AFTER 2019

Like Fifty Shades of Grey and The Mortal Instruments before it, After started off as fanfiction. Specifically, it was fanfiction about One Direction band member Harry Styles, and it amassed such a massive readership that its author, Anna Todd, received a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster. The story of a young couple falling in love inspired an incredibly devoted fan base among preteen and teen girls, but was also criticized for the abusive nature of the central relationship. For the movie adaptation, After was directed by Jenny Gage (All This Panic) from a script by Susan McMartin (Mom). After is an intimate look at the ups and downs of first love that takes some nonsensical narrative turns, but is nevertheless a captivating romance.

In After, Tessa Young (Josephine Langford) starts her freshman year of college as the perfect daughter, and the perfect dedicated student. However, Tessa's world changes when she meets the brooding Hardin Scott (Hero Fiennes-Tiffin). The core of After is the relationship between Tessa and Hardin, which the movie builds and develops in a compelling manner. First love can be all-consuming, especially when coupled with teenage rebellion, which is the case for Tessa and Hardin in After. Tessa has lived her life as the perfect daughter/student/girlfriend, and she meets Hardin when she's on her own for the first time, discovering who she really is. In that way, After also operates as a coming-of-age tale as Tessa discovers her own desires and what she wants from a romantic relationship, and her life. The movie balances the coming-of-age story and the romance well enough, though it does skew much more toward the romantic storyline.

Josephine Langford and Selma Blair in After

The romance between Tessa and Hardin is explored in an incredibly intimate way through Gage's tendency to use a great deal of closeups on Langford and Fiennes-Tiffin, allowing the viewer to experience the characters' range of emotions and moments of intimacy along with them. After is, of course, a PG-13 movie, but it still manages to depict its female protagonist exploring her sexuality for the first time in her life in a way that feels honest - even if it's set within a hyperreal romance story world. Much of that comes down to Gage's deft directing, but the relationship between Tessa and Hardin is also carried by Langford and Fiennes-Tiffin, who work incredibly well together. Further, the relationship is developed well through McMartin's script. There are moments when the script really shines, like one particular back and forth between Tessa and Hardin about Pride and Prejudice, but there are other times when the story seems restricted by its need to stick to the source material.

While Tessa and Hardin are the focus of After, everyone else in their orbit is underdeveloped as a result. The script particularly suffers when attempting to justify key story points because After doesn't properly develop the relationship between Tessa and her mother. The film twists in certain directions to get Tessa and Hardin to where they need to be for the big third act conflict, but never truly justifies how they got to that point. Meanwhile, though After makes the effort to add diversity to the story by genderswapping the romantic interest of Tessa's roommate, Steph (Khadijha Red Thunder), so that Tristan (Pia Mia) is a female character, the film is so focused on its main couple that it spends very little time developing these supporting characters. Similarly, the other teens in Hardin's group are largely one-note stock characters that play their roles in moving the plot forward, and do nothing else in the movie. After also tragically wastes the talents of Selma Blair as Tessa's mother, as well as Peter Gallagher and Jennifer Beals, who play Hardin's father and stepmother, respectively.

Josephine Langford and Hero Fiennes-Tiffin in After

Still, though After may struggle under the weight of adapting a book as lengthy as its source material, Gage's movie does an excellent job in condensing the story to a palatable hour and 46 minutes. Further, and perhaps most important to those that recognized the abusive nature of Hardin's behaviors in Todd's original book, Gage and McMartin's After evolves the relationship between Tessa and Hardin to be much less abusive in nature. Hardin still makes mistakes, but Tessa - and, by proxy, the movie - holds him accountable for his actions. After also gives Tessa a great deal more agency and independence in a way that rectifies the inherently problematic power dynamic between the two in the book. Gage and McMartin adapt After into a truthful and relatively more healthy story of first love, while not changing too much about the original story so as not to alienate fans of the book.

As a result, After is an entertaining watch for fans of Todd's original novel, or even those who were interested in the story but concerned about the implications of the relationship between Tessa and Hardin in the book. It's an honest look at first love and a young woman's sexual awakening, but one that sticks as close to the source material as possible without adapting too much of its problematic themes. The film isn't necessarily a must-watch in theaters, but is definitely great counterprogramming to other releases at the moment, offering an engrossing romance tale. After is a truly worthwhile romance for the modern era, and it's one that will be beloved by girls and young women - which is, ultimately, who the movie is for anyway.

