Review: 'Creep 2', Mark Duplass Is Unsettling As Ever

When Creep came out two summers ago, it was one of the most original and inventive uses of a found-footage technique in years.  Released just in time for Halloween, the follow-up, Creep 2, is a return to the same form.

Director Patrick Brice is uncannily comfortable wih the uncomfortable, as he proved with both the lighter The Overnight, and a recent episode of the Duplass-helmed Room 104. Where most low-budget horror dives into schlock -- if not downright camp -- Brice and co-writer Mark Duplass instead aim to unsettle.

If anything, they make fun of the cheap jump-scare.  Whenever our returning murderer, now calling himself Aaron (Duplass), tries one on his latest cameraperson, Sara (Desiree Akhavan), it fails miserably.  Maybe that sort of thing worked once upon a time, but the audience is made of sterner stuff now.  Even if jumping out and yelling "boo" manages to startle, it's fleeting at best.

And when it comes right down to it, Aaron knows it too.  He's made 39 of these movies so far, and it's starting to feel like he's just going through the motions.  So, as his serial-killer's mid-life crisis looms, he decides to change it up a bit.

He places another ad online, looking for someone to "go deep" with "emotional bravery", and comes up with Sara, a videographer who's been struggling to get her passion project off the ground.  She visits people who have placed personal ads on the internet, documenting their interests and curiosities, so the prospect of picking up a thousand dollars for what she's trying to do anyway seems like an obvious choice.

This time, when she shows up at the address, Aaron comes right out and tells her that he's a murderer, and promises that if she follows him around, talking and shooting video of his thoughts for the next 24 hours, he won't kill her.  And then, in order to promote radical openness, he decides that they have to see each other naked.

That's just one of many points where I could see someone bailing out of this movie.  But there's just something so perversely fascinating about this character, and whether anything he says is even true.  How did he get started?  Why does he do it?  And who, exactly, is really in danger here?

Creep 2 is not constructed to scare, but to unnerve.  If you're coming for a fright, you may go away confused, or even disappointed.  But if the scares are beginning to bore you, something truly creepy may be right up your alley.

Rating: 4 out of 5

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Review: 'Dean' Wanders Far From Demetri Martin's Comfort Zone

If there's one thing that sets Demetri Martin apart from his contemporaries, it's that he does jokes.  Seriously, very few comedians these days actually ever tell a joke.  They relate humorous stories, make funny asides, and even perform sometimes-elaborate slapstick routines, but it's become almost rare for a stand-up set to include a proper joke.  But Martin's got a ton of them, usually in the form of drawings that run the gamut from pithy to punny to downright bleak.

So when he decided to write and direct a feature film, naturally Dean came out looking like every other indie-spirited comic's failure-to-launch story that has come down the pike over the last couple decades.

Dean (Martin) is a struggling young illustrator in New York trying to assemble enough of his drawings to make a book, but struggling with the malaise that follows the death of his mother.  He's got a strained relationship with his father (Kevin Kline), who wants to sell the house that Dean grew up in, and who is dealing with the loss in his own staid way.  That involves a flirtation with the realtor (Mary Steenburgen) he hires to sell the house, so we've got that old story to fill in when the main old story drags.

But Dean thinks if he can just avoid all conversations about it, nothing ever has to change.  Which also seems to be his approach to his illustrations.  But ultimately his desire to do nothing about his dead mother and his childhood home outweighs his desire to do nothing about his career, and he takes a friend up on an offer to go out to Los Angeles for a job interview.

That's where he meets Nicky (Gillian Jacobs), who is young and pretty and fun in a Los Angeles way that's totally fresh to the Brooklyn hipster ennui Dean knows from all his New York friends.  They start hanging out and spending time together, with her friend Jill (Ginger Gonzaga) the only fly in the ointment.

Thankfully, Nicky never quite descends to Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory, and does seem to have other concerns in her life.  But for the most part Dean is indistinguishable from the same sort of twee indie-pop coming-of-age-even-though-quite-of-age-already fare as gets cranked out by Neustadter/Weber or, even more insipidly, Zach Braff.  This whole overgrown manchild bit is remarkable in the way each story is about growing up and moving on with life, and yet the audience never seems to take the hint.  They keep coming back for more of the same comforting words about how it's okay, you'll behave like an adult when you're good and ready.

