Hustlers (Lorene Scafaria, 2019)

Inspired by the New York Times article about a group of strippers who drugged and robbed their ultra-rich clientele, Hustlers is a story about women operating in a men's world. Thematically, it comes across like a more upbeat take on Widows, with a group of women forced to take drastic actions to carve out lives in a system designed to subjugate and exploit them.

A prime combination of real-life crime drama, a familiar social context and women coming together to form a self-made family, Hustlers is one of the most enjoyable times I have had at the movies all year.

I used to be able to have a take on almost every movie I saw. Nowadays, I feel less inclined. Partially, it is a growing sense of which kinds of films I have enough of a foundation in (thematically, generically etc) to make an interesting argument; the other is inspiration.

And, frankly, there have not been many movies that have inspired me to write lately. Not that it has been all rubbish. There have been some great movies I have seen - but the muse just was not on-board.

The last couple of weeks, it feels like the dam was beginning to break - and Hustlers was a big reason for the breakthrough.

I do not know where it started, but I have always been a fan of movies centred around women coming together to solve a specific problem (Do not mistake this as a sign of some greater 'woke-ness' or sensitivity on my part - as noted in a previous review, I did not see The Craft till a week ago because of ingrained YA bias).

There is something inherently dramatic about women and female friendship, sans any romantic component. Past movies that fell into this category include last year's Widows, or Whip It, Sunshine Cleaning,  - even if the stakes are small, there is a real satisfaction from witnessing this kind of camaraderie. And that spirit of togetherness is a big part of why I enjoyed Hustlers so much. 

Right from the beginning, Hustlers sets out its thematic foundation: before we see any of the characters or the club they work at, we hear the opening lines to Janet Jackson's 'Control'.

'Control' and its parent album signaled Jackson's break from her father's control and the pre-fabed version of pop on her first two albums. An important meta-textual reference point, the song lays out the movie's underlying theme: women taking control of their lives from the men who think they are instruments of their own desires.

It never felt like the filmmakers were leaning into the exploitative potential of the story and the characters' profession - there is not much flesh on display and the only time we see a stage number is the introduction of Jennifer Lopez's Ramona - even then, it is not solely about her sex appeal. The scene is framed from Destiny's POV, the camera sharing her fascination and admiration for the star of the show.

Let's get to Ms Lopez first. I have not seen Jennifer Lopez this deep into a role in years. She's always been good, but it always felt like she was trawling in the shallow end, trying her hand at Sandra Bullock-style rom-coms and a few Ashley Judd-style thrillers. Nothing against either of those two actresses, but it felt like Lopez did not quite fit those roles.

One of the big selling points of this movie was Angelica Jade Bastien's review, which eulogized Lopez's performance, and she was not kidding:

From the moment she appears onscreen, Lopez comes across like a queen; throwing off her cloak to reveal flesh feels less like titillation and more like a power flex. While Ramona's power is partly carnal, it is only part of it - her power goes from knowledge and experience - she knows how to navigate and out-maneuver the men who have the power and the money. They are merely obstacles standing between her and what she needs.

This is the first time where she has a role and a movie that fits her like a glove - there is an inherent steel to Lopez that has rarely been utilized in her previous roles. In most of her romantic comedies, she seems to play characters are meant to be more ditzy and  less together, which never fit - she always feels far smarter than the roles she plays, and Ramona is a character that is all brain all the time. 

What I loved about Lopez's performance is what I loved about the movie as a whole - none of the characters are villains. There is no virgin-whore binary here. These women are human beings, and film never demonizes their profession.

As the lead and heart of the movie, Constance Wu is great as Dorothy/Destiny - someone who is smart enough to put on a front, but too empathetic to keep it on. Wu exhibited a real pathos and vulnerability in Crazy Rich Asians, and that quality is magnified here.

It is great to see Keke Palmer in this - she gets some great comedy beats, although the role does feel like it exists solely to be comic relief.

If you are coming to the movie for Cardi B and Lizzo, they are both effectively cameos - although Cardi does get an important scene teaching Destiny how to lap-dance.

Cardi B tells our heroine to 'drain the clock, not the cock' and it sums up the movie - this story is not about the men, who ostensibly hold all the money and power - this is about these women working to hack out their own piece of the American Dream, here a rancid fantasy that can only be taken by laser focus and ruthless ambition.

The soundtrack is a highlight - not only is hte movie bookmarked by two of Janet Jackson's best dance songs, there is a strong selection of bass-charged tracks by Britney Spears, Usher and - in one pivotal scene - Lorde's 'Royals'.

