Trap (2024)

 

OK, I'm going to say this right off the bat so you can decide if you want to keep reading, this movie is not good. It is however entertaining enough for the hour and forty-five minutes that it runs. It would not hurt the film at all if it was fifteen minutes shorter, but that would probably mean that the concert sequences and musical performances by co-star Saleka Shyamalan, the daughter of writer/director M. Night Shyamalan. I strongly suspect that more than half of his reason for making the film in the first place was to showcase her.

Movies about serial killers are a dime a dozen. Occasionally they transcend the genre and have something special about them which makes them essential. "The Silence of the Lambs", "Seven" and "Zodiac" are not found in the discount dozen. Those are the exceptions, more often we get "The Watcher", ""Copycat", "Mr. Brooks" and this film. Because this is an M. Night Shyamalan film, you expect something of a twist in the storytelling. He is famous for the twist endings of some of his films, but this movie starts with the twist. The serial killer is a loving Dad, who is taking his tween daughter to a concert by a pop culture phenomena. It's not really a spoiler to tell you there is a "Trap" in play, it's right in the title. This movie plays with conventions only slightly, and it does not do much to build any tension, except in the fact that we are sympathizing with the serial killer for most of the film.

There are a couple of reasons this works. First the film is told almost entirely from the perspective of the killer, at least until the third act. Also, we are spared seeing any of his crimes, they are mildly described and we get a discrete crime scene photo, so we don't know much about how horrible he is until later in the story. The third thing that serves the purpose of making us root for evil, is the performance of the actor cast as "The Butcher". Josh Hartnett is solid as a doting father, and when he is prowling through the arena, looking for ways to escape, he is convincingly clever (and of course conveniently lucky). If there is anything that holds the movie together, it is his performance. Otherwise, the film is a series of cliches and tropes that don't seem to be written in a very interesting way.

For the movie to work, you have to suspend your disbelief repeatedly. Here is a list of just a few of the lazy writing moments; there is a pop concert by a major star, at an arena in a big city, in the early afternoon, the serial killer gets information first from the loosest lipped venue employee on the premises, when challenged for a card that would prove he was at a particular location, he magically discovers one, every radio contact he listens in on is timed perfectly with his next move. Those are just the plot points that stretch credulity, the concert setting itself offers us a whole bunch of impossibilities. For instance, in a crowd of twenty thousand, only three thousand of which are men who could be the killer, they all are using the same bathroom at the same time. I went to a Katy Perry concert several years ago, with similar demographics, and when I went to the men's room at Staples Center, I was alone. 

If there is a twist to the story, it is what happens when the location changes. Had I known the connection of the pop star to the creator of the film, I think I would have seen her plot line coming. I did not realize that "Lady Raven" was the daughter of the director until I saw the credits. Halfway through the movie, the trap is behind us but there is still an hour of the film. Things really go off the rails then, and the exposition dump at the climax, tries to explain how this all could have come together. It feels completely tacked on.

Ariel Donoghue is cute as Riley, the daughter of our serial killer. Alison Pill shows up late in the film and she has the thankless role that is supposed to get us to the conclusion of the movie. Disney child star Hayley Mills has grown into the role of wizened expert profiler, and ninety percent of her performance takes place over walkie talkies.  Saleka Shyamalan is a better singer than she is an actress, and that is unfortunate because her character is critical when we get to the midway point of the film, and she struggles to be convincing. 

I did not hate this movie the way I did "Longlegs" from a week or two ago, I was just indifferent to it. I tried to ignore all the shortcuts that were being taken and just enjoy the story. Walking out of the theater, I could see all the things wrong with the movie, but I paid to see it, I wanted to have a good time, and I allowed myself the amount of space needed to be partially entertained by this concoction. Maybe I should see Mr. Brooks again. 

Paramount Summer Classic Film Series-The Lunchbox (2013)

Two of the most pleasant surprises I've had at the Paramount classic film series over the years have been films from India. Last year it was "RRR", a rousing action film that got the audience shouting out encouragement laughing uproariously, and generally rooting for the heroes. This week a film with a very different tone joins my list of films from India that I have enjoyed greatly, "The Lunchbox" from 2013.