What distinguishes Dean from the rest of the pack are the short segments where Martin pauses the literal action to have Dean show us some of his drawings, which of course are Martin's.  They're a great window into the way that Dean's mind works.  Which of course is also how Martin's mind works, which is why they're such a good comedy bit in the first place.

The drawings are original and quirky and funny, and they're what makes Martin such a good comedian.  I get the desire to stretch himself, but outside of his native comedic language Martin comes off as derivative and boring, which he is most definitely not.  Maybe there is a way to fit his drawings into a larger comedic narrative, but he hasn't found it yet.

Rating: 2 out of 5

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Review: 'Spirit Game: Pride of a Nation' The Iroquois Nationals' Chase Lacrosse Gold

Growing up in the mid-Atlantic region, lacrosse was pretty much just the sport you played in high school if you were a bit too preppy to go out for the football team.  The sort of niche now increasingly taken up by rugby.  But long before the well-off suburbs picked it up from the private schools, lacrosse began in the cultural traditions of the Iroquois people, and you'd better believe that the self-consciously multicultural school systems in central Maryland drummed that little fact into our heads.

Of course, that's about all the point they made about the game's origins.  We got nothing about how it was played or what it meant to those who played it.  Or, for that matter, about what it means to those who still play it.  Because despite this country's best efforts, the Iroquois nations still exist, calling themselves Haudenosaunee and even issuing passports under that name.  And they field lacrosse teams in international competition.  Or at least they try to when the UK doesn't kick them out of the country for not having fancy enough passports (seriously).

Spirit Game: Pride of a Nation focuses on the Iroquois Nationals box lacrosse team.  It's a variant that started in Canada as something to do with hockey rinks in the summer.  In some venues, they set up at one end of an indoor soccer pitch, the length of the boxia field fitting neatly within the width of a full-sized field.  There's not much explanation of any other differences between box and field lacrosse, nor really an explanation of lacrosse itself.  Basically it's something like hockey or soccer, trying to get a ball into a goal, in this case by throwing and catching it with a special stick or "crosse".

Beyond that, I can't tell you any more after watching Spirit Game than I could have before it.  If you aren't already familiar with the sport, you're probably not going to learn much more about it here.  To be honest, I had trouble following exactly what was going on when it came to the lacrosse itself.  When we saw some on-the-field action, it felt like a highlights reel with little of the narrative quality that makes sports stories inherently dramatic.  The Nationals make their way to one championship after another, but without a lilting rhythm of highs and lows, their efforts flatten out into one constant drone.

The lacrosse scenes are, however, cut with talking heads talking about the sport's history, or contemporary culture in the remaining lands of the Six Nations, or about their ongoing legal battles for respect from the United States and the international community.

The history could well be interesting if it weren't presented so superficially.  We get to see how  lacrosse was traditionally formed from a single piece of wood, before the modern practice of sticking a plastic head on an aluminum shaft took over.  We hear a little about the mythology attached to the game, and how various styles of play are associated with different animals that were important to the Haudenosaunee.  I'm certain there's a lot more to it, but this movie doesn't seem to have any interest in it beyond a little color to cut up the rest.

The contemporary cultural and legal challenges facing the Iroquois people also could probably make up a documentary of their own, but it's not really clear what they're doing in this one.  To be sure, these are legitimate grievances worthy of consideration, and I'm hardly calling for them to "stick to lacrosse".  But other than the 2010 passport dust-up, the fields and the courts seem to have little to do with each other.  There's not even a parallelism like that which animates Patricio Guzmán's documentaries about Chilean astronomy and authoritarian regimes.

And without some tighter connective tissue, Spirit Game feels like a jumble of two other movies, linked only by happening to involve the same First Nations communities.  I'd be interested to see each of them fleshed out, but together they can't make up their minds about what they want to say.

Rating: 2 out of 5

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Review: 'Buena Vista Social Club: Adios' Marks The End Of The Tour

Back in 1996, guitarist Ry Cooder went to Cuba and recorded a week of sessions with local musicians.  They turned up some of the original son players, the same ones whose bands in the '40s and '50s worked in the hotels and casinos and kicked off the Latin dance boom in America.  These very same musicians were still around, playing and singing in Cuba, unheard of outside the island.  Together, they captured some of the old songs in an album perfectly targeted at the rising self-consciously globalist strain of American consumerism.

