Cailey Fleming and "Steve Carell" in IF
IF
Written, produced, and directed by co-star John Krasinski, the comedy fantasy IF concerns a bunch of imaginary friends (hence the acronym) eager to feel needed again, and when I first scanned the list of those voicing these beings, I practically needed an overnight bag and a canteen to get through it.
Take a deep breath, because here's who's on board. Krasinski's Office-mate Steve Carell. Krasinski's real-life wife Emily Blunt, as well as Blake Lively, the real-life wife of IF second banana Ryan Reynolds. Ocean's 11 schemers George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Brad Pitt – the latter's participation itself imaginary. (Pitt is credited as portraying “Keith,” an invisible IF who never speaks.) Academy Award nominees Bradley Cooper and Richard Jenkins. Academy Award winners Sam Rockwell and the late, great Louis Gossett Jr. Emmy nominees and winners Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Keegan-Michael Key, Christopher Meloni, and Matthew Rhys. Saturday Night Live veterans Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph. Standup-comic actors Amy Schumer, Awkwafina, and Sebastian Manascalo. Oh yeah, and Jon Stewart. Taking all this in, I immediately feared the worst, presuming there was no way Krasinski's family fare would survive the inevitable, distracting games of “Guess that celebrity!” that would ensue. Turns out I was wrong. The star voices are the only things that make IF even remotely fun.
Generally speaking, you should always be wary of kids' movies that are less interested in entertaining children than in awakening the inner child in grown-ups – to misquote Lear, that way treacle lies. And Krasinski doesn't waste any time telegraphing his mawkish intent, opening with a (suspiciously artful) home-video montage of a playful father, mother, and young daughter as they goof around, make each other laugh, and visit Mom in the hospital. Yes, Krasinski is absolutely trying to one-Up us here – the score is by that film's composer Michael Giacchino – and before you can say “blatant Pixar appropriation,” Mom is dead, several years have passed, and now it's Dad (Krasinksi) who's hospitalized, suffering as he is from a literal broken heart. Meanwhile, his 12-year-old daughter Bea (Cailey Fleming) has been scooted off to the New York apartment of her grandmother (Fiona Shaw), and it's there that the tween discovers her unusual gift: She has the ability to see the IFs of long-since-grown children. Maybe not for long, though, because as Carell's gigantic, furry, purple monster Blue (his human was color-blind) informs Bea, if they don't find ways to be seen by others again, they're gonna disappear.
Yet here's the thing: They're not. Within minutes of Blue relaying this information, Bea and her upstairs neighbor Cal – the Reynolds character who can also see imaginary friends – are escorted to Coney Island, where, beneath one of the rides, a whole realm of IFs live in an expansive retirement community. So these things don't vanish when forgotten. They simply go to the underground equivalent of Fort Meyers, Florida, and from what I could tell, they seemed okay with it. They have art classes and pool parties and nightclub entertainment, and beyond a few grumps in the group-therapy session, everyone appears to be having a ball. So the middling stakes essentially dissolve before the film is half-over, and when Bea and Cal decide to help the lonely (but are they?) IFs reunite with their “creators,” it becomes obvious that Krasinski will push any buttons necessary for an emotional response, coherence and consistency be damned.
We're told that the IFs won't disappear if their human pals from long ago remember them, and those memories evidently need to be rekindled through effects from the physical world – listening to a decades-old record album, say, or smelling fresh croissants. But when the Spartacus LP does the trick for Grandma and Waller-Bridge's humanoid butterfly Blossom, nothing much happens. Gran smiles and dances, Blossom radiates E.T.-heartlight luminescence, and the two never once make eye contact. The croissant bit is weirder, because apparently, yes, all it takes for Bobby Moynihan's sad-sack businessman to remember Blue is the scent of fresh French pastries. The man-child beams (but still can't see his IF), Blue glows, and with Giacchino's über-pushy score soaring, we're left to wonder: Did Moynihan's character really spend decades not once setting foot in a bakery? This doesn't make a lick of sense, but then again, none of the “rules” do. By the final minutes, humans are not only remembering but seeing their past IFs, and without any sensory prompting. A couple of the reunited friends are even able to hug. IF is like a cinematic Etch-a-Sketch that Krasinski can't stop shaking.
