Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Summer of 84 / *** (2018)

Any teenage boy who owns a pair of binoculars is destined to see himself as a private investigator. He uses them like an infallible window into the unknown, a dagger that pierces a hole through comfortable exteriors to study the inner workings of people with seedy private lives. Hitchcock used this ideology to fuel the voyeuristic tendencies of his hero in “Rear Window,” and now young Davey Armstrong adopts it while he spies shamelessly on his neighbors during the warm nights in “Summer of 84.” His first glimpse is innocent: harboring a crush on the girl next door, the lenses provide him a bird’s eye view of her upstairs bedroom, usually while she is in various stages of undress. Later, after news breaks that the disappearance of a dozen young boys in the county is linked to a single culprit, they become the instrument that will guide his quest against the cop across the street, whom he suspects may be the serial killer in question. The key difference, perhaps, is that voyeurs are content to watch without involvement., whereas Davey turns his endeavor into a quest that includes stalking the outer perimeter of a man’s house, going through the trashcans and even digging up a backyard in search of corpses.

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Marriage Story / ** (2019)

Aficionados of Noah Baumbach’s eccentric brand of hard-hitting family comedies will find themselves right at home in “Marriage Story,” the latest in his resume of accessible mainstream opuses. The rest of us would argue it could have used three key additives: a better script, more focus on the pain, and less insufferable leads. That is not to discredit or undermine the abilities of Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, who are competent in the material, but to emphasize the corner they are painted into. Here are two likable actors swimming upstream in a current that wants to drown them in detestable melodrama, and for nearly every scene they occupy shared space, we find ourselves praying for psychological intervention. They are cloying, arrogant, and deluded. Towards the middle act, well before the two come to a head in a heated exchange about unresolved feelings, they are offered advice from brutally honest lawyers as to what steps to take in maintaining custody of their young son. The more proactive argument ought to have been obvious: why do either of them deserve to supervise a goldfish, much less an impressionable kid?