"The Edge of Seventeen" will ring true at 17, and 37, and probably 107.

Movies like The Breakfast Club resonate with us when we’re young because they validate our emotions without even a hint of criticism or irony. But when we look back on these films as adults, we may find they no longer speak to us in the same way: the problems that seemed large and insurmountable at 16—distant or demanding parents, alienation from peers, confusion about our identities—may have faded into the background of our lives (or maybe not); and while those problems mattered and do matter, their teeth aren’t as sharp as they used to be, or we’ve grown tougher and more resilient, and gained some valuable perspective, with age. The Edge of Seventeen, a new comedy-drama about teen angst, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, succeeds marvelously at sympathizing with its main character, the unhappy high school girl Nadine (played by Hailee Steinfeld), without pandering to young people. It’s clear from the beginning that while Nadine’s problems are real and difficult, she isn’t the center of the universe, and, by extension, nor are the young viewers who might find in The Edge of Seventeen their own version of The Breakfast Club. Part of Nadine’s emotional journey, in fact, is recognizing that it’s not all about her.

The heart of the story involves the giant rift between Nadine and her best friend, Krista (Haley Lu Richardson), who unexpectedly falls in love with Nadine’s charming, seemingly perfect older brother Darian (Blake Jenner). Nadine only has one friend, and all the important high school gods—of good looks, of popularity, of Straight A’s, of athletics—have smiled on Darian, and half-heartedly smirked in Nadine’s direction. She’s got her personality—which is funny and intelligent when she’s not terribly self-conscious, which is almost never—and her humor, which tends to irritate rather than amuse. Nadine is also dealing with the unexpected death of her dad, and the subsequently strained relationship with her mom (Kyra Sedgwick), who relies too much on Darian now that her husband is gone. 

Steinfeld, whom readers probably remember as the fiery, determined young heroine of the Coen Brothers’ True Grit (2010), gives a funny, big, yet controlled performance. Nadine is by turns irritating, gauche, impulsive, and ultimately, lovable. She also cannot control the things that come tumbling out of her mouth. In multiple scenes, Nadine chides herself for her awkward behavior, and screams at herself, “Why do you say these things?” Those of us who, like Nadine, weren’t coasting on our good looks in high school (although Hailee Steinfeld is certainly a lovely young woman), can probably relate to this. We had to work at developing our personalities, and anytime we spoke, it was like we were taking our driving tests without any practice. The art of saying the right thing at the right time takes a lot of work for most of us, and before we perfect it, we’re all falling flat on our faces most of the time. (Now of course, these moments of verbal awkwardness are seared into the permanent record of social media and Youtube.)

Woody Harrelson gives another of the film’s standout performances, playing Nadine’s history teacher Mr. Bruner. During lunchtime, Nadine frequently sits in his classroom and dumps all her problems on him while he tries to savor his 30 minutes of peace. The teacher obviously cares about Nadine, but he often responds to her woe-is-me attitude with smart-ass quips. When she shows him an explicit text message she accidentally sent a boy on whom she has a crush, Bruner reads it aloud and then chides her for using run-on sentences. Their relationship is a prickly one, a kind of love-hate tennis match, and one more unexpected delight in a movie that repeatedly goes against the conventions of teen movies.

Sometimes, I think about what Ally Sheedy says in The Breakfast Club: “When you grow up, your heart dies,” and I feel that John Hughes cashed in on a huge lie: that life peaks during adolescence, and that the big emotions we experience in high school have to define us. Our hearts don’t die just because we become more able to deal with problems, and the things we said and did and experienced in high school do not have to define us. Kelly Fremon Craig understands this, and, perhaps that is why she doesn’t reduce the teenagers and parents in her film to good guys and bad guys; nor does she reduce young people to stereotypes. And while I still love all those 80s teen comedies because they’re my nostalgia, I’m not sure I would have loved them if I’d seen them as an adult when they first premiered. The Edge of Seventeen is sharp enough and honest enough to appeal to both a teenager and a grown-up, and while it may mean something different to the 17-year-old girl who falls in love with it and the 37-year-old woman she becomes, I think it will always ring true.