I do applaud the guy for spearheading a big-budget ($110 million) family enterprise that isn't based on preexisting IP, and happily, the movie doesn't feel cynical – or rather, it doesn't when Ryan Reynolds is out of sight. Does this man even enjoy acting anymore? Hopefully, July's Deadpool & Wolverine will suggest that he occasionally does. But Reynolds has spent his last five years in movies looking like the planet's most miserable A-lister, and his sardonic mopiness leaves Cal a constant, massively unappealing wet blanket. Reynolds is as wrong for the film's tone as the exquisitely handsome, supremely misapplied Jasusz Kaminski cinematography that turns purported wistfulness into heavy-handed melodrama; somehow, here, cascading beams of cleansing light pour through the windows even at night.
Aggressively sentimental without being moving, lumbering when it should be ticklish, and an outing that'll likely irritate adults while mostly boring their kids, this thing would be a near-complete debacle were it not for Krasinski's insane Rolodex of pals who signed up for vocal duties. And in a welcome surprise, most of them aren't employed, as I expected, for one-and-done punchlines – there are legitimate characters here. I would've preferred it if Gossett's every line as an elderly Teddy bear didn't sound like the inside of a fortune cookie, and a little of Carell's mania, here, goes a long way. But Waller-Bridge delivers aural delight with Blossom's glass-half-full vigor, and while I never laughed out loud at IF, I did grin, and pretty widely, at the unmistakable comic cadences of nearly all of our off-screen participants, particularly Blunt, Stewart, Rockwell, and Cooper, the latter voicing an ambulatory glass of ice water. “What kind of kid has an imaginary friend who's water?!” he's asked. “I dunno,” Cooper replies. “He was from Arizona. Always thirsty.”
THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 1
This is what I get for not researching movies before seeing them.
When I first saw the trailer for The Strangers: Chapter 1, I presumed – logically, I thought – that it would be a prequel to the series' two previous, gut-crunching home-invasion/massacre freakouts: Byron Bertino's masterful The Strangers from 2008, and Johannes Roberts' nearly-as-terrifying The Strangers: Prey at Night from 2018. Given the “Chapter 1” subtitle, I thought this would be an origin story of some sort, explaining how Bertino's original trio of masked psychopaths got their brutal start, and why they wore masks of burlap and cheap plastic, and why they were so insistent on knowing where Tamara was. (To that point, I was aching to know who Tamara was.) So after this new outing began, I started mentally clocking inconsistencies in the time frame, asking myself why, with the first film taking place 16 years ago, everyone here had cars and phones that didn't exist more than 16 years ago. I remained confused about the chronological discrepancies until the end credits rolled, at which point those dreaded words “To Be Continued” flashed on-screen. O-o-o-oh, I realized. This isn't Chapter 1 meaning an origin story. It's Chapter 1 meaning a freaking reboot. And one with (apparently) two additional chapters on the horizon. That's when I started clocking a whole new set of grievances.
To begin with: Why reboot this franchise at all? Why not just continue it? A full decade separated the releases of Strangers one and two with no detriment, and because the series' woodsy lunatics never remove their masks, it's not like we'd notice that they were now getting too way old for this shit. As with most Hollywood projects, I imagine the answer lies with box-office considerations. But even then, why add the confusing, potentially alienating Chapter 1, especially given how disappointingly 2023's Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One fared last summer? (Many pundits blamed audience reaction to the subtitle – “So we're not getting a whole movie, then?” – for their relative disinterest, and at my screening of the latest Strangers, several patrons groaned when that “To Be Continued” title card popped up.) What makes this all especially maddening, though, is that the latest Strangers isn't worth a chapter one, let alone a two and three. Its fright-flick formula may still work, to an extent. But our new characters aren't interesting, their locale isn't distinct, there are no cliffhangers to speak of, and the villains don't do anything they couldn't or wouldn't have done in a good-old-fashioned Strangers 3. Did director Renny Harlin consider his imprint so singularly impressive that crowds would be immediately clamoring for a continuation, and he wanted to send out a message of “Don't worry – there'll be more”?
En route to Portland, a cute young couple (Madelaine Petsch's Maya and Froy Gutierrez's Ryan) stop for a bite in the sleepy/creepy town of Venus, Oregon, experience car trouble, get shucked off to an Airbnb in the woods, and spend the rest of our time with them trying to survive an attack by three homicidal sociopaths. That's it. That's the whole movie. How this is worthy of a sequel, let alone a trilogy, is thus-far beyond me. The relatively minor goings-on would've have mattered much if Harlin and screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland delivered the requisite number of jolts – or, preferably, the sustained tension than Bertino and Roberts produced. And to be fair, there is one brief, sublimely shot sequence in which the camera slowly pulls away from Maya at the piano, and we discover that the portrait over her head is actually a mirror reflecting a Stranger standing mere feet behind her.
