The Fall Guy

Ryan Gosling is an affable presence. He’s hard to dislike, but in recent years he seems to have dialed down any urgency or passion in his acting (except for his big “I’m Just Ken” number in Barbie and on the Oscars). He just wants to keep himself amused, and that’s what he does in The Fall Guy. We don’t necessarily want anything more from him in this role; there’s no need for him to revisit the early drama of The Believer or Half Nelson. This is meant to be a big-budget based-on-TV wedge of cheese that gets the job done and keeps us feeling secure that it’s going to stay steadfastly vanilla and mainstream. It’s the sort of glitzy, unchallenging blockbuster that used to open on Memorial Day in the late ‘80s or early ’90s, and might have made more money then.

Gosling drives this contraption smoothly, but the movie pays a price for his noncommittal vibe. For one thing, it rubs off on Emily Blunt, who plays a cinematographer turned director, Jody Moreno, who’s supposed to be and feel a bit in over her head. As her debut, she’s helming a megabudget sci-fi thing involving cowboys and aliens, she’s working with a highly unreliable star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and she’s still sore over her breakup with Colt Seavers (Gosling), a master stuntman who usually doubles for that star. Emotionally, though, she reads as null, her complaints pulled from a screenwriting checklist. The script pushes Jody and Colt back together, and their rapport is all glib banter and “funny” scenes like the one where she requires him to be set aflame and flung into a rock over and over. Nothing of importance seems to have been lost, or be rekindled, between them.

Colt has been offline for about a year following a stunt mishap wherein he broke his back (one reason it isn’t all that funny when he keeps getting launched into that rock and his back takes the brunt of the hit). A lot of that time in the wilderness, we gather, is down to Colt’s feelings of shame about the injury and inability to face Jody, who was there when it happened. But we don’t feel this any more than we feel Jody’s anger at Colt for his ghosting her for a year. There’s a similar dynamic in Grosse Pointe Blank between John Cusack and Minnie Driver, but hangdog Cusack hooked us into his grief over the relationship and for the younger version of himself capable of simple love, and Driver sure as hell made us feel her rage and her revived feelings for him and her rage about that. Maybe director David Leitch and credited writer Drew Pearce should’ve given that film a look.

The stunts, when they come, are crunchy and elaborate. Leitch is a former stuntman and stunt coordinator himself, and knows the life. But The Fall Guy is no Hooper, much less The Stunt Man. There’s a bit of standard Hollywood japery about tough-talking but sissy movie stars, and Hannah Waddington steals the movie without much effort as a Diet Coke-addicted producer who covers her anxiety with rictus grins meant to be reassuring. That this producer essentially turns into an empty noisemaker in scenes that could be lifted out of her own cheese epics is the sort of depressing meta comedy the film passes off as satire. But there’s a purity to the stunts, realized practically whenever possible, that lifts the movie somewhat. The fight choreography seems more on-point than the many chases, which never quite impress us because they feel like, well, stunts. 

Colt has a cracking, wild-ass moment when he swings from skid to skid on a helicopter in chaotic flight, like a kid swinging from bar to bar on a jungle gym. But otherwise the stunts announce themselves too lazily, sometimes with characters batting the same banter back and forth in mid-air that they do on the ground. If the people onscreen don’t take their situations or love lives or anything else very seriously, why should we? The Fall Guy was never going to be high drama, nor should it be, but even a fizzy action-comedy should have some stakes. What does it mean, really, that the movie Jody has been thirsting to make for years, and the one for which Colt and many other stunt performers risk their lives, looks like a big stupid Comic-Con Hall H hype bomb? Are her dreams being ridiculed, or is the movie saying that so much of her time spent on Hollywood sets has cheapened her dreams? A goofball amusement like The Fall Guy shouldn’t leave us asking ourselves disheartening questions like this.

Drive-Away Dolls

It’s probably too simplistic, and probably wrong, but on the evidence of Ethan Coen’s solo debut feature Drive-Away Dolls, he’s the goofy one in the Coen partnership and his brother Joel (who directed The Tragedy of Macbeth a few years back) is the serious one. (Typically perversely, the truth is probably the other way around.) Drive-Away Dolls, which Ethan also co-wrote with his wife Tricia Cooke, is blessedly short (77 minutes less seven minutes of end credits) and full of sex, violence, and jokes. The jokes sometimes land and sometimes don’t, but overall it’s a pleasant enough trifle. Not everything the Coens are involved in, separately or together, has to be a cinematic game-changer.

