Two for the Money: FOCUS

Focus is a shiny package that offers fleeting, but reliable, pleasures of moviegoing. It has attractive people in beautiful locations wearing gorgeous clothes engaging in wittily plotted preposterous schemes. It stars two glamorous, charming movie stars, an old pro near the height of his powers (Will Smith) and a young up-and-comer more than ready to take the spotlight (Margot Robbie). They meet cute as she, an aspiring scam artist, fails to swindle him, a veteran con man, in a hotel bar. He agrees to help hone her powers of observation, to shift her mark’s focus with one gesture while picking a pocket with the other. Besides, he needs a pretty and clever girl to help pull off his latest schemes. They have a flirtatious early scene lifting items off each other mid conversation, trading rings and wallets, testing skill. It’s easy to believe they’re both so charming they could pull off such delicate, intimate slight of hand with ease.

That also happens to be how writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (of the sly I Love You Phillip Morris and sappy Crazy Stupid Love) get away with making a featherlight and empty picture like this feel fun and diverting in the moment. The movie's so charming it’s easy to lose focus on how ephemeral its effects are. You don’t even feel 100 minutes slipping away. It's familiar, but cool. Of course the con man appears to fall for the con woman as their complicated schemes go well, or not. There are double crossings and ulterior motives, shady side characters and elaborately convoluted clockwork timing. It’s a movie of globetrotting, big bags of money, wine, watches, cars, and likable career criminals. Bursting with handsome, sleek cinematography that’s practically glittering, nighttime glows with warm light, daytime burns bright and colorful. It’s a cool look.

And the filmmakers know what they’re doing with this surface cool. The film keeps a tight focus on Smith and Robbie as they court and con their way through trust-no-one schemes that are simpler than you’d think, but complicated to unravel the surprises. We start in New Orleans, where Smith is running an elaborate set of cons around a big football game. After some satisfying hijinks and romance, the movie switches gears, jumping to Buenos Aires for another con, longer and more elaborate with an even tighter focus on our leads. They’re charismatic in that con artist way of never entirely knowing just how deep their feelings for each other go. Are they using each other? Or is it really love? It’s not a particularly deep or interesting characterization, but either way there’s undeniable sparkle in their repartee and satisfaction in seeing them react to twists in the plot.

Ficarra and Requa have fun with a variety of shell game set pieces, from street-level scams to high-stakes betting and finally high-risk corporate espionage. Along the way we meet a bumbling master thief (Adrian Martinez), a brusk security man (Gerald McRaney), a high-rolling gambler (BD Wong), and a slippery racecar owner (Rodrigo Santoro). They’re an eccentric and slimy enough rouges gallery we can watch Smith in sharp suits and Robbie in stunning dresses flirt and fool their way into and out of lots of money without feeling bad about their victims. Everyone’s playing some sort of game here, and the screenplay unveils its twists and turns with fine relish. In the end, the flashiness fizzles – when the credits rolled I thought, that’s it?  But there’s something to be said for an enjoyably slight diversion that just wants to charm and dazzle with alluring megawatt star power and formulaic genre charms. Its surface pleasures go down silky smooth.

Her? THE DUFF

The DUFF is a cute, formulaic teen comedy interested in playing within the bounds of the stereotypical high school caste system. It buys into the clichéd social structure of athletes, nerds, and other Breakfast Club groupings for maximum cliquish silliness and angst, before breaking it down in a happily every after scene at the Big Dance. It’s a movie about being comfortable in your own skin and owning what makes you unique. I suppose it makes a certain sort of sense that the movie follows suit, being comfortable settling into a bright, colorful, light mood, content to do nothing but the predictable and expected. Plot turns are not merely telegraphed, they’re practically scrawled on the poster in the lobby. They practically give away the ending free with the purchase of your ticket.

So it doesn’t benefit from the screenplay cleverness that factors into the genre’s best. There’s nothing like a Tina Fey (Mean Girls), or Amy Heckerling (Clueless), or Cameron Crowe (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) sociological wit to the writing here. But the script by Josh A. Cagan, from a book by Kody Keplinger, does feature a bouncy energy that carries across its thin derivative ideas about how teenagers relate to one another. It starts with a girl (Mae Whitman) who is told by her jerk hunk neighbor (Robbie Amell) that she’s her group of friends’ DUFF – their Designated Ugly Fat Friend. Ouch. Mad, she ignores her friends (Bianca A. Santos and Skyler Samuels) and improbably asks this rude boy to coach her into coolness, hoping to win the affections of her crush object (Nick Eversman) in the process.

