The Media Tourist

The slow-moving, meditative, existential charms of ‘A Ghost Story’

A Ghost Story
Starring Casey Affleck & Rooney Mara
Directed by David Lowery
R

Don’t be scared.

Despite the spooky title, there’s nothing to be frightened of in A Ghost Story. It’s not that kind of movie. But there is a ghost, and this is his story.

As the movie opens, we meet a young couple (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara), presumably husband and wife, whose sleeping is disturbed by a discordant twang on the keys of an old piano in their living room. Getting up to investigate, they find nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary, and they go back to bed.

The camera then holds an overhead, close-up shot of the couple for several long minutes, lingering as they embrace, motionless, in the silence. Nothing more happens, but it makes you feel like a voyeur—or maybe like someone else, or something else, is also watching.

In the very next scene, the husband is dead, killed in an automobile accident. At the hospital, after the wife has viewed his lifeless body, he sits up from the slab in the morgue. Still covered in a white sheet, now with two mournful-looking eye holes, he slowly makes his way out of the hospital and heads back to the house that was his home.

This certainly could have been played for yuks, but writer-director David Lowery (who also directed Disney’s 2016 live-action remake of Pete’s Dragon) has something else in mind—a meditative, existential reflection on memory, life, loss, longing, loneliness and legacy.

Back at his home, the ghost silently watches his wife come and go. He tries—unsuccessfully—to “reach out” and touch her. But she is unaware of his presence. When she comes home from a date with another man, the ghost has a jealous poltergeist moment—light bulbs burst and books fly off the shelf. (One of the books opens to a page of the Virginia Woolf short story “A Haunted House,” quoted at the beginning of the film.)

One day the ghost looks out and sees another ghost, through a window in the house next door. They wave to each other, then communicate via subtitled ghost telepathy. “I’m waiting for someone,” says the other ghost. “Who?” asks the Casey Affleck ghost. “I don’t remember,” says the next-door ghost.

If you stay through the end credits, you’ll find out the next-door ghost (who has a floral-pattern bedsheet) is played by certain singing pop star (credited as “Spirit Girl”). Watch closely and you’ll catch a glimpse of her, without the bedsheet, in a party scene later.

Eventually the wife moves out and moves away. Other people move in. But the ghost stays. Time flows, forward and backward. The past, present and future begin to swirl and spin, like the planets around the stars—but the ghost remains in one place, the spot where his home was…or someday will be.

Affleck and Mara’s characters are never named, but in the credits they are identified as “C” and “M.” Of course, C is for Casey and M is for Mara. But coincidentally, C is also the Roman numeral for 100 and M is for 1,000—and in this movie, those quantities could easily signify years.

M says in the very first scene that she’s moved around a lot in her life, and she always wrote little notes wherever she lived and stashed them away in the nooks and crannies of her houses. “If I ever wanted to go back,” she says, “there’d be a piece of me waiting.”

Those little notes play a big part of the story. So does the idea of going back, especially in a metaphysical sense, and what kind of “little pieces” we leave behind—whether it’s Beethoven writing a symphony or a pioneer driving a stake for a homestead cabin.

Casey Affleck

There’s a lot to think about in this mesmerizing, slow-go, low-budget minimalist movie with very little dialogue—although the slam-bang Transformers multiplex crowd might find its lack of action and pyrotechnics downright maddening. As unique and hypnotic as it is, a nine-minute sequence of Rooney Mara sitting on the kitchen floor binge-eating an entire pie isn’t exactly Mark Wahlberg fighting a giant robot—I certainly can’t argue with that.

But with Oscar-winner Casey Affleck underneath a form-fitting sheet, and mute, for almost 90 minutes, A Ghost Story is unlike anything else you’ve ever seen. A beautiful, haunting ode to the impermanence of everything—and the precious, mundane, sometimes mysterious moments that make up the music of life—it reminds us that we’re all just watching it go by, one way or another, and that it will continue, in some shape, form or fashion, long after we’re gone.

Wide release July 14, 2017

New Spider-Man returns Marvel’s web star to his high school roots

Spider-Man: Homecoming
Starring Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Marissa Tomei & Robert Downey Jr.
Directed by Jon Watts
PG-13

Of all the comic-book superheroes, Spider-Man was always the one that always connected most directly to me as a kid.

