Antisocial Network: DUMB MONEY

Dumb Money is a movie based on the true story of what can’t be any more than the second most important American event of January 2021. It can’t reference the actual most important event because recognizing the conspiratorial mob mentality of the January 6th capitol riots would be too much complexity for a surface-level story of the other internet-abetted swarm of those days. Remember the amateur stock traders who, emboldened by the ease of an app, swooped in and inflated the stock of troubled video game store GameStop? They held on long enough for the hedge funds betting against the company to post massive losses and lean on the app to freeze trading until they could bail each other out. The movie’s best moment comes in its first needle-drop. These so-obvious-they-circle-back-around-to-surprising song choices are becoming something of a specialty for director Craig Gillespie, after his enjoyable I, Tonya and Cruella played with pop soundtracks to good effect. In this case, it’s a setting-appropriate blasting of the Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s catchy, exuberantly profane “WAP.” As Seth Rogen and Nick Offerman’s fat cat characters stare in shock at their impending potential financial doom we hear the now-iconic opening sample: “There’s some whores in this house. There’s some whores in this house. There’s some whores in this house.” That juxtaposition could’ve set the stage for a vivid bit of agitprop with a point of view about stock market games and who’s whoring whom. But the movie is a slow deflation from there.

The rest is a dutiful docudrama retelling of the moment—a basement vlogger (Paul Dano) egging on day traders who push an under-valued stock sky high, gambling on a big payday if they can break the system. The story scatters across an ensemble of participants, from cash-strapped traders (America Ferrera, Anthony Ramos) to those Wall Street types and the tech bros (Sebastian Stan) playing both sides. This lets the movie go wide without getting deep. There’s a certain discount Social Network sheen to its wan digital aesthetic. (There’s the Ben Mezrich source material, too.) And there’s some clomping inevitability that creeps in around any movie that more about recreating a Wikipedia page than commenting on its moment in any meaningful way. That means the modern period picture leans on popular songs, but also the memes and the masks. As head-spinning as it is to see 2021 already feeling like a distinct historical moment despite still living in its immediate implications, it’s even weirder to leave feeling like you’ve seen little more than a reenactment of stuff you literally just finished reading about in the news 18 months ago. Gillespie places a lot of fine actors in decent scenes, but the movie’s point of view is little more than a shrugging, well, wasn’t that a thing? Its final title cards claim something big changed here, but the preceding movie doesn't exactly make that case.

Sympathy for de Vil: CRUELLA

Director Craig Gillespie’s energetic follow up to his swaggering true-crime I, Tonya plays out a rollicking rivalry between fashion designers in 70s London. One is an old fashioned grand dame Baroness (Emma Thompson) used to ruling the scene by any means necessary. The other is a prickly proto-punk misfit who gets a job as an underling, but all along is gunning for the older woman’s throne. There’s fun to be had here, as Gillespie keeps the pacing quick and camera fluid, catching sumptuous production design and snappy performances. That it happens to be a quasi-prequel to 101 Dalmatians is simply a fact of what elements get projects green lit in Hollywood these days. As such it suffers from some belabored backstory and a need to make everything connected. Who needed to know about Cruella de Vil’s unhappy childhood? However, the rest of the picture is such a feast of fashions and attitude that I hardly cared. It works best when it leans away from the need to provide token psychological underpinning to such a classic Disney villain — the standard formula in many of what Bob Iger so inelegantly coined “brand deposits” — and leans into giving us more of her beautiful wickedness. The result is great actors are swanning around in fabulous costumes and chewing every bit of snazzy scenery in sight. That it would be an enjoyably outsized glossy period melodrama drifting on a confident hodgepodge style and a soundtrack grooving on loud hits of the era without the cute references to an animated classic is a good sign.

The movie finds the most fun when it sticks with its charismatic cast colliding. Stone makes a good theatrical villain-in-the-making and Thompson a fine foil. There’s always been that underlying sarcasm, the self-satisfied smirk, underneath Stone’s work and here (as with the cunning schemer she played in The Favourite’s prickly palace intrigue, a role also scripted by this film’s co-writer) she can cut loose against Thompson serving her finest looking-down-the-nose casual cruelty. As Cruella enlists the help of longtime friends and flunkies (Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser) to help her plan elaborate revenge plots to get one over on the older woman and make herself a name in the fashion world, there’s a capering heist quality to the film’s best set pieces. She shows off her designs — all color-coded to match her natural shock of black-and-white hair — in elaborate prankish stunts, upstaging the fuming Baroness every step of the way, and provoking her potentially homicidal wrath. This tension is joined by a dash of twisty family drama that’s just over the top enough to fit the bill. But the focus is never pulled from the core contest of wills between two stubborn women jockeying for power. And that's where all the fun is. The more the project feints toward character study, the falser it feels; I could do without the cloying voice over and the attempts at making us feel sorry for Cruella instead of serving up what’s sure to become the marvelous whirling dervish of monstrous high-class privilege. Better to let the ladies plot and plan and fight. Unlike the 1996 live-action remake of Dalmatians, which gave Glenn Close similar excuse to cut loose with a howling well-dressed villain, Cruella, cut free from most constraints of a straight remake, has the ability to let Stone grow into that enjoyable cackle, taking a sudden chill the more she's prepared to take her rival down.

