Tallulah

A short walk on a long pier.

(2016) Drama (Netflix) Ellen Page, Allison Janney, Tammy Blanchard, Evan Jonigkeit, Felix Solis, Uzo Aduba, Fredric Lehne, Liliana/Evangeline Ellis, John Benjamin Hickey, Zachary Quinto, Maddie Corman, Tommar Wilson, J. Oscar Simmons, Charlotte Ubben, Olivia Levine, Jason Tottenham, Todd Alan Crain, Chanel Jenkins, Stacey Thunder, Jasson Finney. Directed by Sian Heder

 

Motherhood is one of the most primal of all human urges. There is no doubt that it changes a woman, not just in a physical sense (which it does) but also in her perspective, in how she sees the world. Some say that every woman becomes a great mother, but that simply isn’t so. Some women were flat-out not made to be mothers.

Lu (Page) has been living on her own, homeless and content to be. She doesn’t want to be tied down to anything or anyone – although she seems pretty smitten with her boyfriend Nico (Jonigkeit). However, he isn’t terribly smitten with the lifestyle of stealing and conning to survive and eventually takes a powder. Knowing that he is headed to New York City to find his estranged mom, she follows him there. Since she’s in a van and he’s on foot, she gets there first.

Margo (Janney) is Nico’s mom and she’s bitter ever since her husband Stephen (Hickey) deserted her – for another man, in this case Andreas (Quinto). Because Margo is living in faculty housing and it’s Stephen who is actually the faculty, she has to pretend like he’s still there, a fiction that has kept her in a place to live even though she hates the artwork on the walls and feels trapped in a place that she doesn’t particularly like.

When Lu turns up at her door, she’s at first dismissive but at she realizes that Lu is the only connection she has to her son so when Margo sees the doorman Manuel (Solis) she instructs him to send the waif back up the next time she drops by. And she drop by she does, only this time in the company of a baby (Ellis).

You see, while Lu was at a posh hotel taking leftover food from room service trays, she was spotted by Carolyn (Blanchard), a Real Housewives type. Mistaking Lu for hotel staff, she has her babysit her baby while she goes out and parties with a man who she is most definitely not married to. When she comes back to the hotel room and passes out dead drunk, Lu realizes Carolyn is not a fit mother. Rather than contact the authorities, she impulsively takes the baby herself for her own.

On the Margo front, Lu passes off the baby as Margo’s granddaughter and suddenly the two women are bonding, not just over the shared genetic material but also over motherhood itself. Margo realizes she wasn’t mother of the year – neither was Lu’s mom, who essentially abandoned her – but she has a chance to redeem herself for the mistakes she made with her son. The police however are closing in and Lu doesn’t sense the tightening net around her.

Heder, one of the writers of Netflix’ hit Orange is the New Black series, has a keen eye for women’s issues and what could be a more important one than motherhood? Well, at least that’s the way society makes it out to be. A woman is more than her ovaries and this is a movie that makes a case that being a great mom is not all there is to life.

In fact, the three main female characters are none of them great moms. The closest one to it is Lu, who stole her baby which is certainly one of the most unforgivable crimes in our culture. That she took it from a woman patently unfit to be a mother, who didn’t want to be a mother, who endangered her child’s welfare and seemingly her life was not necessarily the issue, or at least I didn’t think so.

Margo had devoted her life to Nico, particularly after she and Stephen broken up but her bitterness and betrayal colored that relationship as well. It wasn’t until after she met Lu that she was able to let go and be free of her self-imposed burdens, which is a theme in the movie symbolized by both of the two main female characters imagining they are floating away from earth, no longer tethered by gravity. With Lu it’s a dream at the beginning of the film; with Margo a daydream at the end.

I’ve never been an over-the-top Ellen Page fan, although I recognize that she is an extremely talented actress and I can relate to her on that point. However, the characters she chooses to play are often a bit too strident for my liking and often a bit too offbeat from time to time. Lu lives by her own rules; in some ways, she is as self-centered a character as Page has ever portrayed. There are those who will characterize this as kind of the logical continuation of Juno, the title character that launched her career, a pregnant teen. I don’t really see it that way though; Lu is nothing like Juno.

One of the objections I had to the script was that Lu has been set up to be something of an individualist. She wants relationships to be on her terms, in fact life itself is lived on her own terms. Her action of impulsively stealing the baby just seems to be so out of left field in that sense; someone who is as irresponsible as Lu is suddenly decides to take on the biggest responsibility of them all? It didn’t make sense when I saw it and I imagine that it could be written off as the impetuousness of youth – but that’s some bad writing.

While I enjoyed the performance of Allison Janney immensely, at the end of the day this seems to be a missed opportunity more than anything. We rarely get to see mothers portrayed as anything but saints and sacrificers and that is largely true of most moms, but we don’t always get to see the other side of it – the loss of identity, the absolute panic of not knowing what to do when your baby won’t stop crying, the exhaustion and the mistakes. Any mom will tell you that she made her share of foul-ups and sometimes things that she’s done that she wishes she hadn’t. I don’t think Heder was really certain as to whether she was writing a treatise on motherhood or finding freedom as a woman, and in a sense she tried to do both and ended up doing neither. I didn’t see anything here that really gave me any insight into the characters that I couldn’t have figured out by watching the Lifetime network for an hour or two.

