Review: BOOKSMART

   
     Ah, the high school film. Making high school seem like it was some sort of over-the-top, zany, rollercoaster ride full of wall to wall adventures when in reality it was probably either disappointing, boring, or both. You could argue that if anyone attempted to make a realistic film about high school it would be the stupidest, dullest thing to ever see the light of day. But last year's Eighth Grade was fairly realistic, albeit about, well, middle school, and that wasn't stupid or dull or monotonous, it was perhaps the most awkward and cringe worthy film I've ever seen...it was also glorious. But the newest high school film, Booksmart, is out, and it's back in the typical, Hollywood high school realm. Starring two actresses in their twenties, featuring ridiculous, unrealistic parties, misadventures, and just-for-laughs antics that'd never happen in real life anywhere ever. I remember an actress from England mentioning that the high school "experience" that it so prominently featured in the endless amount of Hollywood films and TV shows doesn't really exist outside of the United States. It's ours. We own it. And is that a good thing? Because after being the football star that wins the big game, deflowering the prom queen or inadvertently driving your car into the principal's pool during a hazy, wild night of debauchery...is their anything left that's exciting in life? Is that a good thing to teach our kids?
     The best high school films will probably always be Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Dazed & Confused. These days, it's hard to fathom something real and serious like the abortion plot even showing up in a teenage comedy like it did in Fast Times. These days the best high school films are mostly like Superbad; they're superfluous, funny films that aren't completely bonkers or silly but still edgy and riotous. And Booksmart seems to either want to be Superbad or just copies it because they're all the same. Jonah Hill's sister, Beanie Feldstein, is one of the stars in Booksmart, so it's not difficult to call this a female Superbad. The plot is basically the last night of high school before graduation featuring two nerds that decide to have fun for once and go to some parties. Um...what could go wrong? Early on, the script is whip-smart and features some very clever lines like the one where a tough bro in the bathroom laments that, "I'd fuck her...but I'd have to put a bag over her personality." Hilarious! Unfortunately, the witty one-liners seem to go deserted once we enter the party and night life section of the film. Sure, the film is fun and entertaining, but what it doesn't have is any great, classic, memorable set pieces. We also get a lot of disappointing scenes like the party on the boat with no people and just about every scene featuring an adult. The principal, played by Jason Sudeikis (who is director Olivia Wilde's husband in real life), is given an atrociously unfunny storyline. And Amy's (Kaitlyn Dever, who's a total, bonafide star) parents, played by Will Forte and Lisa Kudrow, are groan inducingly awful. The Barbie doll drug scene doesn't entirely work, although it's at least an attempt and trying something different.
     What does elevate the film from being just a forgettable, lame, random teen flick is probably the fact that this is a film written by women, directed by a woman, with two main characters that are women, one being a character that is a lesbian. I suppose that would be enough to shout for joy in male dominated Hollywood, but there are some excellent things about the film beyond that. Olivia Wilde, forever known as the hot, blonde bartender from The O.C., does a terrific job directing her first film. The film looks great, has a great flow and feel, a kinetic vibe with non-stop music, and is super enjoyable throughout even though it never does move into great film territory. If anything, you can blame the script. While there are parties, sex scenes, drugs, drinking, laughs, and even a serial killer...there needed to be at least one truly, gut-busting, hilarious sequence. Just give me one! And honestly, for a comedy romp, the greatest scene in the entire film is a poetic, melancholy one. Amy is pining for a skater chick that she finally meets up with at a party. They go swimming at the party and Amy is underwater with bodies swimming all around her and she's alive and this is her night and she's young and beautiful and it's a gorgeously shot, very moving sequence. Then of course we get conflict and a sex scene and a gross-out, as per usual high school films.
     The two main characters, played by Feldstein and Dever, do have great chemistry together and play the type of characters that are a nice buddy comedy team that you could probably watch do any type of movie together and it'd be a lot of fun. While the other, assorted high school chums are a mixed bag in terms of enjoyment (the drama kids are unfortunately unwatchable...the long-haired kid that fucks a teacher plot seems out of place and goes nowhere), the one highlight is Billie Lourde (Carrie Fisher's daughter), who lately has been stealing the show every season on American Horror Story. Lourde, playing a drugged out, fur-coat wearing, space cadet blonde that keeps popping up everywhere out of nowhere is actually probably the funniest thing in the whole movie. In real life, Lourde is 26. So the funniest thing in this high school film is a 26 year old that plays a character that is literally the most unrealistic high school character ever. I suppose that tells you something about the high school film genre. You've gotta push the boundaries to their breaking point until they're completely nothing like real high school for it to be entertaining. Go figure. **1/2