Two years later, in the wake of the album's critical and popular acclaim -- including two Grammy awards -- Cooder assembled the musicians for two performances in Amsterdam and one at Carnegie Hall.  Wim Wenders made a documentary at the time, Buena Vista Social Club, which itself was nominated for an Academy Award and won a number of others around the world.  But it focused more on the album and the live performances, and less on the history behind the music itself.

Sixteen years after that, as the Obama administration finally began to work towards normalizing relations between America and Cuba, the five musicians who remained held one last tour.  Documentarian Lucy Walker spends some time with them, and digs deeper into the history and culture behind the music itself in Buena Vista Social Club: Adios.

The first hour of the film covers the history lesson that Wenders' documentary didn't.  The roots of son cubano in the eastern highlands around Santiago de Cuba rhyme strongly with those of blues and jazz in the American south, but with a distinctly Hispanic accent.  Bantu-derived rhythm and percussion combined with Spanish canción and guitar variants that settled most commonly on the tres.

Through the early 20th century, Cuban bandleaders like Arsenio Rodríguez and Beny Moré developed the son, merging in and spinning out most of what America now thinks of as Latin dance.  Rumba, mambo, cha-cha-chá, and salsa all have their roots in these Afro-Cuban dancehalls.  And before the rise of rock 'n' roll in the late '50s, it was the hottest sound across the United States.

But the focus is always drawn back to the core group that ended up involved in the '96 album and '98 tour.  They have some interesting stories to tell, but it can sometimes feel like their presence is due as much to being in the right place at the right time as to any sort of inherent importance to the son.  Some of them, like Compay Segundo, really do occupy a central role, and were famous back before the revolution; most seem to have been hard-working and talented, but little-known before Ry Cooder needed to assemble a band.  Compounding this, many of the '96 lineup aren't around anymore, so their stories are told through a combination of archival footage -- often from Wenders' documentary -- and testimonials from the others who have survived.

By the second half of the film, the focus is entirely on the album, the tour, and what has happened to the musicians since then.  If you're a huge fan of the original tour, it may well be fascinating, but it can feel like the sort of thing you'd find in the supplemental material of an anniversary re-issue of the Buena Vista Social Club DVD.

Notably missing from the film is a serious look at how recent political developments have interacted with the son.  The historical section at least glossed over the revolution and the segregated social clubs of the '50s, but what effect is the relaxation of tensions between the United States and Cuba having?

For that matter, what about the commercialism of the American and European bourgeoisie, and how they turned the original Buena Vista Social Club into a phenomenon in the first place?  There's a fascinating tension between recognition and exploitation, and a more daring documentary would pluck that string.  But of course Buena Vista Social Club: Adios only exists because of that well-off Anglo audience, and it knows better than to ask them to examine their own complicity in the difficulties their beloved struggling Latinx artists have endured.

Rating: 2 out of 5

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Review: 'Chuck' Starring Liev Schreiber As The "Real Rocky"

Hey, did you ever hear about Chuck Wepner?  A working-class hero of Bayonne, New Jersey, he was the first boxer to fight Ali after the Rumble in the Jungle, and he came within nineteen seconds of going all fifteen rounds.  That fight kinda sorta inspired the script of Rocky.  Maybe.  If you squint at it.  Then he mostly tried cruising on that fame and screwed up his life before putting it back together and settling down to run a liquor store.

The challenge of Chuck is to draw that paragraph out into a hundred-minute feature.  Because that's really all there is to this guy.  I'm sure that Wepner (herein played by Liev Schreiber) is a great guy who loves his wife, Linda (Naomi Watts, nearly unrecognizable in '70s makeup and redhead wig), and surely treats her better than he did his long-suffering second wife, Phyllis (Elizabeth Moss).  But honestly I just don't really care about this guy, and making the audience care is job one for a biopic.

It's not like this is a fantastic boxing movie.  Wepner scorned the "sweet science", and mostly achieved fame on his ability to take a punch and keep on lumbering.  He may have hated it, but they didn't call him the "Bayonne Bleeder" for nothing.  So we get the one bout with Ali (Pooch Hall), in which he does little but survive, and that's about it.  There are flashes on his infamous pro-wrestling appearance with Andre the Giant, and that time -- I hope the only time -- when he got in the ring with a bear.  And they're good for a hit of absurdism, but don't have much to offer Rocky fans.

