Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Four Summer Movies of 2024

Summertime is traditionally a commercial wasteland for people who take cinema seriously, and 2024 hasn’t been much of an exception, yet I’ve seen a few films so far this summer that have held my interest in various ways, at least to some degree. To my surprise, I’ve enjoyed a handful of the Minions movies in bursts and snippets over the past several years. I mean, they’re not really worth watching beyond the Minions themselves, yet the comedic onslaught of those little troublemakers usually makes the ticket price worthwhile. The kids and teens dressed up as Minions out in the cinema lobbies clearly agree. I’ll confess that I fell asleep through the middle of Despicable Me 4 a total of three times before I finally made it through the entire thing without dozing off. When I managed to stay awake, that middle stretch of the movie wasn’t even well-written, of course, because it focuses on Gru’s family. To be frank: nobody cares, even if the infant son who hates Gru is enough to maintain our attention in brief spells. The basic desire of the audience at these movies is consistently “bring back the fucking Minions or we’ll leave.”

The only reason why I’d watch this particular movie four times, other than to give myself some time to drift off into dreamland, is because the screenplay was co-written by the great Mike White, who worked on one other film in the series previously. Given the noticeable slack in the middle of the movie, I have a feeling that Mike White was simply brought in to doctor the script. The bookends of the first and last portions in the movie are entertaining, with plenty of smart jokes and rapidly dispatched dialogue, along with characters like the villainous Maxime & Valentina and Principal Übelschlecht, campy creations that obviously didn’t spring from the mind of some random straight guy. But as usual, the only reliable homosocial, bromance-driven, and slightly raunchy humor arises from the frenetic, slapstick, irreverent interactions of the Minions themselves.

At the opposite end of the summer movie spectrum tonally is the origin story A Quiet Place: Day One. The first two films in the series didn’t indicate how and when the aliens-slash-insects-slash-monsters arrived to start attacking anything that makes noise, so now we get to see the introductory part of the narrative in this prequel. We also get plenty of suspenseful and well-crafted action sequences, chase scenes, underwater antics, and visual echoes of 9/11. I wasn’t expecting the actually valuable aspect of the movie to be its performances by its two central actors, Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn, as they evade and face off with the invading creatures from outer space. Because so much of the film must be silent, the two actors are forced to rely on their eyes and expressions to convey the depths of meaning, far more than they’re required to do in other films, and they accomplish that feat subtly and expertly throughout the movie.

The relationship between these two characters is calibrated carefully through a sequence of quiet and intimate scenes that excel the overtly trashy genre they inhabit. Joseph Quinn’s sweet-tempered law student, Eric, is intrigued that Lupita Nyong’o’s troubled character Sammy is a published poet. “Used to be” is her blunt retort, one to which I related, and it’s also one that the actress clearly gets. That converted me to someone who’ll follow her career more than I’d previously been interested in doing. There’s a lot that her character must navigate, both physically and emotionally, and she knows how to balance that in a way that few other actors could manage. She builds a background for the character out of things that are dead and gone, while also building up to a fierce final moment in the film that ensures that her character will not be back for another prequel. Move on to “Day Two” without her, so that she can move on to something that her talent deserves.

The milieu that’s embraced Jane Schoenbrun’s impressive film I Saw the TV Glow might despise the two previous movies that I’ve written about in this post as much as the characters in the film might potentially enjoy them. They’re mid-to-late 1990s kids who are obviously aligned with fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, however, so they predate the ridiculous penchant for perpetuating sequels and multiverses that Hollywood has now settled into and settled for. High schoolers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) are diehard fans of a fictional TV show called The Pink Opaque. It’s a hallucinatory mixture of teenage television and edgy horror by way of both David Lynch and Dawson’s Creek, in that its main characters Isabel and Tara rarely speak like teenagers at all. The same might be said, to some extent, of Owen and Maddy, in a kind of parallelism that’s rife with meanings which gradually unfold for an audience that’s willing to pay enough attention.