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Shazam! finally lets DC superheroes be joyous fun

Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

Shazam! takes place in the same universe as other films adapted from DC Comics, but writer Henry Gayden (Earth to Echo) and director David F. Sandberg (Lights Out) seem determined to turn that universe upside down. Or at least, they want to blow a raspberry at the glum-and-glummer world established by the Zack Snyder trilogy of Man of Steel, Batman V. Superman, and Justice League, plus their neck-tattoo-sporting companion piece Suicide Squad. The first big-screen starring vehicle for one of the oldest superheroes in existence, a kid who can turn into a superpowered grown-up with the help of a magic word, Shazam!would be tough to turn into a grim-and-gritty DC story.

And that’s because it’s too deeply based in childhood fantasy. One moment, Billy Batson (played as a teenager by Asher Angel, and in his superhero form by Chuck star Zachary Levi) is an ordinary kid with a difficult history. The next, he’s a beefy, cape-wearing hero capable of flying through the air and shooting bolts of electricity from his finger. He’s barely able to convey the joy he takes in his newfound abilities. It’s almost as if superhero stories were at heart about wish fulfillment. It’s almost as if they’re allowed to be fun.

It’s certainly easier for some superhero stories to tap into this kind of gleeful power trip than others. Created by artist C.C. Beck and writer Bill Parker, Batson first appeared in the second issue of Whiz Comics, which hit newsstands in late 1939 as part of the flood of comic books inspired by Superman’s success. In the original comic, a wizard grants Batson the ability to turn himself into the hero Captain Marvel by saying the word “Shazam,” an acronym of “Samson, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus and Mercury,” whose powers contribute to his might. Over time, Captain Marvel picked up a supporting cast that included other kid heroes and a talking tiger, as well as nemeses like the fiendish Dr. Sivana and Mister Mind, an alien worm who headed the Monster Society of Evil.

Fawcett Comics aimed Captain Marvel’s adventures squarely at even younger readers than those devouring rival superhero stories, and he became a hit, outselling even Superman for a good stretch of the 1940s. But interest in superheroes waned at the end of the decade, and a copyright-infringement lawsuit launched by the company now known as DC Comics proved an enemy even Captain Marvel couldn’t defeat. His adventures temporarily ended. But by the early 1970s, Captain Marvel and his extended family had been absorbed into the DC Comics universe. He’s stayed there ever since, though he’s been retrofitted as “Shazam” to avoid confusion with that other Captain Marvel, who’s also just gotten a big-screen debut.

Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

In Gayden and Sandberg’s film, though, Billy’s superhero alter ego remains nameless, even by the end of the story. Billy and his pal Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer) keep cycling through name possibilities, which are mostly awful (“Thundercrack,” for one, is quickly rejected), which serves as a thematically appropriate running gag. Shazam! is the story of a boy trying to figure out what kind of hero he wants to be — and, by extension, what kind of man he should become. He screws up a lot in the process.

With or without the name, the spirit of the old Captain Marvel adventures is very much at the heart of Shazam!, even amid a lot of just-barely PG-13 violence and a couple of gags about a strip club. That’s part of what makes it such a gleeful alternative both to the grimness of past DC films — a tone the company seems eager to shed — and the cosmos-in-the-balance stakes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Whether played by Angel or Levi, Billy is just a kid. It’s fun to watch him take delight in his new powers, and a little frightening to realize how little control he has over them. And where Batson’s earliest comics adventures gave him a big city to treat as a playground, Shazam! does the same with Philadelphia. His pleasure at bouncing around the city proves infectious, even though he always seems to be on the verge of accidentally leveling a city block.

His joy is all the more exciting to watch because joy doesn’t come naturally to Billy, who’s had more stacked against him than most teenage boys. He’s spent much of his childhood running away from one foster parent after another in search of the mother he hasn’t seen since he drifted away from her at a carnival at age three. Shortly after the film opens, he lands in what he expects to be another temporary living situation: a Philadelphia group home overseen by a married couple (Marta Milans and Cooper Andrews) who used to be foster kids themselves.

They’re also looking after Freddy (who’s developed a gift for wisecracks as a defense mechanism against those who bully him for using a crutch), college-bound overachiever Mary (Grace Fulton), hug-enthusiast Darla (Faithe Herman), and a handful of other kids. It’s a chaotic but loving environment that instantly embraces Billy — literally, in Darla’s case. Billy can’t wait to flee it. He’s been searching for a home so long, he can’t recognize it when he sees it, with or without superpowers.

