toyed with the conventions of a musical romance but never allied fully with that genre, Baby Driver orbits the heist/crime film but inflects it with all sorts of other things for a unique and exhilarating experience. The true mark of a film’s success is the reaction it provokes in an audience, and Baby Driver had me gasping, chuckling, and breathless.

Baby Driver is rated R for “violence and language throughout.” Written and directed by Edgar Wright. Starring Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza González, and Kevin Spacey.

Monday at the Movies - May 2, 2016

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.”

Elvis & Nixon (2016) – Here’s a film that can best be described as rivetingly peculiar, as if the Coen Brothers turned their eyes on the most esoteric corners of American history to say, “Gee, wasn’t that strange?” It’s director Liza Johnson, though, who helms this look at the famous photograph of Elvis Presley (Michael Shannon) and Richard Nixon (Kevin Spacey), and how it came to pass that these two met to discuss drugs, popular culture, and the fate of the nation. Elvis & Nixon takes the strangeness of that sentence and runs with it from the word “go,” with even the supporting cast musing how curious all of this is and doubting its veracity. Whether the film is accurate – based on a conversation with my resident Elvis expert, it’s pretty close – isn’t of chief concern, so much as the film wants to give Shannon and Spacey a chance to revel in the weirdness of their roles. Spacey’s is something of an exaggerated caricature, maybe not the best Nixon impression we’ve seen, but he performs exasperated better than most. It’s Shannon, though, who steals the film with a bizarre portrayal of Elvis by way of Michael Jackson, surreal in his aloofness and his disconnect from the way the world works outside of Graceland. The film seems told through the eyes of his friend Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer), who lets us see Elvis from outside the head of the King, but even scenes without Schilling allow Shannon to bring Elvis to life with all his quirks, eccentricities, and sequined outfits fully intact. Elvis & Nixon might be Amazon Studios’ second film, but it’s star power like Shannon that will make the studio a successful one.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

BUT – face front, True Believers – we’ll continue to Make Yours Marvel this Wednesday with the final installment in “The Grand Marvel Rewatch,” so check back then for a look at all five Marvel One-Shots. Or subscribe above, and receive those missives right in your inbox. Nuff said!

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

It’s refreshing to see an Army movie that isn’t politically charged. There’s no hidden agenda at work in The Men Who Stare at Goats” - just hippies, psychic powers and goats. Lots of goats.

Grant Heslov (co-writer of the Murrow biopic Good Night, and Good Luck) directs Jon Ronson’s book of the same name, profiling reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) as he begins to investigate and uncover a top-secret military research program on psychic abilities.

If it sounds like an intrigue-laden espionage thriller, it’s not. Bob’s top contact is Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a dishonorably discharged serviceman who still insists that he’s a Jedi warrior but who can’t seem to drive a car for more than two scenes without horribly wrecking it. Lyn’s mentor, Bill Django, is even more ridiculous; Jeff Bridges is perfectly cast as the innovator of the Army’s new program, more Jeffrey Lebowski than Sgt. Hartman.

That Clooney and Bridges cut their comedy teeth in films directed by Joel and Ethan Coen is a fascinating coincidence, because if there’s one word I’d use to describe The Men Who Stare at Goats, it’s Coen-esque. Heslov is borrowing more than a page from the Coen book here, playing up the absurdity and playing down conventional techniques of cinema (like character development or chronology). It doesn’t matter that the characters don’t really grow or that the storyline oscillates back and forth in time like an episode of Lost on LSD.

What matters is the ridiculous nature of the story unfolding before our eyes. This is a movie driven more by personality than by plot, more by narration than by narrative. The personalities in the film - McGregor as the piece’s Doubting Thomas, Clooney playing dead-on deadpan and Bridges as a doped-up hippie holdout, with Kevin Spacey as a smarmy mentalist - successfully carry the picture from its low-key opener to its unabashedly hokey high-note ending.

What’s even more fun than the Star Wars metafictional subtext (McGregor, lest we forget, played Obi-Wan Kenobi from 1999 to 2005) is that the film keeps pretending to take itself seriously. Even though the narrative throughline is grounded in Bob’s quest for an identity, let’s not forget that isn’t the opening scene of the film. The first scene finds Gen. Hopgood (Stephen Lang) running headfirst into a wall he thinks he can pass through.

Similarly, The Men Who Stare at Goats never really tells us if the Army has developed psychic weaponry. For every bent spoon, there’s something like the death touch - the dim mok - that doesn’t kill you right away but could take effect at any time years later. For every cloud that Lyn Cassady disperses with his mind, there’s a giant rock he rear-ends with the car he’s driving.