The dolls (the original title was Drive-Away Dykes) are buddies Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan). They get a car from a drive-away service and head to Tallahassee, not knowing there’s something in the trunk. Violent men hired by a powerful figure are after this something, for reasons I should let the movie tell you. Jamie, a lascivious sort, and Marian, who brings a Henry James novel with her, are generally the kind of diametrically opposed friends you only meet in B-movies. But Coen never pretends this is anything but a B-movie. Full of psychedelic scene transitions that recall the knockout daydreams in The Big Lebowski, it’s informed by any number of exploitation flicks of the ‘70s, though I feel sure none of those had references to The Europeans. 

The movie is all over the place — its tone is the ‘70s, but it’s set in 1999 for some reason, and sports some anachronisms like someone saying women can marry each other in Massachusetts (they couldn’t until 2004). A small dog is treated somewhat cavalierly (though not cruelly, thankfully), its only purpose being an excuse to get Jamie’s ex (Beanie Feldstein, funny as usual) on her trail. The terrific character actor Bill Camp scores every time as the drive-away manager Curlie, who’s sort of the comedic flip side of the elderly gas-station attendant who almost loses the coin toss in No Country for Old Men. As often happens in Coen movies, the desperate criminals are ruinously stupid, and their quarry is only innocent in comparison. Stars Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon drop in briefly, adding to the tapestry.

It may also be simplistic to imagine that Coen came up with the knockabout male crime stuff while Tricia Cooke (who identifies as queer; she and Coen have an open marriage) handled the lesbian stuff. Certainly the scenes inside various lesbian bars (an endangered species these days) were informed by someone who’s been there. Apparently “basement parties” are or were a thing; Jamie and Marian find themselves at one such shindig hosted by a women’s soccer team, and are invited to another. The South in 1999, presumably, was a lava pool of activity for like-minded young women to pursue glory or humiliation. In this universe, men mostly exist to be laughable or menacing (Colman Domingo holds up the “menacing” portion as imposingly as he did in @Zola). This is the kind of movie where Beanie Feldstein comes to the rescue, gun blazing.

Weirdly, of the two solo Coen efforts, I prefer Ethan’s sex-positive, consolateur-laden goof to Joel’s starkly artsy Shakespeare. (The two films couldn’t be less alike.) For one thing, it’s more fun, and fun is as rare nowadays as lesbian bars. The loosey-goosey Qualley and the stoically suffering Viswanathan are an engaging match; if their Jamie and Marian headlined a TV series I’d be there for it. If you don’t relish their company, you’re only with them for slightly north of an hour, and there are other strange divertissements throughout, such as Miley Cyrus’ bit as a character named Tiffany Plastercaster, or a heavy who emphasizes people skills as a path to persuasion (with dialogue you can imagine hearing, slightly tweaked, in Miller’s Crossing), or the funniest front-page headline since Arrested Development’s heyday. It’s silly and soft and bound for the cult-movie section, where it will find the following it lacks right now.

Blazing Saddles

This year, Netflix is curating selections of notable films having an anniversary — 20th, 50th, and so on. One of them is Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, which turns 50 on February 7. The movie has in recent years been conscripted in the new culture war as an example of comedy that “could never be made today,” because the “wokesters” and oversensitive Zoomers would “cancel” it, or some such thing. Yet there it is, on Netflix, with all thirteen “N-words” intact, along with other slurs. Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today because it’s very much of its time — a spoof of ‘70s blaxploitation as much as westerns. Other satirical material with bawdy humor and language continues to be made. It’s just that you’re more likely to see it on Max than in the theater.

The movie, written by two Black guys and three Jews, has its heart in the right place when it comes to race. Today, it might come under fire more readily for its gay-bashing humor. Mel Brooks stops the movie cold during its climax so that Dom DeLuise can direct a bunch of flaming nellies in a song-and-dance number while himself playing a gay stereotype. It’s one of several bumps in the narrative’s road, as a Superposse of bad eggs has a traveling brawl with the heroes and townsfolk and keeps bursting in on other productions or the studio commissary, a shambolic meta-ending not unlike the non-climax of Monty Python and the Holy Grail a year later. The thing is, there’s no mitigating satire here, no gay Cleavon Little figure. It’s just making fun of the faygelehs. It’s not great.

