IF (2024)

A Big IF'n Steal

or

"What Kind of a Kid Comes Up with an Invisible IF???"

Everybody loves bed-time stories. That ritual of childhood that settles one down from the turbulent activities of childhood and lulls the mind and the nerve-endings to slowly limbo under the bar of sleepiness and gather the necessary 40 winks of REM sleep needed to recharge the batteries and the burgeoning brain-cells of the aware recently-minted child. It can also work for the preoccupied and agitated adult who is lucky to eke out 30 winks without resorting to warm milk and a couple of pills. Bed-time stories are nice and cozy and curatives for the sleep-reluctant child and the sleep-resistant adult and that's a good thing.

 

IF (standing for "Imaginary Friend" and not to be confused with the 1968 Lindsey Anderson movie starring Malcolm McDowell) is not unlike a good bed-time story. But more on that later.

 

IF tells the story of little Bea (Cailey Fleming), who would bristle at that "little" adjective. As she's likely to tell anyone stoically "I'm not a kid anymore." No. She's 12. And as much as her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) wants to treat her like the kid she was, she is highly resistant. There's bad reason for that. She's visiting grandma's in New York, because her Dad (director John Krasinski) is in the hospital there for an upcoming operation—we're not given a lot of specifics but one guesses that it's heart surgery, and Bea is determined to tough it out, be grown-up about it, and not to be a child.

She's had experience at that, as we're shown in the opening credits sequence filled with home movies, she had a rather bucolic childhood full of laughs and the love of her parents. So bucolic that only rarely do you see Mom wearing a warm hat (which will fly by any child watching this movie, but adults will see it and think "cancer"). Bea, you see, lost her Mom at any early age, and now Dad's in the same hospital and she's going to be serious about it, act like an adult, and won't let him or his mother try to cheer her up.

That will be somebody else's job, as she stumbles into the orbit of various "Imaginary Friends" who are at loose ends because their own "Real" friends have grown up and forgotten them. They're employing a placement service run by Calvin (Ryan Reynolds) who is trying to find them new humans, and Bea eventually decides to help out. Cal takes her to the Memory Lane Retirement Home, located in Coney Island, and, with a slightly frayed older teddy bear IF named Lewis (Louis Gossett Jr., in his final role) to start the process of finding new kids for the old IF's.

It does not go well, and Lewis suggests a change of tack—rather than finding replacement people for the IF's, they should try to re-unite them with their old Unimaginary Friends. At this point, you begin to realize that the rules governing IF's is rather arbitrary, and it only gets more arbitrary as the movie goes along. The plot if as untethered as the orphan IF's and lacks any real depth, which puts it at odds with the inspiration that Krasinski was going for when he imagined this movie.

IF references two staples of the Imaginary Friend trope, the movie Harvey (of course) and Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes" cartoon strip. But, the true inspiration is the output of Pixar Studios. Krasinski has gone on-record to say that his intention was to make a "live action Pixar movie." One can certainly see it when one considers the steals from Up, Monsters, Inc., touches of Inside Out, some character designs that certainly are inspired by Pixar creations. And, admittedly, it is a high bar to set oneself as Pixar has consistently been at the top of the form as far as story-telling, film-making ingenuity, and artistic craftsmanship.

But, there's something that Pixar consistently accomplishes that Krasinski utterly fails at: emotional depth. Yes, it's fun to make a movie about toys, about monsters hiding in the closet, about any high-concept merchandisable gimmick that looks fun. But, Toy Story is just play-things without the concept of abandonment (that's checked off rather clean-fingered in IF), the motivations behind monsters and their creators) in Monsters, Inc., the yearning for something better despite prejudice in Ratatouille, the overcoming of grief in Up (big IF'n steal there!), or the deep-dive into the psychological stew of Inside Out. Krasinski begs, borrows and steals parts from Pixar, but he can't make them work together for a satisfying, mind-blowing epiphany the way that the Pixelators can.*

And, gosh, everybody tries so hard to make it work it was causing me to grind me teeth down to the root. Krasinski—the actor—is constantly working the comedy card, quite winningly, Reynolds, as if sensing he should play against type, dials down the clownishness he excels at, and Cailey Fleming comes off the best, gamely tossing any "cute-kid" shenanigans to survive this zombie of a movie. 

