Gemini Man

First Hit: Entertaining story, but it was the special effects of a young Henry Brogan (a young Will Smith) that was the star.

Ang Lee spent time and money using CGI to make Henry (Will Smith) have a Junior, and it worked.

Brogan is the most perfect and lethal sniper the US Government has ever had. To prove the point, we see him in the first scenes preparing to kill a man moving on a train traveling at 248 kilometers per hour (154 mph) while lying on a hillside some 200 meters (~650 ft) away from the tracks. He nails it.

But Brogan is done with killing after he’s shot more than seventy people. He’s tired, 51-years-old and all the deaths are eating away at him. At one point, he says, “I can’t even look at myself in the mirror.”

However, the powers that be, including CIA director Janet Lassiter (Linda Emond), want Brogan dead, and the funny thing is that the reason for this is poorly explained and developed in this story. This was the weakest part of the plot, but if you buy their explanation, it works well enough to enjoy the rest of the film.

Arriving back home after the initial assassination scene, ready to enter retirement, he heads to the harbor where he has a boat. Going to pay for gas, he finds a new person named Danny Zakarweski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) in the dock shed. She gives him a story that the previous guy retired and that she’s studying marine biology at the nearby University of Georgia.

Taking his boat to meet with a secret contact, he finds a directional bug under the dashboard. Arriving back at the dock, he storms into the shed where Danny is seated and accuses her of being an agent operative for the government. She denies and denies his allegations. Apologizing he asks her out to eat as a way to make up for his rudeness and accusations. When he meets her for dinner, she shows her his research proving she’s an agent.

This scene gives the audience supporting information that Brogan is smart and knows what he’s doing, not only with a rifle, but he’s made it this far because he’s smart. Secondly, being found out implicates Danny in a larger scheme, and now she must support Brogan because she becomes an assassination target as well.

He awakes when assassins come to his home. He takes care of them as only an assassin would and rushes to Danny’s house to tell her she’s surly a target for assassination now and to go with him.

This is the setup. Lassiter is under threat by Clay Verris (Clive Owen), who owns a gun for hire company called Gemini. Verris is holding information that will ruin Lassiter’s career. If Lassiter cannot finish the job by getting rid of Brogan, his team will. Her ego won’t let him take over yet. She wants to prove she can finish the job.

After multiple failures by Lassiter’s team, Verris uses his squad of assassins, including a 23-year-old-clone version of Brogan, to kill Brogan, Zakarweski, and Brogan’s close pilot friend Baron (Benedict Wong).

The rest of the film is about the battle between the clone and Brogan, along with understanding why a clone of Brogan was created.

The action was excellent, although at times it seemed as if the fight scenes were too long. The realism of the younger clone put together by the CGI team was terrific. I loved having Danny as part of the plot because her rationality and the way she added to the story grounded the film.

Smith was strong as Brogan, the supreme assassin and weapon of the United States. He outwardly carried enough of the internal pain of his upbringing to make his character seem real and whole. Winstead was excellent as the agent sent to track Brogan and ends up partnering with him as he gets to the root of the issue at hand. Owen is outstanding and always makes a great evil foil. His voice and attitude are perfect as the antagonist. Emond was good as the CIA director trying to clean up the mess she’s created by losing so many men to Brogan’s skills. Wong was the perfect long-time associate to Brogan. They had great chemistry together. David Benioff and Billy Ray wrote an entertaining screenplay. Lee knows how to create action, and he does here as well. I think they might have gotten more impact by shortened the fighting scenes as they felt long. He didn’t settle for less with the CGI of the Will Smith (Brogan) clone. It was amazingly done it seemed like Brogan was fighting a real person.

Overall: Entertaining enough and at the end with Brogan is telling his clone about his prowess it felt typical good time Will Smith.

Lucy in the Sky

First Hit: Lackluster and non-cohesive, the story had potential, but distractions and character jolts didn’t work.

First off, when the actual picture on the screen kept changing the size, I thought, oh, we have a projection problem. Then I realized that the shifting from letterbox, to full screen, to square in the middle, square on each side of the screen, and wavy vertical edges was all part of the tricks Director Noah Hawley used to create the physical feeling of Astronaut Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman) was having because she felt disjointed and separate from world after having traveled in outer space.