Fire and Ice: I, TONYA

Yes, I, Tonya, Craig Gillespie's rollicking whiplash darkly comic recreation of Tonya Harding's ice skating career, is a sports movie with an arc of scandal and tragedy. It would have to be, following the inevitable unlikely rise and tabloid-violence fall of an Olympic hopeful. But what the movie is about underneath these grabby trappings is digging into the psychology of a woman in an abusive relationship. She (Margot Robbie) is used to getting hit. Her prickly, chain-smoking, boozy mother (a tough, biting Allison Janney) chips away at her for years with mean-spirited jabs and frequent smacks. When she escapes, as a late teen, into the arms of her first real boyfriend (Sebastian Stan, with a shyly dangerous charisma unseen in his Marvel pictures), he hits her too. "I told myself, my mom hits me and she loves me," Harding tells us with a honey-drip affection in her voice. It's harrowing and sad, a film intermingling the glowing romance she feels with the bruised eyes and raw scrapes of a battered woman. All the while her skating career is taking off, the thrill of her graceful athleticism sitting next to her hard-scrabble poverty as she has to fight classism and snobbery at every step of the way. She sews her own costumes, which are pretty but not quite the pageant-level shine of the fussy rich girls who dominate the sport. It's not just about talent; it's about image. 

By the time Tonya’s handsome dope of an abusive beau -- now her on-again-off-again husband -- gets it in his head, with prompting from a buddy of enormous, stupidly delusional self-confidence (Paul Walter Hauser, with a convincing bovine look), to intimidate Harding's closest rival, the ensuing chaos threatens to snuff out Tonya's life-long dream. By this point Gillespie -- providing a booming jukebox score, overlapping voice over perspectives, and an active, swirling camera with insistent, pushing editing (a very David O. Russell approach for this usually more restrained journeyman) -- has made it clear the whole incident will be no less than the final parting smack of this abusive husband. Steven Rogers’ screenplay skips around between characters’ competing, overlapping versions of events, sometimes even stopping the action to have another character in the scene turn to the camera and say “I never did this.” It creates a swirling triple-axle of tone, allowing Tonya’s pain to be centered in every telling. This neither excuses her complicity, nor lays all blame at her feet. The film overemphatically pushes and prods at the real complexity under the tabloid sensationalism while using it to raucous effect.

Watership Down: THE FINEST HOURS

Like a Norman Rockwell painting poured over The Perfect Storm, The Finest Hours is a sturdy, old-fashioned picture. Based on the true story of a 1952 Coast Guard rescue of a tanker split in two by horrendous winter weather, the film tells its tale in a rather conventional way. We meet a stubborn do-gooder guardsman (Chris Pine) and the sweet girl (Holliday Grainger) who’d like to marry him. Then the storm hits, the tanker is in trouble, and the man’s commanding officer (Eric Bana) sends him out on a small boat with a small crew (Ben Foster, Kyle Gallner, and John Magaro) to do the impossible. Their boat is tossed about by the waves and winds, equipment malfunctions, and the sun sets. Meanwhile, the men on the tanker (over 30 of them, including Casey Affleck and John Ortiz) are struggling to stay afloat, with no way to make contact, and thus no way of knowing if help is even on the way. It’s a simple story, but the story is simply engaging.

A live action Disney movie, it looks and feels more or less like it would if the company made it in 1956, 66, 76, 86, 96, or 2006, modern tech aside. There’s a fine layer of timeless Hollywood gloss over it, and a proficient element of spectacle as special effects buffet the boats out in the storm and softly falling snow coats the coast in a sparkling snow globe lighthouse look. And in the midst of this is a dependable cast playing people who are largely identifiable types, but given just enough personality and interior lives for rooting interest beyond making it out alive, and to suggest a reality beyond the big studio lights on the sets and CG. The situation is inherently dramatic – true life-or-death stakes, with survival hinging on how well these people can do their jobs, and on the whims of nature. The screenplay (by The Fighter’s Eric Johnson, Scott Silver, and Paul Tamasy) is smart not to undercut the proceedings. It crests perilous waves of cliché to find clear sailing to the heartstrings.

