With “Bottoms,” writer-director Emma Seligman turns up the dial a few notches from her darkly comedic first feature, “Shiva Baby” (2021), about a young, financially insecure Jewish woman (Rachel Sennott) trying to make it in New York City with the help of a poorly chosen sugar daddy. “Bottoms” is something of a rimshot off the raucous, sometimes sex-crazed high school hijinks of “Heathers” (1988), “Porky’s” (1981), “American Pie” (1999) and more recently, “Booksmart” (2019), topped with a dousing of social commentary.
This is told with a queer, feminist eye, though – and a wicked, nod-and-wink one at that. Lesbian besties PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) stumble into a confrontation between prom-king/QB stud Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine, just seen in “Red, White & Royal Blue”) and his prom queen Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), who thinks he’s cheating on her again (he is, in a Mrs. Robinson/Stifler’s mom kinda way). The power duo form a firewall around Isabel and, in the aftermath, when they are accused of vehicular assault on a cherished local hero, form a fight club for women to empower and defend themselves. The sweet, semi-ironic twist is that the club is overseen by Mr. G., played convincingly by former NFL bad boy Marshawn Lynch in a casting choice that pays off nicely.
That said, a bigger budget doesn’t make for a better film. “Shiva Baby” was so intimate, subtly dark and lived in that you felt you were in every frame. That smaller film allegedly cost less than a half-mil to make, “Bottoms” has a cited budget of twenty-two times more ($11 million). Plenty of blood gets let between the under-the-radar girls, including ultimately pretty popular ones who join, ushered in by Isabel. Under the banner of self-defense, mantras of “just let loose” and “come at me” get issued within the fight circle, and there’s camaraderie as one scrapes the other off the floor. But it doesn’t make sense the way the psycho madness of David Fincher’s “Fight Club” did back in 1999, and it somehow doesn’t quite feel earned (I mean it’s funny, but a faculty member sanctioning such a thing?). Further, the skewers regarding racism, anti-LGBTQ+ and misogyny – all fair and necessary – just prick the surface, and feel platitudinal in the same way Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach articulated things in “Barbie.” It feels raw and edge-pushing as you sit through it, but afterward there’s a want for something more from folks who have shown they can hold us further out on the edge.
But then there’s the ability to make people laugh. The fight club lasses, gay, bi, straight and in between, popular, nerdy and arty, unite to, well, save the resident asshole in a “West Side Story” kinda showdown. It’s grim, hilarious, over the top and ephemeral, but a blessedly gonzo crescendo that you could see gender-pushing visionary John Waters smiling at in smug approval.
Director William Friedkin on the set. (Photo: William Friedkin via Facebook)
Cinema lost a defining voice when William Friedkin died Aug. 7 from heart failure. Friedkin, 87, was vital to what is considered the greatest era of American cinema, the American New Wave (loosely the late 1960s to early 1980s and also called “New Hollywood”), in which directors shot on location and were able to craft their visions without studio interference. The movement produced instant classics including Coppola’s “Godfather ” films, Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver ” (1976), Polanski’s “Chinatown ” (1974) and Friedkin’s hardboiled crime drama, “The French Connection” (1971).
Born in Chicago, Friedkin, like other era directors Sidney Lumet (“Dog Day Afternoon, ” “Serpico”) and John Frankenheimer (“The Manchurian Candidate, ” “Ronin”) cut his teeth in TV (“The Alfred Hitchcock Hour”). His first feature-length work was “The Thin Blue Line (1966), a documentary that chronicled the difficulties confronting police at a time crime and violent public protests were on the rise; it proved to be prep work for “Connection,” an on-the-street magnum opus based on the true account of a cat-and-mouse heroin sting by Boston-born Robin Moore, who also wrote “The Green Berets.” In between, Friedkin made the poorly received Sonny and Cher hodgepodge “Good Times” (1967), adapted Harold Pinter’s play “The Birthday Party” (1968) starring Robert Shaw, and helmed the light comedy “The Night They Raided Minsky’s” (1960) about a naive young Amish woman (Britt Ekland) who arrives in New York City to perform in a religious production that turns out to be a burlesque show. Friedkin next pushed boundaries with the 1970 adaptation of Mart Crowley’s play “The Boys in the Band, ” a claustrophobic house party where gay and bisexual young males divulge travails largely caused or triggered by unaccepting families and society. The film (recently remade by Netflix for the play’s 50th anniversary) was semi-controversial in part because of the material, but also because Friedkin had claimed he had been “cruised ” while researching the film. His controversies with the gay community and mainstream would rise to another level in 1980 with “Cruising,” the sexually graphic S&M thriller based on Gerald Walker’s novel about a serial killer stalking New York City’s underground gay clubs.
There’s little question that Friedkin’s career will be defined by “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist” (1973), which not only captivated filmgoers but redefined the boundaries of what was possible with onscreen car chases and the horror genre. When on his game, Friedkin was a master of mood, vision and pacing. He also possessed deep admiration and love for his characters, especially the flawed and those living on the edge or under life-smothering pressure. The prime example is Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle in “Connection,” a cocksure cop seeking redemption for failures but who is imbued with an avuncular twinkle in his eye, a hair-trigger temper and a barroom manner that screams old-school Boston. (Speaking of which, Friedkin did make a movie here – “The Brink’s Job, ” another true-crime drama about an infamous 1950 North End heist; it’d make the perfect double bill with Ben Affleck’s “The Town.”) Even more emotionally visceral was Ellen Burstyn’s imperiled mother in “The Exorcist,” desperate and unnerved by not knowing of what is wrong with her demon-possessed daughter (Linda Blair, forever locked into genre due to the role) and hapless in her efforts to help. Her harrowing performance took a battle ax to nurturing parental nerve. Burstyn was nominated for her struggling single mom; Hackman won Best Actor for his gruff, gritty portrayal of Doyle.