It’s a conventional makeover teen comedy, in which a perceived ugly duckling makes minor changes and suddenly she’s stunning. In this case, Whitman, no DUFF to begin with, starts with baggy pants and a limp haircut. She also leans into the role, slouching and pulling inwards, shyly avoiding the gaze of her crush. The jerk next door ignores his on-again-off-again mean girl girlfriend (Bella Thorne) and spends a lot of time with Whitman, helping pick out new outfits and telling her she’s not so bad looking after all. You can see where this is going. Director Ari Sandel, of the Oscar-winning short West Bank Story, brings some instantly-dated modern touches – cutesy webspeak references, a light cyberbullying subplot – that add a bit of freshness around the edges. But the core is conventional, filled with thin stereotypes in an overfamiliar story.

What makes this mildly bemusing movie an agreeably painless distraction is Whitman. A comedy veteran of everything from Arrested Development to Tinker Bell, she takes what could be a garnish’s worth of material and turns it into a three-course meal of sympathetic awkwardness, sly sarcasm, funny voices, blushing crushing, terrific reaction shots, and believable teen angst. While hardly ugly or fat – I wanted to tell the film to stop trying to make “DUFF” happen – Whitman does look out of place in high school, though less so this one populated with twentysomethings. She’s a decade older than her character, and uses that to her advantage. It’s easy to look at this cool young woman and see how her best features – an easy goofiness, dark sense of humor, and love for cult horror films – could go unappreciated in the moment, but help her make her way in the future.

It’s not about the ugly becoming beautiful, but a girl finding her way back to a sense of self-confidence. That’s sweet and empowering, saving the film from being a total waste of time. Familiar but well intentioned is a reasonable accomplishment, I suppose. It won’t hurt anyone. It helps that Whitman’s so watchable, and is surrounded by a capable cast, including charming Allison Janney, Romany Malco, and Ken Jeong livening up underwritten adult roles. There’s not much here, but what is can be pleasant enough.

Unlove Song: THE LAST FIVE YEARS

Telling the story of a failed marriage, The Last Five Years is a musical two-hander. It’s sung through, trading perspectives between spouses with each new number. This gives it a good sense of balance, starting with Cathy (Anna Kendrick) lamenting the end of a relationship, before launching into a back-and-forth chronology that shows us Jamie (Jeremy Jordan) at the beginning of their time together. Then it keeps switching as their overlapping timelines cross in the middle and then leave them on opposite sides once again. Yanking us between the good times and the bad, it attempts to dissect what went wrong, juxtaposing happy rushes of love, domesticity, and success with frustrations, arguments, and difficulties. Adapted by writer-director Richard LaGravenese from Jason Robert Brown’s Off-Broadway play, the results are small, cramped, low-budget intimacy decorated with cutesy theatrical flourishes. I found it mostly irritating.

But if you have to spend 90 musical minutes with a couple, it may as well be Kendrick and Jordan. Both accomplished Broadway performers, they’re terrific singers who know how to modulate their performances for film. They’re big and tuneful, but carry the light touch of film acting, knowing when a small shift of eyes will sell a feeling just as well as projecting to the back row. I can only imagine how unendurable the film would be without them. As it is, the plotting lets the audience in on the futility of the relationship immediately, emphasizing the disjunction that was always there, which makes the entire experience one of watching charming Kendrick stuck in a doomed marriage that never seems worth it. Sure, they had love, but we can read the early warning signs she muddles past. Such ironies are meant to be insightful, but I couldn’t take satisfaction reading hindsight.

There are fleeting minutes of enjoyment, a few hummable bars here and there, but it’s a blur of melody that started sounding awfully samey to me. It’s monotonous musically and emotionally, especially once you get the hang of its flip-flopping chronology. The couple’s moments of happiness – he signs a book deal, she works at a summer theater, they get married and move in together – are sickly sweet. Their arguments are bickering that’s supposed to be real and raw, but are instead just vague specificities, Mad Lib style conflict. Kendrick plays blushing excitement and exhausted frustration well, and Jordan, to his credit, leans into his character’s insufferable clichés, like a wandering eye, and a big ego brought about by early success. (Is the line “He’s like a young Jonathan Franzen!” foreshadowing?)

But their enervating disagreements are just as hard to sit through as their lovey-dovey syrupy good times. LaGravenese films their numbers with the usual American-indie faux casual looseness, but layers in some theatrical conceits – backup dancers, breakaway walls, dramatic lighting – to emphasize important moments. It’s fine, but never rings true. The film made a break straight for my last nerve and scraped away for the duration. I found it irritating, not just for how little it worked on me, but also for how much I wanted to like it – we don’t get too many musicals these days.