But none of that matters. The film’s much more of a throwback to the old Bob Hope and Bing Crosby buddies-on-the-road pictures of the mid-20th century. As such, then, the film doesn’t break a lot of new ground; the laughs are more than amusing, but they aren’t anything we haven’t seen before. There’s nothing new, for example, about Major General Holtz’s (Glenn Morshower, TV’s Aaron Pierce on 24) exclamation of “Holy (you-know-what)” upon seeing Lyn kill a goat with his mind, but the Southern drawl delivery, not the uniqueness of the moment, is what elicits the biggest laugh in the scene.

But what The Men Who Stare at Goats lacks in ingenuity, it makes up in execution. The cast have spent years climbing to the top of the Hollywood ladder, but it’s pictures like these that prove they’re not too good to make us chuckle.

With Oscar season right around the bend, The Men Who Stare at Goats isn’t cerebral drama or even brainy comedy, but it’s just right for (to paraphrase a line from Cyndi Lauper) girls - and boys - who just want to have fun.

These goats are rated "R for language, some drug content, and brief nudity." Language is run of the mill F-bombs, but the drug content is heavy although played for laughs. As for nudity, there's a fleeting glimpse of two rear ends from a distance.

21 (2008)

(NOTE: Written shortly after the TWBB review)

In the period between the Oscars and the summer blockbuster season, a good film is hard to find (did anyone need to pay to see Fool’s Gold or College Road Trip to know that would be a complete waste of money?).

Enter 21, the (sort of) true story of a ring of card-counting blackjack players who moonlight in Las Vegas when they’re not studying at MIT. Led by Professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey), the team takes the casinos by storm and makes a fortune at the blackjack tables.

Don’t be fooled by the less than lukewarm reviews 21 is garnering. 21 is an entertaining and engaging piece of filmmaking that, while it won’t put you on the edge of your seat, allows you to sit back and enjoy the ride. Director Robert Luketic, best known for the courtroom chick flick Legally Blonde, deftly keeps the plot moving amid plot twists and setting changes.

But like any game of blackjack, 21 has its hits and busts.

Among those hits is Spacey’s performance as the ringleader of the card-counting cabal. Simultaneously cloying and devilishly malicious, Spacey steals every one of his scenes, and – though the part of Micky Rosa probably won’t win him any gold statues – this film reminds us all why Spacey has two Oscars to his name.

Laurence Fishburne, who audiences will recognize as Morpheus from The Matrix but who will for me always be Cowboy Curtis from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, also has a decent supporting role as casino security head Cole Williams. As intense as ever, Fishburne commands attention and does more with his small role than most actors (think: Keanu Reeves) do in a leading role.

But the star of the show, both on the posters and in the mind of this reviewer, is Jim Sturgess, who made his big splash as Jude in Julie Taymor’s Beatles-based musical Across the Universe. With an all too convincing American accent, Sturgess is more than comfortable playing both sides of Ben Campbell, both the uneasy novice and the drunk with power “big player.” Look for greater things to come from this endearing Paul McCartney doppelganger.

Indeed, the only acting role that falls flat in 21 is Kate Bosworth. Certainly she succeeds in looking attractive (that is, when it’s not evident that she’s unhealthily skinny), but that’s the only strength she brings to the role of Jill Taylor. Emotionally, Bosworth is dull, empty, and otherwise lifeless in what is supposed to be a powerful leading lady role.

The other element of 21 that falls short of the mark is the plot. Though the plot meanders and twists in several different directions, no plot point is truly surprising. 21 falls squarely into all the tropes of the genre, and the message is as transparent as the glass windows in the gorgeous Vegas suites.

The cinematography is similarly dazzling. Luketic guides the camera through Vegas casinos almost effortlessly, navigating the audience through the pits and highlighting clearly the tricks and communicative signs used by the players. In this respect, 21 does for card-counting what Lagaan did for cricket; without going into too much detail, the film gives a cursory explanation of the ins and outs of card-counting while focusing more on the importance of the skills to the characters.

Though the message of “There’s more to life than money” is hammered repeatedly like a blunt bludgeon, it’s not difficult to read the film as a thematic sequel to Scorsese’s Casino, since both films carry an undercurrent of lament for a new method replacing an old guard. Here we see biometric software replacing traditional security measures and a new squad of card-counters replacing Spacey’s Professor Rosa.

Is a new method always the best? The film lets its audience make up their own minds.

Is this new film the best? By no means is this the best film ever, but compared to duds like 10,000 B.C. it’s certainly the best film of the year currently at the theaters, as box office receipts would agree.

Then again, there’s more to life than money.