Review: US

   Everyone loved Jordan Peele's Get Out. It made a ton of money when it wasn't supposed to, established Jordan Peele as one of Hollywood's big time directors, and it even got a nomination for Best Picture at the Oscars. It was the kind of film that so many people talked about and got such a cultural buzz swirling around it that if you didn't like it or didn't get it or thought that it was overrated...well, you probably kept your mouth shut. But let's face it: Get Out was overrated. It wasn't a terrible picture. It was an interesting, current twist on The Stepford Wives. It was Peele's first film as a writer/director, so Get Out's problems can be overlooked. It was an okay film but it fell short in a lot of categories, like the undecided comedy/horror of it that never fit to the rushed, gory ending that would have been better drawn out. Get Out is already a cultural touchstone, so breaking it's balls is akin to shouting for help in an empty forest. But Peele's latest picture is out, titled Us, and it has yet to emerge in the zeitgeist and garner a place. I'm here to let you know that Peele is, apparently, stuck doing horror movies with a sociological slant for the rest of time. And Us may just get as much notoriety and love and buzz as Get Out because it's very similar, but I doubt it. Us is a movie where a writer/director has carte blanche. Peele could have done whatever the heck he wanted to after the success of Get Out. And it shows in both bad and good ways. Us is a bit darker, serious, and more bloodthirstily sadistic than Get Out. There's less comedy, the film looks terrific, but it's also the type of film that probably needed someone to edit Peele's screenplay or, at the very least, ask pertinent questions and be given substantial answers. 
     The story has a family going to their vacation home in California. They drive a boat, hit the beach, hang out with another family. It's the perfect life! But then a strange family shows up in their driveway holding hands and not moving. Okay. So scary! And then the shit hits the fan when this strange family decides to kill them. Then it's hunt-and-chase-and-kill for an hour until the credits hit. The strange, murderous family turn out to be doppelgangers. Lupita Nyong'o is the mother, Winston Duke is the father, Shahadi Wright Joseph is the daughter, and Evan Alex is the son. All four of them also play their doppelgangers, which works, thanks to the doppelgangers being either masked or hidden in shadow most of the time. And if you think there's more to this movie than wouldn't-it-be-scary-if-your-evil-twin-showed-up-to-kill-you then you wouldn't be wrong exactly, though the film would probably be better if it didn't attempt to make it more about that. Get Out was a horror movie but also tried to say something about white liberalism and black life in modern times. Us is, I guess, supposed to be about class difference and the 1% in the U.S., hence the title. We all have a dark part of ourselves, even our country! The doppelgangers come from an underground bunker below the beach in Santa Cruz. Where did they come from? It's slightly hinted at that it was some sort of experiment, but even that feels like a lame cop-out since nothing is explained nor even really attempted to explain. Everyone just has an evil twin underground, okay? And they're not really evil, they're just pissed off that they're underground and their life sucks while their other self is up on the surface living it up on the beach. Kind of like the upper class vs. working poor? I guess that's the intent, although who the fuck knows what that's even supposed to mean amidst a horror movie/thriller or if it's supposed to be revelatory.
     The best part of the film, and, really, the only part that matters, is the hunting-and-killing horror aspect of it all. A lot of it reminded me of The Strangers. In that film, strangers show up at a house to kill people for no reason and it's full of action and suspense without answers. Us has some exciting sequences. We get chases and a fight on a boat and the family driving away in a car with a killer on the roof. The film isn't particular scary, although it's creepy in part, well shot and looks terrific. Lupita Nyong'o gives a good performance as both sides of the coin and Elisabeth Moss is great as a short-lived, vain Real Housewives type of character. I think one huge problem with the film is that the entire time you're waiting for answers or a great, final reveal. There is a twist at the end that's fairly obvious, but no answers to the big questions are revealed. Who are these doppelgangers? At least say they're from another dimension or alternate universe like they do in the comic books (Peele definitely reads comic books, as DC's Forever Evil is very similar to Us, as is the current Batman Who Laughs doppelganger storyline). And why are the doppelgangers holding hands across America like that dumb 1980's charity event? And why did they ruin the big fight scene at the end with awkward cuts away to Nyongo's character ballet dancing? And the rabbits?
     I'm sure moviegoers will be just as baffled as me at this film in a way that moviegoers weren't with Get Out. That film may have had an obvious, societal critique undertone but at least casual people watching it got it and could enjoy it. I'm not sure anyone will enjoy watching Us in a way that they did Get Out, which is why that made a boatload of cash and Us probably won't after it's first weekend.
     Whatever Peele is trying to say with Us, it never reveals itself. Yep, the 1% rules in America. We know this. Everyone knows this. Are you just using a horror film to state a fact? Perhaps it'd be best for Peele to just make a straight up horror movie, forget the ridiculous symbolism that goes nowhere, get a co-writer so your films aren't half-baked, and finally make the masterpiece you're definitely capable of. **