Speaking of which, Chuck does manage to get in contact with a young Sly Stallone (Morgan Spector), who even offers him a bit part in Rocky II.  He seems to be a fan of Chuck's, or at least to be glad to meet the boxer, but it's not clear how accurate that is.  Co-writer Jeff Feuerzig told this same story in a documentary for ESPN in 2011, so he surely knows about the lawsuit between Wepner and Stallone, but it doesn't seem to make an appearance here.

Instead, Chuck squanders his opportunity with his escalating cocaine habit, egged on by his sycophantic friends (Jason Jones and Jim Gaffigan, the latter playing marvelously against type).  Abandoned by his wife and his manager (Ron Perlman), and failing to reconnect with his brother (Michael Rapaport), he hits bottom without even a blaze of glory to make a good climax.

It's nice to see Schreiber get a leading role that still lets him work his character acting skills, but Chuck's story is just not that interesting.  Director Philippe Falardeau and cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc seem more interested in matching the grain of their film stock to the archival footage they cut it together with, and little if any effort goes into making this a movie worth watching.

Rating: 2 out of 5

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Review: 'The Lovers' Starring Tracy Letts and Debra Winger

Tracy Letts is probably best known to film fans as a screenwriter, especially since he won a Pulitzer Prize for the stage version of the ensemble drama August: Osage County.  His screen acting, on the other hand has been mostly small supporting parts, with the notable exceptions of one section of Todd Solondz' Wiener-Dog and a two-year stint on Homeland.  On stage, however, he's had plenty of critical acclaim, including a Tony for his portrayal of George in the Broadway revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

His role in Azazel Jacobs' The Lovers isn't too far off from that frustrated, embattled husband.  But rather than elevating beyond minor skirmishes, Michael and his wife, Mary (Debra Winger), have settled into a cold war of a marriage.  The hostilities may be below the surface lately, but they haven't escaped the notice of their son, Joel (Tyler Ross), who warns his girlfriend, Erin (Jessica Sula) before they visit.  "They hate each other," he says,  "Watch them carefully, and if you ever see me acting like either of them, punch me in the face."

The visit will bring more to a head than even Joel cynically expects.  Both Michael and Mary have been having affairs, and both of their side pieces have been pressing for a commitment.  Michael promises Lucy (Melora Walters) that he'll tell Mary about her as soon as Joel leaves, so it doesn't ruin their whole weekend.  Mary promises Robert (Aiden Gillen) that she'll tell Michael about him as soon as Joel arrives, so they can have their discussion out in the open, and face-to-face.

But the predictable train-wreck gets interesting when, a few weeks out from Joel's visit, to their mutual surprise, Michael and Mary begin to have another affair, this time with each other.  Soon they're sneaking around, making excuses to their lovers to carve out time for a clandestine marital romp, each unaware that the other is in the same boat.

As with his previous feature, Terri and the television series Doll & Em he produced with stars Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells, Jacobs draws us into the sometimes weird and uncomfortable spaces where the lines between social roles get blurred.  The story is less about surprising us with what we find, than in getting us to spend some time there with these characters at all.  Characters who, in Michael and Mary's case, are brought to life by a pair of consummate actors.

Letts and Winger are each capable of communicating volumes in silence, transmitted solely through shifting facial expressions and body language.  Jacobs wisely gets out of their way, letting long stretches of screen time elapse without any dialogue at all.  Watching either member of this couple sitting alone, turning over the latest developments in their mind can be as fascinating as any overwrought monologue.  And when Jacobs gets them both doing it in the same shot, the superficial stillness masks truly turbulent depths.

I should point out that I say "stillness" here, rather than "silence".  The lulls in dialogue are filled with swells of the lush score by Jacobs regular Mandy Hoffman.  The music can sometimes seem more appropriate to an old melodrama -- or a Moody Blues album that Michael and Mary might have listened to during their first courtship -- than this intimate indie.  Still, it doesn't take long for it to draw you into its own emotional rhythms, which reflect the characters' own.

Is that manipulative? Maybe.  It's at least the kind of manipulation that it's hard to mind so much, since it's such a nice ride.  The same can be said for The Lovers as a whole.  You may not be surprised where things end up, but it's charmingly bittersweet to get there.