Mainly because he was a kid, too—unlike Superman, Batman, Daredevil, Thor, the Hulk and just about everyone else. They were all bona fide adults with day jobs, or at least grown-up lives and responsibilities.

Spider-Man’s alter ego, Peter Parker, was an insecure, misunderstood high school student, a teenager who juggled classes, crime-fighting and mad crushes on Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy.

I could dig that.

More than 50 years after his first appearance in a Marvel Comic, and now after three big-screen movies starring Tobey McGuire and two with Andrew Garfield, Spider-Man: Homecoming returns the character to the hormones and high-school hallways of his roots.

And it marks the full-blown debut of a new Spider-Man, Tom Holland, and he crushes it. The young British actor, 21, has appeared in several other films, including In The Heart of the Sea and The Lost City of Z, and he was one of the kids swept away by the tsunami with Naomi Watts in The Impossible. But he rocks Spider-Man as if this was the role he’s been waiting in the wings to play all along.

He gave a teaser cameo appearance as Spidey in last year’s Captain America: Civil War, and the movie creatively begins with Peter’s “home video” leading up to his experience in that film’s “clash of the Avengers” tarmac scene.

Do we need yet another Spider-Man movie? Heck yeah—if it’s this one, a rollicking, soaring glide of a ride that puts a bright new, fun, feisty, re-energized spin on pop culture’s top web star.

Although it’s officially a franchise reboot, Spider-Man: Homecoming dispenses (thankfully) with much of the backstory—how Peter Parker became an orphan, how he became Spider-Man—and gets right down to business. In the opening scene, we meet the character who’ll become Spidey’s next nemesis: Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), the owner of a New York salvage company who exacts revenge on the circumstances—and bureaucrats—that screwed him out a big job, spurring him to a life of crime as the Vulture.

Using a high-tech winged harness that allows him to fly, Toomes uses giz-mology stolen from superhero smack-down sites to create guns that can obliterate people and buildings. That’s bad news for just about everyone, except bad guys who’ll pay him big bucks for the black-market bang.

There are several delightful surprises, and one huge one, so the less said about certain things, the better.

Robert Downey Jr. & Tom Holland

Yes, Stan Lee makes a cameo. Robert Downey Jr. pops in and out as Tony Stark, who provides Peter Parker with his righteously upgraded Spidey suit. The scene in which Peter discovers, and activates, the suit’s Siri-like personal-assistant is simply terrific.

Marissa Tomei returns as Peter’s Aunt May, and there’s Jon Favreau as Stark’s right-hand man, Happy Hogan. Donald Glover (from TV’s Atlanta) has a couple of scenes as a chill, not-so-good guy. Laura Harrier (who played Liz on the soap One Life to Live) plays the gorgeous senior for whom young Peter pines. Singer-actress Zendaya (from the Disney TV series K.C. Undercover) provides some coy comic relief as quirky Michelle, another student, a budding artist who might—or might not—be drawn to Peter.

Newcomer Jacob Batalon is introduced as Peter’s super-nerdy best friend, Ned, who’s thrilled when he accidentally discovers Peter’s secret identity and is allowed to become his Spidey confidant.

Michael Keaton

And Keaton… Well, his menacing, metallic Vulture is like Birdman by way of Boeing, and he brings a pathos and dimensionality to his villainy that makes his character more than the typical comic-book baddie. Based on the end-credits scene tag, it’s good to know he might be back for more in the next Spidey installment, coming in 2018.

Director Jon Watts, whose Cop Car (2015) with Kevin Bacon was an underappreciated gem, brings a fresh, fly perspective to everything, from Peter’s anxious relationships to the movie’s big action scenes. And unlike his predecessors, this Spider-Man, still a greenhorn to what he can do, keeps “close to the ground,” not high in the Big Apple sky. A major chase sequence takes place in a suburban neighborhood, across grassy lawns, over low-slung rooftops and through leafy backyards—not between the concrete canyons of Manhattan skyscrapers.

When Spider-Man hesitates at the top of a the Washington Monument, during a boffo rescue scene a bit later, the personal assistant in his suit asks him why he’s pausing, some 550 feet off the plaza below.

His response: “I’ve never been this high before.”

Spider-Man: Homecoming have leave giddy Spidey fans feeling the same way.