Tied Up: FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

Another in a long cinematic tradition of excavating an intriguing movie out of a trash novel, director Sam Taylor-Johnson (of the young John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy) and screenwriter Kelly Marcel (of Saving Mr. Banks) treat E.L. James’ bestselling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey seriously as a picture of a problematic relationship between two very different people. It’s a strange, half-convincing film, part movie romance formula, and part psychological melodrama, shot like a thriller but with a cautiously sad core. It appears to head down troubling paths before pulling up short in a sudden conclusion. It’s a girl meets boy, girl tries out boy’s demands, girl’s not so sure she wants to stay story.

A young woman (Dakota Johnson) meets a rich young billionaire bachelor (Jamie Dornan) whose intensity attracts her. He likes her too, aggressively wooing her with expensive gifts, like first edition Thomas Hardy novels. She’s flattered, and allows her curiosity to pull her into his version of a relationship. They’re a study in opposites, she shy and giggly, and he self-serious and creepily controlled in all aspects of his life. She’s a romantic, and prone to drink a little and turn into a Broad City supporting character. He’s a movie workaholic, talking about “business” and standing around handsomely austere skyscraper conference rooms without ever getting into what, exactly, he does. All we know is she’s an English major without a job, and he’s a man who can afford to get his way.

He’s a dominant personality looking for someone to submit to his every whim. He wants to control her. This goes beyond the kinks that have made the story a sight-unseen source of derision and tittering (whips, handcuffs, and the like). She gets a thrill out of having her hands tied to the bedpost. But as their arrangement intensifies, bedroom negotiations soon involve an absurdly detailed and lengthy proposed contract. He’s clearly put in a lot of time thinking about his preferred partner’s activities. She says she’ll think about it, a totally reasonable reaction to his desire to determine her schedule, her diet, where she goes, who she sees.

To the movie’s credit, his increasingly controlling stalkerish behavior – appearing places unannounced, or taking over her life by, say, trading in her car for a new one without permission – isn’t soft-pedaled as twisted romance. A clear line is drawn between sex (even adventurous kinds) and exploitation. The problem isn’t the billionaire’s kinks, but the intensity with which he demands punishment and obedience, and how unwilling he is to pay attention to the needs of his partner. It’s all about his pleasure, his desires. This uncompromising can scare her, and yet she draws pleasure from their encounters, discovering that physical submission doesn’t need to include emotional compromise.

I never quite understood what they saw in each other. It doesn’t work as romance. He sees someone inexperienced and naïve, able to be molded into the partner he wants. She sees a handsome rich guy. What’s love got to do with it? There’s a tricky arc to be played here, a relationship that starts kinked and grows ominous. Johnson’s winning, vulnerable and charming, giving a real movie star performance. (Could we expect less from the daughter of Melanie Griffith and granddaughter of Tippi Hedren?) She bites her lips and rolls her eyes, able to make fun of her new boyfriend’s oddities, having fun with them, and then getting a little scared of how far he’ll go. She’s so good, floating through with intelligence and good humor, she even carries Dornan’s wooden sulky performance that’s mostly glowering and standing upright. (The supporting cast includes small roles for Marcia Gay Harden and Jennifer Ehle, so it’s not hurting for strong women.)

The leads draw clear differences between their characters, as opposites attract. We get several sex scenes that play dirtier in implication than in practice. They’re soft montages with lots of movement and skin but little lingering reveals. Two are set to Beyoncé songs, so you know they're smooth. The film saves the power plays for their negotiations, as she tries to get a “normal” boyfriend and accuses him of just wanting her as a sex slave. Their relationship is presented ambiguously enough, I wasn’t sure what we were rooting for. Do we want a Beauty and the Beast change on his part to loosen his rigid rules, or for her to leave him for someone more playful? I knew I wanted her to leave. He’s a gender-swapped Fatal Attraction waiting to happen. In its way, the movie’s an extreme metaphor for the difficulties couples face trying to compromise.

The movie should be looser and funnier, overheated in passion and problems. Imagine what a Pedro Almodovar approach could’ve ripened it into! Instead, it’s serious and slow, with long stretches of boredom between moments where Johnson’s allowed to leap to life with a twinkle in her eyes. Surprisingly little happens in the middle stretch as she decides whether or not to agree to his terms and submit to his will in all things. It allows ugly implications to creep in around the edges. But there’s a nice mix of giggling curiosity (“You’re so bossy,” she laughs mid spanking) and tentative caution, wondering just how much pleasure he derives from hurting her. She’s smart, refusing to get steamrolled by his uptight dominance, but curious to experiment a little first.