Note: I'd be remiss without citing the performance of Hayden Szeto, who plays Nadine’s friend Erwin, a budding young filmmaker. (The short film he makes is absolutely delightful.) Erwin is just as awkward as Nadine, and the friendship—and romance—that develops between them feels real and lasting.  

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay-Part 1

In this review, I’m assuming you’re somewhat familiar with the overall plot of The Hunger Games series, so while I do discuss plot points, I’m not going to bother explaining all the rules of the franchise’s milieu.

The trouble with movies like Mockingjay Part I is that they demand so little of the film medium. They’re not interested in being good movies, merely filmed readings of the novels, visual valentines to the devoted readers of the book series who want to expand their excitement and their experience of the fantasy. Harry Potter wasn’t content to be a well-told book series or even a film series. It eventually became a whole world unto itself at Islands of Adventure. And Hunger Games may one day have to follow in HP’s footsteps to give the fans what they truly want. Perhaps a Hunger Games-themed paintball park? No one is interested in adapting the series in a way that feels truly cinematic, although director Francis Lawrence does make some efforts with Mockingjay. But the movie is ultimately tethered to the book series in a way that ensures it will be a boring set-up for the finale. And viewers may likely find themselves restless with disinterest, but unwilling to criticize the movie since it’s part of a larger whole. How can we really even rate a movie like this, when it’s incomplete?

Even the great Jennifer Lawrence isn’t enough to save this movie. It’s partly her very quick rise as a respected actress—an ascendance that actually started before The Hunger Games—that has made her performance as Katniss Everdeen seem labored and gradually too familiar, too repetitive. Jennifer Lawrence already had an Academy Award nomination under her belt by the time she made the first Hunger Games (for the unsettling, murky meth-noir Winter’s Bone). Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other actors who were Oscar nominees before they were stars of hugely popular young adult movie franchises. Now that Lawrence has won an Oscar (for 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook) and a third nomination (for last year’s American Hustle), her presence in Mockingjay Part I—the first half of the conclusion to The Hunger Games—is a little bit like a 22-year-old being stuck at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving. The other grown-ups have legally recognized her adulthood, but they’re still treating her like a child. Of course, Lawrence has obligations to fulfill, and this series is her bread and butter. But Mockingjay Part I is a real yawn of a movie, and for people who look forward to what Lawrence can do on the screen, it represents a dull speed bump for an actress who has shown such promise.

It’s especially hard to watch an actress as good as Jennifer Lawrence be so inactive. Katniss Everdeen never felt more passive than in this movie. She sits, she waits, she reacts. She’s occasionally enlisted to shoot propaganda videos to rally the districts, which are fighting a losing battle against the Capital. She waits for news of her beloved Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who’s a prisoner of the Capital being used as a puppet to denounce the civil war between the districts and the Capital as radical and self-destructive. The alleged love triangle between Katniss and Peeta and Gale (Liam Hemsworth) has no momentum, especially since Peeta is seen through a glass screen for most of the film. (And how crummy is it to be Gale at this point? Always doing things for the woman he knows will never love him back the way he wants her to.) She chats with the leaders of her district—Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour Hoffman—about strategy. She chats with Woody Harrelson (her alcoholic mentor). She chats with Elizabeth Banks. But none of the conversation, none of the characterization, adds up or amounts to much.

There’s also not much of a strong villain presence. The only really tangible bad guy is the face of the cold, ominous President Snow (Donald Sutherland) who’s mostly seen on big TV screens and thus needs desperately to be petting a white cat on his lap. He’s too larger-than-life to feel very threatening, and the movie drones on vaguely about the Capital in a way that never make the threats of the Capital seem real or genuinely tense. Even the big scenes—such as an air raid by Capital bombers—fails to show us the weight or the impact of the struggle. We see lots of terrified district folks running for shelter as the building around them shakes. But we don’t see the bombers and the scene is rendered ineffectual. It’s stagey in the worst way, like when the actors in a play look out the window and report on what they see since we the audience cannot actually see it. Moore and Hoffman are stern and unfeeling and dull as the leaders, always vaguely unaffected by the many setbacks and tragedies going on around them, and too noble to be capable of any real feeling.