This is based on a true story about how Lucy got caught up in the ethereal feeling of being back on earth after having floated out in space for two weeks. It's about how she struggled to get grounded after the experience and what happens when she loses focus.

This version shows Lucy slipping in and out of states of quiet estrangement from the world around her. At one moment she’s speaking with her husband Drew (Dan Stevens) in a usual kind of conversation and the next moment she’s got this dreamy, faraway look in her eyes all the while the picture format of the film is changing, sometimes abruptly other times in a smooth wiping fashion.

We learn about Lucy’s background by Lucy’s visits with her grandmother Nana (Ellen Burstyn). Nana is strict and expects Lucy to be tough, not like her flaky brother, who cannot sit still long enough to raise his daughter Blue Iris (Pearl Amanda Dickson).

Blue comes to stay with Drew and Lucy from time to time because it is the only stability and family she has. Her sadness and estrangement from her father are shown in one poignant scene when, after receiving a phone call from her dad, she goes into her room. She turns up the music loud and sits sulks on the floor. There are bits of scattered paper all round. Lucy goes in and reaches out to Blue and holds her, gives her space to try to put her life in perspective. The irony, of course, is that Lucy’s life is out of control, and she doesn’t know it, and she’s consoling Blue, whose life is shattered.

Hoping to get back into space and have that sense of wonder and feeling all of life distantly, she begins working, studying, and training hard to be selected for the next mission. However, she’s missing appointments with a NASA psychologist and starts acting on impulses that are generally foreign for her.

One such impulse is to begin an affair with fellow astronaut Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm). Another is bowling with a select group of others who’ve been in space as her. Together they are an elite club and talk around the edges of their inner experience of being in outer space.

Lucy is competitive and never loses, so when her fellow female astronaut Erin Eccles (Zazie Beetz) and who is competing with her for a seat on the next ride to space, sets a record for one of the tests, she’s determined to beat it. However, there is a mishap, and this is when she obviously starts to spin out of control.

When she isn’t selected to be part of the next team to space and is told to take some time off, she flips an internal switch and sets out to right all the wrongs she thinks are being done to her by NASA and Goodwin.

As I mentioned above, I thought the shifting screen size projections were distracting and seemed like it was being used as a device to make us understand the character better. It doesn’t happen in real life like this, so the technique only set me farther away from the story.

I also felt like the shifts made by Lucy were a bit inconsistent. However, her intensity of tracking down Mark and Erin in San Diego was fantastic. Watch her bark out orders to Blue like a head sergeant.

Portman, at times, was fantastic. There’s a scene where we see just her face, and she smiles briefly, gives a look of being lost in a train of thought, then smiles and on and on was Portman at her best. However, the script or direction had her inconsistent in such a way that the character was difficult to understand, so overall it was one of her worst roles. Hamm did nothing new from his character in “Mad Men,” he drank to excess and screwed everyone. I would like to see if he can do something else. Beetz was excellent as rival astronaut Eccles. Stevens was outstanding as Lucy’s husband who always looked at the bright side of things. He was known at NASA as ever having a smile. Dickson was reliable as the lost girl who was looking for guidance and stability in her life. Burstyn was fantastic and one of the best parts of the film as the crusty hardened grandmother to Lucy. Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi wrote this story with revisions by both of them and Director Hawley. I’m not sure the story worked, but it was the direction by Hawley that led this film astray. The direction issues began with the projection of different screen sizes in attempts to create a physical experience of Lucy’s adjustment issues. They were a distraction.

Overall: This was a weak attempt to tell this story.

Jojo Rabbit

First Hit: A fantastic black comedy that digs deep at the idiocy of the Nazi movement.

Good black comedies are difficult to come by. In recent years “The Death of Stalin” was one such film. As I wrote the previous sentence, I realized that both films are about corrupt leaders of countries. However, I digress.

In this film, Jojo Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) is a lonely young boy who idolizes Adolf Hitler and his movement. He lives with his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), while his dad is supposedly off fighting for the Germans in Italy.

To support his belief in the Nazi movement, he’s created an imaginary Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi) who visits him in his make-believe world. His version of Hitler is off the charts hilarious. Hitler struts around making outlandish statements and sings young Jojo’s praises for admiring Hitler and what he stands for.

Jojo and Rosie live in a small German town. All the young boys, like him, are signed up to be part of Hitler’s youth corps. His only friend Yorki (Archie Yates), is a slightly rotund young boy with glasses, and together they are heading off to a Hitler youth camp experience.