As the movie progresses, we begin to understand through the main characters’ ongoing obsession with The Pink Opaque that I Saw the TV Glow is an intricate commentary on transgender identities and also quite an intelligent one. (I was reminded by the fictional TV show’s title of the gender theorist Judith Butler’s referring to sexuality, and by extension gender, as a “region of opacity.”) The atmospheric symbols present that forwardly, sometimes even through hazy clouds of pink that saturate and obscure the suburban lawnscapes, or oversized pink shirts that drape themselves over Owen’s angular, lanky frame. The seventh-grade version of Owen (played by Ian Foreman) stands in quiet fascination during gym class, for instance, beneath the dome of a parachute that’s stitched together in the colors of the trans pride flag; a couple of years later, similarly, ninth-grade Owen walks down a corridor of the high school that’s lit in pastel pink & baby blue and white on each wall of the hallway. Those suggestive shades oppose and balance one another on either side of Owen, and they also envelop Owen as the character passes between them while continuing to struggle to arrive at an adolescent version of self-understanding.

The two central actors courageously tackle all that the film requires of them and liberates them to do. Often they sit right next to each other or directly face one another in a manner that implies that they’re two sides of the same persona in a way, connected on a spiritual level like Isabel and Tara, and in other ways this staging toys with our perception of whether they exist at all. Are they from the show? Or are they the show? A later scene in a bar called the Double Lunch lets us know outright that the lines of reality and fiction are blurred. The dialogue between Owen and Maddy in this scene, which is set a decade after their high school years, and especially an artful monologue delivered by Maddy (whose name is no longer Maddy at that point in the narrative) inside an inflatable planetarium, gives Schoenbrun an opportunity to let viewers puzzle things out in a way that reminded me of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, perhaps the best compliment that I can give this layered, slippery, and innovative film. And so the movie’s final act, which finds Owen working and near-fatally languishing in a local Fun Center twenty years later, felt too forced to me, making overly explicit what the film’s prior acts had worked so hard and so successfully to make implicit. (I think the right earlier ending might have been “there is still time” scrawled across the pavement of a suburban street in trans-toned sidewalk chalk.) Nevertheless, I Saw the TV Glow is a stylish and ambitious achievement overall.

My favorite “formula film” so far this summer, and one that also happens to be directed with a grand and majestic sweep, is Greg Berlanti’s Fly Me to the Moon, a spirited recreation of the Apollo 11 mission and what went on behind the scenes to produce the July 1969 televised broadcast of the historic event. Channing Tatum’s strapping launch director, Cole Davis, orbits Scarlett Johansson’s marketing guru Kelly Jones (actually Winnie, we find out later), circling closer to their long-awaited kiss that closes the movie. It’s an old-school romantic comedy with historical underpinnings, and it made me cry a couple of times at the expected dramatic moments, but also because of how I miss that kind of romance in our culture and in daily life. I was also moved to see Greg Berlanti working on such a resplendent widescreen scale with so many resources at his disposal. He’s come a long way from his 2000 gay romantic LA buddy comedy The Broken Hearts Club, one of my favorite gay movies that I still watch at least once a year.

What with the rocket launches and moon landing and many scores of NASA minions running around Cape Canaveral to orchestrate, Berlanti wisely lets his actors convey what they’re consummately adept at communicating, including Woody Harrelson and Ray Romano as head honchos with hearts. The quasi-political messages about American democracy and the perks & pitfalls of capitalism are nothing new, though they click along admirably as the plot advances alongside a mischievous lynchpin of a black cat named Mister. Past traumas are revealed and dealt with expediently by the central characters. Readers can discover those details on their own by seeing the movie on a big screen before it streams on Apple’s platforms. For me, the tawdry highlight was a solid Channing Tatum looking hotter than he ever has, sporting a colorful series of short-sleeved vintage shirts that had me waiting for the next one to appear. After all, it’s summer.

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