I wish I could say I knew the actors in this film well, but as far as I can tell I've only seen the lead actor  in a couple of movies before, Irrfan Khan was in "Jurassic World", "The Life of Pi" and "Slumdog Millionaire".  They were all terrific. Khan plays the lead,  a man nearing retirement, somewhat unwillingly. He doesn't seem like he would be a romantic leading man but that's how deceptive looks can be. The real heart of romance lies in the ability to understand and relate to another human being, and this character, Saajan Fernandes, manages to do that, although very tentatively.

For those of you not familiar with the story, which I assume is most everybody reading this site, "The Lunchbox" concerns the developing relationship between two strangers through a series of notes that are delivered via a lunch box delivery service, which is noted for its accuracy. The twist in this film, of course, is that the service is not infallible. The lunch box order of our widowed soon to be retiree is mixed up with the lunch sent by a woman to her husband. She is attempting to keep her marriage together by preparing meals with love and care and the right amount of ingredients. She succeeds in her meals with the advice of an older woman who we never see, but who shouts advice from an apartment upstairs, and sends spices and special ingredients via a hanging basket to the leading lady's kitchen. I don't know how typical this is in India, but it makes it feel like a pretty friendly place.

At the workplace of the soon to be retired accountant, we see that he is a circumspect man, who doesn't exude much outward warmth and appears to have closed himself up after the death of his wife. A young man, played by  Nawazuddin Siddiqui is supposed to replace him, and the older man is expected to train him in the job but he is clearly reluctant to do so. It looks at first like the younger man will be annoying and a character that we will look down on. The joy and clever script writing, comes when characters are revealed to us slowly and in interesting ways, and the young apprentice accountant certainly turns out to be more interesting and more appealing than initially thought to be.

The woman in the story, lla, played by Nimrat Kaur, is a loving mother, and a wife who wants to make her husband's life better, but who seems to be ignored by an indifferent spouse. As the lunches travel back and forth, she finds the older man an outlet where she can share her thoughts in a way that is a little bit more honest than she is able to manage with her upstairs neighbor. He also begins to reach out a little more and it is his tentative connection with her that allows him to create a stronger connection with his younger coworker. Of course there are complications, and some dramatic turns in the story, but they are all reasonable and set up with plenty of legitimacy.

The actors in this film are all perfectly cast. The older man is handsome but clearly feeling the years. The younger man seems eager and a little naive, but he is also so politely brash that he's hard to resist after a while. I think when I read about this film that everyone received some awards for their performances in the film and as far as I'm concerned they deserved them. The part of the woman is difficult because she is so conflicted. There is a terrific sequence where she finds the dress that she wore on her honeymoon, and models it for her husband, hoping for some attention from him that she clearly needs. You can see in her acting the heartbreak that comes from being ignored. In another scene as she sits in a restaurant waiting for her anonymous correspondent to meet her, we can see the anxiety and confusion on her face when he is not on time. This was a very subtle performance but still very effective.

This is an unexpected love Story, with a fantastic premise, in a world and culture that I know little about but could appreciate from the distance that I have from it. The characters all have good arcs to make us interested in following them, and there is a great deal of humor as the story plays out. This is the kind of charming foreign language film that I have fallen for over the years. I would compare it to a film like "Eat, Dink, Man, Woman", or "Shall We Dance?", two films from the '90s that I still count among my favorite romances. It's nice to add another film to that list, and one that comes from a different culture it helps give me a little insight into the rest of the world.

Paramount Summer Classic Film Series-Blade Runner (1982)

I looked, and it is hard to believe, in the fourteen years I have been writing on this blog, there is not a post solely devoted to the movie "Blade Runner". This film came out 42 years ago, and I saw it on opening night. I have seen it several more times on the big screen since then, but apparently not once in the last decade and a half. I do remember going to a screening at the Archlight in Hollywood with my daughter while she was still in college, so that must have been 2009 or 2010 early on. This is one of the most influential films of the last fifty years, in spite of it's commercial failure. The version we saw last Saturday was the "Final Cut" which looks like it will really be the last version of the movie, at least from Director Ridley Scott.

This version of the film is the most coherent, and the plotline is clear. One of the things that has changed about the film in the last forty years is the narration. When the film came out, there was a narrative track by Harrison Ford as the character Deckard, and it contained exposition that tried to clarify characters and plot. In reality, it only cluttered things, although it did add a noir style trope to this dark future noir story. Ultimately, no one will miss it. The ending has also been altered, in the original release, there is a more upbeat is not entirely happy ending. The ambiguity of the "Final Cut" ending is a lot more in line with the questions raised by the film's premise.

