Producers: Jeremy Plager, Francesca Silvestri, Kevin Chinoy and Oly Obst   Director: Laura Chinn   Screenplay: Laura Chinn   Cast: Laura Linney, Nico Parker, Woody Harrelson, Daniella Taylor, Ella Anderson, Amarr, Keyla Monterroso Mejia, Cree Kawa, Matt Walsh, Pam Dougherty, Scott McArthur, Ariel Martin, Jason Burkey and Danielle Henchcliffe   Distributor: Searchlight Pictures

Grade: C+

Laura Chinn’s semi-autobiographical debut feature presents a coming-of-age story against the backdrop of an end-of-life scenario.  While one can admire the ambition the film’s multilayered combination represents, “Suncoast” proves unable to balance its disparate plot threads successfully.

Nico Parker stars as Doris, who lives with her mother Kristine (Laura Linney) in Clearwater, Florida near the titular nursing facility, which caters to patients who are near death.  Kristine has been caring for her son Max (Cree Kawa), who suffers from terminal brain cancer and is now totally bedridden, at home—with her daughter’s help—but has decided to place him in Suncoast for his last days. 

But the hospice is the center of controversy; it also houses Terri Schiavo, who has been in a permanent vegetative state for fifteen years after suffering cardiac arrest in 1990.  Her husband has for years been prodding the courts to allow the removal of her feeding tube, an action opposed by her parents.  Now, as the case is reaching a conclusion, protesters from around the country have descended on Suncoast, most in support of her parents’ position.  Among them is Paul Warren (Woody Harrelson), a widower still grieving his wife’s sudden death years before.

Doris, called on by Kristine to do duty at home for so long, is an almost invisible presence at the Christian high school she attends.  She does participate in the Ethics class conducted—rather clumsily, one might note—by Mr. Ladd (Matt Walsh), but that’s hardly something that will gain her the peer acceptance she’s yearning after.  So when she overhears some classmates complaining about parental restrictions on their holding a party, she impulsively offers her house as a possibility, knowing that her mother will be spending the nights at Suncoast at Max’s bedside.  Rich girls Brittany (Ella Anderson), Laci (Daniella Taylor) and Megan (Ariel Megan), as well as their handsome pal Nate (Amarr), eagerly accept, and they—along with a slew of other classmates—descend on the place.  Naturally things take a bad turn when Kristine returns unexpectedly, kept out of the facility by the police responding to threats of violence.

But that doesn’t stop Doris, or her new friends.  They introduce her to drugs and drink, and are often as insensitive as most teens are, but they take a genuine interest in her, even lending her clothes for nights out and, ultimately, the prom.  She no longer feels isolated, and, as the saying goes, is beginning to become part of the group.

As she’s growing up as a teenager, though, Doris is becoming more estranged from her mother, whose concern for her son as his condition worsens becomes obsessive.  She has little control over her temper, lashing out at anyone—the chief nurse at the hospice (Keyla Monterroso), the cop (Jason Burkey) preventing her from getting in to spend the night with Max—who interferes with her attention to her dying son.  And she dismisses offers of help that come from the Suncoast grief counselor (Pam Dougherty), an elderly lady she initially takes for a patient.

In a way, Kristine’s anger is understandable.  But her devotion to Max has made her less than attentive to Doris’ needs.  At one point, talking to the grief counselor, she even briefly forgets that she has a second child.  And she has no compunction in berating her daughter for failing to be sufficiently caring toward her brother, in effect guilting her about going out with her friends rather than sitting at Max’s side and talking to him despite his complete unresponsiveness.

This aspect of the narrative is handled with considerable skill; even if the shifts from the teen coming-of-age material and the domestic drama aren’t always handled very smoothly by Chinn and editor Sara Shaw, the nuanced performance of Parker is a great asset, and though Linney comes across as one-note and shrill, the character’s emotional turmoil makes her single-mindedness credible.  The other young performers occasionally come on too strong, but are agreeable enough, and the other members of the supporting cast are all solid. 

But the additional element regarding the Schiavo case and the intervention of Paul, an evangelical right-to-life protestor who nevertheless treats Doris with a nonjudgmental, paternalistic air, comes across not only as implausible but unnecessary.  One might blame Harrelson for the fact  that the character he’s playing seems like a plaster saint, but the truth is, Paul is a screenwriting contrivance and the actor does what he can in a role it’s practically impossible to make convincing.  Harrelson falls back on his general likability, but it’s not enough to make this portion of the plot ring true—even though it does use an actual courtroom battle as a backdrop, if an overly convenient one in dramatic terms, and reflects Chinn’s own experience.

“Suncoast” has an indie movie look, with a gritty production design by Valeria De Felice and costumes by Megan Stark Evans that reflect the period without being overly ostentatious about it.  The cinematography by Bruce Francis Cole is good if a bit dim, declining to beautify the locale while emphasizing the dankness of the interiors, and the score by Este Haim and Christopher Stracey is similarly adequate but unmemorable.