Taylor-Johnson, with cinematography by Seamus McGarvey, films it all in grey steel tones, making a film cool to the touch. It moves like a thriller, weighing its protagonist’s options seriously while keeping her partner’s motivations frustrating and frighteningly mysterious. I was pleasantly surprised to find a film focused on communication and consent, policing boundaries, and ending on what seems to me a triumphant “no means no.” Perhaps it’s a cliffhanger resolved in proposed sequels, but viewed as a single story unto itself, it’s a break for freedom, where a woman leaves a damaged man behind and goes forth into the world with the skills to have a mutually fulfilling relationship on her terms in the future. I’m not familiar with the source material, but somehow I think the filmmakers got the best possible movie out of it.

The Voracious Filmgoer's Top Ten Films of 2014

1. The Grand Budapest Hotel
2. Boyhood
3. Love is Strange
4. Under the Skin
5. Only Lovers Left Alive
6. Belle
7. Manakamana
8. We Are the Best!
9. Beyond the Lights
10. Goodbye to Language

Runner Up
     Two Days One Night

Special Prize
     Over the Garden Wall

The next ten
12. Godzilla
13. Still Alice
14. Whiplash
15. The Congress
16. Selma
17. How to Train Your Dragon 2
18. The Immigrant
19. Snowpiercer
20. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
21. Dear White People

Honorable mentions (alphabetically)
Birdman, The Book of Life, The Boxtrolls, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Force Majeure, Fury, Gone Girl, Interstellar, The Lego Movie, Life Itself, Lucy, Muppets Most Wanted, Nightcrawler, Why Don't You Play in Hell?

More 2014 Bests

Other 2014 Bests

Best Cinematography

            Hoyte Van Hoytema Interstellar

Yorick Le Saux Only Lovers Left Alive

            Emmanuel Lubezki Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Seamus McGarvey Godzilla

Robert Yeoman The Grand Budapest Hotel

Best Sound

            Godzilla

            The Grand Budapest Hotel

            How to Train Your Dragon 2

            Snowpiercer

            Under the Skin

Best Special Effects

            Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

            Godzilla

            The Grand Budapest Hotel

            Interstellar

Noah

Best Stunts

            Godzilla

            John Wick

            Need for Speed

            Selma

            Snowpiercer

           

Best Costumes

            Belle

            Beyond the Lights

            The Grand Budapest Hotel

            Snowpiercer

            Step Up All In

           

Best Makeup

            The Grand Budapest Hotel

            Maleficent

            Only Lovers Left Alive

            Selma

            Snowpiercer

           

Best Set/Art Direction

            Boyhood

            Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

            The Grand Budapest Hotel

            Only Lovers Left Alive

            Snowpiercer

Best Editing

            Boyhood

            The Grand Budapest Hotel

            Love is Strange

            Only Lovers Left Alive

            Under the Skin

           

Best Score

            Belle Rachel Portman

            Godzilla/The Grand Budapest Hotel Alexandre Desplat

How to Train Your Dragon 2 John Powell

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya Joe Hisaishi

            Under the Skin Mica Levi

                                   

Best Song

            “Everything is AWESOME!!!” The Lego Movie           

            “The Hanging Tree” The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1

            “Hate the Sport” We Are the Best!

“The Last Goodbye” The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

“Something So Right” Muppets Most Wanted

Best Adapted Screenplay

            Belle by Amma Assante

            Selma by Ava DuVernay

            Under the Skin by Jonathan Glazer

            We Are the Best! by Lukas Moodysson

            Whiplash by Damien Chazelle

           

Best Original Screenplay

            Beyond the Lights by Gina Prince-Bythewood

            Boyhood by Richard Linklater

            The Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson

            Love is Strange by Ira Sachs

Only Lovers Left Alive by Jim Jarmusch

Best Documentary

            Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me

Life Itself

            Maidentrip

            Manakamana

            What Now? Remind Me

Best Animated Film

The Book of Life

The Boxtrolls

            How to Train Your Dragon 2

            The Lego Movie

            The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

Best Foreign Film

            Manakamana

            The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

            Two Days, One Night

            We Are the Best!

            Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

                       

Best Supporting Actress

Minnie Driver Beyond the Lights

Rene Russo Nightcrawler

Emma Stone Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Tilda Swinton Snowpiercer

Mia Wasikowska Only Lovers Left Alive

           

Best Supporting Actor

Ethan Hawke Boyhood

            Alfred Molina Love is Strange

Edward Norton Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Tyler Perry Gone Girl

            J.K. Simmons Whiplash

Best Actress

            Patricia Arquette Boyhood

            Marion Cotillard Two Days, One Night

Scarlett Johansson Under the Skin

            Gugu Mbatha-Raw Belle

            Julianne Moore Still Alice

Best Actor

            Ralph Fiennes The Grand Budapest Hotel

            Jake Gyllenhaal Nightcrawler

            Michael Keaton Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

            John Lithgow Love is Strange

David Oyelowo Selma

Best Director

            Wes Anderson The Grand Budapest Hotel

            Jonathan Glazer Under the Skin

Jim Jarmusch Only Lovers Left Alive

Richard Linklater Boyhood

            Ira Sachs Love is Strange

Spies of the Roundtable: KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE

Director Matthew Vaughn is always making movies about other movies, not subverting formula or deconstructing tropes, but doing his favorite genres louder, gorier, and goofier than before. The British gangster picture Layer Cake, fantasy Stardust, and superhero movie Kick-Ass are of equal falseness, movies for the sake of movies. They have their moments, but is it any wonder his X-Men movie is his best? The dictates of franchise care required him to play it straight, funneling his skills into his energy and staging instead of stunted and narrow movies borrowing real world pain for nothing more than bloody riffs, one step further removed from anything worth caring about. His latest, Kingsman: The Secret Service, is a colorful goof on the James Bond formula, following the basic outline of the typical 007 plot but playing it looser, faster, bloodier, and cheekier. It’s an enjoyable movie right up until it isn’t.

Maybe it’s more accurate to call Kingsman a half-serious Austin Powers for how consciously silly the plotting, how fawning it is over retro gadgetry. It’s eager to tell us how smart it thinks it’s being, which takes some of the charm out of its self-congratulatory deployment of Bond-style gadgets – bulletproof umbrella, poison pen, exploding lighter – and plot turns. After all, this is a movie with a megalomaniac villain and his exoticized henchwoman trying to execute their convoluted plot for world domination, complete with a giant glowing countdown clock. Several times characters make reference to fictional spies – Bond, Bourne, Bower, you get the picture – and trade the barb, “It’s not that kind of movie.” Oh, but it is. From the first notes of Henry Jackman’s John Barry-esque score, it’s obvious what territory we’re in.

The film’s one clever idea is to recast the double-ohs as a clandestine organization carrying out secret spycraft, a good old Spies of the Roundtable complete with codenames like Lancelot, Galahad, and Merlin. Called The Kingsman, they’ve had a sudden opening. And so respectably stuffy Colin Firth, properly situated in a sharp suit, recruits a rough, tough, street-smart lad (relative newcomer Taron Egerton) and bets he can turn him into a proper superspy, a sort of My Fair Lady actioner (a reference explicitly made). Vaughn, with his usual co-writer Jane Goldman, milks these riffs on pop culture past for bright engaging action. It’s often jolly good fun, drawing on X-Men: First Class montage swagger for early team-building training sequences as Egerton grows from a street kid to a spy, then turns into a adolescent power fantasy. Save the world, get the girl, and all that jazz.

There are giggles to be had in seeing Firth turn into an action hero in elaborately staged, CGI assisted, action sequences. The kid’s quite good, too, holding his own against the older folks while looking dashing in his eventual spy uniform. Their colleagues include a comic relief Q figure (Mark Strong), an underwritten-but-capable pretty girl (Sophie Cookson), and a wise old mentor (Michael Caine). Their villains are nasty, a crazy billionaire (Samuel L. Jackson, hamming it up) and his flunky (Sofia Boutella), a woman with razor-sharp prosthetic legs that make her as fast and deadly as a certain Olympic athlete. The cast is engaging and entertaining, having as much fun playing broad comic book shtick as Vaughn is having a good time whipping up scenarios for near-death action movie experiences for them, like a tense skydiving sequence that’s the cleverest the film gets.

More fun than not for awhile, the movie goes wrong by giving in to its regressive fantasy, probably leaking in from the Mark Millar source material. His are the most gleefully ugly comic books around, trafficking in unapologetic laddish humor and smug shock violence. Kingsman isn’t that bad, but it is a movie in which the villain is an evil lisping black man and the only hope for the world is a bunch of upper-crust white guys and the one up-from-his-bootstraps recruit whose eventual reward is access to a woman’s body. The optics are obnoxious. It’s a movie so caught up in its splashy R-rated cartoonishness that it loses sight of what, exactly, it is enjoying. It spends its time tweaking tropes in the name of escapism, but can’t escape the implications of its giddy gore that ends up giving rightwing nuts something to cheer. (I’d trim two scenes of a real-life world leader if I could.)