THE ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATIONS (BEST PICTURE) REVIEWS

BLACKKKLANSMAN: This is the first year that I can remember when I actually saw every film nominated for Best Picture. That's even more surprising since they nominate more than five films now. But the internet has totally fucked Hollywood. I saw all of these films but none in theaters. BlacKKKlansman I watched on DVD, Roma was released on Netflix, and the others were all illegally put up online thanks to the DVD screeners that the studios send to the members of the Academy that end up leaked online. What's not entirely shocking is that none of these films are great films. I can't even remember when a Best Picture winner ended up on my Top 10 list of the year. I haven't even seen a few Best Picture winners in the last few years; Spotlight and A King's Speech. And the last two year's Best Picture winners, The Shape of Water and Moonlight, were good but not great. As for BlacKKKlansman, the critics loved it but I felt that it wasn't that good at all. Denzel Washington's son plays the main character, a Colorado police officer in the 70's that infiltrates the KKK through telephone conversations and by using a white, real-life stand in played by Adam Driver, who got a Best Supporting Actor nomination (John David Washington was not nominated). Spike Lee got his first ever Best Director nomination for this, but he's obviously made much better films in the past. I think John David Washington is as bad an actor as his father is; he never acts like a real person for some reason. The movie is somewhat entertaining but never reaches any kind of great, poetic energy that some Spike Lee films have. It's an okay film. ** out of ****.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY: Rami Malek, the star of USA's awesome TV show, Mr. Robot, is Freddy Mercury. The film is basically about Mercury and Queen's rise and fall. It culminates in a pretty accurate, long adaptation of Queen's legendary 1985 Live Aid performance. For what it's worth, go watch that Live Aid performance on YouTube because it's a hell of a lot better than this film. While the movie is entertaining, it's also awful, silly, and really bad in parts. Malek does give a good performance, but the fake teeth he wears in the film are so distracting it's hard to notice much of anything else. Some have said that the film downplays Mercury's homosexuality, and I suppose that's true since his ex-wife is more prominent than any of the men he dated and slept with. What may have hurt the film is that the director, Bryan Singer, was fired late in production thanks to stories that came out that he had sex with underage boys. Singer's name is still on the film, which certainly isn't a good thing since new revelations about him just came out the other day. The film is an entertaining bad movie, if that makes any sense. **1/2

THE FAVOURITE: Yorgos Lanthimos is kind of like David Lynch in that their films are always interesting but usually never that good. The Favourite, much like Lanthimo's last picture, the super bleak and depressing The Killing of a Sacred Deer, is gorgeously shot. The Favourite looks incredible. The acting from the three women, Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz, and Olivia Coleman (all three received nominations, Stone and Weisz for Best Supporting Actress, Coleman for Best Actress), is excellent. And the script does have some nifty, fun, and amusing dialogue. The story, a tale about a real life English Queen and two women that lie to win her affection in the 1700's, is rather dull. The problem is that the first half is compelling and then it goes downhill, turns into a boring slog, and abruptly ends instead of building up to some sort of exciting, dramatic conclusion. **

