Movie Monday: Beast

This mystery/fantasy/psychological thriller opens with pictures of the body parts of a dead girl and then launches into a short scene in which a choir is singing.

In the choir is flame-haired Moll (Jessie Buckley).  In lore, we know, bright red hair is associated with anger and passion.

The choir director, Moll's mother (Geraldine James), stops the singing and says, "Moll, I need more from you."

Everyone seems to need more from Moll.  She is a grown woman, possibly "a little wild," who still lives in her family home and whose severe mother is clearly afraid of her.

 During her not very celebratory birthday party, Moll flees the house for a bar where she drinks and dances the night away, an apparent declaration of freedom. 

The next morning -- and still out of the house -- we see Moll walking along the coast with a young man, presumably also from the bar, who pressures her for sex even as she refuses.  

Onto the scene comes a stranger, Pascal (John Flynn), who threatens the pursuer with a long gun and then takes Moll home, where her exasperated mother sighs and says, "It was your birthday.  We'll let this one go." 

Moll and Pascal continue to see each other and fall quickly in love.  As others fear and the Jersey police investigate the recent unsolved killings of several young women, the pair seem to exist mostly outdoors, perhaps as creatures of nature.   

Indoors, they are less at ease. Pascal offends by wearing inappropriate attire -- black jeans -- to dinner at a golf club, a sort of tamed natural setting.  When the jeans are criticized a second time, Moll grabs what looks like a 5 iron and uses it to whack the surface of a carefully maintained putting green. 

Well.  Tensions increase on all fronts, and the story moves along at a nice pace.  In a way, this film defies categorization, a novelty among today's mostly high-concept cinematic offerings (superhero, heist, horror, action, buddy, hangover, etc.). 

The essential question here is simple:  Who is the beast of the film's title?  Along the way to the answer, there is good acting and the sort of beautiful photography we get from movies made in the UK's clement months.  

"Beast" is the first full-length project from director Michael Pearce, a Jersey native who also wrote the script.  We can look forward to more from him.

Memorial Day and the Forgotten

Yesterday I walked past this Vietnam War Memorial on a busy street in Venice, Calif.  It was painted in 1992 by a veteran of that war and lists by name more than 2,000 Americans whose bodies had not been found in almost 20 years since the end of fighting. 

The message at the top of the mural is this:  

YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN

This resembles, in a way, the main Vietnam Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC -- two long black granite walls etched with the names of the 58,000 service members who died in the conflict.  

Similarly, New York's 9/11 memorial includes names of the 3,000 dead etched in bronze.  

People now visit these installations to see the names of loved ones whose losses they are grieving.  After the survivors have died, the lists of names will remain to remind us that real people were lost in these terrible events.

Unusually, in Venice, the monument is to the forgotten dead whose bodies never have been found.  Its idea is to remind Americans not to forget those persons' loss.  

Except, sometimes, at least some of us do forget.  

Vandalism

Two years ago, on the week before Memorial Day, several young men sprayed silver paint over most of the names on the lower half of the Venice wall and then "tagged" it with their personal graffiti monikers.  

Below is the result and, below that, a closer example of how the names of lost soldiers were replaced with bigger, showier tags of a few young people seeking attention. 

   

Venice is a flaky sort of place and no hotbed of rah-rah military bravado. But this offended the community.  

Prolific taggers are not hard to find, and so authorities identified at least some of the four who left their messages.  One, who perhaps had a criminal record, was sent to prison for four years (two years, tops, now in CA), and another had to write a letter of apology.  Both were assessed hefty fines that neither is likely to be able to pay.

The vandals were in their early 20s, born years after the Vietnam War ended. Presumably they did not see the irony in "disappearing" even the names of people who had been missing for more than 40 years and then replacing those names with flamboyant look-at-me messages about themselves.  

After the tagging, veterans and local people worked in teams to wash off the graffiti.  This had the unintended effect of erasing many of the original names from the wall.  