Its most troubling scene is a turning point between goofy wish fulfillment and poisonous misanthropy. An elaborate gory massacre is played for laughs, scored with rock and staged with slapstick. It’s followed immediately by the death of a major character we’re supposed to mourn. (How we’re to care about deaths, and yet also find exploding heads hilarious is beyond me.) As this rockets the movie towards a crescendo of climaxes, the movie wants us on the edge of our seats fretting over the fate of the world as violence erupts here, there, and everywhere. I felt the suspense, was effectively manipulated by the crosscutting. And I would’ve enjoyed it more but for the feeling the film was reveling in the carnage and wouldn’t mind if its heroes failed to stop it. It’s a brisk, exciting movie, better in its breezy charming moments than its splashy nasty conclusions.

All Wet: SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER

Nickelodeon’s long-running series SpongeBob SquarePants is characterized by sweet, cheery cartoon surrealism. In recounting the bizarre adventures of a happy sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea, it has built a gentle world of nautical nonsense, non-sequiturs, asides, incongruous mixed media inserts, goofball slapstick contortions and silly voices. The show will do anything for a ridiculous sight gag or goofy sound effect, but loves its characters so earnestly and consistently that it rarely devolves into free floating weirdness. At the loveable center is SpongeBob himself. Created by Stephen Hillenburg and voiced by Tom Kenny, he’s one of the all-time great cartoon characters, a source of endless silliness springing forth from a supply of inexhaustible optimism. Even if a story is a dud, I still like this sponge.

In The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, the second big-screen outing for this TV world, the jokes aren’t as dense as they should be. But we’re talking about a cartoon that has been on the air since 1999, hasn’t been in theaters since 2004, and is accustomed to telling stories 10 or 11 minutes long. A bit of franchise fatigue should be expected. It sets in as series regular director Paul Tibbitt and screenwriters Glenn Berger and Jonathan Aibel, of the Alvin and the Chipmunks squeakquels, stretch a thin bit of plot to goof around for over 90 minutes. There’s not much there in terms of emotional investment or compelling story, but at least the time passes largely painlessly. It’s hard to dislike something so bright, chipper, and eager to please, even as I found myself wondering why this story was worth telling at all, let alone outside the confines of the show.

There’s really no reason the movie should work, or be as charming as it often manages to be. The characters aren’t as fresh as they once were, and their new film recycles storylines done better in their first film, and in some of the series’ classic episodes. (There’s even a totally unsuccessful attempt to recreate the magic of “The F.U.N. Song.”) Sponge Out of Water concerns yet another diabolical plot to steal the town of Bikini Bottom’s beloved top-secret Krabby Patty formula, zealously protected by Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) from his tiny megalomaniacal rival restaurateur, Plankton (Mr. Lawrence). It’s up to the loyal Krusty Krab fry cook SpongeBob to save the formula, a process that’s longer and more elaborate than TV would allow, with an epic food fight, angry mobs, magic, and time travel, culminating in a slapstick superhero parody that somehow doesn’t mention Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy.

We get a great deal of hand-drawn zaniness that draws in all the series regulars – dim starfish Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke), fussy Squidward (Rodger Bumpass), squirrelly Sandy (Carolyn Lawrence) – and cameos from memorable supporting characters, with quick wordplay and rubbery gags. Eventually, it concludes with the gang washing ashore on the trail of a missing recipe. There on the beach, they interact with live action extras while rendered in 3D CG animation. This sidesteps one of my favorite running jokes in the series, representing SpongeBob out of water as an actual dry sponge on a stick waggled about by an obvious puppeteer. Making him and his friends exaggerated CG things walking around a beach is an okay bit of colorful nonsense, but seems a concession to something more ordinary and predictable than the usual SpongeBob tone.

I didn’t mind it too much, but it goes on far too long. The picture seems a little underpowered, burning bright with engaging zippy randomized cartoonishness, then losing steam the longer it runs. But where else will you see Antonio Banderas play a character named Burger Beard, an exaggerated pirate who just wants to start his own food truck? Or a cosmic dolphin named Bubbles? Or singing seagulls? Or a burger-shortage inspiring full-on Mad Max apocalyptic mob mentality? Or multiple hilarious montage parodies? Or repeated trips through a 2001 time-travel kaleidoscope wormhole set to an original Pharrell song? You’re never exactly sure what’s around the next corner in Sponge Out of Water, as much a sign of its desperation as its inspiration. It could’ve been more, but as a modestly effective bit of harmless superfluous silliness, it’s not so bad.