In the cinematic universe of multiverses, CGI and green screens, it’s refreshing to see how well “The Exorcist ” and “Connection” have held up. Their timelessness is notched in part because they’re both deeply character-driven films, but also because of Friedkin’s shrewd, put-you-in-the-scene filmmaking. With “The Exorcist,” the paralyzing chill was psychological, achieved by grafting a gravelly, sinister male baritone onto a 12-year-old girl, some ingenious (and grotesque) makeup, a few cinematic sleights of hand (levitation, 180-degree neck rotation) and that devilish spewing of split pea soup. There was essentially no bloodletting to make you wince, yet you did, and the deft sound editing and use of Michael Oldfield’s soul-rattling “Tubular Bells ” only served to deepen the film’s immersive eeriness.
With “Connection,” Friedkin not only made one of the greatest car chase sequences ever put on screen, but perhaps the perfect film. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won five, including Best Picture and Director (Friedkin beat out Kubrick, who was up for “A Clockwork Orange”) – feats that seem even more monumental when you consider the city-sprawling film was made for less than $2 million, or $15.4 million in today’s dollars, and featured a cast of relative unknowns. It also won Best Editing and should have won for sound editing, as those elements are so essential to that jaw-dropping chase scene in which Doyle, in a commandeered Pontiac LeMans, races after an aboveground subway train taken over at gunpoint by a ruthless French hitman (Marcel Bozzuffi). It’s a gorgeously choreographed sequence that begins at Doyle’s apartment complex (where the hitman tries to take out Doyle with a sniper rifle) and becomes something of a bravura brutalist ballet of action as it rifles through the twisted steel girders of an erected subway structure and litter-strewn streets of Brooklyn. When in that careening Pontiac, the sound and film editing are so tight that everything feels like it’s happening in the moment and at 80 mph as Doyle plows through fruit carts and smash-bang ricochets off other vehicles making their rightful way through an intersection. The chase took more than five weeks to shoot and covers more than 26 New York City blocks. The rewards of the effort are self-evident and cemented in cinematic legacy.
That riveting result, however, should be no surprise, as producer Philip D’Antoni had also worked on the too-cool-for-political-subplots Steve McQueen cop vehicle “Bullitt ” (1968) and would later direct his only feature, “The Seven-Ups” (1973), starring “Connection” co-stars Roy Scheider and Tony Lo Bianco, notching three of the greatest car chase sequences committed to celluloid (including “Connection”). It was filmmaking at its very best, with the filmmakers earning every nerve-rattling inch or mile, not some post-production AI spitting out “Fast and Furious” crash-bang video game pablum.
And as much as D’Antoni’s fingerprints are on “Connection,” it was Friedkin’s full visionary control – especially in postproduction – that delivered the symphonic, neo-noirish masterpiece. Friedkin would later prove that his accomplishment was not a one-off with a harrowing, wrong-way chase down a freeway in “To Live and Die in L.A. ” (1985). That deft day-glo crime thriller introduced us to Willem Dafoe and was what made me fall in love with film after Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” (1961). The week it opened, I went to see “To Live and Die in L.A.” on a whim because my roommate at the time, wounded from a breakup, needed solace and friendship and was a huge Wang Chung fan, and the techno dance band scored the film; so on a hungover Saturday we did “To Live and Die in L.A. ” That chaotic freeway scene – the perfect antithesis to the impressive long-take opener of “La La Land ” – ignited a Friedkin deep dive for me and my roomie. Back then you’d pay $100 to rent a VCR for a weekend and $6 per video, and for my birthday that year we ate gloriously greasy Chinese food, drank far too many sugary mai tais at some long-gone place by the Berklee College of Music and watched all we could, even taking in a second helping of Friedkin’s movie at the old Cinema 57 in the bottom of what is now the Revere Hotel Boston Common on Stuart Street. Sadly, “To Live and Die in L.A.” and “The Brink’s Job” are not available for streaming (so if you see either on a repertory slate, run to the box office). Director Michael Mann (“Thief, ” “Heat”) sued Friedkin over “To Live and Die in L.A.,” claiming it ripped off his “Miami Vice” TV series that ran 1984-1989. Mann lost.
Friedkin, who died in the Bel Air home he shared with wife Sherry Lansing, former head of Paramount, has a Cambridge connection. In 2014, he gifted some of his memoirs to the Harvard Film Archive; earlier, as part of the “Uncanny Cinema of William Friedkin” program there, the director took on a brief residency and appeared at screenings of his films to provide anecdotes about their making – most intriguingly, the scores. (Quick pause here to acknowledge Don Ellis’ foreboding “Connection” score, which echoes Doyle’s inner turmoil and captures the drab, coarse ambiance of the street). I had the opportunity to catch “Sorcerer” (1977), Friedkin’s bold remake of the Henri-Georges Clouzot classic “The Wages of Fear” (1953), about four men transporting nitroglycerin across a treacherous Latin American jungle to cap an exploded oil well 200 miles away. After the screening, Friedkin discussed how Steve McQueen was supposed to play the lead role taken by Scheider, but McQueen wanted a part for his girlfriend Ali MacGraw (“Love Story”). “I told him, it’s a movie about four guys in a jungle, ” Friedkin said. The lack of MacGraw in the project proved a deal breaker. Friedkin then recounted how he got the German techno band Tangerine Dream to score the film, a total happenstance resulting from Friedkin, in Germany to oversee the dubbing of “The Exorcist, ” being taken to a party at an abandoned church in the Black Forest. The band was Tangerine Dream. Friedkin remarked that the score was particularly impressive in that they didn’t see any dailies or postproduction material, just the script. The same was true with Wang Chung and “To Live and Die in L.A.” – the director and musicians met at an L.A. radio station. When Friedkin gave the band the script, he said he didn’t want a tune with the title in it. Natch, the song “To Live and Die in L.A.” plays during the closing credits.