But, one of the big selling points of the movie is the list of star-voices for the Imaginary Friends. It's quite impressive looking at the list: besides Gossett, there's Steve Carell and Phoebe Waller-Bridge with the more prominent roles, plus Awkwafina, Emily Blunt, George Clooney, Bradley Cooper, Matt Damon, Bill Hader, Richard Jenkins, Keegan-Michael Key, Blake Lively, Sebastian Maniscalco, Christopher Meloni,** Matthew Rhys, Sam Rockwell, Maya Rudolph, Amy Schumer, Allyson Seeger and Jon Stewart. That would all be great...if anybody really registered as distinctive personalities. As it is, everybody comes and goes so fast that there really isn't any time to register who they are and how those voices related to the characters they play. They don't. For all the personality they bring to the roles they could have just had Frank Welker do all of them—and given Welker's versatility it would probably be an improvement.

Reynolds, Fleming and Gossett's Lewis interview Wall•e...er, uh, Jon Stewarts's Robot

(not that you could tell)

It's a bit like the trick John Huston played with his mystery film of The List of Adrian Messenger, where big A-lister guest stars were scattered in disguise around the movie to see if audiences could guess if they could see them. A nice gimmick, that. But, the real reason to do it was to draw audiences to a movie that only boasted George C. Scott as its lead actor. Here, they're just padding the resumé.

And it results in one of those little things that's emblematic of IF's problems. There is a running gag (more of a stumbling gag...) where Reynolds' Cal keeps tripping over an invisible IF named "Keith." He trips. Yells "KEITH!" After he does it the first time, Cal muses "What kind of a kid comes up with an invisible IF???" And they do the joke again...and again...and again. If you miss the first one, you don't get the rest of them.

 

To top that off, when they're running the credits (which I noticed people stayed through to figure out who's voice was what) at the end of the IF voices, Brad Pitt is listed as the voice of "Keith." Even though...he never says anything throughout the entire movie.*** It would be tempting to say that, like Keith, IF has no "there" there, but some things do work, just not enough to make a movie that's more than only "surface" deep, merely gets by, and certainly doesn't have the resonance of its Pixar betters.

 

Jon Krasinski has done some good work in the past. But, here he bunts and expects it to be a home run. Now, that's imaginary.  

 

Oh, and how is IF like a good bed-time story? Because I was fighting sleep the entire movie.

* Oh, there's an epiphany, but if you don't see it coming a mile away, then you should have your movie-watching credentials revoked (or your movie-chain club card). Oh, and it's a steal from M. Night Shymalan.

Surprise Ending once, Shame on You. Surprise Ending Repeated, Shame on Me.
 

**  ♪Chung-Chung♪

 

*** The same joke was played when Brad Pitt played an invisible character in Deadpool 2. 

It's Complicated

Written at the time of the film's release...

"Karma is the Ultimate Bitch in this One"
or,
If You Can't Stand the Hot-Flash, Get Out of the Kitchen.

It's refreshing to see a movie about a mature couple of advanced age—mine—dealing with post break-up issues. I just wish they weren't being so immature while doing it.

Jane Adler (Meryl Streep) is reaching a transition point in her life—approaching "empty nester" age: her oldest daughter Lauren (Caitlin Fitzgerald) is engaged to Harley (John Krasinski), middle daughter Gabby (Zoe Kazan) is moving out of the house, and youngest, Luke (Hunter Parrish) is graduating from college. Her ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin) is now married to young "Ms. Thang" Agness (Lake Bell), with an inherited son (from her last affair), Pedro (Emjay Anthony). She has decided that she's going to expand her nest...er, house so she can have "the kitchen she's always dreamed of;" she runs a salonish bakery, and she can cook (second movie this year—Julie & Julia from Nora Ephron, this one from Nancy Meyers, both of whom seem to be trying to keep Streep in the kitchen).
Youngest son's graduation pulls the whole family together in New York, with Jake "flying solo" due to family illness. Once there, the two old marrieds hook up, and once Jane is tanked, there occurs a "once more for old times' sake" canoodling that leaves him satisfied and her vomiting.