GREEN BOOK: This film won the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival, which is why everyone says that it's a crowd favorite. The critics have not been so kind, and there's a ton of controversy about the film and how it deals with racism. Some say that it showcases the "white savior" narrative. After I watched it, I felt like it white-washed history. Making a buddy comedy about the horrors of segregation and racism in the 60's does seem to be a bad idea. Viggo Mortensen gives a pretty good performance as an Italian driver that has to drive Mahershala Ali's concert pianist through the South. The film won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy while a real musical, Bohemian Rhapsody, won the Best Drama Golden Globe. The film is never boring, although it definitely feels wrong and out of place in today's world. I guess this is why a bunch of older men and women, like those that are members of the Old Hollywood Academy, like it. It takes them back to when racism was simpler. **1/2

ROMA: This is Alfonso Cuaron's latest, after a long stint of inactivity since Gravity. Roma was released on Netflix, which is why a lot of people probably actually saw it. It tells the story of a maid in Mexico City in the 70's and it's in black and white. The film looks gorgeous but is boring. It does feature 2018's best scene though, when the maid, played by Yalitza Aparicio (who got a Best Actress nomination), gets to hold her baby in the hospital for a very brief moment before they take it away. The scene is as heartbreaking as 2017's best scene, The Florida Project's next to last scene when the police are taking the daughter's mother away. There are a few sequences in this film that are mesmerizing to look at and beautifully staged. But, unfortunately, it's pretty to look at but that's about it. **

A STAR IS BORN: The first half hour or so of this film, Bradley Cooper's re-make, is great. Then it devolves into Lady Gaga turning into a star and Cooper hitting the bottle. If they had changed the ending and had the two of them reuniting on stage and the ending was happy then this movie would have perhaps been a masterpiece. This will probably end up winning Best Picture. It seems like the one film out of all of these that both audiences and critics have enjoyed. The sequence when Lady Gaga's character is forced on stage to sing, "Falling" with Bradley Cooper early on is the movie's highlight. **1/2

VICE: This was the best film out of all of these nominations. This is Adam McKay's Dick Cheyney biopic. McKay of course made zany comedies like Anchorman and Talladega Nights, so this isn't a boring, serious, biopic. It has tricks and plays around and goes for broke. It's, above all else, both entertaining and horrifying. Christian Bale disappears into the role as Cheyney, and while Sam Rockwell got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for playing George Dubya, I think Steve Carrell was awesome as Donald Rumsfeld. Amy Adams was nominated for Best Supporting Actress as Lynne Cheyney, but I didn't think she did all that much to warrant that. This isn't a great film but it's a good one. ***

THE TOP 10 MOST ANTICIPATED FILMS OF 2019

1- ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD: This is Quentin Tarantino's latest, a film about a has-been actor and his stunt double, played by Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, in the late sixties during the Manson murders. The actor lives next door to Sharon Tate, hence the connection. The star list is huge: Al Pacino, Margo Robbie as Tate, Kurt Russel, Bruce Dern, Dakota Fanning, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, Lena Dunham. So far, the plot hasn't exactly been revealed. Which is kind of a shame because by the time the film finally hits U.S. theaters after a probable Cannes premiere every secret will be spoiled. But I'm curious; will this be like the rewrite of history that Inglorious Basterds was and we'll have Brad Pitt and DiCaprio hunting down and killing the Manson family members? And I think that sense of mystery is mostly why this is such an anticipated film. It's stars are fictional characters so this isn't strictly a Manson film. Tarantino will obviously never make another great film like Pulp Fiction, but at least he's one of the more entertaining and interesting filmmakers out there. I'm really curious if the studio let him pay big bucks for some of the rare songs off The Beatle's White Album. If I know Tarantino, "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" will be making an appearance.

