Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising

Zac Efron and Seth Rogen return to wage war agains a neighboring sorority in the sequel to ‘Neighbors’

Neighbors-2-soroity-risingYou could be forgiven for calling “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising” the most feminist movie of the year. Such is the state of Hollywood movies when there are so few truly female-fronted blockbusters and comedies that a movie in which teenage girls chuck their bloody tampons into Seth Rogen’s mouth could be considered progressive. But whether or not Rogen and company have made a feminist raunch-fest, they’ve made an often hilarious sequel that at least begs the question.

“I don’t even know what’s sexist,” Rogen’s character says in desperation at one point in “Neighbors 2.” Director Nicholas Stoller could be breaking boundaries or crossing serious lines, but at the end of the day he’s trying to make a funny movie. The divide between sharp political satire and what could be considered offensive and insensitive is often blurry.

Here’s the ugly truth that “Neighbors 2” brings to light: sororities on American campuses are not allowed to throw parties, but frats can. Stoller perfectly captures modern Greek life in a quick early scene, with Selena Gomez leading a flock of girls all dressed in white while wearing halos made of flowers. Their delicate golf claps say it all. Shelby, Beth and Nora (Chloe Graec Moretz, Kiersey Clemons, Beanie Feldstein) together reject this culture and decide that instead of rushing a sorority where they can’t smoke weed and where frat houses literally have “giant arrows pointing upstairs to fuck us,” they’ll start their own sorority, right next door to Mac and Kelly Radner (Rogen and Rose Byrne).

Time and again the movie reminds us that if a man were doing the crazy, vulgar, potty and drug humor that happens here, no one would bat an eye. To be fair, “Neighbors 2” may be pushing its luck; “Bridesmaids” never had to tell the audience how forward thinking it was to have women acting filthy. But Stoller is smart enough to wink at the audience in that, like in the original “Neighbors,” both the Radners and the college kids next door are man-sized children not nearly as mature as they pretend to be.

“Neighbors” was a riot because it flipped the script of what a crazy frat bro could look like in creative ways, and the sequel has more of the same. Zac Efron returns to continue spending the bulk of his time shirtless, even briefly turning into Magic Mike, but at the same time he and his brothers will pull out a ukulele and sing Jason Mraz during a gay wedding proposal. This movie could arguably be as queer as it is feminist.

What’s new has all to do with the girls. They dress like Minions as a form of hazing. They watch “The Fault in Our Stars” all together in their pajamas. They dress up like feminist icons Oprah and First Lady Hillary Clinton, Senator Hillary Clinton, and future President Hillary Clinton. Five dudes may have written the screenplay, but it feels like comedy for women, not just gross-out comedy performed by women.

“Neighbors 2” doesn’t gel quite as well as the original, but it has equal doses of Rogen and Byrne’s dopey chemistry, not to mention some impressively funny cinematic style. Stoller can stage a pretty solid pratfall, and there’s one hilarious sequence where Rogen and Efron, each shirtless and jiggling, are running through a hazy orange fog as “Sabotage” plays in the background. It would be funny even if they weren’t being chased by teenage girls trying to steal back their trash bag full of weed.

So whether “Neighbors 2” is feminist is beside the point. Stoller’s having a lot of fun, and the girls will too.

3 ½ stars

Sing Street

The director of “Once” John Carney tells a musical coming of age story in 1985 Dublin.

sing-street-posterJohn Carney’s “Sing Street” is a marvelous throwback to a time when kids defined their personality and their fashion by the music they loved, when music videos first showed us what cool looked like, and when a dream of being famous meant picking up a guitar and joining a band. Music has the power to shape the person we become, and the music and culture of “Sing Street” have imbued this coming of age story with so much life, energy and spirit.

Along with “Once” and “Begin Again,” Carney is responsible for some of the best movie musicals of the new millennium. “Sing Street’s” approach to a campy fun ‘80s jukebox musical isn’t half-baked covers of old one-hit wonders but a celebration of the era as seen from a very distinctive place.

Set in Dublin in 1985, “Sing Street” is the story of Cosmo (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), the youngest kid of a poor, working class family on the brink of divorce. In order to save money, his parents pull him out of school and send him to a Catholic school for boys. The rigid dress code and beatings from the priests don’t subdue the cheekily hard-scrabble boys culture of the Irish. No matter how puny, every teenager smokes, picks fights and acts tough.