It borders on corny, but it never quite gets there, kept afloat by its forward momentum and reliably sturdy construction. Who’d have thought Craig Gillespie, the director of the Ryan-Gosling-in-love-with-a-RealDoll movie Lars and the Real Girl and the fun Fright Night remake, would turn into a decent helmer for Disney based-on-a-true-story fare? With Finest Hours he improves on his dull sports movie Million Dollar Arm, this time telling an interesting and compelling narrative with good clarity for its process and perspective. We follow each boat’s progress through the storm, cutting between them, and some judicious glimpses of those fretting on the shore, hoping against hope that their guys will make it back alive. There’s a chaste romance at stake, and a couple dozen souls stranded in a rapidly failing craft. That’s plenty heart-tugging drama to get invested in, and a cast willing to play it earnestly.

The sequences on the listing half-tanker are the strongest, Javier Aguirresarobe’s camera and Tatiana S. Riegel’s editing crisply following a committed cast of character actors chewing on accents and sloshing around a convincingly dangerous waterlogged set, coming to terms with the long odds confronting them. The film is full of towering waves, howling winds, groaning bulkheads, straining chains, swinging beams, straining rudders, whirring propellers, and spasms of sparks and smoke. Gillespie focuses on these tactile details, in sharp, routine frames constructed to show off the heroic efforts taken by various crewmembers to save as many lives as they can. It’s a film that feels the movement of the bobbing waves, the strain on an engine as a boat takes on weight, and the taxing whir of overpowered pumps slowly letting water creep higher up the engine room. It’s an engaging film of sturdy craftsmanship, the sort of feel-good inspirational fact-based family film I’m glad Disney hasn’t entirely given up on making in the shadow of their mega-blockbuster fantasies.

Pitch Imperfect: MILLION DOLLAR ARM

In Million Dollar Arm, Jon Hamm plays a sports agent we first see giving a Don Draper-esque pitch to a potential client who turns him down, a rejection that threatens to take down his company. A brainstorm with his business partner (The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi) leaves him with one last idea to save his failing firm. He wants to travel to India and run a contest to find an amateur cricket player with a throwing arm powerful enough to be brought to America and converted into a pitcher for Major League Baseball. Easier said than done, and it doesn’t sound easy to me.

The movie is built around two culture shocks. First, Hamm’s agent is sweaty and confused during his time in India, befuddled by the cuisine, the way of doing business, and the local help (Bollywood actors Pitobash and Darshan Jariwala). Secondly, his young recruits (Life of Pi’s Suraj Sharma and Slumdog Millionaire’s Madhur Mittal) go with the agent to Los Angeles where they’re dazzled and lonely. One of those culture shocks is more interesting than the other. Want to guess which one the movie focuses on?

We start in the world of the sports agent, following him through his company’s shaky financial situation and his no-strings-attached romantic life. Soon, though, he and a cranky retired baseball scout (Alan Arkin, who else?) arrive in India. During the time the movie spends there, the country is either exoticized or made a source of humor. Their local assistants are a study in contrasting stereotypes. One is drolly in favor of bribery to make their search move quickly. The other is eager to please and prone to misunderstanding directions. Told they need to find a pitcher with “juice,” he runs off to get them some juice. If the performers on all sides had less charm or energy, it’d feel offensive.

Soon enough, we meet the two young guys on whom the movie pins its rags-to-a-chance-at-riches plotting. They’re immediately sympathetic and engaging. Consideration is given to their lives in small Indian villages, where life is slow-paced and poor. They have close ties to faith, family, and culture. When they arrive in America, they’re sympathetically presented as small-town kids suddenly thrown into entirely unfamiliar surroundings. Given an opportunity to come to America and try out for a chance to earn millions, they’re nonetheless understandably homesick and discouraged. And yet they are still willing to give it a try.

Theirs is a stronger, more compelling culture shock, and yet we see them filtered through their agent’s viewpoint. He follows a predictable arc in which he’s a hard-charging career-oriented guy who sees his new guests as a project more than people. He needs to soften up and learn to love his makeshift family. We’ve seen that story before. No matter how well Hamm plays the plot points, it’s still obviously lacking compared to the more interesting story happening just outside his perspective. It’s a problem of point of view.

I wanted to know more about the interior lives and daily struggles of the kids. Instead, they make friends, learn baseball, and learn English almost entirely off-screen. Why push aside their training?  You’d think that would be a key point of interest. Besides, the coach helping them is played by the always-welcome Bill Paxton, and every time the film heads to the field, the imagery lights up and the thrill of the game is palpable. And yet we spend far more time watching their agent stumble towards the point at which he’ll realize the error of his ways. To do so he’s given a token love interest (the charming Lake Bell in an impoverished role), who exists here only to be a potential romantic partner and to give him pep talks.  