Then, early the next year, another street artist or group of artists marked up the already-damaged wall.  

The volunteers went back to work.  They researched the records of the original painter, who had died.  They made templates of the names and lettering, and they restored the writing as he had placed it.  Between sweat equity and donated money, the mural was restored as seen in the top picture.  When completed, the mural was covered with a coating to protect it if -- or, more likely, when -- the next self-styled street artist tries to replace its message with one demanding attention for himself.

So we should be grateful for the public-spirited people who gave their own time and money to put things right.

But as for that message -- YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN -- I am not so confident.

Are we teaching our children about the perils of war and the respect owed to the war dead?

What does it mean when some young people see emblems of such recognition as opportunities to divert attention to their own wishes for grandiosity?

If the young do not learn history or respect its memorials, how will we protect them from future wars that leave us grieving new losses and with no sense of the reasons why?

MovieMonday: Deadpool 2

This is the sequel to the 2016 surprise hit, "Deadpool," an R-rated superhero movie starring Ryan Reynolds.  That film cost $58 million to make and sold more than $780 million in tickets.  Investments that good don't come along every day, and so now we have "Deadpool 2."  

The new film's plot opens with Wade/Deadpool and Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), his girlfriend, still in love.  "My baby factory is now open for business," Vanessa says after giving him the birth control device that she has had removed.  They discuss baby names.

Then something really bad happens, and off we go into a superhero plot in which Deadpool despairs, then revives and then gathers a new team, called the X-force, to pull off amazing stunts and rescue Russell (Julian Dennison), a young superhero who may be going over to the dark side.  

The themes are 1) death and rebirth and 2) family.  These are hammered home hard.

--"Kids give us a chance to be better than we are," Vanessa tells Deadpool early on.

--DP friend Blind Al (Leslie Uggams) says, "You can't really live until you die a little."

--"Family is not an F-word," Deadpool acknowledges later.

Previous fans need not worry that Deadpool has turned into a saccharine good guy, however.  He still is funny and able to laugh at himself, and just about every scene has him saying something like, "Holy motherfucking shit!"  

There's a large cast in the movie, including Zazi Beetz and Josh Brolin as part of the X-Force family and Karan Sori as the comic/relief cab driver, plus Brad Pitt and Matt Damon in cameos that went right past me.  The acting is fine; more important, the computer-generated imagery is incorporated skillfully.

The script has many, many cocky references to pop themes from cloying music to metal rock to political references to old films. The Wrap website assembled an extensive list of these, but I believe it may have missed a few.  

In sum, if you liked the original, you will like "Deadpool 2" even more.  Just go.


Note

The local theater screened about 25 minutes' worth of trailers before the show.  There must have been 150 gunshots In the course of those previews.  The movie itself, like all superhero movies, included many, many scenes of good guys and gals defeating violent enemies who appear out of nowhere.

If you don't worry that this conditions young people to see violence as a way to settle grievances -- and inspires some to resolve perceived injustices with guns and pipe bombs and weaponized pressure cookers -- you haven't been paying attention.  

MovieMonday: Life of the Party

Every year or two we get a Melissa McCarthy movie.  Her breakout performance, you may recall, was in the bathroom scene in 2011's "Bridesmaids," a very popular chick version of "The Hangover."

Since then, there have been better and worse McCarthy-centered movies.  This is not one of the better ones.  It's as if a McCarthy script-generator machine came up with the story after being programmed to produce a feminist version of "Animal House."  

In this outing, McCarthy is Deanna Miles, a nice housewife who has been dumped by her two-timing husband.  She decides to finish her college degree at her alma mater, where her daughter also is a senior.  

From there it's off to the races.  When Deanna seems a little dejected, one of her daughter's friends suggests an uplifting experience:   "We need to get you jackhammer blasted!" 

After restyling Deanna's hair and wardrobe, the girls go to a loud and lively fraternity party where Deanna meets and spends the night with a handsome male student half her age.  The frat guy becomes very attached to Deanna, and shortly afterward they copulate in the school library.  The (not entirely) unspoken message is that Deanna is beautiful and attractive and her husband was a fool.