That feeling starts to change after his fateful encounter with a wizard named Shazam (Djimon Hounsou, under a lot of facial hair). Confused by the new superheroic abilities Shazam grants him, Billy recruits Freddy to help him explore his own possibilities. After a poky start, Shazam! kicks into gear as the two try to figure out what he can and cannot do with his new powers, whether that’s flying, or buying beer without an ID.

Photo: Steve Wilkie / Warner Bros. Pictures

Gayden and Sandberg attempt a difficult balancing act with Shazam! They have to fulfill a lot of superhero-movie obligations, from introducing an evil arch-nemesis to designing a climactic showdown. Mark Strong — a frequent screen heavy easing back into superhero films for the first time since playing Sinestro in 2011’s misbegotten Green Lantern — makes for an unsettling Dr. Sivana, a man given powers by the Seven Deadly Sins. He’s never as clownish as the Sivana of the comics, but his unbending malevolence makes him a fine foil for the big-screen version of Batson, whose goofiness plays nicely off his nemesis’ scowls. But even when the filmmakers let their project come across as a little frightening, they also have to find a way to stay true to the original comics’ fun, kid-friendly spirit.

It wouldn’t be out of the question for the filmmakers to put a dark spin on this material. Alan Moore’s Miracleman found a definitive way to make the Billy Batson idea nightmarish and haunting. If Gayden and Sandberg truly wanted a film more in line with the Snyderverse entries, they could have made it. But Shazam! super speeds in the opposite direction while nodding at the other films in its franchise. Billy’s world is packed with Batman and Superman merchandise, but their adventures seem to take place far from the world where he lives. Gotham and Metropolis get superhero icons who rarely smile. Philly gets a goofball, and that turns out to be a lot more fun.

Sandberg draws on the horror skills he developed through films like Annabelle: Creation. Sivana’s allies include manifestations of the Seven Deadly Sins that wouldn’t look out of place in a much more graphic movie. And though Sandberg retains the shadowy imagery of previous DCEU films, he uses that dark palette to make Billy’s shiny red suit and glowing lightning-bolt chest insignia stand out even more. If Batman branding criminals in Batman V. Superman has a polar opposite moment, it’s Batson’s unnamed hero identity smiling and dancing to “Eye of the Tiger” at the top of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s steps while shooting lightning from his hands, to the delight of the tourists around him. This is the rare superhero film that gets more whimsical as it goes along, up to and including the final fight, a battle royale that mostly unfolds at a Philadelphia Christmas carnival.

But whimsical isn’t the same as frivolous. Both Angel and Levi play Billy as a boy who’s never had the support he’s needed, and the film suggests there’s no easy fix for his traumas, even if he’s both dropped into a supportive environment, and suddenly able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. (Or in Billy’s case, almost leap a tall building in a single bound.)

That’s the subtext resting beneath Shazam!’s broad humor, fun spirit, and scary monsters. The film suggests that wish fulfillment will only get people so far, and power alone can’t change what’s damaged inside. Captain Marvel (or Shazam, or Thundercrack, or whatever you call him) might be one of the simplest superheroes ever created, but Shazam! both gets what makes that simplicity so appealing, and understands the complications stirred by the common wish to grow up too fast and assume powers you don’t know how to control.

Missing Link 2019 movie review

Missing Link

Though cocky as they come, Sir Lionel Frost doesn’t fit the mold of other classical adventure heroes, whether animated or otherwise. In “Missing Link,” the top-heavy monster hunter (imbued with chest-swollen bravado by Hugh Jackman) does a remarkable thing upon discovering a rare Sasquatch in America’s still-untamed Pacific Northwest: He listens.

Compare that with Indiana Jones and centuries of plundering anthropologists, who blithely destroy ancient sites in their pursuit of treasure, and you’ll realize just how unusual Sir Lionel’s reaction is. Though he set out to prove the existence of this primitive ape-man, upon stumbling across the Sasquatch in the wild, rather than hauling the creature back to civilization like some kind of trophy, à la “King Kong,” he stops to ask the beast (voiced by Zach Galifianakis) what it wants, and adjusts his plans accordingly.

Now, most audiences may not even register this nuance, which is just one of myriad ways in which writer-director Chris Butler wrings a more progressive narrative from this most retrograde of genres. As proof that humans can evolve, however, “Missing Link” makes a most excellent case. And that doesn’t even count the cutting-edge technology required to pull of such a hyper-detailed and visually dazzling feat as this.

“Missing Link” marks the fifth feature from Laika, the meticulous stop-motion animation studio responsible for “Coraline” and “Kubo and the Two Strings,” although the tone of this one is so different from the four features that came before — all dark, relatively intense cartoons liable to give young children nightmares — that the company’s grown-up fans may reject it at first. Sooner or later, Laika was bound to branch out, which makes this funnier, more colorful film the link previously missing between the company’s Goth-styled past and whatever comes next.

