The Only Living Boy in New York

First Hit:  I liked the idea of the story more than the pithy clichés and lines that filled up the screen.

Thomas Webb (Callum Turner) is a mid-twenty-year-old man who is living on the lower east side of New York City. His parents live on the upper east side and are wealthy as his dad Ethen (Pierce Bronson) owns a publishing house.

He meets W. F. Gerald (Jeff Bridges), a rumpled mess of a man, as he walks into his building one day. W. F. tells him he has moved into Apt 2B. He seems very personable in wanting to know more about Thomas. Thomas succumbs to his inquiries and begins to tell W.F. his story.

Thomas is in love with Mimi (Kiersey Clemons) after one magical night they had together under the influence of molly and alcohol. But she only wants to be friends. He’d like to be a writer but when he showed his dad some of his writings, he said they were “serviceable.”

One day he sees his dad having an intimate lunch with an unknown woman named Johanna (Kate Beckinsale). He’s hurt and is afraid to tell his mom Judith (Cynthia Nixon) because she’s so mentally fragile. At a loss of what to do, he follows Johanna and confronts her.

However, he ends up having an affair with her and falls in love with her.

Sound twisted? Yes, because this is used to crack open the real story of the film, which isn’t about his love for Mimi and Johanna but how he came to exist.

Turner was adequate in this role but we never see him suffer, grow, or even write which he says is his passion. He almost played victim throughout the film. Bridges was good as the writer who held the secret and was writing a story about “The Only Living Boy in New York”. Clemons was good at the beginning but I thought her character to be not honest. She shunned Thomas because of his affair with Johanna when she had an affair with Thomas when she was with another person. Beckinsale was interesting as the desired woman. It was only till the end did I think she cared about something. Bronson was OK but his moments were few and far between. Nixon was OK as the fragile mother. Still didn’t think the story warranted such fragile behavior. Allan Loeb wrote a weak script that was poorly conceived to tell this story. Marc Webb had some nice sets to work within. I thought the lower east side apartments that both W.  F. and Thomas lived in were perfect. The other inside sets were equally good as well. However, this plot needed a reworking before being committed to filmed.

Overall:  This was a long and ineffective way to tell the real story of Thomas, 'The Only Living Boy in New York.'

Ingrid Goes West

First Hit:  A wonderful reflection of the impact of social media on people.

This is an interesting story about how getting caught up in social media, like Instagram, can alter one’s perception of what relationships consist of.

The film begins with Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza) getting herself in a tizzy over not being invited to a wedding. She perceives that she is a best friend of the bride. Breaking into the wedding, she squirts pepper spray into the eyes of the bride and escapes. We learn that the bride never met Ingrid before – just through Instagram.

Ingrid’s mom has just died and because Ingrid was her caretaker, this probably contributed to her isolation and use of social media to reach out to the world. After the wedding fiasco, she isolates herself and searching social media, discovers Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen) on social media.

Taylor makes her living by being an “influencer” on Instagram. She photographs herself in locations and with products and because of the size of her audience, companies pay her. Taylor lives in Southern California with her artist husband Ezra (Wyatt Russell). Ingrid, armed with money her mother left her, heads to CA to find Taylor and to find a new life.

She rents a studio from Dan Pinto (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) who ends up becoming her friend. Her first step after “following” Taylor on Instagram, is to track her down by going to the places she posts on Instagram. One day she runs into Taylor and stealthily follows her to her home. Noting that Taylor and Ezra have a dog, named Rothko, she creates a plan to steal the dog and return the dog to get in good, close graces with Taylor.

This plan works and they end up becoming pals hanging out together. What Ingrid doesn’t know is that Taylor has no teal intention of making Ingrid a real friend. As long as Taylor gets something from the relationship, she lets Ingrid hang out with her and Ezra.

The film evolves to where it gets pretty twisted because Ingrid will do anything to be close to and hang out with Taylor. As Taylor’s brother Nicky (Billy Magnussen) comes into the picture, he brings new audiences for Taylor and so Ingrid slips out of favor and importance to Taylor.

As we see how far Ingrid goes to stay in good graces with Taylor, I started to cringe. Nicky adds additional leverage against Ingrid by stealing her phone and threatening Ingrid with exposing her phone’s negative and intimate posts of Taylor to Taylor.

Spiraling into oblivion, Ingrid finds out that there are people who care, even if they were only known to her through social media. She also learns that she has the possibility of creating a real human relationship.

What I liked was how well Ingrid showed what it is like to be obsessive about pings on her phone. She made the feeling that her life depended on the pings, perfectly real.