Most guys would take that as a sign, but not Jake. Soon, he's spending too much time at Jane's, telling his ex-wife that his current wife doesn't understand him, and while it may seem like sweet revenge for Jane, she's also creeped out by it, so much so that she won't tell the kids, and allows it to interfere with a budding romance with her architect (Steve Martin). Now, maybe I've been watching too many "Nature" shows on elephants lately, but I could have used David Attenborough to explain this mating ritual to me.

Maybe it's that Martin and Baldwin are playing the roles the other should have taken: Martin's love interest is a deferential, shell-shocked divorcee with a manner that reminded me of Charlie Ruggles, and Baldwin's in full pursed lips obnoxious priss mode (without the "30 Rock" irony) that makes his character not so much funny as alarming. And Streep, consummate pro that she is, works the material for all its worth, fluttering and kvelling and kvetching, making Jane seem two pastries shy of a brunch. There are times when there seems to be some acknowledgment of time—Jane is constantly fanning herself, as if caught in a hot-flash, but the next instant she's giggling like Juno.

The one guy who seems to be doing something interesting is John Krasinski, as the not-yet husband who finds he's baby-sitting his future in-laws, and is the only one who seems to rise above the material to be doing something interesting—interesting and funny. As the only fully-informed character in the cast, he manages to convey the screwball nature of the situation, acting as the surrogate audience, eyes widening with each embarrassing compromise. He makes Meyers the director—with her sledge-hammer reaction shots and uneven pacing seem far more successful than she is.

DC League of Super-Pets

It's International Dog Day...and we're in kind of "dog days" at movie theaters...so...this...

The Secret Life of Secret Identity Pets (They Wear Masks...and They Fight Crime!!!)

or

"You Know Nothing Until You've Drunk From the Cold Steel Tube of POWER!"

 

So, discriminating comic-book readers—and I mean DISCRIMINATING comic-book readers—fall into the Marvel camp and the DC camp (All the others don't matter because we're talking about "discriminating"). They are COMIC-BOOKS, but the "truefans" treat them very seriously. Deadly seriously. Because they're guys...and they're TOUGH guys who wouldn't be caught DEAD reading the rival company comic book. So, they don't want to hear that Marvel comics are soap-operas with powers and tights—not too far afield from Stan Lee's True Romance writing (did you ever stop to think that Peter Parker having two girlfriends fighting over him was basically "Archie"?). And DC Comics are wimpy because, well, they're more adolescent (until Frank Miller showed up) and because they have things like super-pets.*

 

Yeah. DC has had "super pets" since the "Silver Age" of Comics. Superman (and Superboy) had Krypto, the Super-dog (and Beppo, the Super-Monkey). Supergirl had Streaky, the super-cat and Comet, the Super-horse (about which we don't say too much). The Atom had Major Mynah. Aquaman had Topo the octopus and Storm the seahorse (in his cartoon series, as well as the comics).

And Batman had Ace, the Bat-hound. Who used to wear a mask. Because he had a secret identity or something. Oh, you laugh now. But, hipster British writer Grant Morrison topped that when he created a character called "Bat-cow."

Bat-cow does not appear in DC League of Super-Pets.** Nor does Beppo, or Streaky, or Comet (or Cupid), or Topo, or Storm...not even Detective Chimp. But, Ch'p does. You know. Ch'p, the squirrel Green Lantern—he's called "Chip" now (and voiced by Diego Luna). And "Merton" (voiced by Natasha Lyonne!) the speedster turtle from the Zoo Crew, a "funny animal" version of DC heroes, that starred Captain Carrot. I am not making this up.