Guiding Cosmo through this tough transition is his older brother Brendan (Jack Reynor), a whip-smart college dropout and stoner who knows people, the world, and best of all, good music. Carney drew from his own life experience watching music videos in ‘80s Ireland to show just how big an influence those images on “Top of the Pops” had on him and Cosmo by extension. He even ironically updates the classic scene of the square dad dismissive of the new band as actual music. “They’re not exactly The Beatles, are they?”

Cosmo gets so smitten by these music videos, he decides he has to be in one himself. He works up the courage to approach a mysterious girl named Raphina (Lucy Boynton) by asking her to star in it. He’ll work out the fact that he doesn’t have a band or know how to play anything later.

“I’m a futurist,” Cosmo says to his bandmate. He doesn’t really know any bands, any particular sounds, and when he’s quizzed about Duran Duran, he quotes his brother’s insight as his own, even if he nearly confuses John Taylor for James Taylor. All he knows is he wants to make music that’s new and sounds cool. “Sing Street” encourages a sense of authenticity and coming of age through artificiality. The band’s music videos and their sound are ripped directly from the LPs of the day, riffing on The Cure, Hall & Oates and A-Ha alternatively. Cosmo even changes his hair style and fashion sense accordingly. Today he’ll look like Robert Smith, tomorrow it’s Ziggy Stardust.

But the pastiche is exactly the point. The film’s original songs, all of them written by Carney and Gary Clark, sound like the work of young kids finding themselves and their talent, and that doesn’t make the songs any less fantastic. Carney combines the love of music and the tongue-in-cheek adolescent comedy in a way that’s never cynical and often profound. “Rock and Roll is a risk. You dare to be ridiculed,” Brendan says. “You can never do anything by half. You have to dive in,” Raphina says. “Sing Street” believes both of these philosophies and is unabashedly lovely and winning.

Perhaps most impressive however is how Carney has evolved as a filmmaker. “Once” is a magnificent movie that by design looks like homemade dirt. It’s handheld and scrappy like the street performers it follows. With “Begin Again” Carney moved into more polished Hollywood territory, but the film’s cornball quality kept it from being truly great. “Sing Street” combines the best of both films. The film’s pacing crackles with a fast moving, thick Dublin dialect and more ‘80s musical nods than you can count, and the jokey music videos look amateurish in the best way. But Carney also stages a wonderful dream sequence set at a ‘50s prom. The colors and characters just emerge out of the woodwork in what is one of the more magical scenes of the year.

In one scene, Raphina tells Cosmo he needs to be “happy sad,” to not be so miserable about feeling down. And in the perfect note, Brendan plays him The Cure’s “In Between Days.” “Sing Street” knows music and it knows Dublin, but it also knows how a musical can be a story of great emotion and uplift. When Cosmo decides it’s time to embrace being a little more happy sad, he says, “Accept it, get on with it, and make some great art.” Carney has certainly done that with one of the best movies of the year.

4 stars

 

Green Room

A punk band gets trapped by neo-Nazi skinheads trying to kill them after witnessing a murder.

green-room-poster“Ooh, a conspiracy,” says one of the members of the trapped and tortured punk band in “Green Room.” These kids are so punk that even when they’re being slaughtered one by one, they still have room for sarcasm. But it’s not a conspiracy, “just a clusterfuck.”

“Green Room,” the second film from “Blue Ruin” director Jeremy Saulnier, masterfully arranges conflict, depth and intrigue within a gory and disturbing horror thriller, but it never spirals out of control into something larger than a one-room drama. The movie’s modest proportions make the danger and bloodshed flow all the heavier.

The four members of a Pacific Northwest hardcore punk band called Ain’t Rights are truly living on the edge. The film’s first shots show they’ve quite literally gone offroad, having fallen asleep at the wheel and drifted into a corn field with the engine still running. To get by they’ve mastered siphoning gas out of cars, giving them just enough for beer money and to get to a gig in a college town.

Saulnier has an erratic, invigorating pacing, with the band putting the needle down on a riotous record before immediately cutting away to the hazy morning after. They say in an interview with a local student journalist that they don’t believe in being online, and everything in their life is so makeshift and DIY, they reduce themselves to performing at a Mexican restaurant for nothing but their meals. The film is rife with the language of the punk lifestyle and feels perfectly plugged into the Americana surroundings.

But after that first gig is a bust, they head deeper into the Pacific Northwest backwoods home to a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads. Rather than abide by the rules, they open their set with a song telling everyone to fuck off. A hardened audience member gives them the death stare and spits beer on stage. Their fate is sealed.