The boys and girls all gathered together at the camp are dressed up in their Nazi uniforms. They are led through hilarious drills by Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), a drunken Nazi Youth Camp Leader, and his counterpart, Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson), for the young girls.

One day while in his home alone, he hears noises upstairs and discovers a young woman Elsa Korr (Thomasin McKenzie) living in a secret compartment in the walls of a room upstairs. Elsa is Jewish and is being hidden there by Rosie. Why is his mother hiding a Jew in her home? Then we learn that maybe Elsa may also be a stand-in, of sorts, for his dead sister.

Although Jojo is supposed to dislike and want to kill Jews like Elsa, he discovers that she’s not a bad person and that he’s falling for her in his own 11-year-old boy way.

Discussing all this with his imaginary Hitler is hilarious at times. The absurd statements and thoughts about what Jojo should or should not do about his captive Jew make pointed jabs at Hitler’s insane ideology.

As the film moves along, we sense the end of the war is near, and the German Army is starting to lose the battle against the Russians, Europeans, and US forces. They are closing in which makes Jojo’s Hitler even funnier.

The film is quick-paced and moves rapidly from scene to scene. The quick-paced moments are exemplified when the boys at camp and when the war comes to their little town. However, this film knows when to linger. Scenes like when Jojo and Rosie are walking along the river, or when Jojo and Elsa are writing his book about Jews. The film is also deeply touching as shown when Jojo and Yorkie are shown hugging each other several times throughout the film. It was even moving when Captain Klenzendorf saves Jojo from being imprisoned by the allies. Later, when Jojo dances with Elsa, recalling an earlier time when Jojo danced with Rosie. In these moments the film glows.

I thought the sets and costumes were fantastic and really captured the heart of the film.

Davis was extraordinary as Jojo. He carried this story with a wide range of feelings, emotions, and actions. Waititi is superb as the innovative imagination of Jojo’s Adolf Hitler. He uses sarcasm, expressive physical movement, and whit to define and make this character come alive. McKenzie was sublime as Elsa. Her strength and compassion while attempting to stay alive in a country that reviled her kind was, at times, riveting. Johansson was excellent as Jojo’s mother. She embodied someone straddling the line of life and death along with survival and what’s right wonderfully. Rockwell was over-the-top perfect for this role. When he carefully validated Elsa’s papers, you knew of his heart. Wilson was well cast as Fraulein Rahm, a woman who got away with saying outlandish things. Waititi also wrote and directed this film, and it was clear he knew what he wanted, and he got it, a fun-filled touching black comedy.

Overall: This was an excellent film that also reflected the struggles of the current day.

Parasite

First Hit: I really enjoyed this story as it dives from the hilarious into the absurd.

We are introduced to this South Korean family (the Kim family) as they are getting ready to eat. The below ground level home has few street-level windows as they look up from the table to see a drunk young man peeing on a wall near their home.

We can tell the family is barely making it financially from the looks of the room, the view outside the room, and by their sparse, cryptic, and entertaining conversation. However, they seem to be engaged in their lives and hopeful because they are talking about the language of scheme making.

The family consists of the father Ki-taek (played by Song Kang-ho), the mother Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin), the son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), and the daughter Ki-woo (Park So-dam).

Ki-woo’s friend Min-hyuk (Park Seo-joon) comes by their home, wanting to give Ki-woo a present. It is a rock sculpture that is supposed to bring economic well-being. Because Min-hyuk has to leave town for a while, he tells Ki-woo about a tutoring gig he wants him to take over while he’s gone. The subject of his tutoring is a rich high school girl named Park Dye-hye (Jung Ji-so). Dye-hye’s mother, Park Yeon-kyo (Jo Yeo-jeong), Min-hyuk says, isn’t too bright, so he should easily pass the interview. Ki-woo expresses his worries that he’ll be found out and may not be good enough, but Min-hyuk assures him that even though he’s only got a high school education, he’ll dazzle the ditzy Mrs. Park.

When asking Min-hyuk why he’s giving him this offer, Min-hyuk explains that he didn’t want one of his college friends doing the gig because he loves this girl, wants to date her when she’s out of high school and knows that Ki-woo is a true friend and wouldn’t cross him in this way.