But, the leads for DCLOSP are Krypto (Dwayne Johnson) and Ace (Kevin Hart), the World's Furriest (re-teaming from Central Intelligence). Plus, there's a pig (Vanessa Bayer ), who for some sexist misogynist reason is associated with Wonder Woman (Jameela Jamil). What, we're looking for logic here? It's a cartoon about super-animals, fer Rao's sake! And it's not canon! In fact, it's a toy commercial.

 

But, I digress...

DCLOSP picks up where every good's children's cartoon should start—with the destruction of an entire planet and race of people. Yeah, they "do" Krypton again, and it's amusing that Superman's parents, Jor-El (Alfred Molina, not even attempting Brando...that's restraint) and Lara (Lena Headey), wear glowing white suits like the first Christopher Reeve movie (they even use John Williams' "Krypton Theme" here). It seems that Jor-el's dog Krypto hitched a ride in that Krypton arc and, like his master Clark Kent (John Krasinski), gained super-powers (I live under a yellow sun and I never got super-powers...not even a lousy "S" t-shirt!). 

And they're the best of buddies...except for one nagging detail—I use the word "nagging" because it's Lois Lane (Olivia Wilde). Jor-el didn't like her in "The Donner Cut" of Superman II, and Krypto IS his dog, after all, loyal way past death. Well, Clark and Lois are getting kind of serious, and Krypto, in his doggy way, knows that three's a crowd (if not a kennel) and he won't be getting bed-privileges anymore. Naturally, he's ready to concede that pecking orders are overrated and he will be happy to have Lois in his life because...two masters, right? 

Not!

Where's a super-villain when you need him to upset the status quo? Fortunately, Lex Luthor—while not busy "fixing" voting machines and stacking the courts and raising pharmaceutical prices...and...lobbying—is working on a nefarious plot: to use his ultra-powerful tractor beam to capture an asteroid made of (wait for it) "orange kryptonite." "Orange kryptonite?" What does that do? Turn you into a pillar of granules like "Tang?" No, Lex has it in his follicle-disadvantaged head—Chris Rock, don't make a joke!—that orange kryptonite gives you Earth-folks super-powers (maybe because of all that Vitamin-C!) and is determined to capture it. Well, the Justice League—Keanu Reeves voices Batman, which is just precious—prevents it, but it doesn't stop a former LexCorps test-animal, a guinea-pig named Lulu (Kate McKinnon, having a good, manic time)—now relegated to an animal shelter because of her bad attitude—from capturing a shard of orange K with her own tractor beam, thus giving her (bwa-ha-ha) super-powers.

It also affects that list of shelter animals mentioned previously and they all pack-up with a de-powered Krypto (someone put green kryptonite in his flea-and-tick collar) to make everything all right for Truth, Justice, and The Never-Ending Battle Against Dander. Nothing to sneeze at! By the end, all the super-powered pets have teamed up with super-humans and everybody lives fuzzily ever after. Even Wonder Woman and her pig.

Look, I wasn't fond of The Secret Life of Pets, and this is merely that movie with super-powers although some of the "in" jokes are kinda funny. The meta-acknowledgment of a required "training montage" is a nice touch (although it's not that prevalent). At one point, Lex Luthor crows to the captive Justice League: "I had my office turned into a rocket-ship! All the billionaires have one!" To which Batman replies "It's true. They do." That's almost as good as the pregnant pause in the middle of a confrontation where Batman blurts "I miss my parents..." or when he rejects having a canine partner by growling "I always work alone...except for Robin. And Alfred. And Commissioner Gordon. And that guy Morgan Freeman plays." This Batman isn't very self-aware.

My favorite joke comes when Ace (the Bat-hound with a mask, remember) trying to take the starch out of Krypto's cape supposes that his "dooky" doesn't stink. "My dooky doesn't stink," replies Krypto. "It smells more like sandalwood." Which, when your Master is The Big Blue Boy Scout, of course it does!