The band’s guitarist and arguably most timid, Pat (Anton Yelchin), runs back into the green room to grab his phone, only to witness a woman who has been stabbed to death by the headlining act. The bar’s caretaker (Macon Blair of “Blue Ruin”) locks them and the woman’s friend Amber (Imogen Poots) all into the green room until the police arrive, but really buying time for the skinhead leader Darcy (Patrick Stewart) to calculate a plan to kill them and clean up the mess.

Saulnier manages to keep “Green Room’s” numerous moving parts all bottled up in that tiny room. The slow-burn tension plays out with Stewart’s calming, yet authoritative voice calling to them from the other side of the green room’s locked door. A band member has the bar’s bodyguard in a chokehold on the floor, and with no way out it’s only a matter of time before they allow their punk energy to explode.

Saulnier’s last film “Blue Ruin” was about a would-be-murderer who found himself way over his head, and “Green Room” puts these youngsters in a similarly grizzly spot. On stage they’re hardcore, but Saulnier tests their personalities and their resolve with brutal intensity. And while it would be tempting to label the film as merely a horror survival story and exploitation film, these characters have human vulnerabilities and are forced to make tough choices. Even the skinheads aren’t total monsters. One is forced to put his attack dog to sleep after the band has its way, and in a weirdly touching image, the dog curls up beside its owner to die.

What additionally sets “Green Room” apart from “Blue Ruin” however is how Saulnier has evolved as a filmmaker. That film was as scrappy and do-it-yourself indie as its protagonist. “Green Room” is taut and polished. He escalates the hysterics and violence in convincing ways, starting with Pat’s arm getting mutilated entirely off screen. As the band is forced to retreat back to the green room to still be trapped, their psychological horror goes through the roof, and the bloodshed is there to match it.

“Green Room” is one of the finest movies of the year. It’s disturbing, thrilling and stylish but doesn’t sacrifice its humanity. Now that’s hardcore.

4 stars

Dheepan

Jacques Audiard directs the story of a Sri Lankan Tamil warrior turned refugee in France.

DheepanPosterIn “Dheepan,” a Sri Lankan Tamil warrior gets smuggled into France as a refugee, but not before being paired with a family who will allow him to escape. A 25-year-old woman searches the Sri Lankan slums and plucks an orphan 9-year-old girl from the crowd to pose as her daughter. In an instant, the three are in this together.

“Dheepan” doesn’t concern itself with politics, but it will change how people look at the refugee crisis around the world because of how the film deals with acclimating to and accepting new conditions.

Jacques Audiard’s (“A Prophet,” “Rust and Bone”) film, the winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes 2015, isn’t limited to the story of its title character Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan). His “wife” Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and his “daughter” Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) are equally at risk of trying to survive away from home. Dheepan gets a job in France as a caretaker for some low rent apartments, and Yalini takes up housekeeping for an elderly man, all while trying to navigate the gang activity and violence going on around them.

Thankfully for them, life in even this poorer region of France proves to be a major improvement from the war torn Sri Lanka. Illayaal gets her own room and a chance to go to school. Yalini asks their landlord if it’s okay to drink the tap water, and he reacts as though it were a bizarre question. Dheepan quickly earns respect and good money as a capable handyman, a step up from incinerating corpses. And all the people of their community are generally polite.

More troubling is how the three manage to keep up the appearance of a family without any love in their life. Yalini hints that she wants to call her cousin and move to London, even at the expense of leaving Illayaal behind. As for Dheepan, he can’t seem to shake the war he left behind, watching clips of the footage from back home, and the film comes to a sensational end when he manages to recreate those same horrors in France.

Audiard’s strength lies in extracting some tantalizing, surprising imagery from this grim, realistic story. To start the film, Dheepan emerges from a black abyss wearing blinking red and blue mouse ears, a surreal beacon for a man adrift. A few moments linger on an elephant’s face creeping out from within the deep forest, and that sense of lurking danger carries throughout the wide angle crane shots looking over the slums.

But above all, “Dheepan” succeeds because it’s a complex story of how people acclimate to practical surroundings and emotional ones. This family’s grief and culture clash struggles aren’t near as interesting as whether they’ll manage to stick together, and “Dheepan” has drama in both realms in spades.

3 ½ stars

Captain America: Civil War

Captain America and Iron Man engage in an epic battle of titans in Marvel’s latest.