That, however, is where the visual invention ends, and the rest simply involves standard “Boo!” effects offset by occasional nods to the cruel patience of the previous films' set pieces, with neither of our leads engaging enough to make us anxious about their fates. If anything, I was kind of hoping Ryan would go as quickly as possible, given how willing he was to let his girlfriend of five years confront danger ahead of him. It's Maya who's left alone in the house while Ryan is out grabbing hamburgers; Maya who checks the hallway when they're scared to leave their locked bedroom; Maya who leads an underground escape attempt … and gets a nail in her palm for her troubles. Given the minimal cast, not a lot of folks wind up dying in The Strangers: Chapter 1. Based on the evidence, however, chivalry is most certainly dead.
BACK TO BLACK
If you have incredibly strong feelings about and for Amy Winehouse, or even only moderately strong ones, it's easy to see how you could find director Sam Taylor-Johnson's Back to Black appalling.
Tracing the British singer/songwriter's life and career from just before her Frank album debut to her Grammy-dominating Back to Black LP to her untimely death, from alcohol poisoning, at age 27, Matt Greenhaigh's screenplay seems to do what it can to remove any suggestion of the hard work that no doubt went into Winehouse's songwriting success. Every once in a while, Amy will write ideas in her notebook – one early number is apparently, spontaneously completed in full while she lounges on her bed – but the “how” behind her genius basically ends with her repeated refrains of “I have to live my songs!” In even more upsetting touches, though, Amy's father Mitch and ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil come off not merely as well-meaning, but almost unconscionably sympathetic given what we learned about their behavior in Asif Kapadia's Oscar-winning documentary Amy. (A movie, it should be said, that Mitch has vociferously railed against.) Mitch is essentially transformed into a hapless aw-shucks dad who laughs off the irony when his daughter sings “Rehab” on the night of her Grammys sweep. And Blake, who publicly admitted to getting his wife into hard drugs, is transformed into a saintly, if troubled, addict forced to leave Amy because she was becoming a bad influence on him. It says something about Taylor-Johnson's and Greenhaigh's approach that when Amy first samples heroin, Blake is nowhere around.
So Back to Black basically fails its late, tremendously gifted, deeply damaged subject in both her professional and personal lives. Thanks to Winehouse's songs and the leading portrayal by Marisa Abela, though, I couldn't quite get myself to hate it; it's a typically blah bio-musical, but one also typically redeemed by great tunes and inspired casting. In this genre, I don't mind the practice of lip-syncing, and am totally on-board if we hear the genuine vocals of Edith Piaf, James Brown, and Bob Marley while Marion Cotillard, Chadwick Boseman, and Kingsley Ben-Adir mouth the lyrics and act the hell out of them. But there's a special thrill that comes with a bio-musical performer doing their own rendition of the famed crooner they're embodying, and as Amy Winehouse, Abela is rather extraordinary, especially given that she wasn't an accomplished chanteuse prior to filming. While I'm hardly an expert on the Winehouse canon, Abela's teasing, insinuating vocals, full of passion and pain, sound enough like the real deal to make you wonder if what you're hearing wasn't lifted directly from Frank or Back in Black. It's all Abela, however, and the fire that fuels her song interpretations isn't restricted to the studio or stage. Greenhaigh's script may be an insult to Winehouse's memory, particularly in the armchair-psychology suggestion that her aching desire for a baby led to her death, yet Abela plays even her soap-opera set pieces for all their funny, pitiable, heroic, tragic worth.
As a film experience, there's not much else about Back to Black worth discussing. The best that can be said about Johnson-Taylor's direction is that it gets out of Abela's way, and despite solid turns by Eddie Marsan as Mitch, Jack O'Connell as Blake, and the ever-priceless Lesley Manville as Amy's beloved grandma, the movie is light on personality in the manner of most bio-musicals; the star shines, and everyone else basks in the afterglow. Yet while 2015's Amy is an immeasurably finer offering, if a decidedly more upsetting one, Back to Black at least gives us two hours with a sensational channeler and Winehouse's sublime, too-short repertoire. I get why you might hate it. Did I, though? No … no, no.