Spaced Out: JUPITER ASCENDING

Jupiter Ascending is an all-you-can-eat sci-fi smorgasbord. Writer-directors Andy and Lana Wachowski provide a generous spread filled with way more than one person, or, as it turns out, one film could possible devour in one sitting. It’s a big goofy space opera serving non-stop silly names, strange creatures, intergalactic scheming, gobbledygook jargon, majestic CGI vistas, swooshing spaceships, and laser guns that go pew-pew-kaZAAp, all wrapped up in an impenetrably convoluted mythos. Unlike the Wachowski’s Matrix trilogy, which invited a casual view deeper and deeper down a nutso rabbit hole, this offering is crazy from the jump. They’ve gotten so far into their worldbuilding they’ve forgotten to leave an entry point for the rest of us. I don’t mean to give off the impression that I hated it. On the contrary, I admired its idiosyncrasies, but only to a point. I felt perpetually on the outside looking in.

At least the view’s nice. It has spectacular production design, from spaceships that look like sea-creatures with throne-room interiors, to massive steam-punk factories nestled in gas giants, whirring robots, ornate gowns, glowing gewgaws and weird alien thingamabobs from gravity boots to memory wipes and high-tech paperwork. It has a sweeping Michael Giacchino score in full pa-rum-pa-pum-pum epic swelling mode, immersive bleeping and rumbling soundscapes, and a bevy of hilarious camp voices. So it looks and sounds like a great pulp space adventure. But for all its whiz-bang flash and sizzle, as clean and shiny as anything the Wachowski’s have made, it’s chintzy on a human scale, with ridiculous characters, hazy motivations, and an overcomplicated story that’s at once too much and too little. It’s both overstuffed and thinly repetitive.

What, exactly, is supposed to be happening amidst the shimmery sci-fi frippery on display? Well, you see, there’s this cleaning lady (Mila Kunis) who, after the movie's weirdly scattered and confused false starts, agrees to sell her eggs to help her illegal immigrant family. Strange place to start, but the movie doesn't seem to care. It’s just a place where she can be attacked by evil alien bounty hunters and saved at the last minute by a dashing space guy, Channing Tatum with elvish ears and a wolfish grin. He eventually takes her to space, where three wealthy warring alien siblings (Eddie Redmayne, Tuppence Middleton, and Douglas Booth) each want her captured for their individual purposes. Turns out she’s a reincarnation of their mother, a matriarch in a race of practically ageless aliens who seeded the Earth with human DNA millennia ago and are ready to collect their harvest.

They want to trick Kunis into giving up the rights to Earth, since their mother left her eventual reincarnation that very planet in her will. Make sense? It takes more than an hour to introduce all these stakes, as we head to each evil sibling one at a time in episodic encounters, each more dangerous than the last. Allegiances shift, strange creatures and rituals appear, and elaborate background is filled in, like learning Tatum is an animal-human hybrid – part dog, part man – with a complicated sketchy past. Elsewhere we see a part-bee man named Stinger (Sean Bean), armies of winged dinosaur things in trench coats, and a man-sized pilot with the face of an elephant. (When given an order, he trumpets with determination.) It’s fun, but exhausting keeping up with the free-floating oddities that never seem to connect with any real purpose. They’re laid out in earnestly campy detail, so at least some of the giggles these concepts provoke are intentional delight.

It should be a simple story of empowerment, with Kunis as a special person who discovers her alien gifts and ascends to a place of power in the galaxy while interacting with weird beasties and strange beings. Instead, she flails and falls through busy CGI spectacle, bounced helplessly from one elaborate plot point to the next. Those who erroneously claim the Star Wars prequels are only about trade routes won’t be happy to find that Jupiter Ascending is literally only a fight over the deed to Earth. Now, granted, it has energetic action, vials of youth serum, warring factions of creature-people, and nods towards usual Wachowski themes of destiny, reincarnation, conspiracies, redemption, consumption, and rampaging capitalism. And the actors are up for the mood of the thing, with Kunis and Tatum going totally sincere, and others like Redmayne going batty with affected whispery high-pitch mumbling and stiff movements.

But with only the barest rooting interest in any character’s plight, it’s hard to care about the serious craziness on screen. It’s a film of incredible sights put to use muddling through the political machinations of a galactic oligarchy, half-hearted self-actualization, and a totally unbelievable romantic subplot. Throughout, obvious apocalyptic stakes are weirdly downplayed, the main narrative and emotional thrusts drifting away. I appreciated the Wachowskis’ commitment to loony concepts. Keep in mind I think Speed Racer is their best work. But they didn’t crack this narrative open in any compelling way. There’s a fun movie hidden somewhere in Jupiter Ascending's confusion of dropped plot lines and ridiculous implications, but they didn’t quite find it. Perhaps it’s no surprise to find buried with this mess a cameo from Terry Gilliam, the patron saint auteur of fantasy follies. This movie may not work, but it’s the kind of distinctive, eccentric, personal failure I find hard to dismiss entirely.

