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JUSTIN TANNER REVIEWS by Justin Tanner
THE ADAM PROJECT Watching original movies on Netflix can be a crap shoot. For every “Lost Daughter” there’s a “Woman in the Window.” For every “Power of the Dog” there’s a “Starling” (Melissa McCarthy’s bizarre CGI-bird/depression dramedy). But what could go wrong with a Sci-Fi time travel movie starring Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Garner, Katherine Keener and Zoe Saldaña? Turns out, absolutely everything. “The Adam Project” is a non-stick frying pan. A prefab mess easily scraped into the sink with one wipe. Clocking in at a brain melting ‘three groans per minute,’ this acrylic tween movie answers the question “what’s worse than having a smart-ass kid popping off lousy dad-jokes every five seconds?” How about TWO versions of the same smart-ass kid (one twelve, one forty) tossing unfunny stink bombs back and forth like baggies of cat shit. The ‘just collecting a paycheck’ Ryan Reynolds and the enormously slapable Walker Scobell (I even want to slap his name) play Big and Young Adam who meet cute via some of the laziest time travel writing ever, and proceed to trade masturbation techniques for an hour and forty six minutes. Luckily, just when being shovel-fed lame yuks starts to lose its charm, the hijinks stop abruptly so everyone can leap full tilt into a mawkish soup of forced tears and regrets. To watch this insufferable brat go from fifth grade Shecky to maudlin misunderstood waif is cringe-inducing: If earnestness was a punishable crime I’d make a citizen’s arrest. Then there’s poor, sweet Mark Ruffalo who brings his usual fully committed naturalism to the film. While he’s onscreen everyone ups their game accordingly. But then he speaks his unimaginably stupid lines of dialog with a straight face (and a lump in his throat) and the level of cognitive dissonance goes off the charts. And enough with the boomer-nostalgia music cues. "Gimme Some Lovin’” not once but twice? Seriously? I honestly went in with the best intentions. But from the first line of dialog this thing stunk like a ruptured septic tank. Here’s a couple of pull quotes for the ad: “A movie so instantly and unrelentingly hateable it should come with a cancer warning.” “Like swimming in the Fukushima effluvium while sucking on a spent fuel rod.” Enjoy on Netflix
FRESH It’s hard to talk about “Fresh” without wanting to get cheeky and give the entire game away. On the one hand it’s a legit romantic comedy with attractive leads (Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan) who meet in the produce aisle, strike up a glib, flirty conversation, fall in love over Bourbon and end up in bed. On the other hand it’s an appalling horror film with images so grisly it’s hard to contemplate without provoking incipient nausea. The fact that “Fresh” manages to navigate both worlds while also being a stiletto-sharp satire on male/female relationships and the transactional nature of love is a tribute to first-time director Mimi Cave’s expert handling of Lauren Kahn’s twisty script. How romance can be used as a delivery system for emotional (and physical) pain has been explored before (“Blue Valentine,” “Gone Girl,” “Fatal Attraction”) but Cave and Kahn take this idea to a psychotically fucked up place where betrayal and the idea of loss are literalized in increasingly ghastly ways. When, at roughly the thirty-minute mark, the plot’s other shoe lands sickeningly in our laps (in a bait-and-switch reveal for the ages) the movie inches toward the free fall drop of a modern rollercoaster, the kind that looks fun from the ground but once on board you just want to scream ‘let me off!’ And if it weren’t for the safety net of metaphor, “Fresh” would be nigh on impossible to watch: Blood, gore and visceral body damage have rarely been depicted in such clinical exactitude (or served up so politely). But by allowing for the images, actions and ideas to live in both the realistic and allegorical world, a comforting distance and intriguing breadth are given: The objects on display become manageable figures like cave paintings or bones in a reliquary. And the acting, (especially by the preternaturally nuanced Edgar-Jones) is sublime. In scene after scene she and Stan play out the chess moves of this complex material with seemingly effortless precision. It’s daring, it’s marvelous and it’s definitely not for the faint of heart. “Fresh" may be the most disturbing movie in recent memory, but at its bloody beating heart it’s just a story of two smart people trying to navigate an unworkable relationship; and who make the fatal mistake of believing in the possibility of love. Streaming on Hulu
AFTER YANG I liked ‘After Yang,’ Kogonada’s new film about the death of a robot, but I really wish I’d loved it. I should have, it checks all the boxes: Lush soundtrack, gorgeous visuals in muted colors and tons of ruminative interactions about loss, memory, transformation, reincarnation, identity and what it means to be human. As a balm for the post-COVID blues there’s probably not a more gently caressing ninety minutes to be found in a cinema right now. And parts of it are actually fun: The opening credits feature all the major characters and their respective families competing in a tightly choreographed dance competition. Even Yang, the titular robot, shows he can jump and swing his arms with the best of them. But then something goes wrong: the music stops, the humans cool down, but Yang continues to dance. And dance. And dance. In the original short story “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” (by Alexander Weinstein) the title character clues the family into his impending shutdown by repeatedly slamming his head into a bowl of cereal until his scalp splits open. Of course such violent gestures have no place in Kogonada’s ouevre. Like his first film, “Columbus,” (with its modernist buildings set against creamy skies and delicate musings on death) “After Yang” is gorgeous, thought-provoking and deep, but it also suffers from a kind of soporific stateliness. After a while, it’s like flipping through a coffee table book with pictures of nature coupled with meaningful text: With every page you’re knocked out by the beauty and the poetry. But when you’re done, it’s the images, not the book you think of. And yet it comes to life in the second act when a mystery takes over the narrative and we lean in to discover what secrets Yang might’ve been keeping from his host family. Colin Farrell, in detective mode, supplies a much needed urgency. And when the radiant Haley Lu Richardson enters as a clone with attitude, we’ve suddenly got a real movie. But it doesn’t last. The tide comes in. The tide goes out: Resolution is not what Kogonada is after. And ultimately, as lovely as it all is, ‘thinking’ about the film afterwards proves to be a more involving experience than watching it. In Theaters.
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