2- STAR WARS: EPISODE IX: There's no title or trailer yet to this, the final installment in the new trilogy. J.J. Abrams is back on board as director, though, which is a good thing since The Force Awakens was better than The Last Jedi. The problem with this film is that they killed off all of the big stars like Luke and Han and Lea won't be in it for long since Carrie Fisher died in real life. That means we're left with the story of Rey vs. Kylo Ren, which, let's face it, isn't all that exciting. But J.J. Abrams and a massive budget should produce a fun tale. Let's hope it ends on a high note.

3- SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME: So where is he? France? Who cares? It's fucking Spider-Man, the second best super hero (Batman, obviously, is the first). What we do know is that this is the second entry in the Tom-Holland-as-a-high-school-Peter-Parker series and that Jake Gyllenhaal is Mysterio. I loved the first film in this series. It was super fun and action packed and had surprises and was funny. This is what comic book movies should be: fun, not dour like the Avengers films of late.

4- IT: CHAPTER 2: I admit it: I didn't even really enjoy the first It film that came out in 2017 that much. I forget why, but I did read the book right before I saw the movie...so perhaps I didn't like how much they cut out. I think I was also angry that the best part, the clown, wasn't even in it that much, and that they resorted to lame special f/x for a lot of the supposed, "scary" monster bits. This sequel is the kids all grown up and visiting Derry again to battle Pennywise as adults. Bill Hader, James McAvoy, and Jessica Chastain star in this.

5- GLASS: There really isn't much better than going to see the latest M. Night Shymalan film on opening night in a packed, rowdy theater. While his movies usually never turn out great, they always entertain and surprise. And with Split, he seemed to finally get his mojo back after selling his soul and making The Last Airbender and After Earth. His latest, Glass, is the third part of his super hero trilogy that started with Unbreakable, a film I didn't all that much cared for. Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis are back from Unbreakable and James McAvoy and Anya-Taylor Joy are back from Split. I guess this will sort of be like a typical hero vs. villains super hero story? Expect twists, even dumb ones, as usual, and this should be as stupid and as wild as all of Shymalan's features, just how we like them.

6- THE GOLDFINCH: Donna Tartt's mega hit book was one of the best books I've read. Making the 700 plus page epic into a two hour film is, quite obviously, impossible. It's too bad they didn't make this as an HBO mini-series or something, although it doesn't really matter; the book was so great no film will ever touch it. What the film does have going for it is that while Tartt's writing is great, so is the story. It's a hell of a page turner with a fantastic opening sequence and such exotic locales as Vegas after the mortgage crisis and eventually Amsterdam. The film stars Ansel Elgort, Nicole Kidman, and Sarah Paulson. It was directed by Brooklyn's John Crowley. I think it'll be pretty hard to fuck this one up.

7- GODZILLA 2: KING OF THE MONSTERS: Remember how dumb Garth Evans' Godzilla was? Godzilla turned out to be a good guy fighting other monsters when all we really wanted to see was Godzilla destroying cities? Well looking at this title I'm guessing it's more of the same...but I'm still a sucker for mega-budget, disaster, sci-fi, monster epics. Who isn't? This one stars the girl from Stranger Things and the Nordic vampire from True Blood.

8- THE NEW KING OF COMEDY: This is the new Stephen Chow film, a man that is definitely an acquired taste if there ever was one. Case in point: his movies are always the highest grossing films in China, the world's most populated country, yet most Americans have no idea who the hell Stephen Chow is. Even Jackie Chan is famous in the U.S. these days yet Chow probably never will be. He's written/directed/starred in some classics, though, like Shaolin Soccer, Journey to the West, and Kung-Fu Hustle. I even loved his last feature, The Mermaid. Chow is basically a stupid comedian. The comedy is dumb, silly, ridiculous, yet wonderful. The New King of Comedy is a sequel to his '09 feature and is basically about bad actors. Should make a billion dollars and be hilarious and you'll never even know it exists.

9- ZOMBIELAND 2: I put the first Zombieland on my Best of 2009 list (it came in #7). Ten years is a long time and I vaguely remember it (didn't Bill Murray play himself?). But certainly I loved it for some reason and the whole crew is back for a sequel. Director Ruben Fleischer hasn't done too much of anything good lately (he directed the poorly reviewed Venom last year but did make the entertaining 30 Minutes or Less in 2011), but I love zombie movies and Woody Harrelson and Emma Stone and Jesse Eisenberg are always great. The plot involves "evolved" zombies. So, what, they fly now?