Over the years, there has been controversy about whether or not Deckard, Ford's character, is actually a replicant himself. Ridley Scott has asserted that he is, and some of the additions to the film have tried to hint at that. The insertion of the unicorn flashback/dream, is meant to suggest that Gaff, the nominal partner working with Deckard, has knowledge of his thoughts, as exemplified by the unicorn origami found on Deckard's doorstep near the end of the film. I have a couple of problems with this approach. First of all, it undermines the romance between Deckard and Rachel, who is in fact a replicant. The value of the emotional theme is that a human can fall in love with a product and it can be meaningful. If it is simply two manufactured beings, it doesn't mean anything. Also, as Deckard fights with Roy at the climax of the film, it is clear that he is a superior physical specimen. Why would the inferior model be the one set upon the rogue replicants? It makes no sense. One last thought on this point, Rick Deckard returns in the sequel set 31 years later, and if he is a replicant, there would have to have been some planned obsolescence because Deckard has aged substantially. 

Scott and the screenwriters were a little optimistic about some technological elements of the future. We are not operating colonies off world, we still don't have flying cars, and although AI is getting dangerously close to sentience, we don't have slave labor replicants. However, most of the dystopia about Los Angeles is spot on. Homelessness is rampant, languages are not shared, and advertising dominates the vista. I left California in the middle of a multi year drought, but in the last two years, the precipitation seen in the movie appears to have overwhelmed the people still living there. The models of the buildings seen in th film are shot in a spectacular manner. I remember going to a museum exhibit in the early 90s, where the police headquarters building from the film was on display, it was incredible. The visual elements are the thins that make this movie such a touchstone for modern film makers.

Regarding the plot, there is a dilemma that I was reminded of as I watched the film. We are clearly supposed to have sympathy for the replicants who simply want to live, but we are conflicted by the brutality they show to all humans, even the ones who assist in their cause or at least sympathize with them. The four replicants seem to be irredeemably vicious. Chew, the clueless Eye engineer is murdered for no reason except spite. Tyrell is murdered out of frustration, and Sebastian, the kind but naive human who has assisted the remaining two replicants, is killed for no reason at all.  The replicants seem to have been designed with no empathy neural patterns, only rage. Only at the very end, do we get a sense of progress when Batty spares Deckard with his final gesture. I don't know if it is enough to redeem the more than two dozen people they killed in the course of the story. I want it to mean something, and Rutger Hauer's performance and final monologue is almost enough. 

The theater was packed for the show. We had been to the "Dick Tracy" screening earlier, but I was able to go back to the car and pick up my Blade Runner shirt for the evening film. I wore it over my long sleeve shirt because it was very chilly in that first show, and the lightweight material would not have kept me warm during this film. Every actor in the movie was excellent, but Rutger Hauer and Darryl Hannah are the standouts. It is for good reason that this is probably the late Mr. Hauer's signature role. 

Paramount Summer Classic Film Series-Dick Tracy (1990) Re-Visit

 

The 1990 version of Dick Tracy from director/star Warren Beatty has a lot going for it that I think people have ignored over the years. The look of this movie is impressive, coming years before the innovation of CGI that would make movies like this much more typical. This film uses a very simple color palette to make the comic strips from the Sunday funny papers come to life as a motion picture.

Warren Beatty probably remembered the comics fondly from his childhood which explains why he finds Dick Tracy a compelling character. I read the comics as well but I mostly knew Dick Tracy from the cartoons that played during the 1960s. Because those cartoons featured ethnically questionable characters, it is rare to find them easily available. Beatty did the right thing by leaving out all of those sidekicks from the cartoons and sticking with the villains who are cartoonish in the first place.

The movie also features Madonna, who sings three or four of the songs, and does a great job vamping it up as a femme fatale in what is basically a children's cartoon. That is except for the one sheer black nightgown that she's wearing which leaves little to the imagination and would certainly justify dad accompanying the children to see this movie in a theater. They're also some risqué lines that are delivered by Madonna and to which Beatty's character of Dick Tracy seems nonplussed. It's a lot of fun and full of cliches, but still spectacular looking with the photography and the production design.