Rating: 4 out of 5

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Review: '3 Generations', Starring Elle Fanning, Naomi Watts, And Susan Sarandon

At some point since its initial festival screenings, About Ray changed its title to 3 Generations.  Which is probably for the best, since "Ray" is pretty much the last thing it's about.  For a movie trying to ride the crest of public -- well, bourgeois liberal -- awareness of trans stories, it's all but uninterested in the actual experience of the trans character at its center.

That character being Ray (Elle Fanning), whose mother, Maggie (Naomi Watts), struggles to refer to with male pronouns.  But at least she tries more than her own mother, Dolly (Susan Sarandon), who doesn't see why Ray can't just stay "Ramona" and be a lesbian.  If this were a 101-level story there might at least be some basic recap of gender theory to cover the difference between a lesbian -- a cis woman who likes women -- and a trans man who likes women.

Instead, it exists at the level of awareness achievable from a reflexive hatred of regressive Republican policies.  Like, did you hear that trans youth have been forbidden from public bathrooms in their own schools?  It's an outrage!  You should feel outraged and sad for Ray, who has to go to a nearby restaurant.  Except that New York, where the movie is set, has a policy in place explicitly allowing students to use the bathroom that aligns with their own gender identity.  But writer/director Gaby Dellal isn't about to let facts like that get in the way of her sense of indignation.  She clearly doesn't need to do any research about the problems a trans boy like Ray would actually face.

And like I said, it's not really about him anyway, as is clear from her comments about Ray being "a girl, presenting in an ineffectual way as a boy", as if the validity of someone's gender identity depends on how convincing their appearance is.  The movie is far more concerned with Maggie's conundrum: the permission forms she needs to sign also need the signature of the man listed as Ray's father on the birth certificate (Tate Donovan), and Maggie is conflicted about seeing him again.  And when she does track him down, he's not sure if he's on-board.  All of this against the ticking clock of Ray wanting to get on testosterone therapy at least six months before transferring to a new school in the fall.

None of this holds together.  First of all, if the father isn't even paying child support anymore -- she says as much when she has to track him down -- why does his signature matter so much?  Surely it's just a legal formality to sever whatever claim he might have on paper.  But that's where the ticking clock comes in, which itself is artificial.  The forms are not some secret that was sprung on them at the last minute, and realistically there was plenty of time to get all these ducks in a row, except that Dellal needs to inject drama and pressure on Maggie, her real protagonist.

Or maybe they just haven't paid attention to the paperwork until this point? I don't buy it.  Sixteen-year-olds are practically paralegals when it comes to the ins and outs of what exactly is required to obtain a driver's license.  For something like gender dysphoria therapy, Ray certainly knows these forms backwards and forwards, inside and out.  There are whole online communities and support groups; he must be in communication with them, or who is he making his transition progress videos -- the only possibly interesting parts of the movie -- for?  He's seen the line asking for his father's signature, and yet has done nothing to make sure it won't present a problem.

But Dellal isn't interested in engaging with the sort of community young trans people might craft for themselves.  Tumblr itself might be a bit hazy for a woman in her 50s, and it distracts from what she's really interested in: the tribulations of their middle-aged mothers.  Even there, the characterization is awkward; Maggie is a woman who is willing to have serious conversations about gender identity with her teenager, and yet is afraid to tell him about the legal complications with his father.

Which brings us back to Dellal's true perspective: Dolly, played by Sarandon as a well-off, well-meaning, but clueless and outspoken bumbler who lets her ideals run roughshod over the lived experiences of people around her.  She's the one who changes her mind to earn the Woke Merit Badge, which is more important to Dellal than an accurate portrayal of a trans experience.  Like Dolly, the script is mired in second-wave feminism as it is dragged, kicking and screaming, into the modern gender landscape.  It even manages to get in a healthy dose of hetero-slut-shaming along the way: "don't be loose with men, girls, or your own children will pay the price!"

And all of this misguided exploitation of trans experiences comes with one of the sloppiest executions I've seen outside of a student film.  The acting is fine; Fanning does as well as any actress might, though I'm certain that a good casting director could have found an aspiring trans actor just beginning his transition.  But the editing is a giant mess, patched over with truly awful ADR work to add or alter lines.  To some extent this is the result of a hasty re-cutting a year ago, but there's still no excuse for letting it get released in this form.