10- JOKER: Joaquin Phoenix, Hollywood's best actor, is playing The Joker. That's really all you need to know. This movie doesn't make any sense of course. This is a DC film. The Joker in the DC films is Jared Leto. They didn't re-cast him, this is just a separate film from the Suicide Squad universe for no reason. Don't worry, nobody understands the logic behind this. Robert DeNiro also stars and the director is the guy that made The Hangover. I suppose this will either be awesome or awful, and so far it doesn't sound or look like the usual Wonder Woman or Aquaman DC films. Who fucking knows? Phoenix should give a performance for the ages, so there's that.

THE TOP 10 MOST ANTICIPATED FILMS OF 2018 REVISITED

1-SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY:  The script is good. Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "The Empire Strikes Back," and "The Return of the Jedi," wrote it with his son. The final product is unfortunately not as good as the script. Ron Howard came on board late as director and it kind of shows. The film feels slapped together and never really achieves a unified whole. It is entertaining in spots, though, has some cool looking set designs, and does feature a great performance by Donald Glover as Lando. **1/2

2- HOLMES & WATSON: This movie was an ultra-bomb. Not only did it fail at the box office, it even failed with both critics and audiences. I didn't see it but bet it's still hilarious. 

3- THE PREDATOR: A disappointment. After Shane Black's masterpiece, "The Nice Guys," what could go wrong? Apparently everything. While it does feature some of Black's trademarks, it mostly seems like just another bad, dumb "Predator" sequel made by an unknown hack that used to direct video game commercials. *1/2

4- FANTASTIC BEASTS: CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD: I enjoyed this, although it's not as good as the original film. Everyone seemed to dislike this film for some reason. ***

5- ISLE OF DOGS: Good film, although not as good as Wes Anderson's live action pictures. And it's not as good as the trailer, as I predicted. ***

6- THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT: Boring. Who makes a movie about a serial killer boring? You'd think it'd be difficult. The movie does have a great last sequence, though, when Jack travels down to hell and tries to cross the bridge back up to Earth. Finally, after two dull hours the movie gets interesting for ten or so minutes. *

7- JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM: This is another movie that a lot of people hated that I thought was super entertaining and awesome. I give up, really. If you think this movie is bad then what the hell did you think of "Jurassic Park 3"? Seriously. The scene of them running down the hill while a volcano is going off and dinosaurs are running past them is one of the best scenes in all of the "Jurassic Park" films. This was sheer popcorn bliss in my eyes. ***1/2

8- EARLY MAN: Amusing, albeit not as funny as Aardman's other works. I'm still laughing thinking about the staring dog from "Shaun the Sheep". **1/2

9- HALLOWEEN: I didn't see this. It got good reviews.

10- X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX: This was pushed to February 2019 and then June of 2019. That doesn't bode well but it still looks great.

THE BEST FILMS OF 2018

1- FREE SOLO

2- EIGHTH GRADE

3- SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE

4- JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM

5- JULIET NAKED

6- BUMBLEBEE

7- UNDER THE SILVER LAKE

8- THE DEATH OF STALIN

9- A QUIET PLACE

10- YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

Review: UNDER THE SILVER LAKE

   