People may forget that Al Pacino got an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor in his role as Big Boy Caprice in this movie. Pacino appears under a thick layer of makeup and an exaggerated bodysuit that makes him look thicker and nearly a hunchback in his role as the mobster who wants to run the city. This is one of those roles where the actor hams it up and gets away with it because of the nature of the film. I was happy to see Pacino get honored, but there's so much about this film that is enjoyable that he is not the only reason to see it.

It may be the Warren Beatty fell in love with shooting machine guns when he made "Bonnie and Clyde" back in 1967, and he still hasn't gotten over the thrill of pointing a Tommy Gun in the direction of things you want to destroy and pulling the trigger. This movie is full of gangsters and cops who arm themselves with this weapon from 1930s gangster films, and then go out at it in a largely bloodless outcome but with lots of explosions. In the wake of "Batman" the year before, I'm sure the studio was looking for a Hero film with spectacular visuals, and they almost got it. When Warren Beatty as Dick Tracy swings around and his yellow top coat flies open at the waist as he points his Tommy Gun in the direction of criminals who are shooting at him, it's a perfect trailer moment.

A terrific Glen Headley played Tess Trueheart, Tracy's love interest, and she is really under playing it in comparison to both Beatty and Madonna. She feels like a real character from a 1930s screwball comedy, although she's not the daffy one in the film. There are a variety of character actors who joined Pacino in the makeup chair to portray the Rogues gallery of criminals that Dick Tracy faces down. We can also throw in Charles Durning and Dick Van Dyke, both without much makeup, as characters in the film that add some interesting elements to the plot. The kid actor, Charlie Korsmo, appeared in a few other films as a child, but as far as I know his acting career didn't reach much further than the early 1990s. There should have been a sequel to this movie. It probably underperformed, and I know that Beatty fought some rights issues. 

When this movie was first released, it got a lot of publicity to launch it and of course the studio was marketing the images from the film as much as they could. I wish I had saved all of the McDonald's toys, and drinking glasses, and t-shirts that I purchased at the time. The most interesting artifact from my point of view, was the original ticket for the preview screening that we went to. It was a t-shirt with the ticket printed on it, and you wore it to gain admission to the theater on the night of the show. Even though my children were only four and two at the time, I was going to make them attend with me and so our whole family, all four of us, wore our t-shirts that night. I really wish I had that t-shirt to wear to the Paramount screening this last Saturday.

Paramount Summer Classic Film Series-Repo Man (1984) Re-visit

 

The circumstances that gave rise to the aesthetics of this movie are long gone. Punk attitudes rose and fell in the 80s, and in the forty years since this came out, new attitudes of entitlement, resentment and envy have replaced the punk ethos.  The contempt for normative lifestyles continues but it is much less interesting now than it was in 1984. If we set aside the angry young man motif of the film, there still remains an off beat story about losers, struggling to make it in the world, and the complications that arise when they cross paths with society. In other words, this is still a punk movie, it just has lost it's cause.

No characters in the movie are particularly likeable. Otto, the main protagonist played by Emilio Estevez, is an angry, self centered punk, with no respect for women, who feels entitled to something more, but he doesn't quite know what. He does seem to have some ethics, but those morals are constantly undermined by his associates, both the professionals he takes up with, and the girl he supposedly cares about. It may be understandable why he has such attitudes, everyone he interacts with lets him down in some way.  Bud, the Harry Dean Stanton character, is his mentor, but also an antagonist who second guesses and manipulates Otto from the start. Thankfully, their story does get a more satisfactory conclusion than that of Leila, the girl who betrays him after he has rescued her a couple of times. 

The great Tracey Walter, plays Miller , a non-driving cog in the repo man world, who passes out wisdom like candy at Halloween. The only problem is, when you look in your bag, it is full of those circus peanut candies that are disgusting. Nothing Miller says means much, and most of the time it is simply designed to provoke those around him. His commentary on John Wayne is a good example of that. Lite, is another repo man that Otto works with and his philosophy is at complete odds with the one Bud has been espousing.  There is not a homogenous set of opinions in this culture. The Rodriguez brothers, who are set up as antagonists early in the film, turn out to be not so bad in the end. The UFO group that seeks the McGuffin, are not heroic revolutionaries but jaded outsiders who are indifferent to their own benefactor .