Neither is the rest of the movie, really. I adore Mel Brooks as a public figure, your hilarious uncle who’s always “on” and says things in interviews that people quote for decades. May he live to be an actual 2000-year-old man. It’s his movies that don’t do much for me (though I have a soft spot for Young Frankenstein for its obvious love for the old Universal horrors and its dedication to getting the look right). As a writer/director, Brooks tends to elbow us too hard in the ribs trying to sell the laugh. Some of the best moments were improvised, such as the “y’know…morons” line, which benefits from understatement (if Brooks delivered the line he’d have launched it into the cheap seats) and Cleavon Little’s genuine chuckle at it.

Little, of course, plays Bart, the railworker turned sheriff — sent to a town ostensibly to guard it but really to destabilize it. A lot of Blazing Saddles’ racial material, especially as regards white scheming against Black people, wouldn’t offend today so much as seeming somewhat mild. Fifty years ago it was radical; then again, so was the campfire flatulence scene, which now plays both tame and obvious. I can say that Blazing Saddles was absolutely necessary for its time. That doesn’t mean it needs to be driven into oblivion now. To say it hasn’t aged well may only mean society has progressed in fifty years, and I imagine Mel Brooks would be depressed if we hadn’t made any strides since 1974.

Well, in some ways we haven’t. Things go in cycles, and fifty years ago a Black man in drag was on TV (The Flip Wilson Show, still running when Blazing Saddles was in theaters), and today some states are trying to outlaw drag queens. One step forward, ten steps back. The true sin of Blazing Saddles is that its humor is broad (Alex Karras’ Mongo punching the horse — Mongo was reportedly Richard Pryor’s main addition to the script) while its style is bland. The almost serene rapport between Little and Gene Wilder as the broken-down Waco Kid, two hipsters finding each other in a backward-ass town, is a source of pleasure. Harvey Korman, onscreen altogether too much, is not. Madeline Kahn, as the legendary Lili Von Shtupp, is majestically concupiscent while not exactly doing much for the then-fresh second-wave feminism. Blazing Saddles may be instructive in terms of the tropes it chooses to challenge (a group of Black railworkers crooning Cole Porter instead of “Camptown Races”) and the ones it chooses to leave unharmed. 

Poor Things

It won’t do to take Poor Things literally. This, after all, is a movie in which a pregnant woman jumps off a bridge and is brought back to life, with the brain of her still-living child implanted in her own skull. The result is Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), who seems built to violate the Victorian mores of her society. We witness Bella, with her infant brain in a full-grown woman’s body, evolve from an innocent who spits out hated food and speaks in broken syntax to a wiser woman who reads up on socialism but still refers to the sex act as “furious jumping.” 

The movie, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) and based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, is partly a riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and partly a charcuterie board full of bits from other works of dark science fantasy, with frequent visits from weird cinema down through the ages. I loved it, though possibly would have loved less of it; at two hours and twenty-one minutes, Poor Things starts to circle and belabor its point. Some won’t mind; others won’t get past the first half hour. Not a horror movie itself, it’s best appreciated by horror fans with long memories and patience. Its visual imagination is richly capacious, it has an uncompromising vibe of pure cinema, and when you see it a second time — and you may want to — you’ll at least know at which points to hit the bathroom.

Stone gives a hungry, open-souled performance illustrated by I lost count of how many sex scenes; she will be and has been praised for her bravery in the second aspect, but the meat of her work resides in the first, as Bella’s brain grows and her responses to stimuli and to life — at some points in her journey, there’s little difference — gain more subtlety and less babyish affect. Stone helps put across the story as a fable about growth in a barren garden of a society. We’re not meant, from our privileged perch as 21st-century people, to take Bella’s arc as a Victorian woman as commentary on feminism or anything else. Victorian London is just the most diabolically fun setting for this tale and its central figure, a prickly and proudly ungovernable agent of chaos.

A lot of the film, with its mad-lab gore and copious sex and nudity (if this got through with an R rating, what gets an NC-17 these days?), is like a Hammer horror from the ‘60s seen through a fever-dream lens (literally a fisheye lens at times, as well as a bokeh blurring effect). Cinematographer Robbie Ryan and production designers Shona Heath and James Price can take deep bows. And Lanthimos doesn’t forget about the supporting cast, including a waffle-scarred Willem Dafoe as Bella’s creator (who burps bubbles when eating) and a whiny Mark Ruffalo as one of the (male) fools who try to trap Bella’s spirit. Poor Things has a paltry-for-the-2020s $35 million budget but manages to look like a big Hollywood saga, only seen through a funhouse mirror.