“To Live and Die in L.A.” would prove to be Friedkin’s swan song of sorts. He tried to create lightning in a bottle again with the erotic crime thriller “Jade” (1995) with Linda Fiorentino, hot off her sizzling femme fatal turn in “The Last Seduction” (1994), but the script proved a flat “Basic Instinct”-esque pretender and the car chase sequence that included San Francisco’s winding Lombard Street was a painful-to-watch rehash of that epic L.A. freeway misdirection. Friedkin even tried going back to the demonic with a possessed tree in “The Guardian” (1990). He found some middle ground with A-list actors in the psychological thrillers “Bug” (2006) with Ashley Judd and “The Hunted ” (2003) with Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro. He rounded out his career on a high note (we won’t mention 2017’s “The Devil and Father Amorth,” and he does have a play adaptation of Herman Wouk’s “Caine Mutiny ” in the can) with “Killer Joe” (2011), an adaptation of a Tracy Letts play (“Bug” was also a Letts play) about a contract killer (Matthew McConaughey) out to score a life insurance payout for a thwarted son (Emile Hirsch). Two Friedkin films I’d say are unique curios meant for discerning eyes are “Blue Chips” (1994) with Nick Nolte as a Bobby Knight-like college basketball coach trying to get though one more season (Celtics Bob Cousy and Shaquille O’Neal have small roles) and the long-shelved “Rampage ” (1987) about a demonic mass murderer (Alex MacArthur) and the DA trying to put him away (Michael Biehn). Friedkin did do a nice job with his 1997 television version of “12 Angry Men” featuring a knockout cast that included Jack Lemmon, George C. Scott, Ossie Davis, Edward James Olmos, Hume Cronyn, James Gandolfini and William Peterson of “To Live and Die in L.A.”
Friedkin was both a traditionalist and an iconoclast when it came to his trade and wears the “maverick” tag well in an era that preceded the blockbuster. His work heightened the filmgoing experience with old-school craftsmanship, control and tight collaborative efforts from cast and crew. He broke ground in genre and how narrative is paced and told (he’s right there with Kurosawa, Tarantino and Fellini), and most of all, he was able to put the audience in the action without bit-and-byte trickery. “The French Connection” will live on as one of the few films to achieve perfection from frame one to the end credits. It is Friedkin’s well-earned legacy.
At one juncture in Christopher Nolan’s last outing, the mind-bending, time-rewinding spy thriller “Tenet” (2020), a scientist in the future able to weaponize and manipulate the past to alter history is likened to J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead scientist at the Manhattan Project, which produced the nuclear warhead that in effect ended World War II. Foreshadowing for this next project?
That future scientist killed themselves to take their secrets with them and prevent further ripples in time; Oppenheimer, as the Cold War set in, became outspoken against nuclear proliferation and subsequently – with the help of FBI dirty trickster J. Edgar Hoover – had his security clearance revoked by the Atomic Energy Commission. It didn’t help that his wife, lover and several other personal associates had ties to the American Communist Party.
Nolan began work on his “Oppenheimer” in January, shortly after the Biden administration conferred public wrongdoing on the AEC and U.S. government for its lack of process and credible evidence against Oppenheimer, who died in 1967 at the age of 62.
The film plays loyally to its roots, the 2005 biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, and both embrace Oppenheimer (“the father of the atomic bomb”) as a committed yet complicated man, caught at many crossroads: the morality of mass destruction, the dirty politics of Cold War paranoia and messy personal relationships. As Oppenheimer, frequent Nolan collaborator Cillian Murphy portrays the scientist as a reserved, buttoned-up sort with a kind, demurring affect. He’s charismatic and approachable, with piercing blues and a gaunt sheen clearly deepened for the part; Oppie’s signature wide-brim porkpie fedora goes a long way to cement the image. It’s a bravura performance that rightly sends Murphy, best known for the series “Peaky Blinders” and Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” (2002), to the fore after many years of almost getting there. He feels custom minted for the part.
Nolan is a filmmaker who likes to play with time – the brilliant weaving of three timelines that converge at singular moment in “Dunkirk” (2017) as well as “Tenet” and “Memento” (2000) – and works another triptych here: the race to build the atomic bomb before the Nazis at the Las Alamos complex (something of a Western mining town) in the middle of the New Mexican desert; Oppenheimer’s 1954 hearing before the AEC inside a cramped conference room; and the senate proceedings on Eisenhower’s secretary of commerce nominee Lewis Strauss, who had been Oppenheimer’s boss at the commission. The clear but kinetic interweaving that frames the Strauss hearings in black and white and the rest in color is eerily evocative of Oliver Stone’s energetically edited and sharply acted bit of nearby history, “JFK” (1991); in “Oppenheimer,” that then-junior senator from Massachusetts poetically has a small hand in one of the three timelines.