Plaza is wonderful in this role. Her eyes and behavior really reflected the desperateness of her trying to connect the only way she knew how. This was a strong performance. Olsen was very good as the influencer who really didn’t care about the people who followed her. Russell was OK as Taylor’s husband. His abdicating to his wife’s preferences was well done. Jackson Jr. was strong as the landlord, friend, and lover with a Batman obsession. The story how he came to this obsession was wonderful. David Branson Smith and Matt Spicer wrote a fun script that came alive with the actors and direction by Spicer.

Overall: I liked how the social media obsession was portrayed as I am aware of people who’ve been hooked.

Birth of the Dragon

First Hit:  Although this is a poorly done film, I liked knowing more about what it took for Bruce Lee to create his empire.

The sad part of about this film is that it didn’t make the real story the main subject of the film. What came on to the screen was a love story between one of Lee’s students and women who was enslaved by the owner of a Chinese restaurant. However, there was enough in the film about how Lee learned there was more to Kung Fu than just the physicality, to make me sit through the rest of the drama.

Bruce Lee (Philip Ng) was a self-promoting wizard who wanted his Kung Fu school to grow and do well. He is driven by money and fame and will try anything to achieve this, even trying to create a homemade film. Because he teaches both white and Asian students, his school and method are frowned upon by the traditional Chinese martial arts based community.

One school that frowns upon his technique is the Chinese Shaolin Temple and order of priests who use Kung Fu. Wong Jack Man (Yu Xia) is a priest from this Shaolin Temple. He comes to America because he’s serving penance for almost killing someone during a demonstration match. He decides to do this by working in a restaurant as a dishwasher.

One of Lee’s students, a white man named Steve McKee (Billy Magnussen), wants to meet Man and heads to the dock to meet him as he arrives in the US by boat. Lee learns of this and leverages this connection to send a message to Man. He tells McKee to tell Man that Lee wants to challenge him to a fight. Lee knows that if he wins this sort of challenge, it'l raise his popularity and create more fame and money. Man refuses to fight him.

Here is where the film fails to be true to the real story, McKee asks Man to fight Lee to free a woman, Xiulan Quan (Jingjing Qu), from the clutches Janet Wei (Lillian Lim) owner of a famous Chinese restaurant and the person for whom McKee has fallen in love with. That Man fights Lee for this reason, denigrates the story, but supposedly makes it palatable to a wider audience.

In the end Lee does learn something about fighting from his heart. Man learns that Kung Fu can be spread beyond China. McKee gets the girl.

The choreography of the major fight scene was splendid at times and other times seemed a bit forced.

Ng was OK, outside of a few Bruce Lee type squeals while fighting, I didn’t get a "Bruce Lee" from his performance. I got someone who wanted to imitate Lee. Xia was strong and I liked what he brought to the part. McKee was a OK for a character that wasn’t really part of the real story being portrayed here. Qu was sweet in her role as enslaved love interest. Lim was good as the woman in-charge of the restaurant and the Tong she commanded. Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson wrote a very altered screenplay from the real story. George Nolfi did a good job directing most of the fight scenes, but the story and screenplay, lacked a level of authenticity that took away from the real story.

Overall:  I liked the film conceptually more than its reality.

Lucky Logan

First Hit:  Funny at times but lacked intrigue and substance.

Director Steven Soderbergh had previously indicated he’d quit making films.  I guess it wasn't true. Here he made a film that could be compared with his other action crime films, Oceans 11 through 13, although dumbed down. You'd think think he had the formula down, but he must not have, this one didn't work.

Maybe the mistake was thinking that making the same kind of robbery/crime film with people that aren’t very bright would be interesting or compelling. Unfortunately, it wasn't as it because the storyline didn't translate out of Las Vegas at all. Although he tried to reduce the complexity of the crime and dumb things down because of the characters, it didn’t work because the actual details to pull off this crime and the reveal at the end, weren’t believable.

Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) is a doting and wonderful father to Sadie (Farrah Mckenzie). His former wife, Bobbie Jo Chapman (Katie Holmes), is antagonistic towards him but she does see his love for their daughter. He gets fired from his job, through no real fault of his own, because of a old football injury. He does appear to have some smarts about him.

His brother Clyde (Adam Driver) is slow and not very bright. He lost his arm in the Iraq war and has a prosthetic that is somewhat useless to him as a bartender in a local dive. Jimmy also has a sister Mellie (Riley Keogh) who runs a small town beauty salon and knows a hell of a lot about cars.

The location is significant because it is near the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

The Logan clan needs money, so the brothers decide to rob the speedway. Hatching a plan, they decide they need to blow up a safe and decide to hire an incarcerated Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), who is an expert at blowing up safes. Upon hearing the plan, Joe tells Jimmy and Clyde that he'll need his slow hick brothers Fish (Jack Quaid) and Sam (Brian Gleeson) to help him. He wants them to get the explosives and to break the raceway’s computer payment system. The brothers quote was priceless: “I knows all about them twitters and such”, this gives the audience an idea of their ilk.

