American Ultra: (dir: Nima Nourizadeh) Here's my confession: I watch the Harold and Kumar movies. Yes, I do. I do some fast-forwarding, sure, but things like getting stuck in the stop-motion sequence in the Christmas movie and terrorized by the giant snowman... what even sober viewer is not helpless against such stuff? Smoking ganj with a cheetah? The repeating and ever-widening circles of the NPH joke? The robotic waffle-maker who falls in love with Kumar and ends up saving their lives? Brilliant and hilarious.
H & K aside, I don't often cotton to the stoner comedies. This one is part stoner-fest, part love-story, but mostly comic-book-improbable action-film with ill-judged, hipster-"edgy" book-end sequences. Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, however, are great together, and John Leguziamo is close to perfect as the arsenal-toting, paranoid drug-dealer, pulling off with aplomb impossibilities like saying, "You're some sensitive nigger, bitch," with sympathy, as an actual compliment. Eisenberg has wonderful timing (panicking during a fight with his girlfriend: "Please don't use your grown-up voice with me"). The plot is wacky and gets out of hand, but you relax into it in the way you used to relax into absurdities like Air Force One, knowing that it's all ridiculously far-fetched, but will all come out OK in the end. Only this one's funnier, and has people like Walton Goggins in it, as a laughing assassin.
Tomorrowland: (dir: Brad Bird) A two-hour commercial for Disneyland, the space program, and campy sci-fi kitsch. Its inspiration seems to be all the apocalyptic media we have now, how unhealthy it is, how it leads to a "why bother?" kind of mindset. Its moral seems to be that cynical resignation is lazy; saving the world takes optimism and hard work.
All good points to make. Not a good movie at all.
Irrational Man: (dir: Woody Allen) I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it as long as he persists in his tailspin: even when Woody has a good idea these days, even when he's feeling inspired by it, it still doesn't work. He's literally forgotten how to write interesting dialogue. The only reason his movies still hold the interest they do is because all the best actors want to work with him. It's sad watching Emma Stone throw her all, which is considerable, into this thankless, predictable "I'm a young girl seducing an older man" buffalo-wallow.
The camera, the editing, especially the music (an addictive "Wade in the Water" from the Ramsey Lewis Trio pulsing beneath the action), it all flows smoothly enough that we keep watching, but in the end it's as if we've been skimming across the top of a story idea that's never fleshed out.
My advice to you: read Crime and Punishment while you're listening to the Ramsey Lewis Trio instead.
Ricki and the Flash: (dir: Jonathan Demme) Diablo Cody's most pedestrian script yet, which leaves it still about a hilltop or so higher than your standard Hollywood fare. I hate it with a passion when an actor tries to be a rock star, but, grudgingly, Meryl Streep and her band (including Rick Springfield shredding on his Gibson with both gravitas and skills) convince as a sort of lower-tier Bonnie Raitt combo. Her onstage banter, though, her hair, her politics, the cackling dirty-talk... it all feels forced. Then the story loses its focus, and you end up feeling like you got the wrong ending. Yes, there's a culmination, in which Ricki and her band tear up the joint at her estranged son's wedding and she reconciles with all her various, estranged family-members. It began, though, as a story about a woman and her daughter, and that part is left hanging about midway.
I blame Jonathan Demme for dragging Cody away from her own strange and compelling world and into the Hollywood Formula. Although it's ostensibly about women, about the effects of aging and betrayal and questionable choices on women, the shape of the movie has Old Studio Man written all over it. Why do these things always have to end with a wedding or a prom? It's so 1980s.
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