Tag Archives: C-

GHOSTED

Producers: David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Chris Evans, Jules Daly, Paul Wernick and  Rhett Reese  Director: Dexter Fletcher   Screenplay: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers    Cast: Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Amy Sedaris, Tim Blake Nelson, Tate Donovan, Mike Moh, Marwan Kenzari, Anna Deavere Smith, Lizze Broadway, Mustafa Shakir, Israel Vaughn, Burn Gorman, Anthony Mackie, John Cho, Sebastian Stan and Ryan Reynolds    Distributor: Apple TV+

Grade: C-

The leads are attractive but the script is contrived, the banter forced, and the action rote in Dexter Fletcher’s mash-up of rom-com and spy caper.  Even a succession of all-star cameos can’t save “Ghosted,” which mimics plenty of other similar tales of romance budding through shared danger. At one point a character solemnly intones, “This game we play is like no other,” but in truth we’ve seen variations of it many times before.

Cole Turner (Chris Evans) and Sadie Rhodes (Ana de Armas) have the obligatory cute meet at a Farmers Market in Washington D.C.  He’s a wannabe historian who’s moved back in with his parents (Tate Donovan and Amy Sedaris) and younger sister Mattie (Lizze Broadway) to help run the family farm, and she drops by a flower stall he’s temporarily manning to purchase a plant.  After an unfunny altercation over whether she’s home enough to tend one, he decides to take a chance and invite her for coffee.  The meeting turns into a day-long date and a nighttime frolic; he’s utterly smitten.  Too much so, in fact: when she doesn’t answer his barrage of calls and texts and his sister insists he’s being ghosted, he decides to locate Sadie via a tracker on the asthma inhaler he accidentally left in her purse.  (If you find that implausible, be assured worse is yet to come.)

Cole learns that Sadie is in London, and impulsively travels there to reconnect with her.  (The fact that he might reasonably be looked upon as an über-stalker doesn’t deter him.)  He’s immediately accosted by thugs who take him captive, and he awakens to find himself threatened with torture by a guy named Borislov (Tim Blake Nelson, doing a comic villain turn that would have been old-fashioned in 1941), who thinks he’s a CIA agent codenamed Taxman, demands that he reveal a “passcode” he’s supposed to know, and prefers using insects as his instruments of pain.  But he’s saved at the last minute by a kick-ass, fast-shooting masked figure who turns out to be—surprise, surprise!—Sadie, the true Taxman. 

Of course, that will lead to them becoming an unlikely team, though Cole is miffed with Sadie for having told him that she’s an art curator, and she with him for something or other.  It turns out they’re in Pakistan, and the time has come for a big action set-piece, in which they’re attacked in the Khyber Pass by a platoon of motorcycled villains as they careen along treacherous mountain roads in a brightly-colored bus they’ve commandeered.  (Cole, of course, quickly proves himself as adept an action hero as you’d want.)

That’s only the first of such assaults orchestrated by the chief bad-guy of the piece, a French agent gone rogue named Leveque (Adrien Brody, as effete and scenery-smacking a scumbag as you could wish).  He’s in possession of a super-weapon called Aztec, a gizmo that can take control of the world’s computers (the McGuffin of choice in all such espionage movies nowadays) but still requires the passcode that will unlock it so that he can sell it to his prospective buyer Utami (Stephen Park).

Leveque has his own army of thugs, led by Wagner (Mike Moh—his name perhaps a nod to the Russian paramilitary group), but he also puts out a John Wick-style offer to all the world’s hit-men to get the Hitchcockian “wrong man” Turner, whom he believes the Taxman.  That brings in some of the guest stars (Anthony Mackie, John Cho, Sebastian Stan) as arrogant rivals with names like Grandson of Sam and God, but they wipe one another out in a distinctly lame series of sight-gags.  Cole and Sadie are still on the run, with Aztec passing from one side to another and back again until they wind up at CIA headquarters, where, in a twist of surpassing absurdity, Cole is able to figure out the passcode Leveque is seeking through his encyclopedic agronomical expertise.  (The history he wants to write is about the effect of agriculture on the rise and fall of nations.)