Murmur of the Heart: MOMMY

Quebecois filmmaker Xavier Dolan is only 25 years old and now here is his fifth feature, Mommy, arriving Cannes-anointed as one to watch. He’s a writer-director of obvious raw talents, experimenting with style and tone to see what works. It’s not refined, and certainly spills out in unpredictable ways that are equally energizing and exhausting. But there’s a thrill of seeing developing promise and consistency of vision. His age and his mixture of seriousness and irreverence toward his craft tend to sort reactions into extremes, those proclaiming him an out-of-the-box wunderkind hope-for-cinema, and those gnashing their teeth over the flash-in-the-pan enfant terrible. He’s neither yet in my book, but he’s certainly worth keeping an eye on.

After five films in as many years, Dolan’s still a “watch this space” sort of young filmmaker. His films spring from the same source, a clear and direct auteurist personality, loaded with dreamy slow-mo, loud pop songs on the soundtrack, and vivid colors. I was quite taken with his 2011 feature Heartbeats, a small bauble of a relationship picture borrowing Wong Kar Wai and French New Wave cool. Other works – a sprawling three-hour transition tale, Laurence Anyways, and a tiny kitchen-sink melodrama, I Killed My Mother – are uneven efforts, but interesting for the developments they represent. His films have a youthful desire to play with his moviemaking toolbox, to futz with his skills, pressing stories and styles ever so slightly farther than he’s capable of comfortably taking them. So it is with Mommy, a film that has moments of brilliance, but is not a brilliant whole. It is, however, a cohesive vision.

It is a mother-and-son story, about broken, codependent people living difficult lives and the small oasis of connection that keeps them afloat. An unemployed single mother (Anne Dorval) welcomes her emotionally disturbed fifteen-year-old (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) home after a lengthy stay in a juvenile detention facility. They have a close relationship, but one fraught with tension. They have tempers. They smoke, swear, drink, shout, and are generally prone to overreaction. There are moments of quiet tenderness and familial goofiness, but always cut with tension. She’s doing the best she can to keep their family together, but with her son’s wild mood swings, antisocial behavior, and scary intensity, that’s difficult. At one point, the boy slams his mother against the wall, choking her. Later, he sings her a song, tenderly kisses her hand. This isn’t healthy or sustainable.

Dolan shot Mommy in a boxy 1:1 aspect ratio, a perfect square that’s cramped, far more pinched than the Academy Ratio of yore. The look pins its characters into colorful emotional constraints, boxed in by their close and troubled relationships. Dorval and Pilon have intense interactions held in tight close ups, the frame frustratingly limited. It’s claustrophobic. In her face we see frustrations in dealing with such a child, but there’s love in her eyes as she’s determined to make this new arrangement work. He’s rowdy, unpredictable, an annoying and trying presence, cajoling, uncouth, and hotheaded. It must be a strong mother’s love for her to put up with him. Help arrives when a shy, kind, stuttering neighbor (Suzanne Clément) offers to look after the boy while the mother looks for work. As a three-sided friendship grows, hope lets a little air into the picture's stifling emotional terrains.

But uncertainty and strain is never far behind. The film sprawls out for over two hours, growing repetitive in spots, especially when plot turns are excruciatingly telegraphed. Past the novelty of the presentation and commitment of the performers, the film’s structure is amorphous, its themes confused. There reaches a point where the characters’ behaviors cease to be interesting and are instead simply wearing. By the end, I wasn’t entirely sure what we’re supposed to make of them. The meandering plot maintains its psychologically constricted focus, but drifts away into tropes. At a certain point I found myself worrying this would be the kind of movie that would stoop to include a suicide attempt to jolt flagging drama. I was right.  Its point of view is imprecise right when it should be pinning down greater specificity.

But Dolan’s cinematographer (André Turpin) finds moments of great beauty in the small frame, and the soundtrack is alive with corny/catchy pop tunes used to great effect. In the film’s best scenes, Dolan is closely attuned to the performers’ expertly calibrated small shifts in characters’ relationships and attitudes, like an awkward dinner growing into a dance party, a karaoke night turning emotionally bruising, or a bike ride in which hope for a better status quo opens up their world to the point that they press against the very walls of the frame as if widening their horizons. The film is involving for its flashes of brilliance. Dolan knows how to stage a shot, when to cut, and when to cue a perfect needle drop to build aesthetically compelling movie moments. I’m skeptical about some of what he puts that skill to use for here, but can’t deny its moments of effectiveness. There’s a fuzzy widescreen daydream late in the picture that’s as moving as anything I’ve seen recently. And I certainly can’t wait to see what he does next.