 

Those moments created some respite. But, don't take my opinion. The true test if an animated film works is with an audience of children (which is how I saw it). These kids could not keep still, running up and down the aisle, changing seats, running up and down the aisle, asking for a sugar IV drip, running up and down the aisle. It's like they wanted to do anything else than watch this movie and I couldn't blame them. I have scene films where the kids sat in rapt attention and didn't want to leave even when the film ended—E.T. and The Black Stallion come to mind—but this discriminating nest of rugrats wasn't "buying" any of it.

 

Personally, I blame the Snyderverse. This is why we can't have nice superheroes anymore...

"C'mon, Krypto," says Zack. "Let's see more of a snarl."

 

* We don't talk about Groot and Rocket Raccoon because they're soo bad-ass.

 

** The company name is actually IN the title, which tempts me to © it.

Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness

The Mother of All Evil

or

Night of the Walking Stranges

 

Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is not having a good night. In another of those loopy dimensions he goes into every so often that tumble and disorient you, he is trying to get to a mysterious glowing pedestal that will solve all of their problems. 

 

They? Yeah, he has with him a 'tween (Xochitl Gomez) in a star-patched jeans jacket, who supposedly has powers but currently is just having issues keeping her feet. They are being pursued by some "thing" or other (standard Marvel description: "it sure is BIG!") and Strange is hanging on by his pony-tail (he has a pony-tail?) in the fight and makes the decision to sacrifice the kid's powers in order to tray and get them out of it. Woops, bad move. It doesn't work and Strange is killed and the kid gets thrown into another Universe and it looks like the movie, Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, is over before it even gets started.

 

Damn "in media res," anyway! 

No, sorry. It was all just a terrible dream. Yeah. He's a wizard. They don't just have "dreams." Something's going on, and it's not until the good doctor attends the wedding of former flame Dr. Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams), which is a real nightmare for him, that he begins to think there might be something more to this. Christine cuts him down a peg or two by telling him "You always have to be the one with the knife" (which will have some significance later on), and then the reception is crashed by a one-eyed octopus causing a ruckus out in the streets of NYC.

Strange and the Earth's Sorcerer Supreme Wong (Benedict Wong) do battle with the thing and dang if the focus of cycloptopus is the 'tween in a star-patched jeans jacket whose name is America Chavez—this creates a synaptic issue whenever someone says "We've got to save America" and I think we're about to see some canvassing of neighborhoods. A post-octopicide talk with America reveals that she's from another part of the multi-verse, another dimensional version of our space-time, and her super-power is that she can travel between those dimensions, with, she confesses, little control about where she ends up—GPS being on the fritz or something. Strange deja vu's that this was the kid from his dream and they find the body of the other-dimensional Strange and the strange doctor concludes that "dreams are merely windows into our multi-versal selves." Before they can question whether that has been peer-reviewed, they discover markings on the calamari shards of the creature, which are recognized as rune markings and Strange decides to visit another Marvel mage, Wanda Maximus (Elizabeth Olsen), former Avenger, who has been going through her own crises on "Wandavision."

At this point, the exposition should stop or it'll turn as spoilery as Strange's spell in Spider-man: No Way Home. Leave it that things get complicated and that the opening to other Earths and other existences provide motivations, certainly to issues that remain unresolved, and complications. To its credit, the movie does a good enough job of expositioning that you don't feel you HAVE to have seen "Wandavision" or subscribe to Disney+. We get to meet a couple of other distinctive Strange's, another Wanda, a planet that has their own sort of Avengers called The Illuminati (which contains some giddiness-inducing fan-service of what comprises that group and who they are portrayed by—just don't get attached), and there's a marvelously done scene—reminiscent of Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse—that has Strange and America portaling through meta-verse after meta-verse that is marvelously creative for the 45 seconds or so that it lasts.

The best thing about the movie, though, is that director Sam Raimi is back. No, he didn't do the first one— did that—but Raimi did the first three live-action Spider-man movies and basically wrote the template for the Marvel movies, which they would do well to study if they want to make films of innovation and energy. 