In any event they all arrive at a posh revolving restaurant perched atop a spire (think of a combination of Seattle’s Space Needle and Atlanta’s Polaris eatery, or Dallas’ Reunion Tower) where, after some desultory conversation that’s meant to be suspenseful, lots of gunfire and fistfights break out as the gears that turn the establishment go awry and the place turns into something like an out of control merry-go-round.  The entire sequence, in which Ryan Reynolds pointlessly turns up as an old flame of Sadie’s in another limp cameo, can only have been devised as a homage to the finale of “Strangers on a Train” squared; but Hitchcock, cinematographer Robert Burks, editor William Ziegler and special effects man H.F. Koenekampf managed in 1950 to extract more tension and excitement out of merely speeding up the film than Fletcher, cinematographer Salvatore Totino, visual effects supervisor Mike Wassel and editors Chris Lebenzon, Jim May and Josh Schaeffer do with all the high-tech dazzle at their disposal.

Still, their technical work, along with Claude Paré’s production design and Marlene Stewart’s costumes (including soundstage sequences supposedly set in Pakistani streets), is more than adequate if a mite cheesy, and while Lorne Balfe’s score merely blasts the action along, frequently replaced as it is by great swaths of pop songs, it fills the bill.  Evans and de Armas suit their roles, of course, and play the mediocre material as agreeably as they can, though they have trouble selling the lessons their characters are supposed to learn from their joint experience—Sadie not to put the success of a mission above the safety of her partners, Cole to follow his dream (or something like that).  Most of the supporting cast just follow the script’s dictates for good and (mostly) ill, but Marwin Kenzari earns a few chuckles as a one-handed former agent, as does Burn Gorman as a London cabbie.  The “star” cameos are all limp, with Reynolds’ coming off as especially lame.

It will come as no shock that Cole and Sadie wind up together, and a coda suggests they could have further screen adventures.  If that eventuality should come to pass, let’s hope they’ll be significantly cleverer and more exciting than this one.                    

BEAU IS AFRAID

Producers: Lars Knudsen and Ari Aster   Director: Ari Aster   Screenplay: Ari Aster   Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Kylie Rogers, Denis Ménochet, Parker Posey, Zoe Lister-Jones, Armen Nahapetian, Julia Antonelli, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Richard Kind and Hayley Squires   Distributor: A24  

Grade: C-

There are plenty of striking images in Ari Aster’s third film, but they’re all part of an epic odyssey that ultimately proves a grossly self-indulgent exercise in simplistic Freudian psycho-babble.  The story they combine to tell is a threadbare affair—a zonked-out “Mommy Dearest” tale revved up to absurd proportions and played as sour black comedy. (It isn’t for nothing that a statue of Madonna and Child becomes a motif in various forms.)    

The Beau of the title is Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix), a timid, or rather preternaturally and perpetually terrified, fellow.  The picture opens literally with a bang as he’s born, with his mother Mona (played in her younger years by Zoe Lister-Jones, and later by Patti LuPone) screaming not with joy but fury.  We’ll learn later that Beau’s father had died at the moment of his conception, and that Beau has inherited his heart murmur.  No wonder he’s petrified at the thought of having sex.

Beau lives alone in a scummy apartment located in a nightmarish urban hellscape, afraid to venture out into streets populated by throngs of scary people—like the over-tattooed guy who chases him maniacally—and, reportedly, by a naked knife-wielding slasher who roams unimpeded.  He does find some brief solace in the presence of his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who prescribes a new medication for anxiety relief, since he’s about to catch a plane visit his mother on the anniversary of his father’s demise.  The therapist also asks, blithely, whether he drams of killing his mother.  Beau is shocked at the suggestion.

But everything then goes wrong for poor Beau.  Chased back into his apartment by that tattooed wild man, he finds the dilapidated, graffiti-blighted building has become home to a dangerous spider, and his sleep is ruined by an unseen neighbor’s slew of notes demanding that he turn down the music, though he’s not playing any, and by that neighbor’s audio retaliation.  The next morning he oversleeps, and in a rush to pack and leave for the airport discovers that his key has been stolen.  He phones Mona to explain his delay, but after taking his medication—which the doctor has ordered must be taken with water—discovers that the water has been turned off.  Venturing out to buy bottled water at a convenience store, he watches in horror as the building—and his apartment in particular—are taken over by the street mob.  After spending the night outside, he goes back to his apartment, where he tries to take a bath, only to have a man clinging to the ceiling fall on him.  Beau runs into the street naked and screaming, but not only runs into the knife-wielding serial killer but is hit by a truck.

