Keanu, Midnight Special, Green Room, Everybody Wants Some!! Reviews

Keanu

Dir. Peter Atencio

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Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, known for their Peabody Award-winning sketch comedy show, Key & Peele, are sort of the hot thing in comedy right now. And like their fellow Comedy Central star Amy Schumer recently did with Trainwreck, Keanu is the first time the duo dip their toes into the pool of feature filmmaking. The story follows a slacker, Rell (Peele), who shortly after being dumped by his girlfriend finds happiness once again when an adorable kitten, Keanu, shows up on his doorstep. The two form an impenetrable bond, with Rell even making painstakingly intricate photoshoots of famous movie scenes with Keanu in them. But one night while he's away, a thief ransacks his apartment and takes his cat friend with him. Rell recruits his cousin Clarence (Key) to help him, and they soon find out a thug named Cheddar (Method Man) has his pet, and will only give it back if they agree to work for him. The problem: Rell and Clarence are possibly the least "gangster" people imaginable. Instead of N.W.A., Clarence's playlist is filled with George Michael.

Although Keanu has a limited bag of tricks and starts to wear out its high concept about 3/4ths of the way into the film, this was a very promising first feature from Key and Peele. The whole idea of the film is hilarious and is the perfect set-up for some awkward, somewhat tense sequences, as essentially these two buffoons could be killed at any moment, if they get caught. I also loved the idea throughout the film of how these two odd, nerdy guys are constantly trying to find their place in what is deemed "black culture." The way the two actors in a split-second will change from their natural "Richard Pryor pretending to be a white guy" tone to a forced "street" talk is both hilarious and also a smart commentary on how African-Americans have to shift their identities based on social situations.

And did I mention how cute that fricken kitten is?! While Keanu may not be a masterpiece and gets to be a little one-note after a while, it's still very entertaining, filled with laughs, and has a little more on its mind than your typical comedy these days. Its movie references obviously connected with yours truly, and I also can't help but think about how George Michael is making this weird comeback lately after this and Deadpool. Keanu is an overall fun movie that comedy fans and cat lovers alike should check out!

Rating: B

Midnight Special
Dir. Jeff Nichols
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Jeff Nichols, who I think is one of the best directors working today, isn't a stranger to ambiguity. Take Shelter in particular, a film about a man claiming that a giant apocalyptic storm is coming, leaves it up in the air as to whether the guy was off his rocker or just appeared that way. Those kinds of unanswerable questions really worked for that film, but the biggest problem I had with Midnight Special is that for this particular story we need some kind of exposition for the film to have any meaning. Frustratingly, Nichols' first foray into the science fiction genre has less answers than the finale to Lost.

Midnight Special follows a father, Roy (Michael Shannon, Nichols' main man) and his friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton), as they drive cross-country under the cover of night with Roy's 8-year-old son, Alton (St. Vincent's Jaeden Lieberher), to some undisclosed location. The police are calling them kidnappers, but Alton appears totally calm and chill with the whole thing, hiding under tinted goggles and noise-cancelling headphones. We soon realize that this seemingly strange kid might be even stranger than we think - he has various "powers," like his ability to perfectly repeat satellite transmissions and emit a blinding ray of light from his eyes. But no one knows what the heck he exactly is. Is he a superhero? An alien? An extra-dimensional being? A God? Soon joined by Alton's mother (Kirsten Dunst), this strange, dour film is basically a family road movie that combines a fear of fatherhood with some kind of alien-y, Close Encounters-esque sci-fi story.

Although the film gets off to a great start, it slowly loses steam as the unanswered questions start to mount, and we realize they won't be answered. There's a group of cultists that consider Alton to be some kind of messiah, and its leader, Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), was the adoptive father of Alton - but we never learn how he legally adopted him, nor how this cult formed. This fascinating backstory is pushed to the side and dismissed; in my opinion this was a wasted opportunity! Both the cult and the federal government (led by an NSA agent played by Adam Driver) are after Alton because of his mysterious powers, and there's very much a 1980's E.T.-era Spielberg vibe going on - without the fun.