It's apparent very early in the film that his style is missed—his movies, be they action or horror, always had a delirious edge to them that would invoke responses of either horror or humor, a cinematic glee embedded in their mise en scène and montage. It's an added zhuzh to the proceedings, just a propulsive nudge with a wink, a comedic snap, that other Marvel movies just don't have. It's at once an acknowledgment of the goofiness behind the super-hero concept (and that we should take it SO seriously), while also trying to push the peril and make it visceral (so that we DO take it seriously).

It's a hold-over from Raimi's origins in horror (as is a cameo from Bruce Campbell!) where the purpose is to make the "horrible" entertaining, but not so entertaining that you dismiss the darkness and the threat that the film-maker means to describe. You can have the "giggle", but it's better that you have it after a jolt, the directorial "gotcha" rewarded by the communal admission that the audience is vulnerable ("yeah I'm only human—you got me") and can be won over. 

Every movie—every theater-piece—is like that. It's a battle to win over the audience. And one can do that either by playing it safe with fan-service (and this movie is guilty of that, certainly) or by challenging—not placating—the audience in order to win its respect. Raimi is still very much of that old school (oh, he'd hate that term!) and after his box-office disappointments with Spider-Man 3 and Oz The Great and Powerful, he hasn't had a feature film made and released for 9 years. And as much as I trashed those movies, I have to say, it's good to have him back.

For all the plot contrivances, and the attempts to gin up emotional drama, DrS&MOM (oh, that's funny...) is a good ride where you don't think about those things while you're being manipulated so well. It helps that Elizabeth Olsen is a scary-good actor and that there's a good cast of great thesp's lending support all along the way.

 

It's a big improvement over the first one.

"Eyes will pop out of your brain...when you're Strange"

Leatherheads

Written at the time of the film's release...

That Sunday Night Feeling

A director's got to love a project...I mean, really love it... before they devote two to three years of their life, and millions of dollars to it. Maybe the incentive is financial, maybe it's prestige, or getting something someone else wants. But you have to wonder what George Clooney saw in Leatherheads, his "football at the dawn of the pro's" movie. It can't have been financial, although there would probably be a number of ticket-buyers who would go see him or Renee Zellweger in anything. I'm sure there wasn't a bidding war on it, and the studios tend to thumb their noses at "period pictures" (although that's all Clooney's directed so far) because they cost more than a modern-day movie. But Clooney can make any movie he wants as long as he's in front of the camera.

Why this?

Maybe it's a love of football, or the time-frame when liquor sales were banned and speakeasy's were the black-market--when the country was suffering and needed heroes, and when nobody looked twice if you broke the rules...because there weren't any. College football was the game, and pro-football was only for those lugs who never grew up. We believed in heroes hook, line and sinker, and didn't question anything. Life was tough enough. Was that it? Or does Clooney just get his jollies pulling off a movie-trick like making you believe you're really watching a movie set in the '30's, down to the cars, the wardrobe, and the fast way with lines that makes you realize you missed a joke two lines back on the way to the capper. Is it a tribute to Hawks? What is this amiable mutt of a movie?

It works, of course, because Clooney is a good director who's willing to stretch and teach at the same time. He's an artistic director who pulls things off like comic timing and the way a joke is told just by the way it's framed and by the stillness of the thing. He's a director of grace notes that linger because it would just be too sad to waste that held moment that might define a character or make a third-string player a second-string player, and he loves his cast--he knows that the best part of John Krasinski is he's got the wide open face of Gary Cooper hiding something, and he knows that Renee Zellweger should only be doing comedy, pinch-faced or not, because she looks like a kewpie-doll but she's got an iron spine and a zinger of a talent for timing--she's our Jean Arthur.

Or maybe because it's just another in a string of movies about people who do what they have to because it's their nature, and even if they take a flyer, it's worth it because they wouldn't have it any other way, no matter the cost. Because to not do it, would mean compromising their soul. Whether its Danny Ocean, or Edward R. Murrow, or Chuck Barris, or Michael Clayton, or Bob Barnes or Dodge Connelly. Or George Clooney. You do it because its yours to do. And you don't want to wake up on Monday morning knowing you missed your chance.

It's when you know you've grown up.