The Media Tourist

A super-smart android doll makes life interesting—and then dangerous—in this spunky horror comedy

M3GAN
Starring Alison Williams & Violet McGraw
Directed by Gerard Johnstone
R

In theaters Friday, Jan. 6

Back in 1963, Telly Savalas starred in an episode of The Twilight Zone called “Living Doll,” playing a father who buys a talking doll for his daughter. But the chatty plaything becomes a pest, then a threat, telling him, “My name is Talky Tina—and I’m going to kill you.”

“Artificial intelligence” wasn’t such a hot topic in the early 1960s, an era long before smartphones, computerized appliances, interactive toys, Siri searches and self-driving cars. Today we’re surrounded by things that “think,” processing information much, much faster than the human brain.

In M3GAN, a high-tech robotic doll takes over the lives of a young girl and her aunt. Alison Williams stars as Gemma, a computerized toy designer in Seattle who brings her latest prototype home as a companion to her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), whose parents have died in a tragic road accident. Now Gemma is Cady’s official guardian, and she’s stretched thin with her demanding job and the overwhelming duties of being a new parent. M3GAN (it stands for Model 3 Generative Android) can do a lot of things, for golly-gee sure—but can she take the place of a loving mother?

M3GAN and Cady bond almost instantly. “She’s not a toy!” Cady insists, and indeed, the lifelike doll becomes Cady’s companion, best friend and playmate. She sings, she dances, she reads storybooks in the voices of the characters. She can “read” a room like, well, like a computerized android who knows what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling.

And she becomes a fierce protector. Bullying schoolboys, vicious dogs, meddlesome next-door neighbors, corporate males who want to control her—well, M3GAN’s got your number.

This spry, supple horror comedy nimbly slices into our ever-increasing reliance on things that aren’t human but that have become “essential” parts of everyday living. It’s tense and intense and scary without being gory, and its well-placed humor helps lighten the mood of eventual, inevitable murder and mayhem as M3GAN stands up for Cady, and for herself.

M3GAN becomes a sensation and makes Gemma, her creator, a superstar. She’s constructed of titanium and circuitry, with a rubbery silicone coating, but she’s made of pure gold, a sure contender to corner and crush the market for the toy company that commissioned her. (Even though we’re told she’ll retail for “less than a Tesla.”) But M3GAN has other ideas. And when things turn dark and ominous, as you know they will, the movie becomes a gleefully freakish joyride as we wait for her make her next maliciously nasty move, whether it’s bolting on all fours like a wild animal, weaponizing a nail gun or calmly pursuing a soon-to-be victim down a blood-red hallway, wielding a machete.

The film’s stylish horror-show cred is impressive. Williams, a former star of the TV series Girls, made a splash in Jordan Peele’s acclaimed terror parable Get Out, and young McGraw got her start in the streaming series The Haunting of Hill House. One of the producers is Jason Blum, whose Blumhouse franchise gave us Saw, The Conjuring, Insidious and Malignant.

There are respectful nods to the bountiful lineage of other scarifying movies that have come before, from Frankenstein to Chucky and Ex Machina, with touches of Stephen King and even The Evil Dead. As M3GAN mounts her reign of monstrously fun movie terror, the film raises some serious existential issues, most notably mortality itself as M3GAN comforts Cady over the loss of her parents. What is death, exactly? What happens after you die? And, in M3GAN’s case, how can you possibly “kill” something that was never alive to begin with?

It may make you think about what, exactly, Alexia is doing in your home when you’re away. Or if your smartphone is smarter than you are. Just how much do Google and Facebook and Amazon, or your Mac or PC, really know about what you’re doing online?

But if you see Telly Savalas stomping through your house and heading into the basement with a blowtorch…run!

—Neil Pond

Margot Robbie cuts loose in spectacularly profane ode to Old Hollywood debauchery

Babylon
Starring Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Jean Smart & Diego Calva
Directed by Damien Chazelle
Rated R

See it: In theaters Friday, Dec. 23

A sweeping, swaggering, spectacularly saucy salute to old Hollywood, Damien Chazelle’s new Oscar-bait period-piece epic spins a sprawling, gloriously seedy tale about the deep-dish decadence of a bygone era.