Civil_War_Final_PosterMarvel’s head-honchos must’ve spent years dreaming up this moment. It’s the moment when Captain America, Iron Man and 10 other superheroes all dash at one another in anticipation of an epic death match. This battle is why we’ve sat through these movies since 2008, and it’s everything fans could’ve asked for.

And whether you’re a fan or not, that may be enough. This particular scene, what is really a sizable chunk of “Captain America: Civil War,” stands out because it’s all these heroes at their best and having a blast. Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man is clambering through Iron Man’s circuitry, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man is web-slinging and talking wise as Chris Evans’s Captain America manages to drop a building on him, and Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther is sleek, acrobatic and menacing. They’re not trying to kill each other, but are really just having fun.

“I don’t know how many fights you’ve been in, but there usually isn’t this much talking,” Falcon says to Spidey, who really does breathe a lot of life into this film. Except that’s not entirely true. For a long time now, Marvel has been making sensational action sequences that look and feel exactly like this one: rapid fire action editing that resembles comic book panels rather than cinema, carefully allotted portions of screen time for every hero involved, and a bunch of quippy Whedonisms tossed in between the mayhem.

So if this fight really is the best thing Marvel has ever made, is that really saying much?

To be fair, the Captain America movies are arguably a step up from its Iron Man or Thor counterparts. I’d rather watch Cap and Black Widow engage in some Jason Bourne style hand-to-hand combat than watch Tony Stark shoot lasers at swarms of CGI robots.

But regardless of who the participants are, every Marvel movie ever made feels exactly the same. Each one has been polished and tailored to fit a brand image, and they’ve been rubbed clean of their style, emotion and ambition. Anthony and Joe Russo may be listed as directors here, but these movies don’t have directors, just brand managers. It’s meant movies that are perfectly competent, enjoyable and disposable: almost never bad, but almost certainly never great.

In “Civil War,” when Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) bungles a mission in Lagos that leaves 12 civilians killed, the Avengers are brought before an oversight committee to be kept in check by the United Nations. Iron Man and Black Widow both agree to sign the sanctions, but Captain America believes they would be surrendering their right to choose.

Not unlike the recent “Batman v. Superman,” it makes boardroom discussions, MSNBC talking heads and debates about morality the stuff of blockbusters. Say what you will about that film, but Zack Snyder is a filmmaker with a voice and a style behind the camera. He invoked Greek mythology and Christ parables in order to argue his ideas, and he made Bruce Wayne far more of a tortured soul than the narcissist Tony Stark ever could be.

“Civil War” is entirely paint by numbers with simplistic, reductive writing. Is this movie really about anything other than vengeance? It bungles its libertarian political overtones by trying to straddle the line and appeal to a mass audience, and it proves yet again that Marvel has very little clue what to do with its villains. “Batman v. Superman” didn’t have a sense of humor, but so what if “Civil War” does?

When has this franchise ever made you feel anything beyond a giggle? Marvel has never been one to make you afraid, sad or joyful, to pay homage to a genre, or even to truly care for the fate of these characters. It’s for the same reason that Marvel movies only look like other Marvel movies. By making them all uniformly bland with glimmers of excitement and pathos, they can tease you for the next one.

Where can the franchise go after a dozen superheroes have all fought in an epic battle? If all we keep getting is more of the same, does it really matter?

3 stars

Dear White People

Justin Simien’s debut film plays like a Millennial version of “Do The Right Thing,” for better or worse.

Justin Simien’s “Dear White People” plays like a Millennial’s “Do The Right Thing.” It’s extremely smart but insufferably self-aware and overly ambitious, expressing an exhausting need to check every box of racial injustice and semantics in America with a talky, motor-mouthed screenplay. The film grapples with interesting ideas of identity as it ties not just to race but to gender and sexuality among young people, but it doesn’t explain why all the film’s characters have to be pretentious, intellectual, elitist snobs, an unholy mix of Spike Lee and Whit Stillman.

On an Ivy League campus, Sam White (Tessa Thompson) is a mixed-race revolutionary with a radio show entitled “Dear White People,” where she criticizes white people who only have one token black friend or will date a black guy just to piss off their parents. Sam’s loaded language sparks sharp divisions among her Black Panther-esque acolytes and a house full of cocksure, white comedy writers led by Kurt Fletcher (Kyle Gallner), the University President’s son. In a surprise twist, Sam wins a house election over the incumbent Troy Fairbanks (Brandon P Bell), son of the school’s Dean (Dennis Haysbert). Their rhetoric, politicking and class dynamics on the college campus all escalate to an offensive party and race war teased at the start of the film, a scene that echoes “Do The Right Thing’s” intense rioting.