The movie has a wicked sense of humor - there is a masterful sequence involving the central cast as they transport an unconscious client past a cop car. A tense sequence broken up by two great comic beats, it is a great example of the movie's delicate control of tone and the moving parts of the story.

Back by a great soundtrack, Hustlers is one of the most enjoyable movies I have seen this year, while also offering considerably more than what the average punter (or the raincoat brigade) may expect.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

IN THEATRES: Terminator - Dark Fate

28 years after Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) prevented Judgement Day, a protector from the future has arrived to protect another young woman from a new breed of Terminator. The same nightmare? 

Not quite...

...but mostly the same, yes.

When I was growing up, the first two Terminator movies were mana from heaven. My dad had a habit of telling me about R-rated movies that I was not allowed to see. The Terminator was this weird mythical thing that I only vaguely understood. For some reason, my mum was more agreeable on these movies and rented them on a weekend when dad was out. I cannot really remember what happened or why she thought these movies were fine for a 10 and 8-year-old but ah well.

My brother and I watched them, loved them and ran around in the backyard pretending to be robots.

A few years later, I was given T2 on DVD - it was the two disc set with about 1000 special features, breaking down how they made the movie. Watching those special features, and seeing how these movies were put together got me interested in filmmaking in a serious way.

For a couple years, The Terminators were my favourite movies. And then the other sequels happened.

Terminator 3 was disappointingly fine - I don't think I've watched it more than once, but the only things I like about the movie are its fantastically bleak ending and a deleted scene which explains how the T-101 got its human face.

I have a soft spot for Terminator Salvation - it throws away the formula and tries to create a feature-length story set in the future war: sadly said story is so muddled it never amounts to anything dramatically. By the time Genysis I was less attached to the franchise, and did not bother to see it. I was not sure I would go see this movie but I heard some good things, and the return of James Cameron in a proper creative capacity lured me in.

And it was a pretty good time. Dark Fate is not on the level of the first two, but it is pretty good.

While I enjoyed this movie, there is a sense that this is the end of the road - and not just in terms of the diegesis. Ala Halloween 2018, Dark Fate cuts out the non-James Cameron entries, and re-centres the film around original lead character Sarah Connor.

While it has a more solid story than the last two entries, like the last Halloween, Dark Fate suffers from an overriding sense of familiarity - and not just because it replicates the same story structure as Cameron's movies.

The funny thing about Dark Fate is how much it feels like a reboot of elements and ideas from the last couple movies: Like Terminator 3, it features a villain who blends a metal endoskeleton with a liquid metal covering. It even borrows T3's method of dispatching the villain. Like Salvation, it features a human character who has been augmented with Terminator-style technology. Like Genisys, it is in focus.

Because of the echoes, I was not that intrigued by the new machines - the liquid metal gimmick has been done, but the series cannot seem to move past it. That being said, Gabriel Luna is great in the role - the quiet intensity he brings feels in the same range as the blank menace of Schwarzenegger in the original and Robert Patrick in T2.

I just wish the movie treated him with a little more weight.

While I enjoyed the movie, I was not in love with the aspects of the production - there was an incoherence to the editing of the action sequences, and the filmmakers are far too enamoured of the machines' abilities, deploying the same rubbery physics that are detriment to modern action films.

One of the key elements of Cameron's movies is how they lean into the nightmarish aspect of the premise - part of it is the nature of how action films were made, but one of the best aspects of those movies is how they ground us in Sarah and John's POV - they feel like ordinary people watching and interacting with these otherworldly beings.

In Cameron's hands, the Terminators are terrifying. In Dark Fate, the Rev-9 only feels threatening when it is just Luna walking through unknowing civilians.

While the execution is spotty, the story - while familiar - actually bothers to lean into genuine science fiction, as it comes up with a new look at how time travel has affected the future.

Even Arnold's appearance carries more weight than I expected - post-Salvation, it feels like an obligation to have Arnie show up, but this movie manages to use his appearance and age to its advantage to answer the question of what happens after a Terminator completes its mission.

What is great is that the filmmakers lean into the fact that this particular model is a different character from the previous ones: 'Carl' has remade himself as a banal family man, working an incredibly boring job selling drapes. Schwarzenegger is gifted with the lion share of the comedic beats but, unlike Terminator 3, these moments are peppered through the movie with enough tact that they do not detract from the drama.

