Those who wish to see more of Angelina Jolie, get their wish with this (literal) blazing inferno of a movie. And why wouldn’t you want to, she is by far one of the most talented and absolutely the most devastatingly gorgeous movies stars alive. The woman can say more with an eyebrow motion than most actresses can do with a sex scene. And sure, she’s been too busy lately saving the world and all that, but in her wild/wilder younger years, these are exactly the sort of movies she did…because she’s really good in and at action.
      This isn’t a given either, there are plenty of talented actresses out there who can’t do action as Jessica Chastain has recently demonstrated in the lamentably underwhelming Ava. But Jolie can…from aerial ballets of Tomb Raider to a variety of kickass scenes from Wanted, etc. She has done a convincing spy turn including a credible accent. All those movies were oodles and oodles of fun. Which highlights the fact that this movie, while relatively similar, isn’t on the same level.
     This movie is a straight up one note thriller with Jolie playing a smokejumper haunted by a wrong spur of the moment decision a year ago that cost some young boys their lives. It wasn’t really her fault, the wind is tough to predict, honest mistake and all that, but, you know, she’s haunted to give her character dimensions. She’s still firefighting though, the only lady in a team of intrepid party loving dudes, and one day, while stuck in a observation tower as a punishment from her sheriff ex, played by America’s only one of two examples of ugly sexy that’s so popular in Europe (the other one being the mighty brooding oak tree that is Adam Driver), she encounters a frightened kid, alone and on the lam. The kid is a son of forensic accountant (the doughy Jack Weber) who has uncovered something for which one might and does get killed. This isn’t really explained, because the movie is short and A Jolie vehicle and there’s no Jolie in forensic accounting.
     Anyway, there’s now a team of the perennially oleaginous looking Aidan Gillen and a way too cute and fresh faced for this X Men mutant kid all grown up. Grown up to the extent of comically towering over Gillen, but whatever, they are both unconscionably and indiscriminately lethal in different way. But anyway, they are after the kid, Jolie is all that stands in their way…let the battle begin.
    Lots of action, lots of shooting and, of course, lots of fire. Jolie takes copious amounts of physical abuse in this movie, but her innate mamabear insticts take over (no, wait, that’s real life)…her inner goodness and desperation for redemption take over and she does her superhero best to adopt rescue the kid. 
     And that’s basically the entire movie. Entertaining for what it is, but nothing special. Nor is it a worthy enough vehicle for its star. Just gonna have to wait for Eternals to come out. Until then there is this sexy Smokey Bear movie of an ad.

​     I seldom go crazy for a tv show. To an extent of avoiding movies in favor of it. To an extent of looking forward to it in the evenings. To an extent of thinking about it when not watching it. And I certainly never expected a show  about a bunch of privileged millennials to do that to me and yet…lo and behold, Search Party. Blowing away all expectations.
   I admit, this was a random, on a whim, selection based on a generally high opinions of Alia Shawkat’s acting and comedic abilities. Well, it seems that the quirkily funny cousin Maebe is all grown up and has become positively magnetic to watch. Sure, Search Party is an ensemble thing, but make no mistake this is very much a Shawkat’s show, albeit with a surprisingly excellent supporting cast of unknowns and randos.
    The show spawns from the slightly demented and wildly amusing minds behind the Wet Hot American Summer, so that should give you some idea of what to expect, but then again…maybe not. Because Search Party does that thing tv shows (a medium almost entirely reliant on predictability) seldom does, it surprises you, over and over and over again. Every season (and there have been four so far, renewed for fifth) is its own thing in tone, mood and themes.
    It begins sure enough with a Search Party, season one is all about the gang…Shawkat’s Dory, her hirsute Ichabod of a boyfriend Drew (a ridiculously sleepily charming  John Reynolds, who looks simultaneously like a perfect hipsterish boy/almost man and also a middle aged dad in the making) and the sidekicks of a flaming gay and a ditzy blonde (you’d think these would be cliches but you’d be wrong, they are surprisingly (once again) layered…looking for someone they went to college with. They don’t mean to and don’t want to, but Dory (the driving force behind them) becomes positively obsessed with this case as a quest to give her relatively meaningless life some meaning. So the entire season is both mysterious and hilarious. It’s by far the funniest of the bunch, they get serious later, but by then you’re too hooked to mind. And it all avalanches, building up speed and momentum until a strikingly lethal ending.
     Season two gets darker as the characters deal with the ramification of their actions and perfect the art of lying. Season two is all shadows and cover ups in mood, think spy fiction.
     Season three is essentially a court drama, albeit a perversely heightened in its surrealism…think Ted Bundy’s trial. Because, of course, it isn’t just the characters who are on trial, it’s their very privilege.
     They are all some version of young, upwardly mobile, white (though technically Dory is of Iraqi descent), college educated, liberal snowflakes living in NY. They live in the 90s sitcom style oversized apartments, often with no obvious financial means of support. Dory works/worked as a personal assistant to a hilariously out of it aged out trophy wife, Drew appears to have been an unpaid intern, Portia’s a sometimes actress, their token gay friend doesn’t work and hysterically enough doesn’t want to. That’s where most of the comedy and tragedy of the show really comes in…these people have the easiest cushiest lives with barely any merit to them and they proceed to unnecessary complicate them for no good reason, slowly unraveling and erasing whatever’s inner goodness they might have had to begin with. This is most obvious with Dory (as most things, she is the lead, after all), her vehement rejection of traditional values of past generations, her drive to forge her own path that has meddled and stalled and resulted in some seriously tragic and terrible things.
  But then again, that’s the drama of it all and Search Party is by design more of a comedy, albeit a very dark comedy and one that gets progressively darker.