All the film’s dialogue gets so provocative and racially charged that it’s impossible to think Simien loaded the screenplay on accident. His characters too, even Sam, who the film describes as if “Spike Lee and Oprah had a pissed off baby,” are caricatures, exaggerated in order to comment broadly on our constructions of race and identity dynamics.

Simien poses thoughtful questions. What does it mean to “keep it 100” or to be true to your blackness? Eventually “Dear White People” peels back the layers of its characters and exposes them as frauds. Sam isn’t really Malcolm X, but her ability to speak her mind and embrace a righteous attitude has allowed her to find an identity. “Are you trying to be black enough for black kids or white ones,” one character poses to “Dear White People’s” neutral observer, a nerdy and gay journalist named Lionel (Tyler James Williams). That he struggles for an answer proves how complex these characters and these issues are.

And yet that exaggerated line between satire and reality often gets crossed, with Simien’s visual style further underscoring the racial dividing lines and the film’s aggressive tone. All the white people in the film are shot to look as though they came out of a university catalog, and Simien plays with quick wiping reverse shots to show that white and black people are at the opposite sides of an invisible line. He even takes time to editorialize, with an army of black students shouting directly at the camera how Tyler Perry movies promote stereotypes.

Some of this is fun and funny, but “Dear White People” gets overstuffed with its assortment of characters, including one (Teyonah Parris) who’s superficially trying to get on a reality show and become a star, as well as a subplot about student journalists who may just be using Lionel’s blackness as a way to get an editor position with The New York Times. It’s almost insulting how much the movie name drops, with Fletcher casually tossing off names of blogs like Gawker and Buzzfeed to illustrate just how smart and connected everyone on this campus is.

“Dear White People” is entirely made up of those too cool moments. It’s self-aware and smart to a fault, overlooking a more plausible central character in Lionel in favor of the more sensational Sam and muddling the line between satire and simply inflamed rhetoric.

As a straight white guy, “Dear White People” was made to get in my face and shake up my perception. But does it have to be “on” all the time?

2 stars

Tale of Tales

Three fairy tales adapted from Giambattista Basile are interpreted with bloody, satirical results.

Tale-of-Tales-posterNear the beginning of “Tale of Tales” a slender, cloaked old man slinks his way into the palace of the King and Queen of Longtrellis (John C. Reilly and Salma Hayek) to bestow upon them a prophecy. The Queen is desperate to have a child, and she agrees to the specter’s challenge: “Hunt a sea monster, cut out its heart, have the heart cooked by a virgin, she must be alone, then eat the heart, and you will become pregnant.”

The man’s instructions are so oddly specific and strange as to produce a chuckle, but the prophecy is told with the gravest of importance. Such is the tone in Matteo Garrone’s “Tale of Tales,” a contender for one of the more bizarre movies of the year, if not the decade, but also a satirical edge to dull the gravity of its bloody and strange fantasy. The Italian director’s English language film adapts fairy tales by Giambattista Basile to weave together three stories of attachments, vices, and the harsh lessons learned by those corrupted by power.

The first story involves Hayek’s queen, who after gnawing away at a gory hunk of a sea monster’s heart, becomes pregnant and gives birth to an albino son who resembles the sea monster that killed the King. But born on the same day to the virgin cook is an identical twin. As teenagers, the boys form an inseparable, brotherly bond. The Queen hopes to separate her son from this peasant and ends up driving her son’s twin away.

In the second, a womanizing, sexual demon of a king (Vincent Cassel) hears a woman singing in town and pursues her, unaware that the voice belongs to one of two decrepit old hags (Hayley Carmichael and Shirley Henderson under pounds of makeup) hoping to deceive him. Finally, a third king (Toby Jones) begins raising a flea until it is the size of a small elephant. His attachment to his pet distracts him from the needs of his maturing daughter the Princess (Bebe Cave).

From the flea with bulging, alien eyes to the wrinkled old ladies to the underwater sea monster, everything within “Tale of Tales” has an artificial quality. One shot has Cassel stepping over a grotto full of lounging nudes, as though we’ve walked into a Renaissance painting and can now witness the seams up close. And yet the film is alive with colors and rich, painterly landscapes; note the incredibly detailed and craggily blue mountain range surrounding the sea monster’s lair, the overhead shot of a hedge maze or the blooming greens surrounding the red hair of a forest nymph.