In theaters July 7, 2017

Despicable Me 3 offers more of successful family-fun formula

Despicable Me 3
Starring the voices of Steve Carrell, Kristen Wiig & Trey Parker
Directed by Eric Guillon, Kyle Galda and Pierre Coffin
PG
In theaters June 30, 2017

The Despicable Me franchise, launched in 2010, became a massive, worldwide smash with nearly a billion-dollar box-office tally for two movies and its 2015 Minions spinoff.

Small wonder that the third spy-shenanigans flick triples down with more of everything that worked the first two times. There’s more cartoonish tomfoolery, more Minions and more snappy, rockin’ soundtrack tunes (seven of them!) by Pharrell, who wrote the Oscar-nominated “Happy” for Despicable Me 2. And there’s more Gru (voiced by Steve Carrell), the formerly despicable villain who’s now a villain-fighting family man.

Steve Carrell provides the voices of both Gru (left) and his long-lost twin, Dru.

In fact, there are two Grus, sort of. In DM3, Gru discovers he has a long-lost twin brother, Dru, who’s lives in the vaguely Slavic nation of Freedonia, which is overrun with pigs. Dru is more charming than Gru, more successful than Gru, and has much, much more hair than Gru.

Dru tempts Gru by drawing him back into his flamboyant criminal past.

Oh, gno!

There’s some business about a big, colorful diamond that everyone wants to get their hands on, for different reasons.

Carell also takes on the voice of Dru, and seems to be having a terrific time in his new dual roles.

Kristin Wiig returns to her DM2 role as Lucy, Gru’s feisty secret-agent wife. Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier and Nev Scharrel provide the voices of Gru and Lucy’s three young adopted daughters, whose heartwarming subplot becomes a warm center to all the movie’s madcap swirl of sight gags.

Be listening for Julie Andrews in her one scene as Gru and Dru’s mom, and Jenny Slate as the new head of the Anti-Villain League.

Balthazar Bratt

The movie’s main new addition is a character called Balthazar Bratt, voiced by Trey Parker, the co-creator of TV’s South Park and the writer/director of Broadway’s Book of Mormon. Bratt, a star of an ’80s TV show about an abhorrent kid who was always getting into trouble, didn’t adjust to puberty very well and turned to villainy as an adult. Still stuck in the era of his childhood fame, he sports a ridiculous mullet (with a bald spot) and a jumpsuit with oversized shoulder pads, strutting around with a Walkman as he shoots wads of pink bubblegum to immobilize his opponents, toting a key-tar that stuns to the opening power chords of Van Halen’s “Jump” and Dire Strait’s “Money For Nothing,” and hiding his weaponry in a Rubik’s Cube.

“I’ve been a baaaaad boy!” Bratt used to say on his show. He never grew out of his catchphrase—he just grew into it.

And then there’s the Minions, those little jibbering, jabbering, quasi-lingual thingies that look like oversized yellow Jujubes with bad hair transplants, goggles and tiny coveralls. They giggle, sing and make lots of rude noises. Before the title of the movie even appears, they release two honks from their “fart blaster,” which does exactly what it sounds like it would do.

In this movie, the Minions crash an America’s Got Talent-style TV competition, get sent to prison and escape by making an elaborate flying machine—out of stitched-together prison uniforms, toilets and other jailhouse odds and ends.

The three directors juggle all the jokery with craft, cleverness and a finger on the pulse of spry spy satire, lightly spoofing James Bond, Pink Panther movies, Mission Impossible flicks, Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy strip and other familiar tropes. The movie even spoofs itself: Watch closely and you’ll see a billboard for a movie called Onions, which looks a lot like Minions.

As he plots his comeuppance on the Hollywood that shunned him with an attack by a gigantic robot, Balthazar Bratt watches a Betamax tape of one of his old shows. “Does no one value true art anymore?” he laments. It’s a meta joke, a swipe at a crappy TV series within a joke about a former star who doesn’t know it’s all over—wrapped in an irony about the short shelf life of pop culture and the fleeting nature of fame.

With farting Minions, herds of pigs and dance-fights to throwback ’80s tunes, it’s not exactly high art. But as part of a soon-to-be billion-dollar family-fun franchise, hey, DM3 is hardly despicable.

Hop In, Hang On & Rock Out With ‘Baby Driver’

Baby Driver
Starring Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Kevin Spacey, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx & Eiza Gonzalez
Directed by Edgar Wright
R

If you need a ride, get an Uber, use Lyft or hail a taxi. But if you really want to get there in a jif, book Baby.