I haven’t read any of the Hunger Games books. I saw the first film, but skipped Catching Fire. About fifteen minutes into Mockingjay, I was wishing I had skipped it too and waited for the finale, which is sure to be more entertaining (one hopes). This silly trend of expanding the final entry of series into two movies is peculiar and, I think, antithetical to movies and what they are. (Studios, of course, cannot pass up an opportunity to squeeze as much money as they can out of their pet franchises.) Even fans of the series seemed largely underwhelmed by this installment. The theater wasn’t even crowded. (Granted, it was the middle of the afternoon.) And nobody seemed excited. When I went to the final Twilight movie on opening night, half the fun was observing the audience. Those fans were having the time of their lives. The movie was a bummer—although entertaining for what it was—but the fans’ energy made it worth seeing. This latest Hunger Games entry felt lifeless.

The film is technically well-made. The director, Francis Lawrence, makes an effort to give the movie some visual feeling. In an early scene, we see Katniss emerging from a circular hallway into a large bunker, and the shot is kind of elegant. Many of the scenes in Mockingjay are visually tied together in a way you don’t expect from this kind of series. And the movie doesn’t pound you over the head with ending after ending. (I suspect that will come with Part 2). No, this film’s problem is that it’s a place-holder, and there’s so much being withheld that it’s hard to care. Even the one big advancement in the film’s plot (involving Peeta’s eventual release from the Capital) feels too little too late.

Now You See Me

In Now You See Me, four magicians have crafted a masterful bank-robbing caper that keeps the FBI (represented here by an agent named Dylan Rhodes, who's played by Mark Ruffalo) on its toes. It's certainly an impressively grandiose film, with an enormous cast: Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, and Dave Franco are the magicians; Melanie Laurent plays a French Interpol agent; Michael Caine plays an investor who's backing the magicians; and Morgan Freeman plays an ex-magician who's been making a new career revealing the secrets behind the magic tricks.

It's an entertaining movie, to be sure. The tricks are dazzling and the story holds you, sometimes even mesmerizes you, and it's funny. The problem is that ultimately it's another caper film, mixed with the plot of an NCIS or Law and Order episode writ large for the big screen. Nothing here is particularly new or innovative, except for the excessive cleverness of the tricks themselves, but it's hard to be impressed by anything in movies anymore when most of the stunts and other feats are performed by a computer.

That leaves us with the talented cast and the undernourished characters: the four magicians are reduced to stock treatment, which means we get Jesse Eisenberg's usual schtick: he speaks too fast and exhibits that same untempered arrogance he had when he played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Woody Harrelson never plays anyone but himself, but at least he's likable: the dumb-on-the-outside but sharp-on-the-inside cowboy. Only Ruffalo and Laurent, whose relationship develops the more they're thrown together by the investigation, have much room to grow, and the writers--Ed Solomon, Boaz Yakin, and Edward Riccourt--tend to cliches, such as a budding but suppressed romance.

Louis Leterrier's direction is sure-footed enough though. He's intent on showing us a good time, and for the most part he succeeds. Watching Now You See Me is like watching really entertaining trash on TV: no one is likely to remember it a year from now, but it's a welcome diversion from all the other summer fodder, which involve superheroes and the like. 115 min. ★★

Seven Psychopaths

Seven Psychopaths is equal parts clever and insipid, from writer-director Martin McDonagh, whose 2008 film In Bruges turned death into something poetically transcendent and darkly funny. Lightning doesn't exactly strike twice. This is one of those movies that wants desperately to be more clever than it is. It's not as blatantly philosophical as Cronenberg's recent disappointment, Cosmopolis. But it reaches for things outside of its grasp. Deep, cosmic ironies perhaps. This overreaching tends to derail the movie, which is actually quite good when it isn't being hopelessly opaque. Thankfully, McDonagh can't resist pushing our buttons. So there are a lot of wonderfully funny moments involving a handful of truly astonishingly bad people and a few others who aren't all that bad, just mixed up with the wrong crowd.

Colin Farrell plays an alcoholic writer who's struggling to start a script. His buddy, played by Sam Rockwell, works with an aging crook (played by Christopher Walken) who snatches rich people's dogs and then returns them for the reward money. Meanwhile, a serial killer is picking off mafiosos with shrewd efficiency. The dognappers steal the poodle of one of the mob bosses (Woody Harrelson), thus turning themselves into targets of his rage.