“Oppenheimer” for the most is a deeply internal film, and Nolan deepens our access to Oppenheimer’s mental and emotional state with tearaways to stars colliding in the cold dark universe, people in a celebratory audience suddenly melting in a hot white light and, at one point during his AEC security access hearing, sex with his lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh, fantastic in the small part) and him confessing to the tryst to his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt, fantastic in a larger part). The soul-rattling aural immersion and meticulous imagery by Nolan regulars composer Ludwig Göransson and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, as well as an ace team effort by the sound department, fill out the spectacular, collective achievement. The cast beyond Murphy and Robert Downey Jr., who manages to make the eely Strauss human, is a long list of potential competing supporting-actor award nods, starting with Matt Damon as general (to be) Lesley Groves, who oversees the Manhattan Project and gets to deliver a fiery back-and-forth that’s almost on par with his indelible rant in “Good Will Hunting” (1997). Also notable are director Benny Safdie (“Uncut Gems,” “Good Time”) as H-bomb scientist Edward Teller; Josh “where have you been?” Hartnett solid as Oppenheimer’s department mate at Berkeley, Ernest Lawrence; Kenneth Branagh as physicist Niels Bohr; Jason Clarke, insidious as AEC special counsel Roger Robb; and Tom Conti (another “where have you been?”) avuncular and dead on as Albert Einstein. The list goes on. Less effective are Casey Affleck as military investigator Boris Pash interrogating Oppenheimer and Gary Oldman as President Harry Truman.
How Nolan pulls it all together is interesting in how much you see – or don’t – of the actual use of the atomic bomb and the devastation it had on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (thought it’s in the corner of every frame) versus the high of the Trinity experiment at Los Alamos (well orchestrated cinematically) and chaotic proceedings in the rooms and halls of government. Ever meticulous, Nolan also does a masterful job of taking subthreads and small gestures and weaving them into surprising and disparate places with subtle poetic panache that doesn’t scream, “Did you just see what I did there?” I wouldn’t want to call them Easter eggs, but …
As to Oppenheimer’s initial reluctance to signing onto the Manhattan Project due to the potential moral and historical implications, one fellow Jewish colleague says, “We don’t know if we can’t trust ourselves with it, but we know we can’t trust the Nazis.” A point well taken, with added personal appeal. Later, after the Germans have been defeated and Truman drops the two bombs, he justifies it by saying it saved American lives and allowed him “to bring our boys home.” Truman, like Strauss, comes off as a bit of a runaway ego (he calls Oppenheimer a “crybaby” when not quite out of earshot) and the film poses whether the bombings were necessary. It’s another good pique, and a complex one for me – this was when my father, a teenage member of the 101st Airborne, had just finished his service in Europe and was on a slow boat to Japan. Heavy stuff all around.
Rewinding back to “Tenet,” Nolan’s tightly controlled 2020 release during the height of the pandemic and the first big theatrical release at a time we were still in masks, eating outside under heater lamps and spaced apart in theaters. That release signaled the revival of the filmgoing biz and a return to normal; with “Oppenheimer” we have Hollywood writers and actors on strike, which could mark a notable damper to the release schedule come holiday season and beyond. For now we have “Oppenheimer,” which is more than a movie or a just a biopic; it’s an immersed contemplation on destiny, control and power, and obligations to the future. Looking at the political shenanigans then and now, it’s easy to see where we came from and where we are. “Oppenheimer” may not quite be an American history lesson, but it is most certainly an American fable.
If you’re a “Mission: Impossible” fan, you’re gonna be tickled pink by “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.” It’s not anything new, but the stunts and thrills are all there and you get to see Tom run and jump, tuck and roll to avoid the exploded carcass of an armored Humvee hurtling at him. But the appeal of a Tom Cruise “Mission Impossible” flick is that his Ethan Hunt has no superpowers to teleport through walls, smash through a steel bunker or bend the wills of the weak, though he is pretty good with a rubber mask. He’s a can-do everyman just like you and me – not really, but that’s the facade we buy into – and Cruise, who at 60 clearly has an all-access pass to the fountain of youth, famously does all his own stunts (perhaps too famously?), which inherently adds to the M:I pizzaz.
Cruise co-opted the 1960s TV series nearly 30 years ago with Brian De Palma in the director seat and an all-star screenwriting team that included Steven Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”), David Koepp (“Jurassic Park”) and Robert Towne (“Chinatown”). In that first big-screen liftoff, the old IMF Team lead by Jim Phelps (played by Peter Graves on TV and by Jon Voight in the film) get killed off – mission disk-wipe and rebrand accomplished! “Dead Reckoning,” not to be confused with the 1946 film noir starring Humphrey Bogart (did Bogie ever leap between planes or speeding locomotives in his films?), is the seventh Cruise-led M:I chapter, and we know there’s going to be no less than eight including next year’s “Dead Reckoning Part Two.” Besides De Palma, Cruise has worked with some of the industry’s most distinguished directors just over the crest from their cinematic highs, including action auteur John Woo (“Bullet in the Head,” “Face/Off”), J.J. Abrams (the later “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” chapters) and animator Brad Bird (“The Incredibles”), but for these last four he’s settled on Christopher McQuarrie as his director and pen man. If you’re unfamiliar with McQuarrie, he’s the rapier wit who smartly played us all in “The Usual Suspects” (1995) and has since gone on to write many a Cruise film: “Edge of Tomorrow” (2014), the World War II Hitler assassination plot “Valkyrie” (2008), “Jack Reacher” (2012) and even the failed Dark Universe monster movie “The Mummy” (2017). McQuarrie also did Cruise’s most recent box office blast, last year’s unanimous crowd pleaser “Top Gun: Maverick.” The point being, Tom and Mr. McQuarrie are tight and have a good thing going, and are sure to keep at it until it’s not.