Poor Things is essentially a comedy. We never fear for Bella even when things look bleak and Jerskin Fendrix’s ominous score becomes, according to the editorializing subtitles, “perplexing.” With its concerns with dark scientific inquiry and female consciousness coming into its own, it’s the true Barbenheimer this year. It arrives just in time to give me happy optimism about the future of cinema as a delivery system for idiosyncratic visions. It may not make studio accountants giddy, and might even be too stubbornly strange for the Academy, but it’ll take its place among the iconic works in dark-fantasy history. But this sort of unstable experiment comes with a mild warning: I loved it, but some of it I didn’t like. If that makes sense.

Dazed and Confused

Richard Linklater’s third feature Dazed and Confused opened in theaters 30 years ago September 24 — and closed not too much later. It took a while to become the beloved cult comedy it is now, but it’s in the canon — literally, it’s in the Criterion Collection — and the more years pass, the more touching it seems. Watching it as a 23-year-old back in 1994, when it hit video, I didn’t grasp the film’s wistfulness, its borderline melancholia. But it’s there. The then-31-year-old Linklater takes us back to 1976, when he was sixteen, and he gets a great deal of what’s in the air when kids are looking at their last year in high school. I was too young in ’76 to know whether Dazed and Confused is faithful to the details of being in high school then, but it feels authentic. It’s authentic whenever. At the end, when a few of the kids hop in a car the morning after a party to go snag Aerosmith tickets, I guarantee you you’ve been in that car. In 1976, 1986, whenever.

If the movie has a hero, or throughline character, it’s probably the freshman Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), who’s clearly Linklater’s avatar. Mitch drifts through the action, taken under various seniors’ wings. There is bullying and a thriving hazing environment in this small-town Texas community, and some not-terribly-progressive views of sex and women, and Linklater acknowledges that. The senior girls are always chastising the boys for being pigs. Most of Dazed and Confused is a collective portrait, moving from group to group, from pool hall to party to bedrooms where kids just get stoned. (There’s no sex in the film, but a lot of talk about it.) It’s the last day of school, and we follow various kids as they make their way to one party that never happens and then another that gets organized in a hurry.

Despite the bullies, the prevailing mood is fellowship and good cheer. Mitch is due to be paddled as part of the hazing, and Linklater gets that out of the way fast so Mitch (and we) won’t have to spend the movie dreading the paddling. Linklater doesn’t really divide the kids by social cliques. Some of the boys are football players, but that’s Texas high school. Other than that, it seems to be a mix of kids who mostly get along, with weed and beer as their glue. Linklater films the kids hanging out, some of them knowing it won’t get better than this. The moral center of the jocks, Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), Linklater’s other avatar here, even says that if anyone catches him saying these were the best years of his life, remind him to kill himself. But the movie’s vibe is warm and good-natured, and we feel welcomed along with Mitch into the world of the cool older kids.

There’s one thread of plot having to do with a pledge the jocks are expected to sign that they won’t get high. Pink refuses to sign, for reasons he’s barely able to articulate. Nobody gets any big speeches; the most quotable character is ol’ Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey, right at the beginning of it all) with his bit about getting older while high-school girls stay the same age. The way McConaughey plays Wooderson, though, he comes off less a sketchy statutory rapist than a guy who’s still, in his heart, a high-school senior and always will be. Linklater doesn’t rely on dialogue; we fill in the blanks of what’s not said, deducing, for instance, that Ben Affleck’s manically outraged two-time senior O’Bannion is nursing deep regrets and pain that he tries to work out by paddling the living shit out of freshmen.

I suppose it would take a woman who went to high school in the ‘70s to make a Dazed and Confused from the girls’ point of view, but Linklater, while kind of staying in his white-male lane, does well by the girls. He gets a vivid performance from Parker Posey as Darla, the senior who adores being sadistic to the freshman girls; he also has a habit of lingering on one girl or another for a few beats so we can sense their boredom or exasperation with the boys — or their interest in them. The wall-to-wall needle-drop soundtrack does a lot of the emotional heavy lifting, giving the whole movie the tempo and mood of a breezy car ride on a mild summer night. It’s a beauty of a film and an instant pick-me-up, but with enough sad insight to recognize that the moments that shine the most fade the quickest.