(Imagine this movie with the sexes reversed:  A frat boy's father meets and beds a coed after a drunken campus party and then, smitten, continues to pursue her.  Could you make that movie in 2018?  I think not.) 

In fact, "Life of the Party" is mostly about parties and only a little, teensy bit about college.   We see maybe 10 minutes, total, of Deanna in one class, anthropology, where the professor gushes several times that she is his "favorite student."  (This is not creepy in the film -- he's her age and therefore too old.  My guess is that the mechanical plot generator offered an alternate romantic subtheme that was rejected in the final production.)

Deanna's only academic problem is that her midterm requires an oral presentation in front of the class.  Unfortunately, Deanna is very shy and deeply fearful of public speaking. 

You read that right: McCarthy/Deanna is a reticent woman who is afraid to speak in front of an audience.  Now that's funny.

Deanna's daughter and her friends become a tight-knit girl-power group, sometimes in opposition to the two plot-generated mean girls.  There are attempts to distinguish these and other actors, but mostly this is a Melissa McCarthy show.  

The party ethic continues as Melissa and her posse, stoned on marijuana brownies, disrupt the ex-husband's new wedding.  Then mother and daughter graduate.  But you knew all that.

And we wonder why college students don't seem so serious these days.


Notes

This is not the kind of movie I prefer to watch, but I have been traveling a lot lately and was stuck without a car in the suburban redoubt.  The local fourplex offered "Black Panther," a good move I'd already seen, and two lesser shows that sounded worse than "Life of the Party."
       The general trend in American movie ticket sales is downward, and weak offerings like these make me understand why.

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A badly edited version of this post appeared earlier and has been corrected.  TheId was distracted by a very pleasant Mother's Day event.

MovieMonday: Lean on Pete

Here is yet another beautiful film about a young man and horses in the American West.

In this case, the boy, Charlie (Charlie Plummer), has come from Spokane following a happy freshman year in high school to live with his father in Portland.

Charlie is 16, he says, or maybe 15.  His mother abandoned the family when he was a child and his father is an immature lout who disappeared for several days when Charlie was 12, which perhaps landed him in foster care in the intervening years.  The one possession he seems to treasure is a picture of his Aunt Margy holding him when he was a very small child.

Charlie runs for exercise, and his Portland runs take him to the local horse racing track, the nearby stables and Del (Steve Buscemi), who owns a declining horse racing franchise and who gives Charlie a job helping out. Charlie takes a liking to Lean On Pete, one of Del's quarter horses.  

Even after a young life of many hardships, Charlie is kind, resilient and hopeful. It seems possible that Del may become a sort of surrogate father and that taking care of Lean On Pete will add meaning to Charlie's life.

Then things go south in several ways.  Charlie and the horse light out for Wyoming, where Charlie hopes to find his Aunt Margy.  

From there the story devolves into one awful experience after another.  

The movie is well made, and the actors are excellent.   I don't know if the script is too harsh or I am too soft, but I found it painful to watch.  


Notes

Like last week's Movie Monday, "Lean on Pete was made by a non-American filmmaker whose previous work was set elsewhere.  It's interesting that stories set in the little-settled and seldom-seen rural American West are attracting directors from other continents.  Are we missing the significance of our own stories?
       (True, the "Hostiles" film earlier this year was a western story and made by Americans, but it was an historical piece set more than 130 years ago.) 

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The Charlie character in this movie's story has a background that is becoming common in the U.S. Two data points:

-- Across the US, there is a growing strain on the foster care system, exacerbated by the opioid crisis. 
-- At least 10 percent of New York City students are homeless at some point in every school year, a number that has increased by 50 percent between 2011 and 2017.  

In general, children raised under such harsh conditions have a much harder time in life.  Not many of them are as resourceful as the young man in the movie.