That said, “Dead Reckoning: Part One” is a lot of hand waving and techno claptrap about something known as “The Entity.” It’s a McGuffin within a breakfast muffin – that is, bread on top of bread, a lot to chew on with no meat to bite into. Just what The Entity is, we’ll all have to wait for “Part Deux,” but as best I can tell it’s something of a hybrid of a ChatGPT artificial intelligence nursing a bottle of Jim Beam and that pained virtual incarnation know as SID (sadistic, intelligent and dangerous) from the 1995 sci-fi whimper known as “Virtuosity,” a movie that people only went to see because it starred Denzel Washington and forgot about quickly because of McQuarrie’s “Usual Suspects.” Hunt knows whoever has the key to The Entity will decide who lives and dies when world-sustaining resources such as water, food and fresh air become critically scarce in the foreseeable tomorrow. If that sounds like there’s serious climate change talking points afoot, it’s just more of that bread filler so Hunt, out to get the two halves of the key (in this digital era, it is a literal key, and an antiquated one that looks like it could have been used to unlock a crypt in “The Mummy”), can ride a motorcycle at breakneck speed through Roma followed by Italian police and Pom Klementieff, more widely known as a demurring empath in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” films, as an able assassin named Paris behind the wheel of a muscular military vehicle. The sequence feels far too akin to the Vatican crash-bang in the recently released “Fast X” (which has an annoying part two, too). As a result, there’s a bit of early letdown; but when atop a runaway locomotive or dashing through a claustrophobic maze of Venetian alleyways (the murky haziness of it all hauntingly reminiscent of Nicholas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now”) or at an Entity-hosted rave with baddies toting Glocks just three writhing bods away, the action is “Tár”-timing taut, superbly choreographed and maintaining its grip from first blow to final fall.
Old pals show up: The Geek Squad Greek chorus of Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) are back, as is adversary turned ally Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson, who’s got another part two on the horizon with the conclusion of “Dune” this summer) with Henry Czerny’s eely IMF director Eugene Kittridge ever making us ponder if we can trust him. Back too, but in less of a commanding role, is Vanessa Kirby, the enigmatic arms dealer called the White Widow. But the true face of nefarious deeds this time isn’t so much the never-really-seen Entity or Klementieff’s Joker-faced assassin, but Esai Morales’ diabolically debonair Gabriel, an old foe of Hunt’s who takes great pride in his demonic gamesmanship. Adding to Hunt’s ever-expanding sea of troubles and checklist of those who may or may not need saving is a stately yet shifty pickpocket named Grace (Hayley Atwell), who lifts a key half from an unwary bearer nearly every other scene. She’d make a good running mate with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s come-what-may opportunist in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” Just where “Dead Reckoning Part Two” goes doesn’t really matter; it’s all about Tommy under the gun, and it is good fun to see Tom run.
We’ve seen it all from Jennifer Lawrence: gritty, hard-bitten drama (“Winter’s Bone”), culturally critical satire (“Don’t Look Up,” “American Hustle”), spy thriller (“Red Sparrow”), a YA franchise (“The Hunger Games”), even a foray into the superhero ’verse (the “X-Men” series reboot), but a rom-com or straight-up comedy? “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012) kinda fit that bill (though it’s a dark one, as it deals with loss and mental illness) and Lawrence would win an Oscar for her part as a grieving widow looking for release and a way to move on. But in “No Hard Feelings,” Gene Stupnitsky’s not-quite-a-rom-com, Lawrence gets to open up and be free in a way she’s never done – think Cameron Diaz in “Bad Teacher” (2011) or Charlize Theron in “Long Shot” (2019). The thing that will be made the most of is Lawrence’s birthday suit scene. It is an eye popper, but not in the (racy, smutty) way you may think – it’s a punctuation mark in triplicate in a film that otherwise charms on its comedic merits and moments of humanity.
Lawrence’s Maddie lives in swank Montauk, Long Island, but is not one of the living-large summer weekenders looking to escape the dog days of Manhattan; she’s a townie living in the modest one-story bungalow in which she grew up. Mom died not so long ago, and the house is about to be taken away for back taxes. Maddie gets by gig-economy style bartending at the marina to those wealthy sorts and by giving Uber rides – that is, until her car is repossessed. No car, no house, no cash, what’s a youngish single woman to do?
Plan B comes in the form of a Craigslist ad posted by a wealthy couple (a dutiful Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick, rocking a Rasputin ’do) who want a 20-ish woman to help instill confidence in their Princeton-bound son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman, on leave from Harvard for the filming). What that translates into: Make our son a man (take his virginity) and we’ll give you a Buick and enough cash to handle the back taxes. Percy is unaware of the plot, and the task for Maddie – who is in her early 30s and barely passes the mom-and-dad interview – becomes more complicated than expected.
Maddie’s a hot mess, and endearingly self-deprecating. She’s also vulnerable, up against it and has can-do resolve. There’s a whole backstory about her dad and plenty of attempts to get Percy to Buick land. Stupnitsky, a veteran of “The Office” TV series pulling double duty as writer, does a nice job with the comedic timing and plots changeups. Lawrence, believe it or not, is adroit as a physical comedian, be it her Maddie trying to rob her car back from a tow truck, or that buck-naked throwdown on a beach that involves crotch shots (both punches and sightings of) and sleeper holds. Maddie and Feldman’s geeky, sensitive Percy also score some truly tender moments. It’s evocative of “Risky Business” (1982) and “Booksmart” (2019) without being derivative. it’s also refreshing to see Lawrence take a chance, and Stupnitsky does a nice job of playing with the have-and-have-not dynamic the way “One Crazy Summer” (1986) and “Caddyshack” (1980) did, but more affectingly and subtly.