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I didn’t quite have the right place to get this in, but it occurs to me with a chill that Dazed and Confused is now almost twice as many years past as the year 1976 was when the film came out. It is 30 years old, and when it came out in 1993, 1976 was only 17 years in the rearview (but seemed so much longer ago). 1976 is now, of course, of the Late Cretaceous Epoch.

Barbie

The much-talked-about Barbie is hot-pink fun and a big, big hit, but let’s everybody chill out, pro and con. Before it’s anything else, the movie is the latest and biggest salvo in Barbie/Mattel’s mission to separate parents from their money (over a billion dollars in 2020) since 1959. Barbie has been chastised for representing unrealistic physical goals for girls, and she has been lionized for the diverse array of dolls and the centering of female pleasure and fantasy. Greta Gerwig, who directed Barbie from a script she wrote with Noah Baumbach, tries to play both sides against the middle, razzing some aspects of Barbie and cherishing others. It may play better a second time, because some of the film’s tonal weirdnesses are confusing until we get to the end and realize what the story has been about all along.

Barbie (a glimmering Margot Robbie, whose angelic appearance is even gently lampshaded by Helen Mirren’s narration) is happy as can be in Barbieland, where all Barbies reign supreme and all Kens (Ryan Gosling goofs around amiably as the main Ken) are more or less afterthoughts. This reality, of course, is typical of Barbie play; the girls playing with their Barbies extended their consciousness into Barbie, not Ken. Ken was understood to be an accessory, no more emotionally meaningful (and perhaps less) than Barbie’s hair dryer. Ken existed to give Barbie a passenger in her pink Corvette, and she sure as shit was the one driving.

But shadows fall across the pink paradise. Barbie is suddenly having human preoccupations and physical foibles. Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), the village wise woman that a girl played with too hard, tells Barbie she needs to go to the Real World. She does, with Ken in tow, and looks for the girl who played with her. (This brings up strange questions about the movie’s world-building that I guess are irrelevant to the story Gerwig wants to tell.) The girl, now a cynical tween, got rid of her dolls long ago, but her mother Gloria (America Ferrara, who walks away with the movie) works for Mattel and has been designing Barbies with more human dimensions and frailties.

Barbie seems to operate uneasily on several layers of reality, as well as satire that gives its corporate master Mattel an occasional soft noogie but doesn’t bite the hand that feeds it. (Rhea Perlman gives a quietly powerful performance as the ghost of Ruth Handler, Barbie’s inventor and Mattel’s co-founder.) I can imagine Gerwig getting together with a bunch of like-minded friends who also grew up with Barbie, and compiling a list of all the things they love to mock (and mock to love) about Barbie. Gerwig is also a generous-hearted writer/director who knows that girls’ and women’s fraught relationship with Barbie can make for mixed feelings. Barbie isn’t the satire some may have been hoping for, fangs dripping with pink blood; it’s a classic Horatian satire, tickling its target on the tummy instead of disemboweling it. Gerwig’s aim is to tell a human story through Barbie dolls, as girls have been doing for 64 years.

When Ken learns about patriarchy, and turns Barbieland (in Barbie’s absence) into the bro-town Kendom, it’s the sort of plot path that will drive literal-minded viewers mad. It’s here that the film delves into a bit of sociopolitical lateral satire. Was the matriarchy of Barbieland fair to the Kens? Does their rebellion and pivot to patriarchy represent the inverse of what masculinists fear will happen if feminists take over? A lot of questions and meanings rattle around in Barbie, perhaps 60% of which seem intentional. But stay the course, stay the course. It’s a bumpy road for a while, but then it smooths out and lays the tracks to an ending that gives Barbie what she hadn’t known she wanted or needed. The commentators complaining that the movie promotes man-hatred are nuts, but I don’t think it’s a feminist masterpiece either — it shakes out as humanist, anyway, each gender (Barbieland is very binary) advised to seek a more authentic way of being. The final line will be celebrated, denounced, embraced, debated, and it says in six words what this pink but not so fluffy film has been about.

