There’s a very dry “2010s” visual aesthetic that defines a lot of newish heady sci-fi. That kind of IKEA showroom sterility that shows up in, say, Amy Adams’ immaculate living room in “Arrival” or any number of of “Black Mirror” episodes. You know what it looks like: cavernous rooms with untouched hardwood floors and abstract furniture that looks unblemished by a human buttocks. Maybe there’s a lab set with sliding glass doors and an LED touchscreen. This is the case in Alex Garland’s directorial debut “Ex Machina” and it’s definitely the case in his follow up, “Annihilation.”

But while the antiseptic quality of other recent science fiction outings is usually unremarked upon set dressing, the excruciating cleanliness of “Annihilation” feels like an important narrative feature. Our occasional glimpses at the home life of biology professor/grieving Army widow Lena (Natalie Portman) are deafening in their emptiness. The bars of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s ‘Helplessly Hoping’—implied to be Lena and her husband’s “song”—drifts through barren hallways from unseen Bluetooth speakers. Even the film’s brief scenes of physical intimacy feel oddly sexless. It’s not exactly subtle, but these snapshots of Lena’s soured domestic bliss are an effective contrast to the overgrown and unpredictable nature of “Annihilation’s” primary setting, the mysterious Area X.

While based on the initial entry in novelist Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy, “Annihilation” doesn’t feel like the perfunctory adaptation it otherwise might have been. Garland’s film version veers wildly from its source material, which feels appropriate for a movie about standing unbowed in the face of the unknown and unknowable. In a nutshell, the plot of both film and book follows a five-woman team of specialists as they journey into an otherworldly environmental disaster zone where biology and physics have gone wrong. Portman’s Lena volunteers, hoping it’ll offer answers to the inexplicable reappearance of her husband (Oscar Isaac) and his ensuing illness. The previous teams that attempted to investigate the growing blight of Area X never returned and each member of the party has their own reasons for joining what is ostensibly a suicide mission.

Eventually, what you’d expect to happen in a movie called “Annihilation” happens. Radios and compasses prove unreliable. Tensions run high. There’s gruesome snuff film footage in an abandoned military base. The size of the expedition steadily gets smaller. Garland’s film is definitely in the same vein as haunted house sci-fi pillars like “Aliens” but here the goal is to unsettle rather than outright scare the audience. The film populates Area X with a variety of freaky flora and fauna, from a pair of lithe otherworldly deer to an albino alligator with blender-like teeth to a skeletal grizzly bear that makes familiar human screams. “Annihilation” posits these movie monsters as mindless symptoms of the film’s central antagonist, Area X itself. There’s no malice when a helpless linguist is dragged away to her doom, only a terrifying new ecosystem playing out like a vaporwave nightmare edit of a “Planet Earth” episode. When Portman or a teammate blows away a visually stunning CG creature with automatic rifle fire, it’s cathartic, but never triumphant. The film’s stunning visuals are its strongest asset, a prismatic house of horrors with only locked doors.

The human stars of “Annihilation” play second-fiddle to the movie’s funhouse mirror garden of eden but still shine through the unnatural weeds and vines. Jennifer Jason Leigh, as the amoral psychologist heading up the mission, parlays her trademark sneering viciousness into an unreadable and unnerving pokerface as she leads her team into alien oblivion. Tessa Thompson and Swedish actress Tuva Novotny both avail themselves admirably as scientists, but the real scenestealer here is Gina Rodriguez as the tough but friendly Anya. There’s something remarkably satisfying in watching the star of CW’s “Jane the Virgin” chew scenery as a Colonel Kurtz-style maniac and her eventual breaking point torture of her teammates is excruciating to behold. Portman herself is never as intriguing as her on-screen colleagues but delivers a solid, fairly nuanced performance nevertheless. She shines most when playing off her unwitting coworkers’ fraying wits or in her fleeting moments with Isaac’s no-first-name-given Kane.

Still, Portman’s Lena is the lens through which we view “Annihilation.” The film ultimately boils down a woman torn between the comfort of a stolen past and her uncertain but looming future. Garland draws plenty of visual parallels between the ever-growing Area X and the cancerous cells Lena studied as an academic. Lena is a woman in crisis and Earth is a planet in crisis, each unable to return to what they were before. It’s safe to say “Annihilation” isn’t the kind of smart sci-fi movie interested in a tidy finish, only the inevitability of an ending.

