The Media Tourist

Blake Lively doesn’t like what she sees in this artsy psycho-drama

All I See Is You
Starring Blake Lively & Jason Clarke
Directed by Marc Forester
R
In Theaters Oct. 27, 2017

The last time we saw Blake Lively, she was battling a monster shark in The Shallows.

In her new movie, she’s fighting the undertow of a collapsing marriage as a blind woman who begins to see a lot of things differently when her sight is restored.

The former Gossip Girl actress plays Gina, who lost her sight in a car crash that claimed the lives her parents years ago. Now living in Bangkok with her husband, James (Jason Clarke), an international insurance businessman, she’s encouraged when a doctor (Danny Houston) tells her she’s a candidate for an experimental cornea transplant and reconstructive eye surgery.

When Gina begins to see again, and her vision becomes clearer day by day, what she sees at first delights her—a spectrum of colors, faces to put with familiar voices, and little mundane details that get easily taken for granted by people with sight.

“I’d forgotten what my name looked like,” she says, pausing to reflect on the letters G-I-N-A spelled out on a sign welcoming her home from the hospital.

But her restored vision also reveals the cracks in her marriage. And those cracks are what director Marc Forester probes in this artsy psycho-drama about control, attraction, dependence, micro-aggression, jealousy, dominance, deviousness, secrets and sabotage.

James obviously loves Gina, but it’s clear he now feels threatened by her. He subtly criticizes the way she dresses, asking her to not show so much skin, especially around other guys. And the pressure’s on: They’ve been trying to get pregnant, unsuccessfully. The Spanish firebrand husband (Miquel Fernández) of Gina’s sister ribs James, asking if he’s worried that Gina might leave him for a better-looking, more virile man.

James doesn’t exactly warm to the idea when Gina brings home a friend’s dog to save it from being put down. When James berates it for pooping and peeing on the floor, Gina defends the poor pooch—because James forgot to take it outside for a walk.

And so it goes: The more Gina sees, the less she likes. And the less she likes James, especially—and the more James comes to resent her and miss the way “things used to be,” when Gina couldn’t see, when she depended on him, when he was her world, when she made him feel more like a man, an alpha male.

Ahna O’Reilly (from The Help and TV’s Kingdom) plays Gina’s sister, Carla. Yvonne Strahovski (who stars in the Emmy-winning The Handmaid’s Tale) pops in for a couple of scenes, suggesting that an initially bigger role was edited down to practically nothing. Wes Chatum (Castor from The Hunger Games franchise) plays a hunky, hot, kind-hearted dog owner who… well, he’s not James.

For director Foster, who’s done the zombie apocalypse with Brad Pitt (World War Z) and globetrotted with James Bond (Quantum of Solace), this movie seems like a downshift into indie-arthouse, domestic-drama territory. A dead bird, the rotting cow and repeated shots of fish in the tank—we get it, Gina’s eyes have been opened, but she’s feeling more contained, constrained, stifled and lifeless than ever.

There are explosively beautiful visuals, too, as Gina sees the world again, anew, soaking it all in. At one point, James asks her what she wants to do next, what she wants to see. “More colors,” she says.

The story is a slow-burn simmer that never feels in a rush. It has an almost Hitchcock-ian rhythm as it unfolds, especially as things get twisted and toxic. Foster’s collaborator on the screenplay, Sean Conway, was a writer/director for the gritty Showtime crime drama Ray Donovan.

“You look different than what I had in my head,” Gina tells James when she first comes out of surgery, regaining the sight she had been without for over a decade.

How would the world—specifically your world—look different if your long-impaired vision was suddenly improved? Is our imagination sometimes better than what we see? All I See Is You makes you think about that.

Throughout the movie, Gina works on a song with a guitar. She’ll eventually perform it in full, where its lyrics—about jumping rope, swimming, seeing, loving and living—take on extra emotional heft and give added pang to the ending.

Perhaps Blake Lively was thinking, when she sang, about her last movie, about swimming with—and away from—that great white shark that wanted her for its next meal.

