Movie review: "Mile 22"

directed by Peter Berg
written by Lea Carpenter

For years now, director Peter Berg has collaborated with Mark Wahlberg on dramas about American tragedies. Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon, and Patriots Day all took real-world events as their subject matter, with varied but generally positive critical reactions and widespread popularity. Clearly, Berg and Wahlberg have a comfortable relationship, so although the former previously failed to craft a successful summer blockbuster with 2012's Battleship, a new action film from the duo still had potential, especially given Wahlberg's continued box office success.

However, Mile 22 suggests that Berg should have stuck with what was working, as he struggles to find a story compelling enough to compensate for the lack of real-world inspiration. More importantly, the film features some shockingly bad editing, and lacks even a single visually coherent action scene, instead waiting not even a second between cuts. The basic responsibility of any action movie is to ensure the audience can follow the action, and in that sense, Mile 22 is perversely inept. Considering that fundamental failure, it hardly even matters that the film also has an unlikeable protagonist and terrible dialogue. All anyone wants from an action movie is clear, comprehensible action, and this film can't even deliver that.

Movie review: "Crazy Rich Asians"

dir. by Jon M. Chu
written by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim
A lot of the conversation around Crazy Rich Asians surrounds its cast, which is comprised almost exclusively of Asian actors. And indeed, this kind of representation is rare enough that it's worth commemorating, as Asians are so often underrepresented on the silver screen. I'm not qualified to fully discuss the significance of this film's casting, but I can say that it's a very funny, well-executed rom-com which, while covering a lot of familiar territory, finds some strong emotional grounding for its luxurious aesthetic, finding pathos through the specificity of the upper-class Asian experience.

Crazy Rich Asians never really transcends itself or steps out of the predictable, but its all-out charm offensive is irresistible, even in spite of some clunkier moments.  Films like this show Hollywood discovering that shifting the cultural context can give a fresh twist to its usual formulas, and this particular context provides two additional benefits: aside from the aforementioned Asian representation, it also gives the film an excuse to wallow in luxury porn and travelogue-style montages. All of that could have overwhelmed the film, but the story at its core is strong enough to overcome and even complement all those expensive trappings.

Movie review: "BlacKkKlansman"

THROND'S CHOICE
dir. by Spike Lee
written by Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmot, and Spike Lee

For a good while now, Spike Lee has balanced his for-hire work with much more idiosyncratic projects, every Oldboy remake or NBA 2K story mode balanced with oddities like a Chicago-set adaptation of an ancient Greek play, or a story about a man cursed with a thirst for blood. Given that recent history, BlacKkKlansman is one of his more straightforward premises, a biopic based on a particularly strange piece of history, with a lot of work already done by the premise. On the other hand, the film comes as not only Lee's first Palme d'Or competitor since 1991's Jungle Fever, but also as the winner of the second-place Grand Prix at that same festival.

Indeed, it's the relative accessibility of the film which is its greatest strength. Here, Lee has crafted a funny, tense crowd-pleaser while intertwining pointed social commentary into the humour and narrative, and the result is a film which is equally thoughtful and entertaining. The film is professional and straightforward without being mindless, and at the same time it's intelligent and righteous without being self-indulgent... well, mostly. Come for the crazy premise, stay for the sharp critique of American institutional racism.