The new cast are really good - Mackenzie Davis makes for a solid addition to the Cameron Action woman archetype and Natalia Reyes is good as the young woman she has to protect. They are so good, I almost wish there was a version of the movie without the old guard.

 My big takeaway from the movie is that I wish it did just a little more to stand out on its own. But do not take this review as a slam - this is a good movie, anchored by strong performances and builds on what has gone before in interesting ways. It is just after three previous entries, Dark Fate feels like a respectable finale rather than the beginning of something new.

Check it out.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

IN THEATRES: Joker

Fledgling clown Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is losing his job, his mom and his mind. Thanks to a collection of vaguely connected events, Arthur slowly turns into a painted killer known as 'Joker'.

Ugh...

I was not really interested in seeing this, and now I am actively disinterested in seeing/hearing about it ever again.

Joker is not terrible - but it is a singularly uninspired retread of other movies that has nothing original to say about either its title character or his origins.

This film is clearly referencing The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver, but Joker lacks their bite and their deftness with characterisation and world-building (among a thousand other things). Gotham is recast as the New York of the mid-70s: we get all the popular imagery associated with ‘Fear City’, but there is a disconnection between the story of its central figure and this backdrop. 

As though to hammer home the connections to Scorsese, Robert De Niro appears as a talkshow host that Arthur is obsessed with - in an inversion of his role in King of Comedy that only serves to highlight how silly this movie is by comparison. 

But all this is just window-dressing - under the grime, this is a desiccated plot summary cobbled together from anti-hero cliches. 

Rather than feeling like an inevitable descent into villainy, the film feels like a collection of maybe-catalysts that do not tie together. Combined with overt sign-posting (the yuppies Arthur kills mock him by singing 'Send In The Clowns') and the most ridiculous needle drops this year ('That's Life' by Frank Sinatra and 'Smile' by Jimmy Durante both get played TWICE), Joker is unique in its failure to both signal its intentions while failing to achieve them.

Phoenix brings a frailty and bubbling rage to Fleck, but his performance is undermined by the hamfisted script, which reduces his performance to a series of interesting choices in service of hackneyed, overlong sequences that derail any sense of tension or empathy toward Arthur.

It is difficult to really grasp what the filmmakers' intentions are with this film: is it about the downfall of a man? A critique of Reagan-era capitalism (and by implication, the crises of today)? 

The movie is so drawn out, and filled with bizarre choices (the score feels like a parody of 2010's dramatic scores), that I gave up caring about what it was hamfisted-ly trying to say. There is a romantic subplot setting up an obvious misdirect that went on so long that I actually began to believe it. 

What makes the movie feel even less interesting is the way the movie teases a darkness that it never earns, and neuters whenever it feels like it is about to get problematic: the movie opens with Arthur getting mugged by a group of teens of colour. Later, he is accosted on a train and fights back - the obvious reference points are the famous train-set shoot-out scene in Death Wish and Bernhard Goetz's racially-motivated shooting of four black teens in 1984. 

Based on the opening scene, I was expecting the movie to lean into these antecedents, and build up Arthur's rage on racial resentment. Considering how obvious this movie had been in its messaging and plot points, such a tack would be obvious. Instead, the filmmakers have Arthur kill a group of malignant Wall Street types, an inversion so perfect that it negates what feels like a vaguely logical trajectory for his character. 

There is a wrong-headedness to all these choices that I could not shake. To me, the Joker has always been defined by his lack of identity and clear motivation. Part of the greatness of Heath Ledger's Joker was his lack of backstory - there was a terrifying lack of purpose to his rampage.

By contrast, Arthur is a checklist of bad guy cliches - he suffers from childhood trauma, struggles with mental illness and has an unhealthy fixation on his neighbour (Zazie Beetz). The rooting of Joker's evil in mental illness and the pathology of incels feels wrong, and makes me wonder exactly what the filmmakers are trying to say in this movie based on a comic book property. 

There is the kernel of an idea here - take elements of a popular franchise and give it to a filmmaker to do their own take on it. Sadly, Joker feels more like a logical endpoint of the dark verisimilitude that comic books have been labouring under since the great revisionists (Alan Moore, Frank Miller et al) of the Eighties. 

As a reaction to the increasingly constrictive continuity of the Marvel approach, Warner Bros' decision to green-light one-off movies like this are welcome -  as somebody whose favourite Batman movie is Batman Returns, I will always boost risk-taking.

But as a movie in its own right, Joker is a confused and superficial mess.

I just hope that its massive success leads to other movies that take an off-road approach to familiar characters and scenarios, rather than a series of sequels.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.