The summer movie season winds down having left behind a Sargasso Sea of decaying hulks, the latest iterations of worn-out superhero franchises and braindead fast and tedious shoot ‘em ups. Sentient creatures are left to search for the occasional indie, foreign film or relatively un-crude comedy with a touch of originality to it.
“Booksmart” and “Late Night” provided some fun earlier in the summer, both concerning smart girls and their trouble coping with a stupid world. Fans of Quentin Tarantino are undoubtedly in heaven with “Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood.”
I found it a watchable and mildly amusing riff on the movie business in 1969 as it was about to morph into something new, complete with Manson Family walk-ons, but as usual too long, too self-indulgent and too Tarantino-y. This auteur needs a screenwriter or at least an editor.
A pair of likable British films mined pop music nostalgia in similar ways. In Danny Boyle’s “Yesterday,” an electro-magnetic event turns out lights around the world and incidentally erases any memory of the Beatles except for in the head of a struggling singer/songwriter who becomes an overnight sensation passing off their songbook as his own, until he doesn’t.
It’s a charming fairy tale with funny appearances by Ed Sheeran as himself, suggesting “Hey, Dude” is a better title than “Hey, Jude, and Kate McKinnon as a cheerfully rapacious record producer. Best of all may be a surprise cameo by a no longer dead, in this alternative reality, superstar.
In a slightly different vein, Javed, a songwriting British high school student in a beat-up blue collar town, has to contend with both his traditional Pakistani family and his racist classmates and neighbors. Javed is saved by a teacher who takes his writing seriously and a new friend who turns him on to the Boss. Springsteen’s anthems to working class angst seem to have been written to speak directly to him. “Blinded by the Light” touchingly describes the therapeutic benefits of escaping a bleak reality through an invigorating teen obsession and finding one’s vocation.
A culture clash of a different sort is at the heart of “The Farewell,” in which the suddenly ubiquitous Awkwafina plays Billi, a young Chinese-American woman in New York struggling to make her way. (This appears to be a trendy trope.) She is fully Americanized; her Chinese-American family less so, as becomes painfully clear when they discover that back in China doctors have told a relative that the family matriarch, Nai Nai, has got terminal cancer.
Billi insists that her grandma must be told so she can decide how to spend her final days, but the full weight of tradition prescribes the necessity of keeping the dying woman in the dark. So an elaborate charade concerning a hastily scheduled wedding is mounted to explain the return of the expats en masse.
Absurdities, complexities, and sentimentality ensue, especially since Billi annoys everyone except grandma. It soon becomes obvious she is the grandmother’s favorite and vice versa. In the end, she learns she is not as assimilated as she thought.
It’s a touching, little, homemade-looking film, though perhaps a bit overrated in some of the more ecstatic reviews. I suspect any hint of humanity looks like a masterwork alongside the usual mindless clangor of the Marvels of summer.
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” is another tale of angst in which the testy, depressive wife of a Microsoft executive lives in an Addams family house she does nothing to redeem, loves her daughter, dislikes her neighbors, loathes Seattle and barely tolerates her husband who stages an ill-advised intervention that backfires badly.
All is not as it seems, however, and eventually we discover what ails Bernadette, as well as how she can be mended. After a long build-up, the denouement — in Antarctica of all places — seems rushed and the transitions from a misanthropic woman to one who has lost her vocation to one who rediscovers it are rather abrupt, nor is director Richard Linklater’s amiable earnestness ideally suited to the comic first half of the show.
In its dramatic shape, “Bernadette” resembles two better and funnier films about unhappy oddballs — “Toni Erdmann” and A “Man Called Ove.” However, anything with Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Kirsten Wiig, Kate Burton, and Laurence Fishburne is well worth watching.
Finally, in a different genre altogether (comic-horror), “Ready or Not” is this summer’s version of “Get Out.” Samara Weaving is a ditsy blonde bride marrying one of the sons of a family whose wealth derives from a board game empire. After the ceremony at their palatial mansion, she is told of an old family tradition.
She must draw a card from a magic box and play the game it names as a kind of initiation rite. The groom has neglected to warn her that it’s all fun and games unless she has the misfortune to draw Hide and Seek. In that case, instead of playing chess or checkers she will be hunted down and sacrificed to the dark power behind the family’s fortune.
Needless to say, she draws the deadly card and spends the rest of the show trying to survive. Bloody idiocy ensues as she proves incompetent at hiding and the would-be murderers even less adept at seeking. The wrong people wind up dead and the dark power is not appeased.
Now we settle down to await the end of the year flood of Oscar bait and the Christmas sludge designed to lure families to the multiplex for the first time since the summer explosions by promising them more of the same. In a forthcoming post, I will discuss recent TV highlights that suggest that the migration of adult fare from the big screen to the small continues apace.