This is really Sam Rockwell's movie. He's Farrell's unassuming chum, good-naturedly picking on him for being a drunk and busting his chops for not finishing the screenplay (he's trying to motivate him to make something of himself). But he's hiding a dark secret. We soon realize that Rockwell's character is manipulating events so that they will unwind in a cinematic fashion, with the aim of giving his buddy some poetic inspiration. I haven't seen Rockwell play this kind of a part before, and he does it marvelously. He exists in some kind cinematic limbo: part real, part fictional. Rockwell looks like he's having fun with his part. He exudes a certain casual perverseness, and as an actor, Rockwell continually reconstructs what we think is fixed about his character. He's not exactly a blank slate, but he's certainly a layered one, and he continues to surprise.

All the same, Psychopaths is considerably uneven. McDonagh was apparently trying to fashion a sort of living-nightmare vision of Hollywood, in which the all-too-typical weirdness of the golden-tinged Los Angeles neighborhoods constructs the psychotic within: the result is either lived or imagined violence. The flippancy with which McDonagh approaches his subject matter saves it from being heavy-handed. But when he shoots for ironic profundity he misses (unlike In Bruges). Happily, about two-thirds of the movie (intermittently) is still quite good.

The performances certainly bolster the movie's weakness. Farrell, who utilizes the things which made his performance stand out in In Bruges, plays a whining pacifist who's content with his ineptitude. Rockwell's high-functioning psychotic personality makes him a sort of madman-therapist to Farrell's law abiding screw-up. Walken is his usual mock-charismatic self, always providing substance to his scenes. But nothing gels as cohesively as you'd like it to. Beware: It has some incredibly violent scenes, so take that into consideration if you're horrified by horrible things. With Olga Kurylenko, Abbie Cornish, Gabourney Sidibe, Kevin Corrigan, Harry Dean Stanton, and Linda Bright Clay as Walken's hospitalized wife. 110 mins.

Rampart

Here is a movie that succeeds in suppressing the most appealing thing about Woody Harrelson--his ability to be funny even at his own expense. In return we get a masochistic (at least, you'll feel you've put yourself through something painful by the end) study of an arrogant L.A. cop whose career of corruption, abuse, and cockiness finally catches up with him. The question is, how long will it take before he's aware of it? As a man who's the last one to know that his game is up, Harrelson is quite believable. He's got a knack for playing macho jerks, but without the humorous side, there's not much to endear us to Harrelson's clueless cop.

Rampart (2012) is set in 1999. Officer Brown (Harrelson) has been caught beating a man on tape, and because the police department is already embroiled in a massive, complicated scandal, they decide to feed Brown to the press. He doesn't like the idea of being the rolling head, mostly because he's living in a world of denial, unable to admit to himself or anyone else that he's capable of working outside the parameters of the law. Even the case twelve years earlier in which Brown allegedly killed a serial rapist, emerging a hero, is thrown into question. Meanwhile, Brown's not exactly father or husband of the year, having married two sisters, fathering a daughter with each, and failing to be present in any of their lives in a substantive manner.

James Ellroy, the hyperbolic, ultra-weird mystery novelist who wrote L.A. Confidential, co-wrote the screenplay for this with the director, Oren Moverman, who lacks the kind of skillful imagination to make Rampart very compelling. You can hardly tell that Ellroy had much to do with this, since most of his work is dripping with pulpy dialogue, sometimes wonderful, sometimes ridiculous. Rampart is too cautious to try anything like that, and as such it walks a straight line of mediocrity. It's got a cast of characters who all turn out to be fairly uninteresting, but ultimately we're told that's the whole point: Brown is living in a dream world where he's Bruce Willis from Die Hard, only everyone else is firmly ensconced in reality. But the movie hasn't much else to go on from there, and spending two hours with a deluded cop with too much machismo to make rational decisions isn't all that much of a good time, unless your idea of a good time is watching re-runs of Cops.

With Ben Foster, Robin Wright (as a lawyer who enjoys sleeping with Brown because of his reputation as a guy who kills serial rapists), Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon as the two sisters he married (one after the other, not at the same time, the movie points out to us), Sigourney Weaver as the hard-nosed district attorney, Ice Cub, Brie Larson (who is convincing as Harrelson's estranged teenage daughter, although her disgruntled teenage misfit daughter is cliched in the most obvious, unimaginative way), Steve Buscemi, Jon Foster, and Ned Beatty, as a retired cop who's "helping" Brown make a little money on the side.