Go ahead, call me a curmudgeon, hater or whatever, but I’m done with the whole consuming concept of the “multiverse.” Yeah, it rocked the Oscars with “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” but the Daniels are a cheeky, creative tandem whose projects are driven by wit and verve – and that had Michelle Yeoh. Otherwise (with a hall pass given for the animated “Spider-Verse”), it’s a lazy way to just keep the same-old-same-old going around, a toilet bowl eddy of narrative ineptitude that no studio exec will flush as long as it can rack up boffo box office mojo. With “The Flash,” I have reached the end of my tether. Is anyone out there holding onto super fond memories of this year’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” or “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021)?
That said,“The Flash” does pass the time. But then it begins to rewind it – too often – and in the end, feels pointless. In the rebooted DCU (Detective Comic Universe), many of the Justice League entries besides Batman and Superman have fallen flat – sorry “Aquaman” and “Wonder Woman 1984” – and “The Flash” shows even less flair. The plot has Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), aka the Flash, using his super speed to go back in time to save his mother (Maribel Verdú) from a deadly supermarket run-in that left his dad (Ron Livingston) on the hook for murder. Natch, there’s a fly in the time continuum ointment, and Barry drops out and in with his 18-year-old self and loses his superpowers. Also in the mix of this alter ’verse is old foe General Zod (Michael Shannon), trying to terraform the Earth to his desired specs (which would mean the annihilation of the human race), and now there is no Superman, but Supergirl (Boston-born Sasha Calle, in a generic part). And while we do get Ben Affleck’s Batman in a cool opening sequence, the one here giving Barry an assist is a gray-haired kook in a Wayne Manor that’s a weedy, seedy mess, (though the Batcave still rocks) played by none other than Michael Keaton, who pretty much steals the show and saves the film as well as the universe and Barry’s slow-moving ass.
Miller, so good as the troubled, titular Kevin in “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2011) and as Credence Barebone in the “Fantastic Beasts” flicks – and a controversial figure given some recent offscreen incidents – is adequate as Barry Allen. The problem is that the character just isn’t that deep. That mom is lost and there’s that pining to bring her back and the idea that a superhero without powers still has to be superhuman feel borrowed from another movie and sprinkled in. The time rewinds, so much fun in “Groundhog Day” (1993) and “Edge of Tomorrow” (2014), just don’t add anything, and at nearly two and a half hours, a film with a speedy protagonist should feel faster. Directed by Andy Muschietti (“It”) and penned by Christina Hodson (the dully flat “Birds of Prey”) the film does have some neat action sequences – the breakout of Supergirl from a Russian prison – and the Batcycle and Batplane are pretty dope. Besides that and Keaton’s screen time, this “Flash” is pretty much treadmill superhero 101.
The latest from Ari Aster doesn’t quite swerve off into a macabre occult or seasonal cult rite the way “Heredity” (2018) and “Midsommar” (2019) did to the delight of art house horror fans, though “Beau is Afraid” has its own special flourishes of outré that disturb as much as they provoke. The film moves in a very A-then-B fashion with flashbacks to inform us on the trauma unfolding in the present. We begin in the dark with a series of dull thuds and agonized groans. There’s occasional bolts of white light and peers through murky pink filament. What’s going on, you might ask, trench warfare at night? Soon the answer is delivered as Beau is birthed and slapped awake into his new world. We leap ahead to find the mature, balding 40-something Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) in therapy, where we learn he has a lot of mommy issues. Given his father died at the very moment of his conception, this makes sense. His mother calls several times during the session; he doesn’t answer, but tells his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) he’s supposed to go visit her the next day – a task Beau doesn’t fully want to do.
We wander through chaotic streets, or is this unsettled world a projection of Beau’s inner turmoil? A berserk tattoo-faced man chases him with maniacal intent on his way home to a high-rise roost, where he hears news of a naked man stabbing people randomly. That evening, as Beau sleeps, a neighbor keeps sliding notes under his door asking him to turn down the music, yet his apartment is mute, and when Beau takes a bath, another neighbor literally drops in, in nearly the same demonic fashion a possessed soul does in the “Evil Dead” reboot out this week. Getting to mom proves elusive too. Lost keys, lost luggage – he never makes it to the airport, and when he calls his mother a UPS driver (Bill Hader, though you’d never know because you never really see him) answers and blathers on about police on the way and something about a chandelier and a missing head.
Beau remains absurdly calm and tries a plan B. The end result is that he gets stabbed, hit by a car and wakes up two days later in the bucolic home of Roger (Nathan Lane) and Grace (Amy Ryan, so good in “Gone Baby Gone”), kind medical professionals who nurse him back to health. Lurking around is a menacing looking “former war hero” (Denis Ménochet) who I’m not sure ever speaks, and the couple’s surly, sassy daughter (Kylie Rogers), who offers to drive Beau to his mother’s house. It turns out to be something of a blunt-smoking, kangaroo-court shenanigan.