There is a ton of stuff to laugh about in the film. The banality of normal life is lampooned by the use of the "generic" products of the era. Otto's parents are hypnotized by the television and a preacher that they are sending all their money too. The customers who are losing their cars are often nitwits or trying to pull a fast one themselves. The former friends of Otto, who have become stick up artists, are the most inept of all, suggesting that writer/director Alex Cox is is not all that sympathetic to the youth in the picture at all. My favorite moment in the film is an exchange between two of Alex former friends,

Debbi: Duke, let's go do some crimes.

Duke: Yeah. Let's go get sushi and not pay.

I wrote about this movie originally on my 30 Years On Project, saluting the films I saw in 1984. This Screening at the Paramount was the first time I have seen the movie in a theater since 1984. It really holds up well. Just as a side note, the Chevy Impala that Bud drives in the movie, had a parking decal on the bumper from Fullerton College, which was a duplicate of the one I had on my car because I was teaching there in 1984. 

Deadpool and Wolverine (2024)

 

The snarky and violent "Deadpool and Wolverine" is entertaining but in a very specific way. It appeals to the naughty child in us, who is anxious to see all of the things that are held up as role models, taken down a peg or two. We don't want anything to be so highfalutin that we can't make a vulgar joke about it and share it with our friends and hope that they are amused by our cleverness. So congratulations Ryan Reynolds, all of your friends, me included, found your smart ass commentary and visuals to be funny. The fact that they're funny however does not mean that what you're doing is automatically good. I was entertained, and that's the goal most of the time for a movie, but I also want to be moved emotionally by what I see, and that almost never happens in this particular film.

Of course Ryan Reynolds and the filmmakers already know that this is true. The opening sequence has Deadpool behaving as if he is a necrophiliac with the remains of Wolverine from the "Logan" movie. That film had a deliberately dramatic bent to it, and it was a fitting conclusion for that part of the X-Men story. What "Deadpool and Wolverine" does, is simply pretend that that story doesn't matter, and proceed as if it's okay to engage in mocking it as part of our own self-referential style. One of the problems with these films that are set in a Multiverse, whether it is something from the quantum Realm, something from a different timeline, or some magic variant of either the two, is that the stakes seem unimportant and as such the drama is largely missing.

I would have a hard time telling you exactly what it is that the two lead characters are trying to accomplish as the task in this plot. This movie is mostly a chance for fans of comic books who love it when characters that they follow fight one another and fans can indulge themselves in exactly that. Wolverine gets resurrected from the dead, or from some other timeline, primarily so he and Deadpool can bicker with one another like a battling pair of married people, or a buddy cop movie where the partners act like they hate each other, and cover up their true feelings with false bravado. In what would be the second act of this film, we get stranded in a place that were unfamiliar with. The Void doesn't seem to follow any rules that will make it easy for us to understand how characters might manage to escape their situation, and we are returned to the presence of characters that have long been forgotten. That of course is the point of the movie, to give some of those superheroes a final act that they have been denied.

It's been so long since I saw the Blade trilogy that I'm not exactly sure why it is I should be happy about the return to the screen of the actor who embodied that part, but I was. I never saw the Electra movie, so I don't know whether this return is necessary or not. I did appreciate however, the joke that came up when Chris Evans made his appearance in the film. The direction that the moment took was one of those entertaining meta incidents, that the filmmakers clearly planned, relished, and executed so craftily. I hope it doesn't spoil it for you that I even mentioned that actor's appearance in the film.

Grotesque violence as humor is not new, in spite of what people who are seeing Deadpool might think. For example in Pulp Fiction from 30 years ago, we accidentally have a character shot in the face and disappeared for us, as criminals ineptly try to cope with the event. It works as humor because it's shocking, and it stands out against all the other things that are going on in the film. The problem in "Deadpool and Wolverine" is that this sort of violence is in every scene, and it is repeated over and over and over again. There are just so many times you can go over the top and get a laugh from doing so, otherwise it just feels like you're pressing. Which is frequently the way I felt while watching some of those scenes. The best example of it was the resolution of one of the characters who appears tangentially in the film. His demise was so quick and grotesque that it was shocking and funny at the same time, but that was not true in most of the other cases. The violence appeared to be the whole point of those sequences.