Baby (Ansel Elgort from The Fault in Our Stars and the Divergent film series) is the best in the biz, especially if the business is robbery. Nobody drives a getaway car like him. In the movie’s stupefying opening sequence, after his trio of heist passengers (Jon Hamm, Eiza Gonzalez and Jon Bernthal) knock over a bank, Baby cuts, drifts, skids and slides in a souped-up red Subaru through the streets of downtown Atlanta, always just ahead of a column of pursuing cops.

Ansel Elgort, Jamie Foxx, Eiza Gonzalez and Jon Hamm

Unflappably cool behind his shades, Baby is the quiet type—extremely quiet. He rarely speaks, and he’s always got his earbuds in, listening to music on one of his several iPods. “You know why they call him Baby?” says Hamm’s character, Buddy. “They’re still waiting for his first words.” Baby drives for Doc (Kevin Spacey), the icy kingpin of a motley, murderer’s row crew of thieves.

We learn Baby’s backstory, about the childhood tragedy that left him with tinnitus—the “hum in the drum”—that he tries to constantly drown out with his tunes, and about the incident that left him so deeply in debt to Doc that he’s still digging out with his servitude.

Baby is the driver in Baby Driver, but it’s music—a bountiful, supercharged spectrum of R&B, classic rock, nu-metal, funk and soul—that drives the movie. And we hear everything just as Baby does; his personal playlist is the soundtrack. And in a twist on how music is typically used, the scenes in Baby Driver were structured, filmed and “choreographed” to the music, not vice versa, where music is added to a scene after it’s shot and edited.

Kevin Spacey

Music pervades the film. A shot of a spinning washing machine fades into a spinning record on a turntable. Baby pauses after hot-wiring a stolen getaway car on a freeway ramp to find just the right jam on the vehicle’s radio. When he’s not behind the wheel, he makes his own homemade beats from snippets of conversation he captures on a portable recorder.

Baby Driver is almost like a radical movie musical, as if La La Land collided with Mad Max by way of Quentin Tarantino. When Baby walks to get coffee, everything he does and encounters—car horns, sirens, street musicians, door openings—punctuates the song he’s hearing, “Harlem Shuffle.” Later, the explosive blasts of a shootout match the tune in Baby’s ears, “Tequila.” Car chases become grand theft rock ’n’ roll operas, all done without special effects or CGI, just plain, old-fashioned, fantastically planned-out, high-octane stunt driving, scored to Queen, The Damned, Young MC and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

The movie has many, many more songs, from Martha and the Vandellas, Sam and Dave, Barry White and The Commodores, to Focus, T. Rex, Golden Earring and a cascade of more arcane acts. And there’s the 1969 Simon & Garfunkel track from which the movie takes its title.

A heartbreaking backstory explains how Baby got to be such an obsessive music lover.

Not everyone understands his need for tuneage, especially when driving a speeding car during a dangerous job with mega-money on the line. “You don’t need a score for a score,” says Bats (Jamie Foxx), Doc’s thuggish go-to for high-stakes holdups, gesturing to his own head. “I got enough demons right here, playing all the time.”

Baby meets a beautiful waitress, Debora (Lily James, from Downton Abbey and Disney’s Cinderella), who has a dream of wanting “to head west…in a car I can’t afford with a plan I don’t have.” Debora tells Baby she has an older sister, Mary, who got all the good songs, like “Proud Mary,” “Hello Mary Lou” and The Monkees’ “Mary, Mary.” She tells Baby, admiringly, that “Every song is about you.”

When Doc and his plans come between Baby and Debra, and Bats and Buddy start stomping on Baby’s tender heartstrings, watch out.

British writer-director Edgar Wright, best known for his cheeky, comedic-parody trilogy of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End, has made an absolute knockout popcorn flick, destined to become a cult classic. It’s a wildly inventive, sleek, stylish mashup of car chases, pedal-to-the-medal action, dreamy young love, obsessive passions, rockin’ tunes, street-level action and bang-bang, shoot-’em-up thrills that makes The Fast and The Furious franchise look fat, bloated and blown-out by comparison. And it’s clever and funny; some confusion about disguises—Mike Myers from Austin Powers or Michael Myers from Halloween?—is hilarious.

CJ Jones, who really is deaf, plays Baby’s deaf father figure, Joe. Diminutive actor-songwriter Paul Williams shows up briefly, as does Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea.

So hop in, hang on and rock out—and let Baby to the driving!

In theaters June 28, 2017