“Annihilation,” directed by Alex Garland, is now playing.

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“Who is Tonya Harding?” is the unspoken question at the heart of director Craig Gillespie’s darkly comic biopic, depicting the rise—and very public fall—of the two-time Olympic figure skater more renowned for her involvement in a 1994 assault on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan than her considerable professional accomplishments. Is she the ice skating super-villain the media would lead you to believe? A victim of devastating circumstances? The bruised soul searching of “I, Tonya” ultimately leans toward sympathy for its subject, zeroing in on the unfortunately very ordinary cycles of abuse that would come to define Harding’s personal and professional life.

“I, Tonya” is first and foremost an Oscar vehicle for star Margot Robbie, whose sheer screen presence lit up the back half of “The Wolf of Wall Street” and was enough to make “Suicide Squad” at least morbidly watchable. Robbie inhabits Tonya Harding from age 16 to 47, flashing between braces and a feathered perm as teenager to bad skin and weight-adding prosthetics for her modern day incarnation. It’s the kind of big performance this sort of biopic demands. She’s joined for a series of framing device testimonials by Sebastian Stan as Harding’s abusive ex-husband Jeff Gillooly and Allison Janney as Harding’s chain-smoking mother LaVona. These testimonials are one of the more novel inventions of “I, Tonya,” which reenact real interviews recorded for the film. It’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re watching beautiful celebrities slumming it as aging, working-class losers in these segments but Robbie, Janney, and Stan are all talented enough performers that their occasional presence as talking heads never overstays its welcome.

The Tonya-Jeff-Mom triumvirate of “I, Tonya” is central to the film’s hard focus on Harding’s lifelong exposure to abuse, gradually morphing from her mother’s calculated stage mom cruelty to the casual physical assaults that come to define Tonya’s glue trap marriage to Gillooly. It’s a credit to everyone involved that the on-screen violence against women in “I, Tonya” never feels exploitative (even Kerrigan’s story-mandated knee injury via telescoping baton is implied rather than explicitly shown). Janney, whose performance as LeVona is garnering deserved best supporting actress buzz, portrays the elder Harding with borderline cartoonish iciness as she berates her daughter’s performances, calls her names, and tosses chairs around. It’s an over-the-top performance that really only works because Janney’s entertainingly mean LeVona is never given a pass for a lifetime of shit parenting.

Stan, most famous as Chris Evans’ sidekick-turned-murder machine frenemy Bucky Barnes in the Captain America movies, plays the caterpillar-lipped Gillooly as a kind of dopey stock Coen Brothers movie loser whose hair trigger temper threatens to pop off at any moment. Harding and Gillooly’s on-again/off-again relationship is one of the only truly three dimensional elements of “I, Tonya,” with sucker punches and angry slurs from Gillooly punctuating the couple’s rare moments of down-and-out domestic bliss. Gillooly is the kind of abusive husband rarely seen on-screen, a rail thin Ned Flanders type whose outward harmlessness is an “aw gosh” mask for truly scary monstrousness.

When it comes to Tonya herself, Robbie’s performance is by necessity much harder to pin down. Between cigarette drags, Tonya refuses responsibility for the avalanche of nightmares that defines her at-home and professional lives. When an enraged Harding throws a skate at soft-spoken/tough love mentor/coach Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson) after a botched routine, talking head modern day Tonya reflexively exclaims, “that wasn’t my fault.” Later, Harding matter of factly suggests that a distraught, under-investigation-by-the-FBI Gillooly kill himself from behind a locked hotel room door. These are shocking moments and we as the viewer are forced to reckon with the thick emotional callouses Harding’s grown after decades of abuse, the toll that takes on even an ordinary human life.

Tonya Harding didn’t actually attack Nancy Kerrigan, the movie emphasizes, but it also never completely spells out how much she knew about the plot to intimidate Kerrigan paid for by her ex-husband-turned-manager. “I mean, come on!” an exasperated Harding begs the viewer. “What kind of friggin’ person bashes in their friend’s knee? Who would do that to a friend?”