   Cue in season four, the punishment after the crime, albeit much in line with the show’s general mien, a very unorthodox one. Featuring a demented twink and a delectable Susan Sarandon’s guest appearance. And once again, a search party, this time to find Dory.
    Which is to say the first time they looked for someone who didn’t deserve the attention and now they are looking for someone who may not want one. Well, these search parties are well intentioned by nature, but no one said they were well advised.
    Some writer/director mindf*ckery at the end of season four and voila and presto, it’s season five ready when it might have very well ended right then and there. I’m ambivalent about that, since I do like a show that knows when to bow out with grace. Most take the outstaying their welcome  and milking the initial attraction approach. But having that been said, I wouldn’t say no to season five. Though glad to have some time in between.
If this review gives you the impression that Search Party is some sort of a scathing polemic of millennials…it isn’t. it’s nowhere nearly that simply and reductive. In fact, the characters here are more crippled that buoyed by their generational inbred (in more ways than one) specialness, privilege and self absorption and that’s what’s so fun and fresh about it. It’s about people who have been told they are special for so long, they’ve come to believe it and will do whatever it takes (lie, pretend, cheat, steal, kill) to support that notion, because they don’t know what they are without it. These kids here don’t want to grow up and NYC provides a perfect Neverland for them, a place to play at life. They prop each other up in their unfounded beliefs, because otherwise the emperor’s without clothes. It’s a lie that works if everyone buys in, the meritless specialness. And it has never been more cleverly and more subtly presented, observed and critiqued as in this show.
    And so, yeah, the unexpected surprise of Search Party, the unexpected appeal of the millennials if only as laughing stock of punching bags, there it is. That’s what it is when it’s done right. Subtler than you might expect, funnier that it would seem, infinitely more well acted than the traditional standards demand (seriously, how has Shawkat not been nominated for at least.  Golden globe for this, she’s so terrific in this and she’s essentially playing four different characters that’s how different the seasons one from one to the next) darker and certainly cleverer than what the general population might appreciate…this show is deservingly addictive. Though with short episodes (under 30 minutes) and short (10 episode) seasons it won’t steal too much of your time and it’ll be totally worth it. Search for it. Watch it. Enjoy.

​   There once was a director who liked to mess with the concept of time. Not only did he make his name on it with the ever so striking Memento, but he continued to boggle the audiences’ minds with movies like Prestige and Inception. Sure, he did straight forward ventures too, the appropriately dark Dark Knight that got Bruce Wayne just right and the war epic Dunkirk, but it seems that his passion laid with temporal disturbances and back to it he went. And made Tenet. Even the title is a palindrome that can be read in either direction. You are therefore warned...it's going to get very clever very soon. 
    The basic concept is as wild as any this mad genius of a writer/director has ever come up with, follows a secret agent who learns to manipulate the flow of time to prevent an attack from the future that threatens to annihilate the present world. And yes, that was grabbed from Wikipedia, because I might not have been able to sum it up quite so succinctly. And I may not be the only one. Because this gets explained throughout the movie numerous times by numerous characters.  Everyone’s basically going around dodging reversed bullets trying to figure out what’s going on.
   We do know the responsible party, an oligarch played by Branagh with such vicious gusto that he is positively unrecognizable in some close ups. And then there’s his wife played by the distractingly tall and surprisingly excellent Debicki. Seriously, I seem to only remember her from the ridiculous Gatsby adaptation and nothing about that movie really jumped out in a good way, but here she absolutely shines. She also towers in either stilettos or flats over everyone in the cast, she’s so strikingly tall, she appears slightly surreal (on par with the movie itself) like something from the more realistic of surreal art. The character she plays in the movie is trapped in a loveless marriage with a complex and frightening man and she is by turns devastated and devastating, desperate and dangerous. The scenes between her and Branagh are by far and away the best in the movie.
    The rest of the cast seemingly doesn’t need to do as much, because they are all too busy being action guys, bullet dodging and all. You got the teen vampire all grown up and smoldering and strangely charming and a not all that smoldering or charming or even especially charismatic lead, the unnamed Protagonist. And that, aside from Tenet’s overall muddled plot and the overindulgent length, might be the movie’s main detractor.
     John David Washington is an apple that rolled so far from his Denzel Washington papa tree, I didn’t even make the connection until afterwards. Wherein Denzel is one of the best actors of his generation with a strikingly consistent record of acting excellence, his baby boy isn’t even in the same league. Sure, he’s got the leading man good looks and he isn’t untalented as such, he just doesn’t have the screen presence to carry an entire movie. Muscles…yes, really neatly groomed facefur…yes, swagger…too much, but that’s just it, his entire game is mainly swagger. Just strutting through the scenes in designer suits like a model/actor in a music video is pretty much what he does outside of action. Not a hopeless case by any means, might one day get to be somewhere, but as of now, nowhere near on the level it requires to lead a movie like this.
   Why him? What sort of a choice was that for a director whose work normally features absolutely perfectly cast protagonists from tweaked out Guy Pearce to the stoically mesmerizing Christian Bale? No idea. And weirdly enough the movie also features  a very beefy and bearded Aaron Johnson Taylor, who is no stranger to leading huge action productions and plenty charismatic, in a small meaningless and thankless supporting role. Now if someone just switched the two actors, it would have been a much more compelling movie to watch.
    So anyway, that’s Tenet. A wildly imagined, miscast, confusing, almost too clever for its own good, visually striking mess of a movie that features the most original use of bullets since The Matrix. Definitely more of an acquired choice than the rest of this auteur’s spectacular catalog.  User mileage may vary.