Asteroid City

In further evidence that our buddies calling the shots at Hollywood studios are all heart, Wes Anderson’s best film in years, Asteroid City — which almost demands to be seen on the big screen — has been trebucheted from most theaters and onto streaming after a little more than two weeks. Anderson uses his old familiar trick of boxing off painful experience, this time through layers of representation, as in his The Grand Budapest Hotel. Our view is that of an audience member watching a movie, and in that movie we see a play, and the making of that play, and its broadcast adaptation for television. It offers far more than can be taken in at one viewing, and leaves itself wide open for interpretation.

As a longtime Anderson fan (Rushmore is a lifetime top-tenner for me) I was left feeling bruised and hollow by his last effort, The French Dispatch. It came dangerously close to just being a parade of hip actors filing onscreen for their one line. Asteroid City is filled end to end with actors, too, but the melancholy that suffuses all of Anderson’s films feels anchored to something real here. Anderson returns to loss and grief over and over, dressing it up immaculately in symmetrical-bordering-on-ceremonial compositions with the actors center stage, or far off to the side, delivering their speeches softly and without much emotion. The success of his efforts depends largely on his cast and whether Anderson has left them enough air to breathe and create and possibly even argue with the aesthetic they’re in.

Here, he does. Everyone here gathers in the southwestern Asteroid City for the Junior Stargazers Convention, and there’s something about filming in the desert that moves artists like Anderson — or Jordan Peele with Nope in recent years — to think about stories and their role in our lives. Wisely, Anderson gravitates to Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson, who play actors playing characters. Sometimes we catch them as actors, most often as their characters. Augie Steenbeck, the character in the play, grieves his wife; Augie’s portrayer, Jones Hall, has his own grief, and on one occasion Jones adds a level of realism to a painful scene that jolts his scene partner — Johansson as actress Mercedes Ford playing actress Midge Campbell — out of character. 

How easily the spell of story can be broken, says Anderson, whose work features pain shut up in pretty boxes, sometimes punching holes out of those boxes. (I’ve always felt that the box-punching was at its most gratifying and loud in Anderson’s first three films, the only ones he wrote with Owen Wilson.) Asteroid City is whimsical on the surface — it features an alien that’s sometimes stop-motion and sometimes a latex suit filled by an actor whose presence is too good a joke to spoil — but the uncanny color scheme draws us in, invites us to look deeper. Eventually the movie states its case plain, in a repeated mantra that may repel some on-the-fencers in the audience: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” which could mean any number of things. 

It’s clear by now, after almost 30 years, that Anderson can’t make movies any other way. He’s never going to make an emotionally sloppy Sidney Lumet urban drama. You dig the cut of his jib or you don’t, and if you don’t, nothing in his films is going to win you over. I’m on Team Wes, but I don’t blame you if you’re not. There’s just too much stuff, even if I like it, that can elicit understandable exasperation. But there aren’t so many American filmmakers with such an immediately recognizable style that we can afford to pooh-pooh one. I’d say he’s earned respect even if he leaves you cold. Asteroid City, though, is a return to the populous but warmer climes of Moonrise Kingdom and Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson’s one-two punch from the early-to-mid-‘10s. Whether you like it or not, Anderson isn’t lost in Wesville yet; he still has stories to tell and emotions to work out through them (though not in them). 

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Margaret Simon, the 11-year-old protagonist of Judy Blume’s lovely 1970 YA novel Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, would be 64 now. Just thought you should sit with that for a bit. For all her flailing and misery and drama — indeed, because of all that — Margaret has been an icon to millions of pre-teen girls (and not a few pre-teen boys; I read it as a kid when I was deep into Blume, hooked on her by Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing) for over half a century. The warm and generous movie version, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (Edge of Seventeen), didn’t do very well in theaters, but I hope it’ll make up for it at home. It deserves all the love, belated or otherwise, it can get.

Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) is obsessed with growing up. She wants her bra to fill out and she wants her period. She will get these things, but the agony is that no one can tell her when. Partly her preoccupation is due to her circle of friends, in a “secret club” called the Pre-Teen Sensations. The girls are all waiting for the same thing, and one of them, Nancy Wheeler (Elle Graham), is possibly not to be believed when she confides how far along the path she is. We’ve all met Nancys — not a mean girl, exactly, but insecure and desperate to get big and womanly and sophisticated, not awkward and gauche like kids are at that age. Mainly the desire is to impress boys, who are their own kinds of awkward idiot. 

