Weekend Movie Roundup: Tenet, Moxie, Coming 2 America, Hillbilly Elegy

It's Weekend #126346823987 of the pandemic. You need some movie reviews. I have watched anything and everything. Let's do this!

Tenet: I had been jonesing to see this movie since last year when it kept flailing about for a release date and finally whimpered into video on demand. I love everything Christopher Nolan does and had high hopes, but then the reviews of this movie were so bad, and the jokes about its plot so plentiful, that I kept delaying the inevitable. But I finally sat down with it, and yup, everything I heard was true. 

The movie stars John David Washington as the Protagonist (yes, he has no actual name), a CIA agent who gets recruited by a mysterious organization called Tenet, where he learns about inverted entropy and the fact that they've discovered "inverted" objects that seems to signal a war in the future but which have arrived in the past. What follows is an extremely twisty palindrome of a movie where he teams up with various folks to stop an arms dealer from kicking off World War III, and navigates all the insane complexities of time travel and inversion. This movie reminded me of the Inception party my friend's husband threw years ago, where we watched the movie and plotted out its logic on a whiteboard. That was a joyous exercise, but in the case of Tenet, I think it would simply be frustrating. 

Once it's safe to go back to the movie theatre, I might watch this movie on the big screen. It is action-packed and set in gorgeous locales, and now that I've seen it once, maybe I'll have a better grasp on what to be looking out for to make more sense of the plot. It's so confusing, but so artful that I have to admire the audacity even as I shake my head at the execution. I didn't like what any of the actors were doing and they simply weren't compelling enough to pull off this story and keep me engaged. Also, Nolan really needs to stop delivering important exposition via characters who are completely unintelligible because they're wearing masks. But Ludwig Goransson's trippy mind-melting score and the extremely bizarre action sequences turn this into a true cinematic spectacle. This is a movie that truly suffered from not being in theatrical release, and as much as I disliked it while watching at home, I might have to consider giving it a second chance. 

Moxie: When I turned on my Netflix account and saw that a new movie directed by Amy Poehler had premiered on Netflix, I texted two college friends and we immediately set up a Zoom movie night. Poehler adapting Jennifer Matthieu's YA novel about a girl who starts a feminist zine in her high school? Sold!

The movie is exactly what you would expect if Leslie Knope directed a movie. It is terrifically earnest, deals with a lot of serious issues about sexual harassment and the way girls are treated in high school, and has a lot of rah-rah moments where you can cheer on these women for standing up to the patriarchy. Poehler plays the uber-feminist mother of the central teen character, Vivian (Hadley Robinson), who starts off as a shy wallflower but ends up leading a movement at her school. It's a great story, but it certainly all happens at a very heightened pitch, and struggles as it tries to cater to everyone and every wave of feminism. I also wasn't quite sure if this story was outdated - it seems to portray how bad things might have been a generation ago, but high schoolers have gotten a lot more woke since then, and I found it hard to imagine that there would be this much blatant harassment in schools now. Two of the actors from the Saved by the Bell reboot are in this film (Alycia Pasqual-Pena and Josie Totah) and I couldn't help thinking that show represented the current state of high school much better. 

You're probably not going to learn something new, but Moxie will certainly help to reinforce the importance of the things you knew already about how we should be treating women and young girls, that everyone comes to feminism in their own way, that women can sometimes be the most misogynistic people on the planet (Marcia Gay Harden plays the school principal and oh is she awful), and that perfect men do not exist except in fiction (Nico Hiraga plays the world's most wonderful and therefore most unbelievable high school boy in this movie). Go forth and have a pleasant afternoon demolishing the patriarchy!

Coming 2 America: I had never seen the original 1988 film, Coming to America, so my journey to the sequel involved first watching the original, then listening to the Rewatchables episode about it, before I finally watched this film. As such, it was a rapid fire introduction to the world of Zamunda and Prince Akeem (Eddie Murphy). Though given the current debacle with Meghan Markle and the British Royal Family, this certainly seems like an odd time to be caring about a story about a Black Prince.