Drugs? For sure. Sexual kink? Plenty of that! Excessive nudity? Oh, yeah. Hard-partying depravity? Check.

This big, boisterously sleazy ode to Hollywood’s baser instincts of yore clocks clocks in at just more than three hours, spanning several years in the intertwined lives of its ensemble of characters, from the late 1920s into the early ‘50s. Among other, more salacious things, it’s a looking glass into the moviemaking machinery and the process of those “golden years,” from suffocatingly hot studio soundstage sets to chaotic, wide-open on-location spectacles, with hundreds of extras running into (and over) each other and multiple movies filming at once, racing the setting sun before the productions run out of light.

The all-star cast is anchored by Margot Robbie, and you can expect her name in the conversation as a Best Actress contender. She’s the “face” of the movie as Nellie LeRoy, an aggressively eager starlet, hungry to climb up the Hollywood food chain. Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad, a dashing former superstar watching his leading-man legend fade as movies transition from silent films to “talkies.” Diego Calva played a drug lord in Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico, and here he makes his movie-mainstream debut as Manny Torres, a lowly Mexico-born film assistant working his unlikely way to becoming a big-shot studio exec. Jean Smart of Hacks is a Hollywood hack, the been-there-seen-that gossip columnist who watches it all from the sidelines.

Hey, look! There’s Tobey Maguire (he was Spider-Man!), Lukas Haas (the grownup kid from Witness!), Olivia Wilde (she directed Don’t Worry Darling and Booksmart!), Katherine Waterson (her dad is Law & Order star Sam Waterson!), Eric Roberts (Julia’s brother!), and Flea (the bass player from the Red Hot Chili Peppers!). A jazz trumpet player (Jordan Adepo) and a lesbian torch singer (Li Jun Li) are also along for the boisterous, bumpy ride through crazytown.

This outrageously excessive, cocaine-fueled romp depicts a time when Hollywood was itself outrageously excessive, often living up (and down) to its hedonistic reputation—and its nickname, lifted from the ancient cradle of civilization that became Biblical shorthand for evil and immorality. You get a good idea about the why the movie is called Babylon in the Fellini-esque bacchanalia buffet of rampant debauchery that opens the film, half an hour before the movie’s title even appears onscreen. 

Director Chazelle made his mark with the Oscar-winning Whiplash and his smash 2016 musical, La La Land. That movie, too, was set in Hollywood, but it seems like a soft, gentle breeze of a lullaby compared to the roaring hurricane of tawdry behavior in Babylon, which depicts a Hollywood gone wild, yet to be reined in by a “morality code” or restricted with movie ratings. If you think Charlie Sheen was a baaad boy and Lindsey Lohan the poster child for wasted excess, well, they can’t hold a candle to this.

It’s not a true story, but it is true-ish, and characters are amalgams of certain Hollywood screen idols of yesteryear—Pitt’s character represents a cross between the swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and the seductive, big-screen suavity of Clark Gable. Robbie’s Nellie LeRoy follows the career trajectory of Clara Bow, a former Brooklyn flapper who became one of filmdom’s first “sex symbols” in the Twenties—and whose abrasively nonconformist lifestyle didn’t exactly help Hollywood transcend the widespread perception of movies as cheap, disposable “low art.”

Bawdy, extravagant, explosively vulgar and sometimes salaciously savory—it’s all that and more, and you’ll probably not see another movie this holiday season with explosive pachyderm diarrhea, phallic-shaped pogo sticks, a subterranean lair full of freaks and geeks, and a conversation discussing the, ahem, dimensions of Charlie Chaplin’s manhood. And Margot Robbie fights a rattlesnake. Yes, Margot Robbie fights a rattlesnake.

But it’s also funny, sad, sometimes quite poignant, and heart-achingly human, depicting a place of towering artifice teetering on a foundation of vanity and fever dreams, on the cusp and the cutting edge of sweeping innovation and change, with characters watching their own fortunes rise and fall along the wayside. The end sequence, which takes place (fittingly enough) inside a movie theater, is a dazzling, almost hallucinatory salute to the durability of film, the magic of an art form that will ultimately outlast the lives of all who ever work in, on or for it.