Arriving at the Park home, he’s let in by the housekeeper Gook Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun). Walking through the house, he’s amazed at what a sizeable beautiful home it is. It’s very modern and filled with all the luxuries he’s never known and only dreamed about. The interview with Mrs. Park goes very well, and he’s hired to tutor Dye-hye. Noticing artwork around the home, he asks about it. The mother explains that it is her wild son who shoots bows and arrows around the house. But he’s also an artist and Mrs. Park thinks her son could be compared to the Andy Warhol anointed artist Jean-Michael Basquiat.

Seeing an opportunity and because the family is wealthy and pays well,  he says he may know of a young woman who is an Art Therapist that could work with the boy to become a great artist. Getting home, he tells his family about this and his sister is ready to do her part and take on a new role as Art Teacher and Therapist.

I’ll leave the rest to your imagination, but let’s just say the family all participates in this adventure.

But when the wealthy family takes a camping vacation, and the old housekeeper comes to collect something she left behind, the whole story starts to turn towards the macabre.

Parasite is a perfect name for the film, and it is not easy to pin down all the aspects this film offers the viewer. As it won the Cannes Palme d’Or for best film and I can see why.

Song, as the patriarch of the Kim family, was exquisite in embodying this character. Early in the film, when he announces that they need to leave the windows open when the street fumigators come down the street, I knew I was in for a ride. It was perfect for setting up his mindset. His silent looks while driving Mr. Park around after he learns that the Park’s think he and his family smell, are spot on. Jo was excellent as Mrs. Park. Her expressions when buying into the stories shared Ki-woo and Ki-jung were priceless. She was the perfect foil and focal point of the Park family. Choi was terrific as the Kim family young man. His wistful story at the end of the film about finding his father was excellent. Park was sublime as the Kim family daughter turned instant Art Therapist. Her embodying the story she made up for herself was funny, engaging, and perfect. Jang, as mother to the Kim children, made me laugh. Her actions and responses during the opening scenes while the family was eating were scene-stealing. Lee Sun-kyun was outstanding as Mr. Park. His command of the family as he waltzed in from work was evident and clearly identified who was in charge of the Park family. Lee Jung-eun, as the housemaid for the Park family, was engaging. Her arriving back to collect what she left in the basement under the kitchen opened the door for the film to move to another level. Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won wrote a wildly entertaining screenplay that had both funny and dark edges. Joon-ho was outstanding directing this film. Some of the shots, especially as the family tried to get back home during a major storm, told much of the story. The direct downward view of the slums in which they lived, being flooded, was telling. Just as the shots of the luxurious home where they worked were just the opposite; clean, crisp, and wonderfully shot with various angles.

Overall: This is a contender for Best Foreign Film and maybe even Best Picture.

The Whistlers

First Hit: I was, and even a day later, confused by this story and film.

We’re introduced to Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) and Gilda (Catrinel Marlon) when Gilda walks up to Cristi and asks to speak with him in his apartment. Cristi whispers into her ear that the apartment is bugged, so she kisses him and tells him she’ll play the part of a hooker, and they can whisper her request, which is to help her by getting a criminal, Zsolt, out of prison.

In an early scene, Cristi is on a ferry heading to an island where the ancient people use to communicate by whistling. Cristi is part of a plot working with other criminals to free Zsolt and to do this he has to learn the whistling language.

The language breaks vowels and consonants into seven whistling sounds. This lesson in this language was the most exciting part of the film. I was fascinated with Cristi learning how to whistle and wanted to practice, along with him, right in the theater.

As the film develops, some parts led me to believe that the story in the movie was pre-planned, and I missed something as the film progressed. At other times, I felt as though Cristi and Gilda were planning the ending along the way because they’d fallen for each other.

As an undercover detective, Cristi works for an unnamed woman played by Rodica Lazar, who is trying to play both ends of this story.

The result is a film that has the appearance of a storyline running at two different levels, but in the end, the person sitting next to me asked if he missed something about how the ending worked out, I said “I don’t know,” and I still don’t.

Ivanov was quietly compelling as the detective who was also on the take. Marlon was excellent as the woman who seemed totally in control of story behind the plot. Lazar was strong as the head of the investigation and also susceptible to corruption. Corneliu Porumboiu wrote and directed this quizzical story that left me hanging.

Overall: I either missed a critical section of this Romanian film or the story was attempting to be too elusive.