The film’s look is instrumental in allowing Garrone to wink at the camera and provide a sense of self-aware goofiness and outrageousness running through these dour fables. In each he proves that taking these stories literally produces garish, outlandish results and horrifying consequences to the characters at the center. And the film’s cartoonishly bloody nature makes for a film that’s equal parts hilarious and mysterious.

Films as weird as “Tale of Tales” only come around once in a blue moon, and Garrone’s satirical handling of the film’s visual splendor helps make the fairy tale indelible. There’s just no happily ever after here.

4 stars

Everybody Wants Some!!

Richard Linklater’s spiritual sequel to “Dazed and Confused” takes place in a Texas college in the ’80s.

everybody-wants-some-PosterBetween the mud wrestling, the promiscuous sex, the time spent driving around on the hunt for tail, playing ping pong and talking endlessly about baseball, there’s more than a little wish fulfillment going on in “Everybody Wants Some!!” Richard Linklater’s latest is actually more personal to him than his previous film “Boyhood,” an ‘80s throwback reflecting on his college days playing baseball in Texas.

Linklater has grown a little skeezier than usual, turning his crop of characters into raging pussy hounds, reducing the substantive female characters to just one, laying it on thick with innumerable idioms for talking about your dick, and just a little nudity for good measure. But rather than Linklater remaking “Porky’s,” he has the depth and maturity to show that the honeymoon doesn’t last forever. If college is a place where you find yourself, Linklater knows that at some point you have to grow out of this world and find a real identity.

And that combination of low-brow male bonding and high-brow soul searching make for a near perfect comedy. Like its spiritual sibling “Dazed and Confused,” the film put a stupid grin on my face.

As in “Dazed and Confused,” you immediately get a nostalgic sense of halcyon summer days. But this time the kids are heading off to college instead of high school, the time period has been shifted to the early ‘80s, and rather than the last day of high school, “Everybody Wants Some!!” starts a few days before college classes kick off. All the while, Linklater reminds us of a ticking clock to show how childhood behavior quickly slips away. And it didn’t take him 12 years to do it either.

Jake (Blake Jenner) is a new freshman pitcher for Southern Texas University’s star baseball team. The whole squad lives together in a pair of houses, and in these cramped quarters everyone has an air of royalty, competitiveness and one-upsmanship in their dirty talk. The veteran player McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin) says upfront that he doesn’t like pitchers and conceitedly blocks Jake’s way into the next room. One housemate is trying to fill up a water bed, but his roommate bemoans that having sex on a waterbed is like having sex on top of another really fat woman.

Linklater’s screenplay toes the line here between winking misogyny and actual bad taste, but it regardless captures the mood and spirit of that jock, locker room culture. The characters’ various quirks and their pursuit to get laid are all in good fun. Linklater doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, and while this baseball team can still fly off the handle in their competitive nature, neither do these characters.

Part of that has to do with the fact that as much as these boys ogle girls, they’re just as much looking at each other. For an article in Vulture, Kyle Buchanan recently wondered if “Everybody Wants Some!!” might accidentally be the gayest movie of the year. The fashion in Linklater’s ‘80s Texas is all short pants, cropped baseball tees, long hair and soft colors, and the boys crimp and style with the same gusto they display on the field. They’re all superficial and a tad effeminate in their bro-ey masculinity, with one even checking out his self-proclaimed “best ass on campus” in the mirror.

They spend so much time on how they look that Linklater finds a way to ease these characters into the adults they might become. In one of his Linklaterisms, the intellectual stoner Finnegan (Glen Powell) explains to young Jake that, “You bring who you are, not what they want.” Upon striking out yet again at the disco club, the boys put on some cowboy boots and try their luck at the country bar, then wander over to a punk rock show with the band playing a moshing cover of the “Gilligan’s Island” theme. “It’s not phony, it’s adaptive.” Plenty of movies have approached coming-of-age, but rarely has trying on different hats felt this cavalier, laid back and fun.

The cast of “Dazed and Confused” included early work from Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey, Milla Jovovich and Adam Goldberg, and their complex characters and performances were signs that they’d one day be stars. The cast of “Everybody Wants Some!!” is equally rich. Between stand up work from Jenner, Hoechlin, Wyatt Russell, Glen Powell and particularly the film’s sole female character played by the luminous Zoey Deutch, it’s just a question of which one or how many will break out in the years to come.