Fame and fortune can swell and soar, as did the Tower of Babel in the ancient city of Babylon—before it all came crashing down. Nothing lasts forever. And like the resplendently tawdry, off-the-rails Hollywood depicted in Babylon, every party comes to an end, one way or another…no matter how many drugs or how much booze, how many naked starlets, trumpeting elephants or hissing vipers.

Hugh Jackman stars in heart-wrenching family drama

The Son
Starring Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern & Vanessa Kirby
Directed by Florian Zeller
Rated PG-13

See it: In select theaters Dec. 16, 2022

French director Florian Zeller’s previous film, The Father, inventively took viewers into a disorienting world of an older man’s dementia. Now The Son plunges audiences into a drama about a teenager’s descent into the darkness of depression, and his exasperated father’s earnest efforts to reach and rescue him.

Hugh Jackman plays Peter, a super-busy New York City corporate lawyer with his steady eye on a plum spot as a political consultant in Washington. He’s thrown off-course, however, when his teenage son, Nicholas (newcomer Zen McGrath), comes to live with him and his partner, Beth (Vanessa Kirby), and their new baby boy.  Laura Dern plays Nicholas’ mom, Kate—Peter’s ex—who realizes something’s unsettled with their child. “He’s not well,” Kate says. “He scares me.”

Peter can’t understand why Nicholas is skipping school, why he doesn’t seem to have any interest in anything, why he’s let all his friendships go and why he says life is weighing him down. Why does he say his head is about to explode? Why are there cuts up and down his arms, and a knife under his mattress? Why is he so listless, so numb to everything, so zoned out? For Peter, there must be a reason, an explanation, a cause and effect. After all, Pete’s an upper-level exec who sees things as situations that need to be turned around, from loss to profit, red to black, lose to win. He’s blind to the signs that his son is suffering from something more serious, and far more complicated, than ordinary teen angst—something that can’t be amended by Peter sternly telling Nicholas his perplexing behavior is forbidden.

Nicholas’ parents are slow to realize their son is drowning in depression. And when they do, well, things just get worse, and more fraught with raw emotion, from there.

This gut-punch slice-of-life tale reinforces its central father-son characters with a couple of highly symbolic objects. For Peter, it’s the sleek elevator in his office building, a clean, efficiently vertical channel that you’re either riding up, or you’re going down; that’s how his legal-eagle world operates. Nicholas is represented by the sloppy, choppy churn of a washing machine—his mind is a swirling, topsy-turvy tumble of a mess, with everything constantly twisting and collapsing on itself, round and round, wadded up and going in circles, but also going nowhere.

Anthony Hopkins, who won as Oscar (his second) for his formidable, foundational role in Zeller’s The Father, reappears for one scene here, loosely connecting the two films. (Both The Father and The Son were originally written for the stage by the director.) Hopkins plays Peter’s father, a cold and aloof Washington political lion who doesn’t have any patience for reflection, soul-searching, indecision, mistakes…or Peter’s struggles with Nicholas, and his out-of-control life. “Just f__king get over it, for God’s sake,” Peter’s pop snaps at him, the equivalent of a resounding slap across the dinner table.

There’s certainly a slap of seriousness in this family drama about a family in crisis and a son’s desperate cry for help, and how fathers don’t necessarily have all the answers nor always do the right thing.  (“Sometimes love isn’t enough,” a psychiatric doc tells Peter.) How guilty should Peter feel? After all, Nicholas blames him for leaving his mother, and for causing his maladjustment in the world.

But it’s by no means an easy, comfortable, entertaining watch, and when it reaches its heavy-handed climax, it’s shocking, but hardly surprising. The talented cast struggles against the shortcomings of the gloomy, manipulative script, and an ever-downward spiral that eventually strands them on a teary, heart-wrenching shore littered with regrets.

This tale about depression is quite depressing itself. Its message about the understanding and addressing mental illness may be an important one, but The Son is certainly no fun.