The Hunger Games

In The Hunger Games, there are 12 districts of a larger country which must endure a yearly punishment where their rebellious deeds are "remembered" (so they will never rebel again) in a contest called "The Hunger Games." A boy and a girl from each district (that's 24 adolescents) must fight to the death in the wilderness. That means one winner, and 23 dead. Enter our heroine, Katniss, played by Jennifer Lawrence (not so far from the character she played in Winter's Bone).

I haven't read the books. Not planning to read the books. In fact, I felt predisposed to dislike The Hunger Games, because it's the latest book-to-movie series obsession. But, to my surprise, I enjoyed it.  It's an engrossing adventure, with a good adult supporting cast that includes Woody Harrelson, Stanley Tucci, Elizabeth Banks (barely recognizable under piles of make-up and gaudy-looking attire), and Donald Sutherland.

People will likely be scratching their heads about a story in which children are pitted against one another and turned into beasts, but the movie shies away, perhaps a little too much, from the dehumanizing effects of the Hunger Games. They were trying desperately to ensure a PG-13 rating, I'm sure, but in the process I think the point of the story is rendered more than a bit murky. We, the audience, are supposed to be indicted for our role as spectators getting our kicks out of violence. This is merely an amped-up version of those Gladiator fights from the Roman days, you see. The Hunger Games are telecast for all to watch (there are cameras everywhere, hidden even within the trees), and each player receives a tracking implant that lets the government monitor his or her every move.

It's much more rewarding to think of this movie as mindless entertainment than to try and tease out a moral message or some kind of Orwellian warning about the future. All of its ideas are rehashes of other people's ideas, simply put into the world of juvenile fiction, a world which is highly profitable, as even adults are getting into these books. The movies themselves will serve as a nice summing up for those of us who aren't planning to read them.

The Hunger Games's futuristic leanings may be designed to elicit deep contemplation, but they don't. The movie's too tame for that. While I wasn't exactly drooling for more violence (there was certainly a lot implied, so they could have turned this into a real bloodbath had they wanted to), the tameness has a way of luring you back into the complacency which the movie is, I think, trying to rail against. The future is for the spectators. They don't care about kids turning into monsters, killing each other. They want only to be entertained. Oh, but it comes at a price, a high, high price! This is the inner-monologue we're supposed to be having as we watch The Hunger Games, and then I suppose we're supposed to walk out of the theater with the realization that the future is now.

It was interesting to see how the movie (and presumably the book as well) recycled the decadent fashions of years past. You see spectators sporting colorful hair, done up in elaborate and unique fashions, and the clothes are equally loud and garish looking. Apparently everyone in the future (at least, in the big cities), is going to be a metrosexual. The poor folks still look like good old-fashioned working class, adorned in drab-looking, practical clothes. The Proletariat never get the fashion forward. They feel all too real and of the moment, which was probably the intention.

Also, the technology is fun to think about--lots of fancy computer screens flashing everywhere, and some impressive developments in the genetic manipulation of the natural world (often used to give the government a more active role in the creepy fight-to-the-death game that ensues for most of the movie).

The world of futuristic fiction is a strange one. There are so many ways an idea can go wrong when one is trying to depict the future. You look at 2001: A Space Odyssey and you see how inaccurate were their imaginings of what technology would be like in 2001. In fact, the set-up to this kind of movie can really kill it. You might start to giggle or possibly frown if you think too much into the futuristic world carved out for the drama of The Hunger Games. But it delivers enough suspense to be a fun movie, and there are enough moments of drama to make the main characters real and sympathetic, despite the situation that continues to dehumanize them.


Also starring Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, and Lenny Kravitz. Written by Suzanne Collins, Billy Ray, and director Gary Ross.