REASONS TO GO: Janney is as solid as she always is.
REASONS TO STAY: Some of the plot points don’t seem too organic.
FAMILY VALUES:  Profanity abounds; there are also plenty of adult themes, some drinking and drug use, sexual situations and brief nudity.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT:  Allison Janney and Ellen Page are in the same movie for the third time, after Juno and Touchy Feely.
BEYOND THE THEATER: Netflix
CRITICAL MASS: As of 8/22/16: Rotten Tomatoes: 83% positive reviews. Metacritic: 63/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Castle in the Sky
FINAL RATING: 5/10
NEXT: Der Bunker

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The Bodyguard (2016) (Super Bodyguard)

Wu Lin gets ready to run the gauntlet.

(2015) Action (Independent) Yue Song, Xing Yu, Becki Li, Wai-Man Chan, Jiang Boa-Cheng, Dong-Mei Xu, Colin Chou. Directed by Yue Song

When you become a bodyguard, you literally take the life of another person in your hands. It is your job to do everything within your power to protect that person and keep them safe from harm. For some bodyguards (and you would include the Secret Service in this category) that may be at the expense of your own life.

Wu Lin (Song) is a martial arts expert whose master has just passed away. Leaving the village here he has studied for years, he goes to the big city to search for his fellow apprentice Jiang Le (Yu) who had left under bitter circumstances. The master, you see, had chosen Wu Lin to wear the Iron Boots and learn the secrets of the Way of 105 Kicks. The Iron Boots add to his leg strength, making Wu Lin’s kicks lethal. He also cannot take them off, which probably makes Dr. Scholl’s a necessity.

Jiang is heartbroken to hear about the death of his master and now owns a bodyguard service and invites Wu Lin to be a part of it. Industrialist Jia-Shan Li hires Wu Lin to be the bodyguard for his daughter Fei-Fei (Li) after Wu Lin saves Jia-Shan from a group of thugs. Fei-Fei turns out to be a spoiled poor little rich girl who wants nothing to do with Daddy and less to do with Wu Lin.

As it turns out, she has great need of his services when it turns out that there are some pretty nasty bad guys after her. Wu Lin saves her once but eventually even his skills can’t protect her and she and her father are taken. The man orchestrating all the mayhem turns out to be someone intimately familiar with all the parties involved – and with an army standing in between him and Wu Lin, it will be a minor miracle if Wu Lin can save the girl (and her father) and defeat the bad guys.

Like many martial arts movies, the plot really isn’t very important. Basically, the story serves as an excuse to set up elaborate martial arts displays, and Song – who not only directs and stars but also co-wrote and edited this sucker – is a natural, reminding me (as he did other critics) of a young Jet Li. Song has the kind of potential to equal the onscreen achievements of that martial arts legend.

The fight scenes are pretty amazing, to be honest, with elements of the fantastic but solidly rooted in the crime procedurals that are all the rage in martial arts movies these days. Combining the two is certainly a smart move and Song utilizes the elements of both, integrating the two harmoniously and organically. Points for that.

Negative points for being a bit cliché in terms of the filmmaking; there is the “romance is blossoming” montage set at a beach house and set to flowery music as well as a villain so villainous that he all but crushes the skull of a kitten beneath an iron boot except that it’s Wu Lin literally wearing the iron boots, but never mind that.

Chinese cinema buffs will recognize the name of Collin Chou, but he has little more than a cameo appearance here and no fight scenes, so don’t let that fool you. Besides, there are plenty of amazing fights and jaw-dropping stunts to keep even the most jaded fan of the genre grinning ear to ear. The performances here are solid enough, although not spectacular (although Song shows tremendous promise) and while the dialogue is a bit cheesy, no more so than most Asian martial arts films.

Think of this as a Wuxia gangster film and you aren’t too far off the mark. This, incidentally, has nothing to do with the Whitney Houston/Kevin Costner film of the same name; the Chinese translation of the title is actually Super Bodyguard and there is also a Sammo Hung film also titled The Bodyguard coming out this year as well (which is also known as My Beloved Bodyguard – confused yet?) just to keep you on your toes.

In any case, fans of martial arts films will have much to appreciate here, getting to see a rising star in the genre show off his chops. There are a few cringe inducing moments (such as when a young boy whips out his thing to urinate on Wu Lin) but not enough not to recommend this, particularly to those who like their action with Asian spice.

REASONS TO GO: The stunts range from the spectacular to the sublime. A nice mash-up of genres.
REASONS TO STAY: A little bit disjointed. Cliché in places.
FAMILY VALUES: There’s some brief nudity, some rude humor and plenty of violence.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT:  Yu was, prior to his acting career, an actual Shaolin Monk.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 6/25/16: Rotten Tomatoes: No score yet. Metacritic: No score yet.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Proof of Life
FINAL RATING: 6.5/10
NEXT: High-Rise