With its breakneck pace, looped bar jukebox soundtrack, and fourth-wall-shattering addresses to the audience, there’s a slight, winky slickness that pervades “I, Tonya.” Gillespie’s direction and a script from longtime romcom screenwriter Steven Rogers (“Hope Floats,” “Kate & Leopold”) err toward heart-pumping music-driven skate routines that break up breathless “and then this happened” montages in an attempt to summarize the breadth and width of Harding’s life story in a single movie. “I, Tonya” is, as a result, often slight in its otherwise nuanced depiction of a complex figure.

That superficial sheen is at least somewhat appropriate, however: Figure skating is, after all, built on the immaculate artifice of routine and “I, Tonya” hinges on the foul-mouthed, dirt poor Harding’s seemingly endless struggle to present herself as the kind of family friendly ice princess judges award gold medals. Reminders of class are ever-present in “I, Tonya”—from Harding and Gillooly’s awkwardly adult-supervised first date at an all-you-can-eat buffet to Harding’s hunched over evenings sewing her own costumes and ZZ Top-scored skate routines—and suggest that the Kerrigan incident was the long-awaited excuse the perpetually nose-upturned pro skating world needed to banish square peg Harding from their uniformly circular ranks. “I, Tonya” is a tragedy, never more so when it emphasizes Harding’s futile attempts to find love and acceptance—from her mother, from her husband, from the world—that will never be returned.

So who is Tonya Harding—world famous athlete, ‘90s pop culture boogiewoman, and imperfect victim—at end of film’s two-hour-plus run time? “I, Tonya” never sits still quite long enough to give us a totally satisfying answer, but it does cut through the corny late night show jokes and 24 hour news cycle demonization just deep enough to make us question our own culpability in Tonya Harding’s now-faded notoriety. Like the film’s subject, “I, Tonya” doesn’t ever reach its fabled potential for greatness but—as beautifully captured in Robbie-as-Harding’s final bloody lipped “fuck ‘em” during a post-career celebrity boxing match—you at least have to admire its tenacity.

“I, Tonya” directed by Craig Gillespie, is now playing at The Charles Theatre.

The post “I, Tonya” re-examines the crime scene of a celebrity life appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

The unique appeal of “The Room”—a disorienting and stilted tale of lust, betrayal, and emotionally charged games of tuxedo football—is best described as “if somebody made a David Lynch film completely by accident.” Director Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 self-financed labor of love is almost mesmerizingly watchable, a parade of ill-advised cinematic left turns: Pointless philosophical conversations between leads Johnny (Wiseau) and his best friend-turned-surfer-dude-personal-Judas Mark (Greg Sestero) on an obviously fake apartment complex rooftop punctuated by bizarre subplots that come and go without payoff and an excruciating marathon of the most cringe-inducing sex scenes imaginable outside of late night Cinemax.

Given its cinematic half-life—on the fringe of public consciousness as a staple of Friday night college dorm room viewings and midnight movie screenings—it feels inevitable that somebody would adapt Sestero’s hilarious memoir, 2013’s “The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made,” documenting his decades-long friendship with Wiseau and the making of “The Room” from script to screen. That the “somebody” to do it is one-time Academy Award nominee/occasional celebrity nuisance James Franco, who both directs, produces, and stars as Wiseau, is a little more surreal.

“The Disaster Artist” could have easily been a very by-the-numbers biopic in another life and the script from screenwriter duo Michael Weber and Scott Neustadter (“The Spectacular Now,” “Pink Panther 2”) certainly dips into its fair share of “based on a true story” cliches. For one, we probably didn’t need a scene where a minor character all but looks directly at the camera to explain that Tommy’s script shows how he feels victimized by the world.

Thankfully, the actual film is suitably weird and intriguing in its choices. Franco, a talented leading man usually resigned to charming scumbags, disappears into the role of the mumbling, sulking Wiseau in a way that is at times eerie. Franco threads the needle gracefully, keeping his performance funny without delving into a cruel impression as he delivers heavily accented lines—Tommy’s obviously from somewhere in Europe but claims to be an American from New Orleans or “newwarrlins” —and steps into the director’s signature baggy cargo pants. The profound humanity Franco gives the director is easily “The Disaster Artist’s” biggest saving grace, refusing to shy away from Wiseau’s casual abuse of both Sestero and his film crew but zeroing in on a lonely outsider’s desperate need for approval from a cosmically indifferent Hollywood.