The original movie told the story of how Akeem and his aide, Semmi (Arsenio Hall), travelled from the fictional African country of Zamunda to New York to find Akeem a wife (naturally, he figured the best place to find his future queen was in...Queens). That movie was R-rated and I found it weird and mildly problematic, although my friend Anthony and the men on the Rewatchables assured me it was eminently quotable and a beloved classic to most men who watched that movie in their formative years. The sequel is rated PG-13 and spends less time in America. Instead, the story revolves around Akeem discovering he fathered a son in Queens and he brings him back to Zamunda to be his heir as he has only fathered three daughters who cannot ascend to the throne (maybe the people of Zamunda need to watch Moxie). 

Almost everyone from the original movie returns in this sequel and it is a joyful homage to all the characters and one-liners that became so famous in 1988. Both movies are also essentially just romcoms masquerading as male comedy showcases. They both feature a quest for true love and everything else is just filler. New characters played by Jermaine Fowler, Nomzamo Mbatha, Tracy Morgan, KiKi Layne, and the always wonderful Leslie Jones liven up the piece, and there's definitely an attempt to update things for the 21st century as far as the female characters are concerned (let's just say the bathing scenes from 1988 and 2021 are all you need to watch to know exactly how things have changed). This sequel is a fitting tribute to what people love from the original and makes a valiant attempt to fix the problematic elements. It also immediately caught my eye that Ruth E. Carter was the costume designer. She won an Oscar for Black Panther, and she brings that same proud Afrofuturistic vibe to the costuming of this film. 1988 Zamunda was an awful satire of "Africa" and while the 2021 version is still regressive, it gets a complete makeover by the end and is much less cringeworthy. So watch this film if you want some light, silly entertainment, or to see what mild progress looks like over three decades. It isn't perfect, but at least it's something.

Hillbilly Elegy: This movie came out in November. I was expressly avoiding it, hoping it didn't get nominated for any major Oscars. But on Monday, Glenn Close snagged an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, which meant I had to watch this movie. The sacrifices I make for this blog.

Based on the memoir by J.D. Vance, this is the story of his upbringing in Ohio, as well as the story of his mother and her parents who were "hill people" from Kentucky. The older J.D. is played by Gabriel Basso, while his younger self is played by Owen Asztalos; his sister, Lindsay, is played by Haley Bennett; their mother, Bev, is played by Amy Adams; and her mother, Bonnie (but mostly referred to as Mamaw), is played by Glenn Close. It's a good cast, being led by director Ron Howard, but they are working with some extremely thin material, and as the movie wears on, it all becomes a bit over-the-top. They're playing into every stereotype available about white trash and rednecks, and while this is a true story about folks from rural areas who have few opportunities and are also dealing with the opioid epidemic, the performances start to veer into comedy as they spout hillbilly aphorisms that don't amount to more than a hill of beans. 

This movie made me uncomfortable. Probably because J.D. Vance makes me uncomfortable. This is very much his story, and he is out to look like the hero, but there's a lot of martyrdom being portrayed here and no real sense that we're getting anyone's side of the story aside from J.D.'s own interpretations. The whole movie hinges on his sacrifice of driving down from Yale to sort out logistics after his mother takes an overdose, but that sacrifice amounts to all of 24 hours. His sister is clearly the one who has taken on the usual woman's burden of staying behind and being the caretaker while the "man of the family" discharges his familial duties via his credit card. It's all a bit icky and paternalistic and his final actions felt almost cruel to me. But at the end of the film, when we see footage of the real Vance family, the real Mamaw is almost indistinguishable from Close and the rest of the cast look eerily like their real-life counterparts too. So, if nothing else, this movie definitely deserves that Best Hair & Makeup nomination! Otherwise, this is mostly poverty porn that isn't particularly inspiring. But if you're a "pick yourself up by your own bootstraps" kind of person, you may have found your perfect weekend movie.