The Walker

The Walker (2007) stars Woody Harrelson as Carter Page III, a male escort living in D.C. who becomes mixed up in a murder investigation. The corpse--who was a lobbyist--was having an affair with Harrelson's married friend (Kristin Scott Thomas), whose husband is a politician. The movie opens with Carter playing Canasta with Thomas and two other friends, played by Lily Tomlin and Lauren Bacall (more on them later). The weekly card game is merely an excuse for the four of them to gossip about all the latest D.C. social scandals, since all of them are connected to government one way or another. Tomlin's character is married to another political player (Ned Beatty).

Carter's father was a career politician, and he's been living under the man's shadow all his life. The son is gay, hardly a badge of honor in the South, particularly for the son of a Southern politician. He's spent his whole life speaking in superficialities and living his life on the surface of things. He seems to read people's aspersions on him even before they do, and as such he's become extremely guarded. He uses his quick wit as self-defense.

The very idea of a character like Carter Page is like really bad, ultra-cornball Tennessee Williams. Harrelson hails from Texas, and the accent we're used to hearing from him is, I think, natural enough for this movie's purposes. But the twangy Mississippi drawl he adorns in The Walker is too much. It's an irritant, and it gets in the way of his performance. The director, Paul Schrader, may have been wanting it to serve Carter's character and be a reminder to us that he's from the Deep South. Going back to the Tennessee Williams connection, perhaps it makes the drama more dramatic in the director's mind. What's always interesting about Tennessee Williams, though, is the monumental state of denial in which his characters steep themselves. In The Walker, it's not so much denial but acceptance. Carter is a realist, and he's doing what's necessary to survive in the current social and political climate.

What's most striking about this movie is probably the presence of Lauren Bacall. She was always a pistol, and at nearly 83 (in 2007), she's still got it. She has such a knowing ease in front of the camera that you just sit back and enjoy her. She plays the part with relish, and you always feel as though there's much beneath the surface that's not being said. Yet it translates tacitly because she's such a good actress. Lily Tomlin is also good, but then again she's a pro too, just not quite as long in the tooth as Bacall. Kristin Scott Thomas plays the undersexed politician's wife with poise and dignity, but perhaps not enough curiosity or warmth to make her character very sympathetic. She's the one Carter is trying to protect, and she's not much of a friend.

Woody Harrelson is a good actor, but I just can't get behind that accent. It's not a bad accent per se, but it's so thick that it just spills over the top like foam, rushing over and eventually engulfing the character, and if this were Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that would be suitable (though hysterically funny). But then it's not Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Other characters in the movie have these pet Deep South accents, too. Granted, there are plenty of Southerners in D.C., but the movie not only borrows the accents of the Deep South but the ultra-ring-wing political demeanor too, and uses this to make Carter's homosexuality an issue. It's as if the director, Schrader, wants this to be the gay version of In the Heat of the Night, but he's not willing to go far enough for that. And in the process of trying to be subtle in what the film says, it says very little, except something we've already heard before: Carter can't measure up to his father, and he's been trying to impress him even though his dad's been dead for ten years. Well, okay. What now?

The Walker has moments of tingling excitement, like when Carter's boyfriend (Moritz Bleibtreu) is accosted by a goon at a bar and beaten up pretty roughly. That scene comes almost out of nowhere, because the film is going at a pretty slow pace. Schrader must have decided it was time to wake up the audience at that point in the movie. There's also an obligatory sense of dread you get from watching this kind of movie. It reminded me of The Ghost Writer (2010) in some ways. Both movies have a certain chilling banality to them. And The Walker isn't entirely unsuccessful, but it feels slight, and it also strikes me as a disappointment that Harrelson denies the best aspects of his persona and his acting talent in order to pursue a more "serious" role. He has a natural streak of comedic insanity that he suppresses here. In The Walker, he's like a macho Truman Capote. He's trying to outwit you with his charming good looks and his sly too-clever cleverness. Still, it could have been worse.

Zombieland

Fantastic! Not my favorite "looking" zombies, but this is certainly one of the most fun zombie flicks in recent years, sort of America's answer to Shaun of the Dead. Woody Harrelson is a bad-ass. Jesse Eisenberg balances out Woody's redneck Dirty Harry persona with his neurotic, witty and insightful take on his new "world," which is--you guessed it--overrun by flesh-eating zombies. And who would have thought a zombie movie would quote All About Eve's famous line ("Fasten your seatbelts...")? ★★★