Director Craig Gillespie and screenwriter Tom McCarthy are usually better attuned to specificities in their characters. Gillespie has shown a fine eye for community responses to differences, especially in his Lars and the Real Girl. But I’m surprised McCarthy, in particular, ended up with a script with a perspective so out of whack. His The Visitor is a tender portrayal of clashing cultures that finds a bookish professor surprised and ultimately enriched by his entanglement with a couple of immigrants squatting in his apartment. His Win Win is about a troubled teenager taken in by a warm family willing to help him achieve a better life through sports. In other words, McCarthy has done aspects of the story before, but Million Dollar Arm approaches from an angle that feels wrong.

While the characters are for the most part compassionately drawn, and the visual style is glossy up-tempo Disney feel-good uplift, the movie is stubbornly fuzzy with the details and the balance in perspective remains wobbly. The movie is upbeat and well made, but I found the point of view naggingly askew. About halfway through, I started imagining a better version of this movie that started fully immersed in the villages of India, met Sharma and Mittal, got to know them better, and then saw the Americans and America through their eyes. Their characters go through massive changes, leaving their families behind to move across the world to a country where they don’t speak the language, to be taught to play a sport they’ve never seen, and to live at an income level they’d never imagined. That’s quite a shock. Why in the world are they the supporting characters in this story?

There Goes the Neighborhood: FRIGHT NIGHT

Fright Night, a Todd Holland film from 1985, is a horror comedy about a teenaged horror fan who is convinced that there is a vampire living next door. It’s a film that’s fitfully amusing and frightening and very much of its time. When I saw that, very eighties, film for the first time earlier this year I found myself affectionate towards it while seeing room for improvement. Now, here comes Craig Gillespie’s remake, a film with gimmicky 3D effects, a soundtrack featuring Kid Cudi and Foster the People, and characters checking their smart phones for important information. In other words, it’s Fright Night marked specifically for posterity as belonging to 2011. It’s also, luckily, a slightly better movie in some ways than its predecessor, a little bit funnier, a little bit scarier, a little bit slicker. It’s a good story that’s now been well told twice.

This version bursts to life in a stylish way. Bold, graphical splashes of blood-red credits announce the film’s visual energy. The camera swoops in bird-of-prey circles around the little neighborhood, spinning mid-air to capture the isolated tract housing, the place with the unseen menace lurking under a deceptively normal setting. The movie situates the suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Las Vegas, the city that never sleeps. It’s the perfect cover for this vampire who can claim his blacked out windows and nocturnal habits are because he works the night shift in a downtown tourist trap. Jerry the Vampire trades in his relaxed, suave Chris Sarandon eighties wear for a grimy workingman wardrobe placed on the muscular shoulders of Colin Farrell. He’s a physical creature, a matter-of-fact menace, and a disarmingly regular guy who digs around in his home improvement projects and kicks back with a beer in front of his TV to watch some iteration of the Real Housewives.

The kid next door knows what’s really up, though, but not at first. The kid (Anton Yelchin) is Charley, a high school student. He’s a former nerd who’s distanced himself from his best friend (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) in exchange for entry into the cool crowd, including a budding relationship with a class hottie (Imogen Poots). The new neighbor only registers as a mild annoyance until Charley’s friend comes to him with proof of strange goings-on. People have been disappearing and a chart of last know positions puts Jerry’s house at the center of the mystery. That seems to point to more than just an annoyance next door. With a little research (well, spying and Googling), it becomes clear that Jerry is indeed a vampire. But we already knew that.

The film then becomes more or less what you’d expect, an escalation in the tension between the teens and the vampire. Charley’s mom (Toni Collette) is a little oblivious. She thinks she might have a chance with the attractive neighbor. Charley’s girlfriend’s weirded out. Why doesn’t he want to make out with her, prefering instead to leap up at the sound of a car in the neighbor’s driveway? Charley finds this all distressing. Why won’t anyone believe him? It’s bad enough that the vampire tells him to his face that his mom and his girlfriend have nice necks, but now his friend is among those who have disappeared. (Maybe Charley should ask for help from the Vegas magician (David Tennant) who claims to be expert in the occult). It all builds to a series of splashy effects pieces, well rendered conflict between the horror creature and the only mere mortals who know what he really is

This is effective, energetic popcorn filmmaking. Like the original, it’s a halfway decent teen comedy that turns into a series of effects sequences. Laughs are lightly mixed in with the flowing tension and gooey gobs of CGI blood. The performances are largely charming and the adapted script by Marti Noxon (a writer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) knows its way around teens and vampire hunters while still humanizing them all. There’s enough grist of psychological complexity (not a lot, mind you, but just enough) to ground the insistent effects and showy scares in some small semblances of reality. The film also makes great use of a score by Ramin Djawadi that contains a wonderful melodic flourish that works hints of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor,” a piece associated with old-school horror, into the film’s musical texture. All of this just to say that this new version of Fright Night surprised me. It held my attention and entertained me by being better than I expected it to be. It’s not a lazy remake of a minor 80’s hit. It’s reworked and, as they say, reimagined into a proficient new telling of a solid story.