And while “Everybody Wants Some!!” may not be the instant classic “Dazed and Confused” is, or as universal a coming-of-age story as “Boyhood,” Linklater has tapped into a time and place that many will love to revisit again and again, a smile on their face every time they do.

4 stars

My Golden Days

Arnaud Desplechin’s coming-of-age romance finds nostalgia in a very French way.

MyGoldenDaysPosterThe ability to compare your girlfriend to an Italian work of landscape art from the Renaissance, to carry out a long distance relationship of casual sex, or to have an affair with your housemate’s girlfriend without consequence, is all decidedly French. Arnaud Desplechin’s “My Golden Days” follows a romance and coming-of-age story very specific to a Parisian lifestyle in the ‘80s, so frivolous and carefree that watching it feels erratic.

Paul Dedalus (Mathieu Amalric) confesses in casual pillow talk with his current lover overseas that he feels no nostalgia for his country. That romantic tone gets quickly replaced with a flashback to Paul’s childhood, a melodramatic scene of violent domestic abuse. During his pre-teen years, Paul’s mother kills herself and his father checks out altogether.

Back in modern times, Paul becomes detained by a customs official who says a duplicate Paul Dedalus turned up dead several years earlier. In explanation, Paul reflects back on a high school trip to Minsk in the Soviet era when he smuggled in goods and gave his passport to an Israeli refugee. Suddenly the film’s tone assumes that of a tense thriller. Across these different chapters and plays on genre, Paul gets beaten and abused, once by his father, once by his own hand, and once by a jealous boyfriend. And each time Paul describes the situation by saying, “I felt nothing.”

Paul (played by Quentin Dolmaire as a teenager) desperately needs to feel something. The remainder of the film concerns his young-adult relationship with Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet), and as Paul’s life becomes consumed with this relationship, Desplechin strives to show how Paul will learn to feel something after all.

Of course, he’ll only learn to feel in a way that matches Desplechin’s (“A Christmas Tale,” “Kings and Queen”) own personal experience in France. “My Golden Days” draws plenty of inspiration from the French New Wave, and even closes with a cheeky freeze frame that feels lifted from “The 400 Blows.” So the revelations and discoveries about life will all be marred in stories of cool young people having sex, arguing with their stuffy, oppressive parents, lying around smoking and dabbling in just a touch of grad-school existentialism. Paul’s character and his experiences are so specific to this culture that it’s hard to truly relate or feel connected to his brand of anguish and grief.

Paul and Esther are both layabouts. He attends grad school but is a lazy student (openly admitting that every class of geniuses needs someone to remind them how brilliant they all are), and she may or may not have settled into a dull, unhappy job after high school, but finds plenty of time to sleep around with Paul’s friends. They’re cavalier about their infidelity and emotionally run hot and cold in the way that teenagers tend to do with first loves.

And “My Golden Days” mimics that frenetic feeling in its style. The early chapters of the movie experiment with tone and framing, with the beginning of Esther’s chapter even briefly employing split-screen wipes that look like something out of an old TV show. Desplechin also uses strange iris close-ups more commonly found in silent film. It’s a way of calling attention to Paul’s more carefree past, and yet nothing on screen feels particularly nostalgic or dreamlike.

It makes for an interesting viewing experience regardless, but like the characters at the center of “My Golden Days,” the film inwardly looks only at itself. Recapping the big moments of his life for Esther, Paul says “I have no idea what else to talk about.” “My Golden Days” isn’t about politics or bigger ideas of the world at large but about these particular people and how they meander through their lives. At the end of the day they might even be interesting, but they still don’t seem to have much to say.

2 1/2 stars

Triumph of the Will (1935)

Leni Riefenstahl’s controversial propaganda film depicts Hitler’s arrival in Nuremberg in 1934.

leni_riefenstahl_triumph_will_poster_14aEditor’s Note: This piece was written for a class in which we were instructed to review a film that is considered controversial, acknowledging how it can still be viewed as a work of art despite its controversy. 

What’s peculiar about “Triumph of the Will,” the infamous Nazi propaganda documentary from 1935, is that it doesn’t start with a magisterial shot of fascist grandeur and marching citizenry (although there will be plenty of that), but a peaceful image of soaring through the clouds.

Documentarian Leni Riefenstahl imagines Adolf Hitler’s view as he lands in Nuremberg for 1934’s gathering of hundreds of thousands within the Nazi Party to be “reviewed” by Hitler. When he arrives on the ground, the camera rides along in Der Fuhrer’s car and gets a perspective of almost exactly what Hitler would’ve seen that day in 1934.