The reach of “Suncoast” exceeds its grasp, but its attempt to tell a story about growing up within the context of family tragedy has resonance, even if it’s hobbled by some unconvincing elements.

Producer: Kim Sung-min   Director: Choi Dong-hoon   Screenplay: Choi Dong-hoon   Cast: Ryu Jun-yeol, Kim Woo-bin, Kim Tae-ri, Choi Yu-ri, So-Ji-sub, Yum Jung-ah, Jo Woo-jin, Kim Eui-sung, Lee Ha-nee, Shin Jung-geun, Lee Si-hoon, Yoo Jae-myung, Kim Ki-cheon  and Kim Dae-myung   Distributor: Well Go USA

Grade: C+

After nearly two years’ hiatus the second half of Choi Dong-hoon’s “Alienoid” (the original Korean title translates as “Alien+Human”), a wacky mash-up of science fiction, magic, martial arts and slapstick comedy, appears, and proves rather a disappointment after the overlong but engaging lark that was Part One.  You might sum up “Alienoid: Return to the Future,” as it’s been retitled for international consumption, as representing twice the confusion, but only half the fun, of the first movie—a surprise, given that both were shot simultaneously, and presumably from a single finished script.  (A proviso: the first half flopped badly at the box office, so perhaps Choi took the opportunity to do some re-editing in the interim.)

Choi begins with a brief recap of the initial installment, about an alien race using humans as vessels in which to imprison their criminals, the process overseen by a handsome computer program called Guard (Kim Woo-bin), who’s assisted by Thunder (voiced by Kim Dae-myung), a little robotic ball that can mutate into various shapes.  The action shifted between present-day Seoul, where the entire operation is threatened by a master alien criminal called The Controller, who intends to release all his fellow captives and envelop the planet in his home world’s atmosphere so that they can take over earth while the earthlings perish, and fourteenth-century Korea, where a fantastic weapon called the Divine Blade is being sought by a bevy of characters—an inept young dosa named Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol), whose magic fan releases two cat-helpers called Right Paw (Shin Jung-geun) and Left Paw (Lee Si-hoon); a mysterious masked man named Ja-jang (Kim Eui-sung); two comic sorcerers, Madam Black (Yum Jung-ah) and Mr. Blue (Jo Woo-jin); and a strange young woman (Kim Tae-ri), who’s said to release thunder from her hands but is actually carrying a modern pistol she occasionally uses to deadly effect. By the end of “Alienoid,” Guard and Thunder have apparently been destroyed in a journey to medieval Korea, and it’s revealed that the enigmatic young woman and Muruk share a history.

That’s where the action of Part Two picks up.  Chronologically it shifts less haphazardly between the time frames of the first movie; much of the first hour is set in the Korea of 1391, and much of the second in 2022 Seoul, where all of the main characters from the initial installment reassemble in a final showdown with The Controller, which among other things includes a battle aboard a speeding train.  They’re joined, moreover, by one whose part in the first film was peripheral and mostly comic—Min Kae-ae (Lee Hanee).  The aunt of a friend of a young orphan girl adopted by Guard at Thunder’s insistence, she now takes a major role as a customs officer whose attempts to confront the danger The Controller poses are dismissed by government superiors. 

The curious thing about the movie is that while it manages to tie up the various plot threads Choi set out in the first picture, it does so much less elegantly than before.  The less visually expansive sequences, including some of the fight sequences, are oddly cramped and claustrophobic, without the élan of the earlier movie, and when the big last-act confrontation occurs, it’s overstuffed with the sort of CGI bombast that’s characteristic of Hollywood blockbusters, and played in a desultorily repetitive fashion that grows tiresome, coming off as more tedious than exciting.  The slapstick is cruder this time around too, the result of giving more room to the two sorcerers, whose antics too often descend to the puerile (a sequence involving their introduction to treadmills at an exercise club seems to go on forever).

More generally, there’s a feeling or arbitrariness in the movie’s final stages; you’re left with a nagging suspicion that Choi is increasingly making up new rules to fit the requirements of the moment rather than fitting things into an established framework.  It’s absurd to expect impeccable logic in this sort of fantasy nonsense, of course, but when you begin to suspect that anything can happen, you begin to lose interest in what does.

Still, you have to admire the gonzo imagination that animates the “Alienoid” duology and the energy with which the cast commit themselves to the zaniness Choi has contrived.  This second installment doesn’t equal the nearly-inspired lunacy of the first, but it has its moments, and especially if you enjoyed the first movie, you should check out this finale, inferior though it might be.

And finale’s what it probably is, because though it has taken the top slot at the Korean box office during its initial run “Future” isn’t performing even as well as the first movie, which, given the huge budget of the two-parter, was considered a flop.  Any plan to turn “Alienoid” into a continuing franchise—which the concept seems to invite—now appears a forlorn hope.  So to its fans, the advice must be: enjoy what you have, but don’t expect any more.