But the show must go on, as a monument to Dellal's self-congratulation.  If she didn't push this out into the world, how else would everyone know how down with the trans struggle she is?  Never mind the actual trans people saying there are huge problems with it; what would they know about their own lives that Dellal can't explain to them better?  That's what they're really here for: a target for well-off ladies to show just how open-minded and progressive and accepting they can be.

Rating: 2 out of 5

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Review: 'Grey Lady', Starring Eric Dane And Natalie Zea

The title of Grey Lady is evidently a reference to Nantucket Island.  I mean, I've never heard of it, but it shows up on the Wikipedia page, and I'm willing to concede that writer/director John Shea might know something I don't.  But that's about as conciliatory as I'm feeling for what may number among the worst movies I've seen without the words "Lifetime Original" being involved somewhere.

We're on Nantucket because Boston detective James Doyle (Eric Dane) is investigating a series of murders that have already claimed his sister and his girlfriend (Rebecca Gayheart).  Who is, er was, also his partner.  Oh, but the sister and girlfriend are two separate people, though the script isn't terribly clear on that point and I wanted to at least do better on that count.  Oh, and the girlfriend was also pregnant with Doyle's baby, which I'm not entirely sure he could have known, but I think we're also supposed to assume he knew because it adds that much more pathos to his back-story.  Pathos is the name of the game here.  Very, very pathetic.

Anyway, so he shows up in Nantucket despite being thrown off the case by his BPD captain -- a case that since it started with his sister he shouldn't have been on in the first place but whatever -- because he doesn't care about your rules, and he's in this for justice.  Seriously, this kind of dialogue is just in here and as far as I can tell it's meant to be taken seriously.  I could almost respect a movie that quoted this sort of self-serious garbage in an attempt at parody, but no it really is this ridden with clichés.

But why are we on Nantucket again?  Honestly, I've been back over the first chunk of the movie again and I can't see the connection.  Something about Doyle's family, and they used to come to the island, or he thinks some portion of them live here.  It's the sort of small town where everybody knows everybody, but nobody knows the names he's asking about even as we later discover they've been there the whole time.

A representative from the local police (a wasted Adrian Lester) is there to meet him off the ferry, and he quickly meets local socialite Melissa Reynolds (Natalie Zea) who naturally falls for him but he's still too hurt -- in a quiet, manly way, of course -- by the loss of his basically identical girlfriend to return her affections.  Yet.  There's a local drunk (Amy Madigan) and a loopy blonde (Carolyn Stotesbery), and Shea himself shows up as the police chief here to deliver an in-person dose of canned rogue-cop dialogue.

There is nothing redeeming here.  It doesn't look particularly good; there are no bravura performances; there's no interesting quirk that makes up for the overwrought, well, everything.  It even commits the cardinal sin of hiding information from the audience for no story-driven reason, and it has the cluelessly poor taste to do it right in front of us.  I can only imagine that Shea had stockpiled a decade's worth of favors from his television career, and hope that he has now cashed them all in.

Rating: 1 out of 5

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Review: 'The Circle' Doesn't Manage to Achieve Closure

I was excited when I went to see The Circle.  Based on the novel by McSweeney's founder Dave Eggers, directed by James Ponsoldt, and featuring a stellar cast in roles I just knew they could knock out of the park, I'd been looking forward to it for months.

I could definitely see how Eggers' book would attract Ponsoldt, who has always told stories about people with unhealthy and sometimes destructive habits.  His first three features all dealt with alcoholism, including Smashed, among the finest examples of the form.  His most recent was The End of the Tour, adapting David Lipsky's memoir about a road trip of sorts with David Foster Wallace, for the 10th anniversary edition of whose magnum opus Eggers wrote the forward in 2006.  Even when I didn't care for the movie itself, I could respect the craft that went into The Spectacular Now.  This was bound to be good.

But then I started watching.  And one scene landed awkwardly.  And another one felt forced and rushed.  And another one felt unmotivated and convenient.  I tried to reassure myself, of course a two-hour movie has to cut something from a five-hundred-page novel.  It might not have the wonderful character development, or the thematic resonances, or the unexpectedly perfect literary structures.  But surely it would at least get the overall feel and idea of the novel, right?  It might be flawed, but it must still be at least passable.