With effusive control, Aster keeps working us – and Beau – in a downward spiral where the sense of what’s real and what’s not is as murky as that birth canal opener. Lost in the woods, Beau stumbles upon a theater group enacting the play of his life, and there’s a neat segue into animation, further gonzo, dark turns and Parker Posey, superb in a brief yet pivotal part. Mom’s in nearly every frame even when she’s not there, but about midway through we get her in the flesh, in flashbacks (played by Zoe Lister-Jones) and breathing fire in the now (Patti LuPone, bringing it). The line-blurring journey is reminiscent of the award-winning Daniels’ film “Swiss Army Man” (2016), with Aster’s frenetic edginess and dread imbued in nearly every frame. It’s a near three-hour odyssey that rivets right up to the Orwellian finale. Not all of it works, and Beau never seems genuinely afraid at times others might hit the panic button, but Aster’s film, like his others, has that lingering provocative tease that’s both a sign and a gift.
Matthew Maher as Nike shoe designer Peter Moore in “Air.” (Photo: Amazon Studios)
The latest directorial effort from Ben Affleck, “Air,” an underdog story of sorts about Nike’s pursuit of Michael Jordan as the face of its basketball shoe line, has a lot of Cambridge baked into it. There’s Ben and star and Cambridge Rindge and Latin School buddy Matt Damon, who also attended Harvard; some mention of budding NBA star and CRLS baller Patrick Ewing as well as his coach, Mike Jarvis; and something that might pass under your radar – the involvement of character actor Matthew Maher, who in recent years has inched more and more toward the spotlight.
In “Air,” Maher plays Peter Moore, the shoe designer who came up with the Air Jordan concept and that neat hanging-in-the-sky-about-to-slam-it-home logo. It’s a pivotal role, as one of the keys to getting Jordan to sign with Nike was a presentation by the recruitment team played by Damon and Jason Bateman of a shoe that embodied his Royal Airness-to-be.
Maher, a prolific actor with some 60 screen credits, talked Friday by phone and Zoom.
Like Affleck and Damon, Maher grew up in Cambridge and graduated from CRLS. The parents of the three knew each other from Harvard, and bonded over politics in the 1960s, he said.
It was at CRLS – where he was also friends with city councillor Marc McGovern – that Maher first tried acting.
Matthew Maher, left, with fellow CRLS alum Matt Damon in “Air.” (Photo: Amazon Studios)
The theater scene at CRLS was cool, “a place I wanted to be,” Maher said. “It wasn’t nerdy, it’s where many of popular kids were.” But he was keenly aware that a cleft palate and slight speech impediment made him different from the Afflecks and Damons of the school’s drama scene, and would face different challenges. “I wanted to be an actor in high school,” Maher said, “but to me being an actor was to try to be like them. And they were gorgeous, really charming guys. Even back then, they were stars, and I had no idea how to do or be that. I had no idea to how to harness that kind of charm and self-confidence, because I didn’t have it.”
Maher went to the University of California, Santa Cruz, studying English but participating in theater productions. His teacher there was matter-of-fact: “You just have deal with the fact that you have a speech impediment, you have a cleft palate and you are different,” Maher recalled. That teacher was encouraging, and a major influence – though Maher did say that there were productions he felt he didn’t get cast in because he wasn’t in the “the bright circle of successful beautiful people.”
After college he landed in New York working off-Broadway productions, as well as taking small parts in several Kevin Smith projects – the first being “Dogma,” starring Damon and Affleck. His first meaty film role was in the lo-fi production “Vulgar” (2000), about a man who performs as a birthday party clown to deal with the trauma of being gang-raped earlier in his life. The film was directed by and starred Smith regular Bryan Johnson as well as other Smithies such as “Clerks” (1994) star Brian O’Halloran and Ethan Suplee.
Maher’s ubiquity as an actor has come later in life, due in part to the pandemic and the increased prevalence of streaming series. He had a leading part in “Funny Pages,” a small, very funny, indie coming-of-age satire that he feared was never going to see the light of day; filming began in 2017, when there were issues with funding, and then Covid happened. “I had invested so much in it,” Maher said of the film by Owen Kline, son of Kevin and Phoebe Cates. Then the pandemic lifted and the crew was able to get its final reshoots. Maher received strong reviews when it screened in 2022 alongside his roles in two series: “Outer Range” with Josh Brolin (creator Brian Watkins wrote the part of Deputy Matt specifically for Maher), and the gay pirate comedy “Our Flag Means Death.” This year, the Apple TV+ prestige dramedy, “Hello Tomorrow!” on which Maher is a series regular arrived alongside “Air.”
Affleck offered the part of Nike’s Moore directly to Maher, which came as a surprise. It was an esteemed crew, with Oscar winners beyond Damon and Affleck: cinematographer Robert Richardson and actor Viola Davis, playing Jordan’s mother by demand of Jordan himself. Stil, the set was “very comfortable and relaxed,” Maher said.
In researching the part of Moore, who died a year ago at 78, Maher discovered “a true artist, who had to make art that everybody loved” – but a man he looked nothing like. Moore didn’t have a beard, Maher said, “but Affleck decided to let me be as I was.”
Maher has two young children: one pre-pandemic 3½-year-old, and another who’s just notching 8 months. He’s spent time in Los Angeles, but now calls Brooklyn, New York, home and keeps Cambridge ties – his mother, who taught at Wheaton College, and stepmother still live in Cambridge.
Daniel Goldhaber’s eco-terrorist (his word) thriller rides a sharp edge while executing some sneakily cool plot twists. The frenetic techno score by Gavin Brivik rivets as it breathes dread into nearly every frame – it’s essential. That said, there’s also something naggingly twee and subtly insincere to “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” that robs it of what could have been an earnestly earned victory lap.