I love the ideas in this movie, especially that of a father literally alienated from his child, but the emotion wasn't there for me like in previous Jeff Nichols films (especially Mud). As great of an actor as Shannon is, he was just too stoic to get a read on, and Dunst isn't given much to do except "look sad." I think this might be a good film to revisit down the line, with different expectations, but as of now, Midnight Special is probably my least favorite Nichols film thus far, and ironically, wasn't anything special.

Rating: C+

Green Room
Dir. Jeremy Saulnier
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Jeremy Saulnier proved the power of Kickstarter with his debut feature Blue Ruin, his Cannes-winning revenge thriller funded entirely with crowdfunding and what he could scrap together from his own pockets and family members. Green Room, his follow-up, may no longer be the ultra-independent production that Blue Ruin was, but it still shows a fresh, violent new voice on the scene that will undoubtedly have a promising career. The film's premise is simple: strapped for cash, a punk rock band plays a gig at a backwoods venue run by white supremacists. When they inadvertently stumble across a dead body backstage, before they realize what's happened, the skinheads lock them in the green room and take their phones. The club owner (Patrick Stewart, playing a villain for a change) won't have this damage his business, so the cops come and go without suspecting anything, and the band is trapped inside with no hope of rescue. What follows is a bloody, tense ride where no one is "safe."

What elevates this from other "single room" thrillers is the world Saulnier creates. While all this drama is going down, you can hear the other bands playing just outside, through the walls; a haunting reminder that people just on the other side of the building have no clue what's going on behind closed doors. Saulnier has stated in interviews that he grew up in the "hardcore punk" scene as a youth, and the authenticity of the world shines through. Saulnier also loves to just drop you into things, fully immersing you in the specific "punk" language, without hitting you over the head with exposition. The film also doesn't shy away from violence at all, and has some deliciously disturbing practical effects that would make Eli Roth giddy as a schoolgirl. However, one thing that's not so much a complaint as it is my own ineptitude is that I had a difficult time understanding Patrick Stewart's accent in this movie; he must have taken elocution lessons from Tom Hardy's Bane.

Overall, this is a great film that I may have rated higher if not for seeing the very similar 21 Cloverfield Lane so recently (another "single location" film about survival). This is one of the better horror/thriller films I've seen in a while, so if it's playing in your area, I highly recommend it! It's true what they say: Nazis make for the scariest villains.

Rating: B

Everybody Wants Some!!
Dir. Richard Linklater
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For practically his entire career, Richard Linklater has exclusively dabbled in the "hang out" genre. In Slacker we hang out with a series of amateur philosopher Gen X'ers, in his "Before" trilogy we eavesdrop into a series of conversations between a romantic couple, and even in last year's 12-years-in the-making Boyhood we just float through life with the characters, dropping into their lives and finding profundity in the least profound sources. Everybody Wants Some!! fits right in line with that philosophy, but the subject at hand is the college jock. Essentially this is Linklater's anthropological study of the "bro," and it's a great deal of fun, even though I wholly and completely don't relate to this world.

A spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused, which examined high school in the 1970's, Everybody Wants Some!! looks at college in the 1980s (this couldn't be a more autobiographical move on Linklater's part, especially since it's set in his home state of Texas). The movie takes place in the week or so before the start of the school year, and we follow the frat house shenanigans of the college baseball team as they go from flirting with girls to partying it up to rapping along to The Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight." On the surface, it may appear as though it's nothing more than a movie about a bunch of dumb jocks, but really it's a movie about finding your place in the world and how it's in the aimless, "unimportant" days of your life where you find out who you really are; whether or not that's true or interesting is up to the individual viewer, but Linklater has a way with dialogue and characters that makes it work for me, even with these "bros" who are, let's face it, assholes. But they're at least lovable assholes, and it's a breezy, fun time hanging out with them.

If you've seen his other work, you kind of know what to expect here. Why this doesn't rank as high on my list as his other films is likely not because it's considerably worse, but because I just don't relate to the bro-like conquests of booze, sorority girls, and disco dance parties as much as Linklater clearly does. But even I at points vicariously got sucked into the nostalgia of a time I don't remember being in; by the end of the film, you'll feel like "one of the team."

Rating: B-