I recommend the film to people who are fans of superhero movies, and who have struggled with the DC Universe, and what has happened in the MCU. The The Fourth Wall comes down frequently, with commentary by Deadpool about the lack of planning, and coordination, around the comic book films and characters. Reynolds doesn't spare himself from the mocking, and while such self depreciating humor is easy to appreciate, it also seems a little contrived as a way around the failures of earlier films to connect with us on an emotional level.

I don't resent the success that the film has, I'm quite happy that theaters are full and movies are doing business. It's just a shame that audiences are flocking to this while ignoring movies that are probably of greater worth and certainly a lot deeper. The kind of humor that we laugh at may very well reflect our culture and in this particular case not in a very positive look. It would be nice to say that we were the culture the laughed at Jack Benny, Albert Brooks, or Woody Allen but this film suggests that what we really find funny as a culture are The Three Stooges with knives. I like The Three Stooges, but I also recognize their humor is not as complex. The fact that we are amused is good, but it will not be longer lasting and it may not be worthwhile.

John Carpenter's Starman (1984) Revisit

Once again 1984 proves to be a wonderful year for terrific movies. The Alamo Drafthouse has been presenting a series in their time capsule, that focuses on 1984 in the month of July this year. After having a great experience at "Buckaroo Banzai" on Monday night, we ventured to a different location to catch up with the least John Carpenter-ish film that John Carpenter ever made. This science fiction romance includes an Academy Award nominated acting performance, and no dismemberment of any animals or human beings, although a car or two do get destroyed.

This was the adult version of E.T. , and it features a mature love story that plays out very patiently between an alien visitor and an American woman. Karen Allen, famous for the Indiana Jones movie, plays a woman grieving her recently lost husband, who's marriage was only a couple of years old. We watch her torture herself by looking at old films of she and her husband and happier times, as she drinks herself into a position where she can finally sleep, we wonder how this is going to connect with the space vehicle that has crashed not too far from her home in Wisconsin. It turns out that the visitor from another world is going to use the DNA in the lock of hair that she has in a photo album to replicate itself in the form of her deceased husband. This would come as a shock to just about anybody, when she encounters this being as it is growing in her living room, and it when it turns around it is the exact image of her lost love, you would expect her to pass out immediately. It actually takes almost two more minutes for her to do so.

Once the premise has been set up the film becomes a chase movie, as the alien and the Earth woman travel from Wisconsin to a crater in Arizona where the alien is supposed to rendezvous with his partners on a different spacecraft. Of course the woman and the visitor are also pursued by agents of the U.S. government, who use the military in a ham-fisted way to locate the alien, and assess what thread it might present to our country. Trapped between the science and the military strategy, is a scientist from S.E.T.I. , the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, played by Charles Martin Smith. Jeff Bridges inhabits the body of our deceased carpenter, resurrected through advanced cloning, and his charming limited understanding of English vocabulary becomes one of the continuous humor tropes in the film. Bridges best actor nomination is almost certainly a result of the physicality that he brings to the character of Scott, the late husband of Karen Allen's character. 

It is a science fiction film, but the alien here is much different from the one that John Carpenter showed us in his previous film, "The Thing". This character is more benevolent and, as embodied by Bridges, a hell of a lot more charming. The cross country road picture allows Carpenter and Company to make some observations about the nature of human beings, and about the U.S. paranoia around aliens or any threat to National Security. The pig-headed leader of the security team played by veteran actor Richard Jaeckel , could easily have gone in a different direction. That would certainly make it a different film, but it might not be one that John Carpenter would have been willing to make. Instead we get an action film with a science fiction character, and a lot of humor. The road trip romance provides a lot more heartwarming moments than you will find in any other John Carpenter film.

I found this movie endearing back in 1984, and again when I rewatched it for my project about that year in movies that I did a decade ago, and I once again find it to be exactly that on this latest viewing. I'm not sure the film is substantial but it certainly is audience-pleasing and entertaining. Karen Allen by the way was just as good as Bridges was, but she didn't get the accolades because her part was a lot more standard. It's too bad that the science fiction world, doesn't have more movies like this, and by the way, it's also too bad that it doesn't have more John Carpenter films as well.