Margaret wants those life milestones, but doesn’t seem to know why she wants them. Because she’s supposed to want them, I think. Near the end — spoilers, I suppose, for those who never read the book — Margaret finds herself poised at a new beginning, and her mother (Rachel McAdams) recognizes it’s also the end of something, and they both cry and laugh for different reasons. Kelly Fremon Craig has a light, good-hearted touch; she doesn’t push anything too hard, knowing that the level of drama in Margaret’s life — which arguably hits its peak when her Jewish grandma on her dad’s side (Kathy Bates) faces off with her maternal grandparents, who are fundamentalist Christians — doesn’t need amplifying. Craig doesn’t chuckle at it all condescendingly, either. She knows that while none of this is the end of the world, it very much feels that way to an 11-year-old girl. Craig gets emotionally transparent, lived-in performances from everyone, though Benny Safdie as Margaret’s Jewish dad sometimes feels distant from the 1970 era, mainly the way he inflects phrases like “Really? Wow,” which sounds like how a millennial from today would say it.

We spend most of our time with Abby Ryder Fortson, who brings us effortlessly into Margaret’s conflicting feelings. Blume’s episodic structure leaves room for Margaret to have any number of awakenings, including one where she resolves her jealousy of a taller, more developed classmate, who turns out to be a lonely girl sick of being gossiped about. In this way Blume, who also wrote an early anti-bullying book Blubber, encouraged compassion towards anyone whose story we didn’t yet know. The movie follows her lead with an easy and graceful step. Are You There, God isn’t trying to be anything overwhelming or major, and it isn’t, but there used to be a place at the table for small charmers like this. I hope there still is.

Renfield

Of the things we might expect from a Dracula movie, particularly one starring Nicolas Cage as the legendary bloodsucker, the top of that list would probably not be a crime comedy. But that’s what Renfield shapes up as. There are a few decent ideas in Renfield, but they’re left to die of starvation while the plot gives us scene after scene in which gangsters have shootouts with cops or are bloodily dispatched by Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), the immortal familiar of Count Dracula. Renfield is an unassuming-looking British dude until he eats bugs, at which point he turns into Super Renfield and the movie turns into super crap.

After about a century of doing Dracula’s dark bidding, Renfield has sort of a mid-unlife crisis; he feels he’s in a codependent relationship with the vampire. So he attends a support group of such people, and he thinks that by feeding some of his fellow sufferers’ toxic S.O.s to Dracula he can do good and do bad at the same time. But one of those toxic boyfriends turns out to be mixed up in crime, and Renfield’s plan to kidnap him is foiled by a hit man from the Lobo crime family. This, not very long into an 87-minute movie less six minutes of end credits, is where the movie goes badly wrong and never recovers. I’m never unhappy to see Awkwafina, and she’s fine here — none of the cast is the problem, really — but she’s playing Cop Trope #7189, the cop’s cop daughter still sore about his murder by the Lobos, with a side order of tension with her FBI sister. All of this is awful and takes valuable time away from Renfield and Dracula.

A whole dark-comic movie could have been made about the relationship between the familiar and his master, but that’s not what Renfield is truly about. Cops and criminals are brought into it to ensure bang-bang and fight scenes and lots and lots of gore. (Between this and Evil Dead Rise, I’m just gonna say the MPAA doesn’t even care about blood any more. Have as much of it as you want in your movie, you’ll still get an R rating and be able to get a wide theatrical release.) But the idea of Renfield helping his codependent fellows by sending their tormentors to Dracula is lost, and Dracula himself barely makes any sense. Cage is game to give a mint-condition camp performance, but the material just gives him Dracula’s resentment of Renfield to work with. That isn’t enough to make him interesting, or even plausible as a powerful force in Renfield’s life. So Dracula wanders into the sphere of the Lobo family, and a movie that died half an hour ago now lets its corpse fall into a vat of rancid shit.

Speaking of powerful forces, Shohreh Aghdashloo turns up as the matriarch of the Lobo crime clan. The role and dialogue are insults to her, but she still rallies and comes up with a menacing growl to top any vampire’s. When her mob boss and Dracula meet, she purrs “Enchantée,” and he kisses her hand, lingers over her scent (he seems to be sniffing the metaphorical blood on her hand), and says, as genuinely as only Nicolas Cage can say it, “The pleasure is all mine.” That short exchange, showing what great actors can do without explosions of gore, contains the sum total of the Renfield I wanted, something that speaks of dark unslakable desire and ghastly alliances. It’s what it should always have been about, instead of Renfield’s redemption arc and Awkwafina honking insults at people. And a movie this incurious about what the vampire master/human slave dynamic might really be like suffers in every imaginable way in comparison with the fraught relationship between vampire Nandor and familiar Guillermo on FX’s What We Do in the Shadows. Any vampire comedy now has that show to compete with. Renfield ain’t got game. 