This team does come up with an ingenious plan to get Joe out of prison without the prison knowing, rob the raceway, and take the heat off them after the robbery. However, the ending leaves a question as to whether they will get away with it as Special Agent Sarah Grayson (Hilary Swank), who seems to be the smartest person in the film, bellies up to the bar in the end and starts talking with Clyde.

Tatum was good, but I didn’t buy his perceived dumbness nor his smartness, and maybe that was the point. Driver was OK as a slow dedicated brother. He almost came across at too dumb. Keogh was fantastic as the smart as a whip sister that knew how to control what she needed to control. Mckenzie was excellent as Tatum’s and Holmes’ daughter. She was very engaging to watch. Holmes was OK as mother and former wife. Craig was odd in this role. There was something that didn’t work for me as him being a hick. However, he did create an over the top character. Quaid and Gleeson were very good in their dumb brother roles and it appears they’ve picked up the acting chops of their parents. Rebecca Blunt wrote the screenplay. What didn’t work was not making the characters believable. Their actions and a lack of character depth created too many questions about the story. Soderbergh made some of the comedy work, but the weakness, for me, lay in the believability of the characters and congruency of their actions.

Overall:  This film is funny at times, but fails where it really needs to be strong, pulling plausibility out of characters and their actions.

Brigsby Bear

First Hit:  A very creative interesting film about a young man coming to terms with his past.

The first thing about this film when watching the initial scenes are that James (Kyle Mooney), and his so called mom and dad, Ted and April Mitchum (Mark Hamill and Jane Adams respectively) are odd people. They live as a family in an underground bunker in the middle of nowhere (looks like a high-desert area in the southwest part of the United States).

James is obsessed with the "Brigsby Bear" videos he watches on an old VCR player. Afterwards, he writes up a synopsis of the video and posts the synopsis on a blog site using a very old, out of date, portable computer. He’s all alone except for his parents and never seems to go outside. Stealing away one night, with a gas mask on, he ventures outside. While watching the sky on top of the bunker’s concrete entrance, he sees the flashing lights of police cars in the distance. Panicking he goes back into the bunker to wake up his parents.

However, he's too late and the police are inside the bunker. He’s taken to a police station where Detective Vogel (Greg Kinnear) tells him he was abducted as a baby and that Ted and April aren't his real parents. He’s introduced to his real parents Greg and Louise Pope (Matt Walsh and Michaela Watkins respectively). He also has a sister Aubrey (Ryan Simpkins) who is very standoffish to James because she suddenly has an older brother who is weird and not cool. As a teenage girl, it is horrible to have a geeky strange older brother who's name is plastered all over the news.

Greg and Louise take James to see and work with a psychologist named Emily (Claire Danes) who insists that James must begin the process of forgetting about Brigsby Bear. Although he asks everyone else about Brigsby, he discovers that no one else has ever seen Brigsby Bear. Then he learns that his former Dad created all the Brigsby videos to teach him life lessons in addition to reading, math, and the importance of right and wrong.

James has grown up with Brigsby as his only touchstone to life outside of Ted and April, so he decides to do a film to help him understand it all. The film he hopes to make will complete the Brigsby Bear story. When he shares this idea with Aubrey’s friends they offer to help him make this film.

The rest of the film is about creating new friendships by creating this film together. Even Detective Vogel gets into the act. The way this unfolds is interesting and only until we get close to the end of the film do we really see how this is James’ way of saying "goodbye" to the life he once had and saying "hi" to the life he is entering.

The film’s creative naivete, as witnessed by the way both sets of parents are characterized, shows how James is a mirror of his parents and a reflection of the film he creates. This makes this movie captivatingly perfect.

Mooney was excellent as the partially blank tablet young man trying to find his way into a world he knows little about. Hamill was strong as the surrogate dad and the evil sun. Walsh was puzzlingly good. I was puzzled because he reflected a certain level of spacy-ness himself. There were times I thought he as putting on an act and other times I felt true and solid engagement to the role. Watkins was clearly less puzzling and good in this role. Simpkins was excellent. I thought she did an excellent job of being put off by James presence as well as embracing him as she learns more about him. Danes was solid as a therapist who lacked clear empathy towards James and his path to grow. Kinnear was excellent as the detective who began to see James and support his efforts to move his life forward his way. Jorge Lendeborg Jr. was fantastic as Aubrey’s friend who is the first to be open to James and his story. Their interactions while building the film and at the party were priceless. Alexa Demie as another one of Aubrey’s friends who takes James under her wings and was excellent. Kevin Costello and Kyle Mooney wrote this interesting script and Dave McCary’s direction gave it all life.

Overall:  I thought this was a very creative and bold film.