     After It Follows, David Mitchell was the hot, indie director to watch. When it was announced that his next film would be a film noir mystery set in modern day Los Angeles, I was excited. That sounded fairly interesting and fairly cool. Mitchell had made a teenage film (The Myth of the American Sleepover) about, well, teenagers doing teenage things like getting drunk and staying out late and falling in love, then he followed that up with a weird horror film (It Follows) about a sexually transmitted disease that was perhaps the exact opposite of what you would think of when imagining a horror film about a sexually transmitted disease (Cabin Fever, this was not). So to now make a film noir feature seemed to cement the fact that Mitchell was definitely a filmmaker to watch. He zagged when you thought he would zig, and he would always come up with something fresh and new. He was going to be a fucking star, huge, a legend. And then the film noir film, Under the Silver Lake, premiered at Cannes earlier this year and all of the air was let out of the balloon. The critics that reviewed it didn't hate it nor love it. They did the worst possible thing: they didn't care about it. It was meant to be forgotten. And now, seven months later, it kind of seems like it has been.
     Under the Silver Lake was deemed too long, too weird, too strange, with flashes of brilliance but ultimately a let down of a film with grand ideas and a bold vision that went nowhere. The studio was set to release it stateside in the summer then pushed it to December and now it's set to be released sometime in April of 2019. I wouldn't be surprised if it never gets released in theaters, if it's the type of film that's decided is unreleasable and simply sent straight to DVD or a streaming site. You might see it pop up one night at 1 AM on Showtime and vaguely remember that, yeah, it's that movie by David Mitchell starring Andrew Garfield and Elvis Presley's granddaughter that never came out. What happened? What went wrong?
     Surprising or not, I'm here to say that Under the Silver Lake is a great film, one of the best I've seen this year. It's also exactly what everyone has said it is: it's long, sure, it's weird, sure, it doesn't make a ton of sense, sure, and most people will fucking hate it's guts. But I was engrossed, captivated, intrigued, and entertained for its entire running time. Maybe it just plays into what I like about films and what others loathe. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for anything that takes me on a bizarre journey that's like nothing you've ever experienced before, or rarely have, if ever. The film reminded me of how it felt reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. That's a book, sure, but the experience of reading it is more akin to taking a new drug for the first time and experiencing something beyond reading mere words or a rudimentary story. Under the Silver Lake is more of an experience than a film. It's not technically a straight mystery film. It's not even technically a straight film, although it does have a primary mystery that's solved amidst so many other tangents unresolved. Ultimately what it is is a film that wraps you up in it's dream like fog and doesn't let go for two hours and fifteen minutes. You don't know where it's going. Every new scene is like opening a new door in Willy Wonka's factory. What the fuck is this? Where are we? Who are these people and strange things? Often it doesn't even matter because it's so thrilling, oft-putting, beautiful, entertaining, and new that you're just enjoying the ride.
     Andrew Garfield plays a typical, L.A. slacker who somehow has a car, apartment, friends, and an affinity to attract beautiful women yet doesn't have a job, prospects, great hygiene, or sense. Early on we find him watching a topless neighbor through binoculars. When his mom calls him he's pretending that he's at work. The world he inhabits is modern day Los Angeles, but there's always something strange on the margins. When he gets coffee at a local coffee shop, a worker is trying to clean off a spray painted message on the front window that reads: "Beware the Dog Killer." When a new, blonde beauty played by Riley Keough shows up at his apartment complex pool, the plot kicks in. Who is she? What's her deal? Things then get weird. And more weird. And while the main mystery of the film is this blonde beauty, there's also the eye-patch pirate, the escort service, the Jesus rock band, the woman-watching pervert with a drone, the underground bunker, the hobo code, and more. The film is so stuffed to the brim with oddities that it often feels like the script wasn’t written with a story or plot in mind, that it just came about when Mitchell wrote down a string of “cool" ideas he dreamt up on random days. And while some of the ideas and scenes work more than others (the song writer scene is just bad), the film is filled with a lot of beautiful imagery and absorbing sequences. I loved the dance scene in the cavernous, cave nightclub on old school music night when REM's "What's the Frequency Kenneth?" is playing. And the naked, owl-masked serial killer that moves like a ballerina with a butcher knife is both frightening and very cool. I guess it's basically to say that this movie is fucking nuts. It deals with secret codes for secret societies but doesn't ever fully make sense or reveal itself to be smart or profound. But it's very interesting, fresh, and kinetically alive. Garfield gives a great performance and is the type of protagonist you'll gladly follow down the rabbit hole with. The big question is: will the viewer go down the rabbit hole as well? The answer so far is no, and that's a shame, as it's nice to see an independent filmmaker finally get the cash to make a big, grand, bonkers vision come alive. Bravo, you strange mother fucker. ***1/2