When an aggressively overeager Wiseau is dressed down by a big shot movie producer (a cameoing Judd Apatow) after interrupting his dinner at an expensive restaurant, your heart breaks with him: You know from the second the stardom-hungry Wiseau sees his shot that no one on the L.A. celebrity food chain is going to tolerate his schtick and he’ll walk away utterly humiliated. Wiseau may be just another aggrieved rich white guy mad at the world for not giving him what he feels entitled to, but you find yourself admiring his clueless fearlessness, whether he’s dancing like a jackass at a nightclub or demanding that an alley scene be shot on an obviously fake set instead of an actual nearby alley.

“The Disaster Artist” wisely grounds itself in the relationship between Wiseau and Sestero, played by Franco’s brother Dave Franco. The younger Franco is not only a talented actor in his own right (see last year’s slept-on 15 minutes in the future thriller “Nerve”) but the decision to cast actual brothers as Wiseau and Sestero gives their messy, odd friendship a crucial lived-in dimension, from their awkward first meeting in a San Francisco acting workshop to the seemingly endless limo ride to the premiere of “The Room.”

Franco’s film nails the rough edges of Wiseau’s bizarre pseudo-mentorship of the much younger Sestero, like his intensely guarded privacy about his wealth and ethnic background or his abrupt invitation to share a previously unmentioned one bedroom apartment with him in Los Angeles. As the traditionally handsome Sestero finds some small semblance of success with bit part TV auditions and a bartender girlfriend, Franco’s Wiseau lashes out at his self-appointed protégé for finding the success that he knows will always be out of reach for someone who looks him.

This back and forth—the earnestly grateful but embarrassed Sestero shouldering more and more of Wiseau’s verbal barbs and public outbursts—is the emotional center of “The Disaster Artist” as they go from friends to filmmakers. Their emotional foosball game finally hits a breaking point as Wiseau callously forces Sestero choose between their movie and a potentially career-making guest spot on “Malcolm in the Middle,” Wiseau’s cruelty punctuated by his mocking insistence that the show is called “Little Malcolm.” The resulting extreme close up on Sestero as a crewperson shaves off the beard he needs to book the “Malcolm” gig is a quietly devastating little moment in a film that’s largely a comedy. Wiseau’s slow but steady alienation of the only person who truly believes in him, seemingly the first person to reach out and embrace him for who he is, is the mini-tragedy of the heart of “The Disaster Artist.”

“The Disaster Artist” feels less like an attempt at biographical realism and more like a streamlined creation myth for “The Room.” The aforementioned fateful “Malcolm” gig or Wiseau’s revelatory viewing of “Rebel Without A Cause” that serves as the inspiration for “The Room’s” famous “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” line are obviously fabricated or exaggerated, but they give the proceedings a larger-than-life weight.

Notably, “The Disaster Artist” is full of bit parts and cameos from everyone from Hannibal Burress and Bryan Cranston (here playing himself circa 2002) to Sharon Stone and all three comedian hosts of the “How Did This Get Made?” bad movie podcast. On paper, this would be distracting; but in practice, the sea of recognizable celebrities playing nobodies act as a kind of Hollywood Greek chorus to the tragedy that is the making of “The Room”—a constant on-screen reminder of the traditional fame that eludes Wiseau and Sestero. That one-hit wonders like Corona’s ‘The Rhythm of the Night’ and Rick Astley’s immortal ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ are heavily featured on the soundtrack also feels significant in a film about making peace with celebrity infamy.

Hard-fought blood, sweat, and tears success stories showcasing the indomitable human spirit in the face of adversity are a dime a dozen in Hollywood, so it’s fitting that “The Disaster Artist” is an ode to the undeniably American story of a strange, aggressively unpleasant man failing so badly at his corny dream that he falls ass backwards into his own kind of fame.

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