I held out hope as long as possible, but I slowly came to the realization: this is a bad movie.  Yes, the basics of the story are in place -- Mae Holland (Emma Watson), with help from her old friend Annie Allerton (Karen Gillan), gets a job in The Circle, a mashup of Google, Facebook, Apple, and every other utopian Silicon Valley behemoth you can think of -- but the similarities run thin.  Mae is at first skeptical of The Circle's share-everything ethos, as in the novel, but the person she meets who shares her suspicions (John Boyega) quickly reveals his identity.  In the original it was a mystery that dragged out much longer, and even if the reader could probably guess it earlier, the question helped drive much of Mae's evolving opinions.

Speaking of which, there's none to speak of.  We slam right from Mae feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to participate in on-campus activities and online Circle interactions -- which are far from mandatory, but from which her absence keeps raising questions -- into her embracing the radical openness espoused by Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks), the charismatic Steve Jobs-esque CEO.

In contrast, Eggars' novel guides the reader through this evolution smoothly enough that even if you don't personally buy Bailey's arguments and Mae's rationalizations, you can at least see their appeal.  The adaptation lacks all this nuance, allowing The Circle to become yet another example of the superficially-happy dystopias that form the settings of so many young-adult-targeted movies.

And even as Eamon's plans with his co-founder and COO, Tom Stenton (Patton Oswalt), are revealed, life in The Circle never takes on a darker, more threatening, or even dystopian tone.  It's bad because well obviously they're the bad guys, but we never feel trapped within a system that's growing to encompass more and more of our lives, that scares us as much to leave it as to stay.  This goes right down into the score, which opts for a poppy Danny Elfman vibe where it really needs something closer to Cliff Martinez' queerly edgy sensibility.

We do at least get some sense of those who remain skeptical, in the form of Mae's parents (Bill Paxton and Glenne Headly) and a childhood friend, Mercer (Ellar Coltrane).  But again they feel poorly integrated into the central plot of Mae's life at The Circle -- not that we really get the feel of life at The Circle in this adaptation -- and their arguments feel less like real misgivings and more like cheap knee-jerk Luddism.  None of it jells into an effective statement, much less a serious attempt to wrestle with the real changes being wrought on our society by the rise of social media.

But the most galling change is the wholesale replacement of the dénouement.  Everything after the climactic sequence -- which of course is itself tweaked to take off its edge -- is replaced by something far more pedestrian and audience-friendly than the thematic genius of Eggers' novel.  The only thing that surprised me more than the way his story was mangled was to see that he himself, along with Ponsoldt, did the mangling.

Maybe it's not entirely fair to judge an adaptation that tries to squeeze a decently hefty novel into a single feature's running time.  I know that "the book was better" is among the cheapest jabs to take at a movie.  But is is more than a mere abridgment; the whole texture of the work has been squeezed out, and the central ideas have been reduced almost to the point of self-parody.  World-class actors struggle mightily with clunky, expositional monologues, which are all the script has time for anyway.  And no matter how pretty cinematographer Matthew Libatique makes it look, it's clear that the soul of The Circle did not survive the transition to the screen.

As a bit of a postscript: while most of the cast do at least a decent job, Paxton is the only one who is really fantastic, for as little as he's given to do.  It's a shame for him to go out on this one, but he still manages to remind us here just how great his talent was.

Rating: 2 out of 5

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Review: 'Unforgettable' Starring Rosario Dawson And Katherine Heigl

Unforgettable offers us a tragic story: a beautiful, intelligent, talented young woman, forced into playing out one restrictive ideal of femininity.  She repeats her dictated role over and over, internalizing her oppression until she becomes the harshest critic of her own imperfections.  And even that doesn't prevent her from being passed over and replaced with a younger, fresher face.  Naturally enough, she snaps, throwing just as much craft and dedication into her rage as she once did into her affections; the very dedication that some had found off-putting in the first place.  She would claw her way back to her former place, even if she had to destroy herself in the process.

But aside from Katherine Heigl, there's not much reason to watch this one.

In a switch from her long-running typecasting as a rom-com lead, Heigl takes a heel turn in this psychological and sporadically-erotic thriller.  The picture of icy perfection, thanks to her own overbearing mother (Cheryl Ladd), Tessa Conover had everything.  Most importantly she had the husband, David (Geoff Stults), with his high-status job at Merrill Lynch, and she had her perfect little girl, Lily (Isabella Rice).  But when David decided he'd had enough of real estate and instead started a microbrewery, things were strained.  Now divorced and sharing custody of Lily, Tessa's biggest threat comes in the form of David's new fiancée, Julia Banks (Rosario Dawson).