Safety Last

Last Saturday, April 1, Harold Lloyd’s famous Safety Last hit the century mark. Aside from a couple of low-key caricatures common in its day (they could be worse, but they still stick out to the modern eye), the film has aged beautifully — it goes like lightning and seems supercharged by creativity and by the comedy of physical logic particular to silent films. If a rope or a net or a flock of birds introduce themselves, you can be sure they’ll be getting in the way of our hero as he attempts to scale a tall city building. Even before the climax, Lloyd (playing a character called Harold Lloyd, though the credits name him The Boy) sidesteps or blocks or evades one spot of trouble after another, by luck as much as by ingenuity.

Harold Lloyd was perhaps the most relatable of the silent titans (Chaplin, Keaton) of his time. He repped the American can-do ethos, brightened by his eternal smile, meant to instill confidence in him, occasionally soured by anxiety. In Safety Last, Harold leaves his small hometown for the Big City (actually Los Angeles — the film inadvertently gives us a good peek backwards, at L.A. streets and storefronts the way they looked two years before The Great Gatsby was published). He leaves behind his girlfriend (Mildred Davis, who’d married Lloyd earlier in 1923), who expects he’ll send for her when he gets settled. A while later, Harold is a $15-a-week garment clerk in a department store, but pretends to have a management position. We accept he’s not trying to be deceitful out of any malign motive — he just wants her to think as well of him as he does of her. The credits call her The Girl, and she’s kind of treated as such.

The sexual politics there are a bit cobwebbed, as are the fleeting but still eyebrow-raising appearances of an overeager Jewish jewelry seller with bad, ratty teeth and a Black worker literally scared up the wall by one of Harold’s ploys. For the most part, though, Safety Last —  I will remind you the film is a hundred years old — is good-hearted and simple. The really enjoyable thing about it is that it establishes the general pattern of Harold’s tribulations before the stakes become life or death. There’s a lengthy section where Harold’s girlfriend comes to his work for a surprise visit and he has to improvise, lord it over baffled coworkers, bribe and then rescind the bribe (‘20s and ‘30s movies are far more money-conscious and honest about class than any movie today) — he pulls out all his tricks. Before that, he’s accidentally whisked away by a towel truck and must make his way back to the store before the bell rings so he can clock in on time, and he moves heaven and earth to get there, culminating in posing as a mannequin, the act that so frightens his Black colleague. Harold is a chaos magnet; the chaos comes out of his wanting to fit into the capitalist machine. And that applies, as well, to him ending up dangling from a clock high up on a building.

That image is the film’s most famous, possibly American silent films’ most famous — I imagine everyone has seen it somewhere. The full effect of Lloyd’s achievement requires some contextual understanding. It turns out he didn’t do 100% of the stunts himself, and some camera trickery was used to make the clock seem higher than it was; nevertheless, Lloyd did more than enough, and could easily have been killed. These days, we just assume CG effects are involved. Even if Tom Cruise actually scaled the world’s tallest building for Mission: Impossible 4, the cables securing him to the surface were digitally whited-out. By and large, we know no such pizzazz was available to the makers of Safety Last. We can see it plainly: He’s up there.

Lloyd was inspired by watching steeplejack Bill Strother (who plays Harold’s pal and roomie) ply his trade, climbing a building, and he made sure to add a bunch of roadblocks to that vertical run. Every smaller, less dangerous obstacle we’ve seen Harold contend with builds towards the payoff of the clock. (And clock and watch faces have been a visual motif, too — Harold setting back the punch clock, prefiguring his turning the big clock’s hand back.) Time itself is the big city monster that drives and pursues Harold. Mortality and financial insecurity are in the air — World War I was fewer than five years in the rearview when the movie premiered, and the Great Depression was only six years ahead. That image speaks volumes about how America must have felt — on a disastrous precipice, the bloodbath of history still not fully dry, yet trying like mad to move up anyway. The fact that the movie is also, after a hundred years, still funny as hell doesn’t hurt.