If Kimmy Schmidt went surfing

The Shallows

Crit

She's (spoiler alert) alive, dammit! It's a miracle! Nancy Adams (Blake Lively) is a female who is strong as hell, and also resourceful as hell in this marriage of the horror movie villain introduced by Steven Spielberg 41 summers ago to the timeless horror movie trope of the woman menaced by a malevolent and, let's face it, supernatural force.

The great white is basically the same one we met in Jaws, with the same intelligence and the same strategy of attacking the machines and other devices by which its tormentors, aka lunch, are tenuously clinging to survival.

A less obvious association is 127 Hours; in both, nature, before showing its red-in-tooth-and-stone hand, is majestic and . . . not gentle, but essentially benign. The feeling is different here, though, because even before GW shows up, we get the underwater Jaws shots and ominous musical cues as Nancy surfs, literally and figuratively immersing herself.

Later, stranded on a rock and unable to summon help from shore, Nancy does what she can, and that's enough, as she employs plenty of brain and more brawn than the shark expects. She is a damsel in distress, but . . . well, strong as hell.

Trailers

Bookended by Ghostbusters and Swiss Army Man trailers I'd seen before were 4 from horror, and seemingly from hunger:

• Don't Breathe--Or just don't go to this movie.
• Morgan--Or don't screw around with artificial beings.
• Lights Out--As bad an idea as not breathing.
• Ouija: Origin of Evil--With Henry Thomas (speaking of Spielberg)!

Dancing in the dark

Maggie's Plan

Cine

What a delight! A screwball comedy in structure and spirit, though there's more melancholy and less slapstick than we associate with the genre.

I don't want to spoil too much, but I can say that what seems to be the titular plan turns out not to be, and what turns out to be is so far-fetched as to tweak the cynicism of the 21st-century filmgoer. But I for one willingly suspended my cynicism; it helps to have a triangle with Greta Gerwig and Julianne Moore as 2 sides. Ethan Hawke (John) is OK, too, but let's face it: both Maggie and Georgette could do better.

And two bonuses: a transit adventure to Outer New Haven on the long-neglected D13 and D5 buses, and a joke at the expense of my employer, Yale University Press.

The name of the game

The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013)

Crit

[Narcissism alert!] In a way, Muhammad Ali and I grew up together, and in a way he helped raise me. We came to despise the war in Southeast Asia in parallel, but he taught me more about acting on your convictions, no matter the cost, than did the boys just a little older than I, who looked more like me and whose backgrounds were more like mine, who went quietly to Canada.

I remember the first Liston fight--I had no idea that Sonny Liston was a thug, but I knew Cassius Clay was a braggart, and that was a cardinal vice for my 10-year-old self, so as I listened on the radio that night (such a different me: caring about boxing, listening to the radio), I was rooting for the champ, and was distraught when he didn't answer the bell in the 8th, and then again when he was floored early in the rematch.

Like any white boy from a conservative family, I was skeptical of Clay's conversion to Islam. (Louis Farrakhan, a key talking head in the film, makes the perceptive point that in the mid-sixties, the mainstream white attitude toward Islam in the Middle East and Asia--where it belonged, Farrakhan might have said but didn't--was benign, but Black Muslims in the United States were considered violent and dangerous, whereas now African-American Muslims are mostly tolerated, but Muslims in the rest of the world are the dangerous ones.) Within a few years, though, the sincerity of his religious convictions came to be as clear as the force of his antiwar stance, and I don't remember, but I suspect that my choosing Islam as the subject of a high school report must have been inspired in part by an interest in Ali.

That's speculation, but this is not: part of who I am today, part of the way I look at the defining global challenge of our time, has to with watching Ali's public evolution from the reflective comfort of my private living room. I wonder how Donald Trump's perspective was shaped? 

Oh, so the film? Very good, affectionate but not hagiographic, and focused on the matter of the title without falling prey to tunnel vision. The most informative segment is an insider's look at how the Supreme Court's 5-3 decision to uphold Ali's conviction turned into an 8-0 vote to overturn it.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make horny

Weiner

Crit

Here's the thing (no, that's not the punchline to a joke): I'm convinced that this guy was a terrific congressman, and that he'd have been a terrific mayor. But dude: if you can't keep it in your pants, and least don't share photos of it. At one point, after the game is lost but still unconceded, Weiner reacts with righteous indignation to Lawrence O'Donnell's question on MSNBC, "What is wrong with you?" The righteous indignation is understandable from a guy who had had to answer essentially the same question a zillion times by that point, but it remains a fair question, and in fact, in a calmer context, with the filmmakers, he takes a stab at it, suggesting, reasonably, that the drive that pushes someone into politics contains a neediness for attention and affirmation that can play out in Oval Office blowjobs and Carlos Danger sexts.

Whatever, what he has lost--what he has forfeited--is enormous, but so, I think, is what New Yorkers and the Democratic Party have lost. It's Greek tragedy with a smartphone and an unsympathetic 24-7 news cycle as chorus.

A pair of ragged claws

The Lobster

Crit

Wow, emotional fascism times two. The unnamed character played by Colin Farrell, whose wife no longer loves him, checks into a hotel that specializes in pairing off the loveless or, failing that (you have 45 days, with a creepy asterisk), turning each into the animal of his or her choice.

Eventually our man escapes, only to find himself in a group of rebels wherein love, sex, and even flirtation are forbidden, with dire consequences for transgressors. There he meets an unnamed woman played by Rachel Weisz, with whom he has myopia in common, but they're insufficiently short-sighted not to notice that they look like Colin Farrell (albeit with a pot belly) and Rachel Weisz, so transgressions are pretty much inevitable, along with the dire consequences.

An absurdist comedy that turns dark as eternal night, unlike anything else I've seen, which is also true of the other Yorgos Lanthimos film I've seen, Dogtooth. Funny though, I see my last paragraph of that post fits here too:

I'll give [A. O.] Scott the last word, because it's a good word: "a creepy, funny, elegantly shot allegory of something very weird in human nature (Language? Power? Sex? Family?)."

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

Crit

Consistently hilarious, a Spinal Tap for the youngsters, and if I don't necessarily need the entire soundtrack, I may have to buy the bin Laden song, based on a joke expressed much more subtly in Annie Hall.

Trailers

• De Palma--Documentary by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, so yeah, probably.
• Kevin Hart: What Now?--Probably not.
• Nerve--Truth or Dare taken to catastrophic online extremes.