There’s no shark in All You See Is Me, but this fierce little marital fable still draws blood.

In theaters Oct. 27, 2017

This pulpy winter  tale is a sloggy, sadistic Scandinavian mess 

The Snowman
Starring Michael Fassbender & Rebecca Ferguson
Directed by Tomas Alfredson
R

“The great Harry Hole.”

That’s how a colleague refers to the driven, dour detective at the dark heart of this lurid tale based on the central character in the popular pulpy crime novels by Norwegian author Jo Nesbø. In The Snowman, actually the seventh of Nesbø’s 11 Harry Hole adventures but the first to make the big screen, the glum gumshoe is on the trail of a winter wacko who’s carving up women all around Oslo—always leaving a sad-faced snowman as a calling card.

Hole (Michael Fassbender) is supposed to be a brilliant detective; we’re informed that police cadets study his case files in their classes. He’s supposedly a genius at finding clues that everyone else misses. Hmmm… So how did Norway’s most celebrated criminologist end up in such a misguided, muddled, murder-y mess of a movie?

Swedish director Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) has spoken about the movie’s troubled production—a rushed on-location shoot that only allowed for part of the script to be filmed. That certainly accounts for some of the movie’s choppy, patchy feel, the sense that characters are only partially formed and the feeling that what’s on screen often just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

That’s all the more disappointing given the project’s promising pedigree: an Oscar-nominated director, an all-star, international cast and an executive producer (Martin Scorsese) who certainly knows a thing or two about making a solid movie.

Rebecca Ferguson

You might expect a flick called The Snowman to be set in the dead of winter, and “dead” pretty much describes it. Everything is grey, everything looks cold and everything looks lifeless. And many of the people you see—especially the women—will eventually be set free of their mortal coil, and dismembered as well. Heads, fingers, arms and legs get sliced off, blown to pieces and eaten by animals. The Snowman ain’t no jolly, happy Frosty, and this is hardly a holly-jolly corncob-pipe romp around the town square.

Harry and his colleague Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson) collaborate—more or less—to track down the serial killer. They’re led to a kinky industrialist (J.K. Simmons) in charge of the city’s Winter Olympics bid; and the uncooperative, secretive husband (James D’Arcy) of a woman whose disappearance may be linked to the most recent murders; and a cold case from several years ago involving another detective (Val Kilmer).

J.K. Simmons

There’s also Chloë Sevigny as twins, veteran British actor Toby Jones as another detective, and Charlotte Gainsbourg—who would be better known for starring in the 2013 Lars von Trier movies Nymphomanic: Vol. I and Vol. 2 if anyone had gone to see them—as Hole’s old flame, Rakel.

Rakel is dating Mathias (Jonas Karsson), a physician, and has a teenage son, Oleg (newcomer Michael Yates).

The movie is a Nordic swirl of suspects, victims, red herrings, clunky plotting and confusing editing. It certainly doesn’t help that every scene is the same shade of barren, wintry grey—it’s almost impossible to tell today from yesterday, or know when flashbacks return to the present. Harry and Katrine chase a thread about the killer targeting women of whom he disapproves, and there’s a subplot built on “bad parenting.” This movie’s mommy and daddy issues could easily fill up a fjord.

And the killer must be an evil spirit, a ninja, or both, the way he slips into places noiselessly and invisibly, lurks undetected and appears out of nowhere with his lethal bag of tricks. He’s a gamboling grim reaper, all right, until he steps right into a gaping (literal) plot hole.

Have you ever actually built a snowman? You know it takes the right kind of snow, not too dry, and you can’t just throw one together zippity zap. You’ve got to find something for at least the eyes and mouth—the killer apparently likes coffee beans, and skinny little sticks for arms. He never seems to have any trouble making a snowman anytime, anyplace, anywhere, and he still has time to murder and maim. But how come the killer’s snowmen—intended to strike fear, terror and dread—look like sad practical jokes made by a prop department?

“You can’t force the pieces to fit,” Harry tells a frustrated Katrine as she struggles over the tangle of clues, false leads and dead-end hunches. The same is true of The Snowman, a misfit pileup of talent and material that turns into one soggy, sadistic Scandinavian-flavored slay-belle ride.