If all this sounds like too much, rest assured it’s only the beginning of Beau’s journey to a reckoning with his past.  There follow two long, bizarre episodes offering different perspectives on family.  In the first, he’s treated at their home by the couple who hit him with their truck—Roger (Nathan Lane), a gregarious surgeon, and his entrepreneur wife Grace (Amy Ryan), who put him in the room of their hostile teen daughter Toni (Kylie Rogers).  The home is a cartoonish portrait of weird suburban life, in which the couple also host a demented veteran named Jeeves (Denis Ménochet), who served with their son, who died, they repeatedly say, in Caracas. 

Despite the insistence of Mona’s lawyer Dr. Cohen (Richard Kind) that he come to his mother’s home immediately, Beau finds his departure delayed by Roger and Grace, and his safety endangered by Toni.  So he takes off on his own, pursued by Jeeves, winding up in a dark wood, though whether what he finds there is divine or infernal is debatable.  Invited to join them by Penelope (Haley Squires), a member of an experimental theatre company, he sits enthralled by a play, transformed into a combination of live action and colorful animation provided by Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León, in which Beau himself plays a man who grows old searching for the three sons (Michael Gandolfini, Théodore Pellerin and Mike Taylor) he has lost.  While he watches, he’s approached by a stranger who insists that his father is actually alive, and  when the play is disrupted by the raging Jeeves, he escapes and makes his way to his mother’s house.

Up to this point the supposedly chronological order of events has been periodically interrupted by flashbacks in which the young Beau (Armen Nahapetian) alternately is suffocated with affection by his mother or suffers at her hands, and an episode in which he nervously grows close to a far more forward teen girl, Elaine (Julia Antonelli), who, when she’s torn away from him, beseeches him to wait for her.  Now he’s reunited with both of the women from his past (Elaine now played by Parker Posey and Mona by the ferocious LuPone), and, in a surrealistic scene, with his father as well, though in a very peculiar form.  A confrontation with Mona leads to a trial of sorts in which Beau’s life is scrutinized and he is found wanting.

One has to admit that Aster, who became a cult hero with his first film, the effective horror entry “Hereditary,” but stumbled with his second, “Midsommer,” here gives free rein to his imagination in what can only be interpreted as a continuing effort to examine what genealogy means in human affairs.  Nor can it be denied that his cast and crew have given their all to realize his peculiar vision on screen.  Though Beau doesn’t provide Phoenix much opportunity to demonstrate his wide range (as contrasted with his ability to embody an utterly tortured soul), he remains compulsively watchable even as the character becomes a bit of a bore.  The rest of the cast supply full-bodied performances—in the case of LuPone, Ménochet, Kind, and some of the lesser players, arguably too much so; Lane is, as usual, the consummate pro.

And the look of the film is quite amazing.  Fiona Crombie’s production design is breathtaking, in a completely artificial way, Alice Babidge’s costumes are exemplary (down to LuPone’s black high heels), and Pawel Pogorzelski’s bright cinematography adds to the unreal feel of it all; the León-Cociña animation is exquisite, and the effects by Louis Morin fine.  Booby Krlic’s score is unobtrusively effective.  As for Lucian Johnston’s editing, it can hardly be blamed for the film’s bloated running-time, just under three hours, including the final credit crawl.  It’s Aster’s script and direction that must be saddled with that.

But the production company must also shoulder some responsibility.  Studios, even boutique ones, have apparently forgotten the lesson, taught by Michael Cimino and “Heaven’s Gate,” that it can be a mistake to coddle young directors, even those who have enjoyed some well-merited success.  So we get major failures like Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” and now this large-scale misfire.  It’s somehow appropriate that “Beau Is Afraid” ends, as it began, with an explosive burst, since it’s pretty much a bomb.  Aster’s devoted cult followers may embrace it as some sort of off-the-wall masterpiece, but the truth is that, despite that loud finale, the cruelly overextended last act, which makes an obvious point though gussied up with perversely comic touches, brings it to a close not with a bang but the kind of pitiful whimper that Beau himself might have emitted.