From the opening scene, Sir Lionel Frost makes monster hunting look easy. He has dragged his assistant to Loch Ness, where it takes little effort to lure the odd-looking legend to the surface, where he proceeds to photograph it — the proof he needs to earn the respect of his peers at the London-based Optimates Club (although, strangely, that he’s a “sir” suggests he’s already been validated by more important people than this snooty society of explorers and “great men”).

Unfortunately for Sir Lionel, Nessie destroys the evidence in a scene that’s conceived and shot as dynamically as anything Laika has done before — early proof that Butler (who previously made “ParaNorman”) is pushing the medium. The rest of the film will bear that out, as “Missing Link” not only expands the geography of previous Laika films but widens the repertoire of how the camera navigates these spaces (the best example being a shot broken down over the end credits, in which the camera swoops around an elephant porter, while digital set extensions give the surrounding jungle a sense of depth).

Watching “Missing Link,” audiences can no longer tell where the practical, stop-motion puppetry ends and computer effects take over. That may sound like a compliment, though the strange hybrid approach serves to obscure the hand-tooled aspect of the film. The result resembles Aardman’s “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” not just in flavor (that film took place at a time of early scientific exploration and featured both Charles Darwin and the queen as characters) but also to the extent that Butler embraces CG in order to deliver a more ambitious film. The truth is, far more of “Missing Link” was crafted in the real world than meets the eye, though audiences’ attention will most likely be fixated on the plot and characters — as well it should be.

All the humans boast memorable, visually humorous looks, with marzipan-colored skin and long, reddish noses, which give off a rosy pink glow when backlit by the sun. In fact, so much attention has gone into the design, performance, and amusingly asymmetrical facial expressions of these characters that the script feels anemic by comparison. In that department, the film seems a little familiar, leaning too heavily on silly wordplay and a constant stream of jokes, as if overcompensating for a certain lack of excitement.

Once Sir Lionel finds his Sasquatch, he’s obliged to deal with the fact that his Optimates Club rival, Lord Piggot-Dunceby (Stephen Fry), has enlisted a Yosemite Sam-style varmint named Willard Stenk (Timothy Olyphant) to thwart his quest, even as that quest happens to be changing shape. When Sir Lionel stops to ask Mr. Link what he wants, the creature proposes an altogether new adventure: He wishes to be taken halfway around the world, to Shangri-La, where his cold-weather cousins — a lost tribe of snow-white-haired, blue-skinned yetis — have built a society far removed from the threat of mankind.

Not yet “woke” so much as gradually awakening, Sir Lionel accepts the mission, deputizing Mr. Link as a kind of glorified valet, and together they set off, the world’s most conspicuous traveling companions. But success depends on stealing a map from the woman once married to Sir Lionel’s late partner, Adelina Fortnight (who looks like Salma Hayek, but sounds like Zoe Saldana). As with the Sasquatch, Sir Lionel rejects the bigotry of his peers and welcomes Adelina along for the trek.

Here, one might expect the movie to serve up a series of classic adventure-movie challenges, but instead, it follows a more vaudevillian playbook, wringing laughs from funny disguises and elaborate physical comedy gags. Mr. Link’s clumsiness is almost never amusing, alas, though his literal-minded use of the English language can be quite charming. When the trio finally does reach Shangri-La (where Emma Thompson plays the yetis’ matriarchal leader, “the Elder”), only then does “Missing Link” unveil a series of puzzles for its characters to solve, building up to a quite literal cliffhanger — no, really, the movie dangles ensemble and audience alike over a looming chasm — so intense I could hardly take it.

By this point in Laika’s evolution, the studio has reached a point where every frame is a work of art, which is more than can be said for most computer-animated features. And yet, while “Missing Link” no doubt advances the aesthetic and story possibilities for the company going forward, it comes at a price. The illusion has become so sophisticated, we take the craft for granted.

This may be why Aardman animators don’t go out of their way to remove every fingerprint from their work, or the reason “Anomalisa” opted not to hide the seams the Laika team paints out in post: Part of what makes stop-motion films so impressive is the fact that they’re still sculpted, posed, lit, and photographed by hand. To speak in terms Sir Lionel might appreciate, the Great Pyramids of Egypt stun not only for their beauty and shape, but also because we can’t fathom how they came to be made. Counterintuitive though it may seem, going forward, Laika might do well to take a step back.

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