Cinema is robust enough to feel almost limitless as an art form. Although movies are nearly 130 years old, a few filmmakers continue to push the medium forward every year, finding innovative and groundbreaking new ways to tell stories. While it’s rare to come across a film that feels wholly singular, I still find joy in spending half a day at a movie theater, attempting to fit as many disparate and opposing movies into my head as possible. By running the gamut of emotions across a few hours, I find it stretches the muscles of my empathy in a way nothing else achieves.
Here are three new movies that are so completely different from each other, it reminded me how versatile film can actually be. That’s not to say that all the movies I saw were prime examples of the form or will even remotely set the world on fire, but watching them over such a short time was a comforting way to remind myself that I’ll never run out of things to write about.
First was The Friend, a heartwarming dog movie starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray. When Murray’s character passes, he leaves his giant Great Dane, Apollo, to his best friend, played by a wonderfully warm and authentic Watts, who most decidedly doesn’t really care for dogs, nor can she properly care for one in her rent-controlled New York City apartment.
What we have here is a bittersweet examination of the five stages of grief, embodied not just by Watts, who’s profoundly distraught by the loss of Murray, but also by Apollo. While still a very good boy, Apollo is depressed, acting out and doesn’t know why Murray isn’t coming home. Watching Watts and Apollo slowly grow to trust each other is genuinely moving, and even though the film feels a bit stiff and writerly in moments, The Friend is cozy comfort cinema, achieving nothing more or nothing less. Dog people will adore this regardless.
Next was Fight or Flight, a ridiculously and proudly stupid (yet equally entertaining) hyper-violent action movie starring Josh Hartnett, who seems to be having the time of his life during his recent career renaissance. He plays an ex-secret service agent on board a 16-hour flight filled with assassins who are all trying to kill him and the mysterious hacker he has to protect. That’s it. The entire film is Hartnett murdering bad guys on a plane in increasingly bonkers ways while proving he could easily be a massive action star if that’s the career path he wants to take.
What makes Fight or Flight infinitely better than the recent string of goofball action movies like the dire Love Hurts and the forgettable Bullet Train is that the action is genuinely well crafted and viscerally exciting to watch. Action movies don’t really need to be well written or acted as long as they’re fun and Fight or Flight knows that to its core. The violence is so gleefully over the top that the film feels like a live-action Looney Tunes, but with Josh Hartnett swinging a chainsaw around a packed airplane. In no world can I say this movie is good, but holy hell did I have a good time watching it.
I ended this homemade trilogy with the new Nic Cage freakout, The Surfer, and that was definitely a choice. He plays a yuppie snob trying to recapture his youth by buying his childhood home on the Australian coast. When he tries to take his teenage son surfing and the locals tell them to get lost, Cage, whose manhood has just been impugned in front of his boy, goes on a downward spiral that Job would think is a bit extreme.
Directed with reverence for ’70s Ozploitation classics like Wake in Fright and Picnic at Hanging Rock by Lorcan Finnegan, The Surfer excels at sun-bleached paranoia vibes, but when it tries to unpack new things to say about toxic masculinity and mental illness, it gets lost in the weeds. Cage doesn’t go nearly as batshit as I expected and somehow finds subtlety in a story bereft of any, but I still wouldn’t have minded watching him channel his inner German expressionist and crank things up to eleven. There are a few moments where we get Maximum Cage, but nothing nearly as marvelous as Mandy or Face Off. As it stands, The Surfer is a mind-bending trip for most of its run time, but it eventually abandons all its twitchy intensity and metaphorical metaphysical shenanigans for something far too mundane and literal.
The Friend
Grade: B
Fight or Flight
Grade: B
The Surfer
Grade: C+
