Weekend Screen Scene: F1 the Movie

Do not go into F1 the Movie expecting surprises. Director Joseph Kosinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger have essentially recreated their previous hit Top Gun Maverick, replacing the fighter jets with Formula One race cars, and Tom Cruise with Brad Pitt. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing! It just depends on how much you like fast cars and Brad Pitt, because it's those things and not the story that are going to do the heavy lifting when it comes to entertainment.

Pitt is aging race-car driver Sonny Hayes. While racing for Lotus's Formula 1 team back in the 1990's he crashed and almost died, so stepped away from Formula One, though never left racing behind completely. After winning a race at Daytona, he's approached by his former Lotus teammate Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) with an offer to join his now struggling F1 team, APXGP. Though they have the talented but brash rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), they have yet to win a race that year, and with nine ahead of them, and their second driver out for the season, Cervantes hopes Hayes will get them a win.

If you're suspecting the aging racer will Break the Rules, and Teach the Rookie a Thing Or Two About Racing and Life, you'd be right. Just about every cliche you'd find in an underdog sports story can be found in F1 the Movie, and every expected story beat is there. In fact, the only time it veers away from the predictable is in its ending, which is all wrong, and the one time it should have stuck to cliches.

Filmed for IMAX, the racing scenes are undeniably thrilling. And loud. I don't know enough about Formula 1 to know if what happens in these races is in any way plausible, but I suspect they are not. But they're what are required to make a sometimes monotonous sport a tad more thrilling to watch in a movie. If actual races feature as many POV shots, and camera whip pans as seen in F1 the Movie, I could actually see getting into the sport, which, thanks in large part to the Netflix series, Formula 1: Drive to Survive, has picked up a lot of new fans in the past few years. I'm not sure F1 the Movie will satisfy those fans. I suspect the implausibility of some of the races may irk more than thrill. But it could create even more followers of the sport, which I suspect is exactly the point.

Weekend Screen Scene: The Life of Chuck, The Phoenician Scheme

The Life of Chuck is like a Frank Capra movie bookended by a Stephen King movie. It's a King and Capra sandwich, if you will. 

Told in three parts, it starts with part three and ends with part one. Part three introduces several characters in an unnamed town who are facing what may be the end of the world, while also being bombarded by some inexplicable advertisements on billboards, TV, and sky writing, all thanking someone named Chuck for "39 great years." Part two centers on one moment in the life of Chuck, and part one tells the story of Chuck's youth.

And that's about all I'll say about the plot, because how all of this ties together is the film's central mystery, and message. And I'll admit, it's a message that had me crying more than once. Mike Flanagan is not new to the Stephen King world. Even when he is not overtly adapting his work, as he has done in the past with Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep, the influence King has on his work is often clearly evident. (For instance, Midnight Mass could easily be viewed as an unofficial Salem's Lot sequel.) It's a match that works quite well because Flanagan, whose work is almost exclusively in the horror genre, understands the importance of sympathetic characters when you're telling a horrific story. 

Chuck is not a horror movie, but those bookends definitely have elements of the genre. I will offer a tiny spoiler and say that if you are going to see this movie because you are a huge Tom Hiddleston fan, you may be disappointed, as he is not in the movie as much as the advertising may suggest. But his Chuck is figuratively and literally the center of the movie, and he's quite good in a film full of excellent performances. (Chiwetel Ejiofor as a teacher, Mark Hamill as Chuck's grandfather, and Benjamin Pajak, especially, as the middle school aged Chuck, are all standouts.)

The Life of Chuck could have easily veered off into the realm of maudlin sentimentality, but I think it's those small nods to the horror genre that both King and Flanagan know so well that keep it grounded, and ultimately make the movie so effective. Perhaps it's my age, where there are more years behind me than there are ahead of me, that make stories like this hit differently, or just the general state of the world right now. But I came away from the movie with a profound feeling of both sadness, and hope.

I've grown less tolerant of Wes Anderson's patented brand of twee ever since The Grand Budapest Hotel, the last film of his I can say I truly enjoyed. And while I would not put The Phoenician Scheme on par with Anderson's greatest, I did find it it to be more fun than annoying, which is at least an improvement.

All the things that make a Wes Anderson movie a Wes Anderson movie are here: A muted color palette. Symmetrically composed shots. An overall vintage aesthetic. And characters that deliver their deadpan dialogue in a story centered in some daddy issues.

Benicio del Toro is Zsa-Zsa Korda, the central daddy this time around, a mysterious and corrupt industrialist hoping to complete his latest "scheme" which involves taking over the infrastructure of Phoenicia. But because he is under constant threat of assassination, he decides to get his things in order and make his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) his sole heir. Liesl, who is a nun, is reluctant. Along on this journey is Bjørn (Michael Cera), an entomologist who has been hired as a tutor because...well because this is a Wes Anderson movie.

For me, it's safe to say that Michael Cera's performance is what makes this movie so fun, and I'm as shocked as anyone that this is his first Anderson film; he was basically built in a lab for this sort of thing. At one time, Wes Anderson movies were a complete package: aesthetically pleasing movies that made me laugh and cry. For the last two movies, I was only able to get one those three things. This time, thanks to Michael Cera, The Phoenician Scheme offers two of the three.