In theaters Oct. 20, 2017

Kids make magic in sensitive, sad, moving, magnificent ‘Florida Project’

Bria Vinaite and Brooklynn Prince star in ‘The Florida Project’

The Florida Project
Starring Brooklynn Prince, Willem Dafoe & Bria Vinaite
Directed by Sean Baker
R

Purple, it’s said, is the color of royalty, so it suits the young pint-sized princess strutting around her lavender palace in this fractured fairy tale just a couple of wide miles, and a few aching dreams, away from Disney’s Magic Kingdom.

In director Sean Baker’s outstanding slice-of-life The Florida Project, six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) and her ragtag playmates seek fun, friendship, mischief and adventure from their extended-stay homes in low-rent Orlando motels on the strip leading tourists straight into the money-fied maws of Disney. Moonee lives with her mom, Halley (Bria Vinaite), in a place called the Magic Castle—getting an unauthorized ride on Disney’s coattails—which the manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe), has painted top-to-bottom purple.

Willem Dafoe

Bobby’s motel, with its plum-colored walls and faux parapets, fits right in with the other garish attractions on the busy freeway, which include a souvenir shop topped with the giant head of a wizard and a citrus palace called Orange World.

Every day, from a field across the bog, a helicopter repeatedly takes off and lands, whisking tourists away for birds-eye-views of Disney World, Epcot and other wonderful sights.

Baker’s 2015 indie, Tangerine, about a transgender prostitute on the gritty streets of L.A., was shot entirely on iPhones. The Florida Project has a similar down-low, street-level, quasi-documentary feel, as if we’ve been dropped into a setting with a small group of characters to watch them live their lives, just off to the side of where most of mainstream America usually travels—or would ever want to go.

The young cast of newcomers is outstanding, especially Brooklynn Prince as Moonie, a zippy, zapping combination of sass, innocence, vulnerability and pluck. Valeria Cotto plays her friend Jancey, who lives at the motel next door, Future World. Christopher Rivera is Scooty, whose mom (Mela Murder) slips Moonie and Halley food from the diner where she works.

Much of the movie is shown from the worldview of the kids, who revel in the simple delights of childhood—sharing a messy ice cream cone before it melts, spitting on a car from a balcony, burping, making fart noises, playing hide and seek. They also set fire to an abandoned apartment complex, turn off the power to the motel and sass grownups.

But you really come to care about these urchins, worry about them and empathize with their plights, especially when the movie heads into some inevitable danger zones—and it’s not just alligators lurking in the lagoon or a creepy old man nosing around the playground.

No one looks after the kids like Bobby, the beleaguered manager, who also serves as a surrogate father. Real dads are in short supply, and the young moms are floundering, too. Dafoe—whose lifetime of juicy roles has included playing Jesus of Nazareth and Spiderman’s nemesis, the Green Goblin—is already getting Oscar buzz for a Best Supporting Actor nomination. It’s one of his best parts, and best performances, in years.

And Bria Vinaite, as Moonee’s mother, also makes a remarkable debut. Halley is a mess, a scrawny, scrappy spitfire scrounging around for whatever she can find, do, scam or steal at the bottom of life’s scrap heap. She’s fiercely protective of her daughter and she’ll strike like a scorpion when provoked.

But mostly, The Florida Project is a tattered tale about kids growing up in the flotsam and jetsam of an American economy barely afloat offshore of Florida’s signature tourism mecca. Moonee and her friends use their imaginations, the way kids do, to make their own magic in the shadow of the Magic Kingdom.

At one point, Moonee and Jancey play in a downed cypress tree that’s been toppled, likely by a storm, or perhaps a hurricane. Moonee says it’s her favorite tree because “it fell down but it’s still growing.”

This saucy, sad, rousing, riveting drama gives you the same hope for Moonee and her friends—that life may knock them around, may knock them down, may topple them sideways. But you hope, somehow, they’ll keep going, and keep growing.

In theaters Oct. 8, 2017