I SAW THE TV GLOW
As I may have mentioned two or three or a trillion times before, I'm a huge Twin Peaks fan, never more so than when watching David Lynch's unclassifiable TV serial on a weekly basis from 1990 to '91. My unhealthy devotion as an early-20-something led to my then-14-year-old sister becoming an addict, too, and on two occasions, I distinctly recall reaching out to her after especially distressing episodes. Following the one that revealed Laura Palmer's killer, I called her in the Chicago suburbs from a pay phone at the Rock Island Village Inn. After the series finale, I left my episode-viewing sleepover party to drive home and check on her. Both times she was sobbing.
That was the power, for some of us, of Twin Peaks, and it was frequently replicated in the 1992 feature Fire Walk with Me and Lynch's 2017 The Return continuation for Showtime. When that show hurt, it hurt at a deep-inside place where you never imagined a TV series could venture; it left you shaken, emotionally battered, and strangely exhilarated. Twin Peaks fanaticism doesn't appear to be the main influence for writer/director Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow – it's more readily Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with maybe a bit of The X-Files thrown in. (The Return is certainly hat-tipped, though, in the dreamy pop vocals performed at a roadside bar.) Still, I've never before seen a movie that so abjectly got the feeling of being an obsessive fan watching those '90s shows week after week, and endlessly replaying them on VHS, back in that pre-Internet/pre-smartphone era before next-day recaps and texts with friends and instant social-media “WTF?!?”s. After Twin Peaks' 1991 finale aired, and we were left with the unresolved cliffhanger to end all unresolved cliffhangers, a friend and I screamed “No!!!” at the television and fumed for the next two hours. After our I Saw the TV Glow hero views his unresolved-cliffhanger finale, he plunges his head straight into the TV screen. I completely related.
That hero is Owen (Ian Foreman as a seventh-grader, Justice Smith afterward), a shy, sheltered suburbanite who, in the film's late-'90s setting, crawls out of his shell with his introduction to the two-years-older Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), an almost stereotypically troubled youth whose entire raison d'etre revolves around her favorite TV series The Pink Opaque. Like Buffy, X-Files, and, to an extent, Twin Peaks, The Pink Opaque deals with the battling of demons, as well as the not-so-buried subtext within the pursuits. Maddy's obsession leads to Owen's obsession, and as these theoretically mismatched souls find their perfect matches in one another (and the monster series they love), the movie becomes a painful yet electrifying lament for lost time and opportunities, as well as the struggle to find some understanding of why some people are consigned to Earth when the make-believe world of The Pink Opaque is infinitely more appealing. In a Vanity Fair interview, Schoenbrun delivered a more-than-credible argument that her latest is a metaphor for the trans experience. I saw it instead as a metaphor for anyone crushingly locked into perceived ideas of “normalcy,” and those whose fears lead to refusing their true identities. When Maddy, who's openly gay, asks Owen if he likes girls or boys, Owen takes a heartbreakingly long pause before he answers honestly, and with the only answer he can give: “I like TV shows.”
It's taken until mid-May, but I finally have a 2024 release I love more than my previous favorite Snack Shack. (With no disrespect meant to that uproarious indie, there's something wrong with a movie year that makes you wait six weeks for something better than a coming-of-age comedy titled Snack Shack.) I found myself as hypnotically entranced by the weirdness, humor, melancholy, and unbridled emotionalism of I Saw the TV Glow as I was by any number of unforgettable Twin Peaks (or Buffy … or X-Files) episodes, and just about bawled when Schoenbrun's narrative left her leads' teen years and settled on a grim present, with Owen re-watching The Pink Opaque and discovering, to his shock and sadness, that it wasn't at all the show he thought he was watching. Justice Smith, previously superb in this spring's American Society of Magical Negroes, is phenomenally empathetic and subtly expressive, Lundy-Paine appears almost frighteningly connected to her material, and the pleasures continue with, but aren't limited to, the peerless recreations of '90s “young-adult” television, the haunting mystery of Maddy's disappearance, and the concert sets by Sloppy Jane and King Woman. (Their performances take place in a venue called the Double Lunch. Many Twin Peaks scenes were set in the Double-R Diner. Coincidence?) I Saw the TV Glow, the latest by those reliable sadists at A24, does boast a confounding ending – one totally worth diving into – and as a result, may not stick around the area much longer. Its own glow, however, may reflect for years.