You can’t argue with the film’s high-alert climate change messaging – I mean you can, but I won’t. Adapted by Goldhaber, Ariela Barer (who also stars and is one of the producers) and Jordan Sjol from Andreas Malm’s 2021 nonfiction work, the movie settles in with a group of young climate change activists who are looking to up their game from slashing the tires of diesel-chugging SUVs to the event of the title. The assemblage is one of diverse backgrounds, but all are focused on the same thing: Stopping climate change now, by any means. Xochitl (former “Modern Family” star Barer) lost her mom during a heat wave; the bomb-making expert Michael (Forrest Goodluck, who played Leonardo DiCaprio’s son in “The Revenant”) is angered by the presence of oil crews on his native lands; another, a square-jawed Texan (Jake Weary), is pissed off a pipeline is being put through his backyard; and then there’s the Bonnie and Clyde hipster couple (Kristine Froseth and Lukas Gage) who seem to do this kind of thing just for the fun of it.
Goldhaber, who came to notoriety for his taut Internet chiller “Cam” (2018) about a camgirl who encounters her doppelgänger on the Web, shows a deft eye for plot orchestration and messaging, but when it comes to depth of character, not so much. How the principals come together – by happenstance, Internet forums, current relations and even a documentary – is well baked, but once we meet them and learn their “Dirty Dozen” expertise, we never really get much more; most come off as posturing idealists with an ax to grind and no grindstone.
There are, at varying key junctures, punctuated flashbacks in which each activist’s backstory is meted out. Some add great relevance to the current action, others feel like ill-advised meanders, a detraction from the main mission, like the driver of a getaway car who decides to go into a bar for a burger and a beer moments before the heist goes down. Of the characters, Barer’s Xochitl feels the most developed (wearing the writer’s hat likely having something to do with that) along with Theo (Sasha Lane), who grew up with Xochitl and, like several others in the group, withholds critical information from other players – though her’s is more organic and real, less a plot-twist gotcha. Thankfully on tap is Theo’s girlfriend Alisha (Jayme Lawson), the group’s Greek chorus (“people are going to get hurt,” “this won’t work” and so on).
The group’s decision to go over the line into violence is rationalized as justified because global corporations bow only to their boards and the bottom dollar, and the only way to stem climate change now is to trigger a domino effect of eco-terrorist acts. I’d argue that getting legislation passed that would put a stiff tax on non-green corporations and those lazily reliant on fossil fuel would be the way to go, but, hey, if someone asked me that back in my bar-brawling days (probably at the apex of fossil fuel consumption), I’ll likely be up for lighting it up. Then again, I don’t think I was that interesting or deep back then either.
When it’s hard to imagine humble beginnings for corporate giants, origin stories reframe, refocus and provide new context. Microsoft and Apple started out of garages, right? Nike, the now-mega sports apparel conglomerate, took flight when founder and longtime chief executive Phil Knight started selling shoes out of the trunk of his car in the ’60s. The company became a leader in the track and running market in the ’70s, but as far as basketball went, it was a JV wannabe behind Converse and Adidas. The push to garner a greater market share is what “Air” is all about, and we all know who his royal Airiness is and how the story goes – but that union wasn’t as easy or even as probable as many might imagine, and that is where this film, directed by Ben Affleck and sharply written by Alex Convery, finds its sweet spot.
The lens falls on portly basketball scout Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), who’s given a quarter-million dollars by Knight (played with shaggy-dog gusto by Affleck) to sign an NBA draftee and help the company move up in market share. The problem is that Converse and Adidas have millions at their disposal; Vaccaro and crew (a chatty, avuncular Chris Tucker and Jason Bateman, stealing every scene as a smug marketing maven) have to look past the cream of the crop – Charles Barkley, No. 1 pick Hakeem Olajuwon, Sam Bowie and Michael Jordon – to the next tier of John Stockton, Jeff Turner and Melvin Turpin (who, you might ask?) for a realistic signee that may, against steep odds, become a marquee player in the NBA and give Nike a brand blastoff. Instead of spreading the money around on a few late, first-round long shots, Vaccaro fixates on Jordan, proclaiming him a once-in-a-generation superstar. History shows he wasn’t wrong, but few at the time, including Knight and the Nike board, were willing to take a chance. Vaccaro persists, though, coloring outside the lines by bypassing Jordan’s agent (played with hilarious, foulmouthed vitriol by Chris Messina in a breakout role) and driving to North Carolina to connect with Jordan’s parents, James (a gentlemanly Julius Tennon) and Deloris (Oscar winner Viola Davis, bringing her A-game to the pivotal role).
Like the journalistic investigation that sussed out the evils of Harvey Weinstein in “She Said” (2022) – granted, the contexts are worlds apart – you never really see or hear the object of the film’s focus, though Jordan haunts nearly every frame. It’s good to see Damon and Affleck together again. They played together most recently in Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel” (2021) but most Boston-famously in “Good Will Hunting” (1997); this is the first time one Cambridge Rindge and Latin buddy gets to direct the other, and their casual familiarity deepens the scenes between old colleagues Vaccaro and Knight. Speaking of Rindge, there are some cheeky references to Mike Jarvis and that phenom from Jamaica, Patrick Ewing. Rounding out the ingeniously cast ensemble is Matthew Maher as Peter Moore (who passed away last year), the designer who came up with the iconic logo of Jordan hanging in the air, and Marlon Wayans as George Raveling, a college basketball coach and sounding board for Vaccaro.
For What it's Worth 