No doubt, it’s an incredible sight that we can today recognize as bone-chillingly evil. So many smiling people giving the Nazi salute to their leader, so many star-struck kids gleaming in the sunlight, and all of it so terrifying to today look back and recognize the immense power this monster held over the masses.

But as much as Riefenstahl’s film is made to showcase Germany’s power, it has traces of calling attention to the region’s beauty. Early on the documentary has a travelogue look at the tranquil and old fashioned stone architecture, all the local farmers arriving in traditional lederhosen, the girls in braids and lacy gowns, with the shimmering canals and flags flying gracefully in the wind. You just have to ignore the fact that those flags are all carrying the Nazi insignia.

What’s more, it might be instructive to watch “Triumph of the Will” divorced from its rousing score of victorious marches. With the exception of the film’s several speeches from Nazi elite and Hitler himself, “Triumph of the Will” is practically a silent film, and Riefenstahl’s eye, taking cues from Old Hollywood’s approach to lighting, deep focus cinematography and striking low angles, is not as blindingly celebratory as you might imagine. There is an unconscious, sinister undercurrent to everything you see here, from intense, stoic looks on the faces of the Hitler Youth, to the geometrically precise armies of people gathering in stadiums and plazas that have come to define the look of fascism. In fact, the propaganda proved so powerful and effective, American filmmakers were able to use Riefenstahl’s footage in their own propaganda against the Nazis.

It would be wrong to oversell how impressive “Triumph of the Will” looks, because Riefenstahl’s documentary is by no means a “behind the scenes” account of Nuremberg in 1934. “Triumph of the Will” is exactly the film the government wants you to see, a sparkling, even sanitized look at the Nazi Party. While the film depicts hundreds of thousands celebrating Hitler, it neglects the many more both in fear and in danger of his rise to power. It would be tempting to see “Triumph of the Will” as a powerful historical document, but you quickly realize the film is decidedly one-sided.

That polished, rubbed clean sheen even reflects in the Nazi speeches. Speaking to the Hitler Youth at a massive stadium, the Fuhrer says with all his conviction that the children need to “practice obedience,” “steel yourselves” and “learn to sacrifice,” and you may raise an eyebrow when he says that Germans should be both “peace-loving and strong.” The Nazi leadership all speak of Germany’s greatness in the endurance and fortitude of their culture, economy and jobs. Their words serve as a reminder for how Germany rebuilt itself after the first World War, and Riefenstahl even opens “Triumph of the Will” with a title card that says this all takes place 16 years after the beginning of Germany’s suffering.

While “Triumph of the Will” doesn’t have any of Hitler’s directly inflammatory rhetoric and racism that would prove so terrifying and damning, his speech to close the film evokes and demands a slavish loyalty among the party, an us against them mentality that the enemy must be removed in order for the country as a whole to thrive. You can see how evil can fester under this lens.

But perhaps these images themselves aren’t far different from that of American flag-waving patriotism and militaristic advertisements and propaganda. The Nazis were responsible for some of the greatest evil known to man, but Riefenstahl’s film simply wants to celebrate a country’s power and unity.

Granted, “Triumph of the Will” isn’t exactly thrilling viewing for modern audiences. Have I mentioned the sheer amount of marching? All the parading and mass gathering as Hitler stands firmly in observation makes for the most tedious of pageantry. More interesting would honestly be a documentary about how “Triumph of the Will” was made. Hitler himself said Riefenstahl was his favorite filmmaker (hey, at least the Nazis were progressive in championing female directors) and gave her complete access and free reign to film as she pleased. Riefenstahl deployed 30 cameras and 120 technicians to film the rallies, and the sheer scale and production value necessary to capture everything must’ve required elaborate cranes and detailed, carefully orchestrated tracking shots. Ultimately, the finished, nearly two hour film represents just 3 percent of all the footage Riefenstahl shot.

star-wars-triumph-of-the-will-1935

Even films as massive as “Star Wars” have borrowed liberally from “Triumph of the Will,” and the countless images that have come to define fascism and the Nazis throughout modern popular culture all owe a huge debt to Riefenstahl.

Perhaps the greatness of her propaganda helped stoked the flames of war. Perhaps the world was right to label her a pariah. Or perhaps Riefenstahl’s artistry had the power to put the monstrous evil of Adolf Hitler into perspective.