Longtime producer Denise De Novi does well enough her first time in the director's chair, and the script by Christina Hodson and David Leslie Johnson isn't significantly worse than most others in this genre.  They're not significantly better, though, either.  The movie seems to play as if there's any mystery at all about who's harassing Julia, which puts a bit of a damper on any tension.

It could have been a fine if somewhat lackluster thriller, except for the one big problem staring us right in Dawson's face.  I'm sure the script was turned in long before she was cast, but it's impossible to see how a woman of Julia's complexion sticks out in the otherwise lily-white community in the hills outside Los Angeles and not wonder how that must play into the psychodynamics.  A pale blonde ice queen who met her husband at Stanford displaced by a Latina from Oakland, and somehow race never even comes into it?  Even at the climax, when police are on their way, there's no question that Julia's story will be believed over Tessa's.  It's a glaring omission.

Still, it's fascinating to see Heigl turn bad, even if the result is far from unique.  Everyone who dismissed her during the rom-com days might have to take another look now that she's breaking type.

Rating: 2 out of 5

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Review: 'Norman', Starring Richard Gere

If nothing else, Richard Gere's work with producer Oren Moverman has given him some of his best acting roles since the turn of the century.  First in I'm Not There., Todd Haynes' impressionistic portrait of Bob Dylan; then in Moverman's own Time Out of Mind, as a man dealing with homelessness and mental illness on the streets of New York City; and now in Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer.  Written and directed by Joseph Cedar, whose Footnote fell just short of A Separation as Best Foreign Language Film, Norman provides Gere with yet another opportunity to stretch his range.

Which is not to say that he disappears into the role, the way some of the best character actors can.  Norman is always recognizably Gere -- you can't forget a face that's been in the public eye for so long -- but he is, for lack of a better word, nebbishy, which adjective I'm pretty sure has never been applied to Richard Gere before.  He's a "fixer", which seems to amount to a professional go-between even when you'd rather he just go away.

Right from the beginning he's trying to get his nephew, Philip Cohen (Michael Sheen) to introduce him to big Wall Street movers-and-shakers like Wilf or Taub (Harris Yulin and Josh Charles), saying he knows a guy in the Israeli government -- he can't say exactly who right now -- who wants to cut some deal about withheld taxes and if he can just meet the guy with the right capital to invest...

But of course Norman doesn't "have an Israeli" in his pocket; he's also hustling to find one in time for the meeting he's hoping to set up.  And though he doesn't find what he's looking for, he does meet the up-and-coming Micha Eshel (Lior Ashkenazi) outside Lanvin.  They talk and relax, and Norman buys Micha a pair of $1200 shoes.  And when, three years later, Micha turns out to be the new Prime Minister with a mission to make peace with the Palestinians once and for all, you can already see where this is going.

At times it feels almost like a caper movie, with Norman trying to get all the pieces in place to help his friend, Rabbi Blumenthal (Steve Buscemi) with a favor from Wilf for a favor from Micha for a favor from Philip for a favor from the rabbi, all without each other knowing about it in a plan that you're never sure quite makes sense, even when he explains his web of connections to an unfortunate Amtrak passenger (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who just wants to get some work done.

But it's either more complicated than the script gets into, or not as complicated as it seems.  Either way, things never quite click, and the caper aspect feels unsatisfying.  The oblique Israeli politics angle as well comes up short, though it might resonate better for an audience more in tune with the rhythms of the Knesset.

Instead, what Norman really offers is a study of a character you're never quite sure whether or not to root for.  The schlubby, sad-sack bit makes us feel sympathetic, but at times it's hard not to see Norman as simply pathetic.  It's hard to see how he even makes a living, seeming to be interested in approval and validation more than anything else.  Cedar even offers us a younger version of the same kind of glad-hander (Hank Azaria) just to cement how creepy the whole thing can be.

And if nothing else it's fun to watch Gere exploring this character.  Couple that with some of the same imaginative imagery that Cedar and his cinematographer Yaron Scharf deployed in Footnote and you've got a pleasant enough distraction, even if it's not the greatest film any of the principals have ever made.

Rating: 3 out of 5

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