Patti Cake$ undercuts its own message

Danielle Macdonald in Patti Cake$. Image courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Patti Cake$ succeeds as a piece of cinematic fluff, a vehicle to deliver a friendly, uplifting story of a down on her luck woman trying to pursue her dreams. It does just fine following the formula of the scrappy underdog fighting against the travails of her life and passion, carried by a solid lead performance and some solid jokes along the way. The movie is cute and endearing, although its shiny patina can’t cover the emptiness and some disconcerting aspects to the characterizations. All the cheeriness and hopefulness can't cover the concept craters residing just underneath it.

The sense of lightness for Patti Cake$ begins with the eponymous rapper Patti (Danielle Macdonald), an overweight 23-year-old white woman who dips into Doug-esque daytime fantasies about becoming a famous rapper. Her reality is that of a Jersey girl still living with her drunken dreamer of a mother Barb (Bridget Everett) and her grandmother (Cathy Moriarty) and working a few menial jobs to pay the bills. Fantasies are tough to shake though, and she's joined in her quixotic quest by fellow rapper and best friend Jheri (Siddharth Dhananjay) and quiet avant-garde anarchist Basterd (Mamoudou Athie). Together they form a rap group to escape their dead end lives and the horrors of living just outside of Newark.

Patti Cake$ gets a lot of mileage from how downtrodden Jersey is and how much people want to escape it. There's no real future there for Patti and her friends aside from repeating her mom's life and rapping outside of gas stations (albeit one that is lacking the requisite service attendant). So, yeah, there's enough in the milieu to start cheering Patti on from the get go, and its assisted by Macdonald's performance. Macdonald's performance highlights the lack of hope in her character's life, one in which jobs at seedy bars and in a catering company are considered highlights to a better future. It just feels right to cheer Patti on as she navigate the movie's formulaic but well executed plot points to a not overly positive but hopeful ending. Add in some good supporting performances and a few catchy tunes and gosh is this such a friendly little movie.

Where Patti Cake$ falters is when it considers inserting a little substance to its otherwise empty narrative. Ideally for writer/director Geremy Jasper viewers would accept the movie's cheery vibe and well executed motivation story, pleased by the simple satisfaction of an ambiguously optimistic ending. A quick peek just under the hood could result in a favorable look at a movie with an overweight female protagonist finding success despite the societal hurdles put in front of her.

But stew on this movie a little more though and a whole host of problems begin to arise that reveals a sour taste underneath the sugary coating.The issues start with the transformation the characters make to reach that happy ending. Through most of their trials and tribulations, Patti and Basterd have a sense of self worth devoted to their outlooks on the world. They’re individuals in style and substance, content to allow their talents to speak for them despite it being less than ideal in a societal sense. At least until the final act in which Patti gets a glamorous makeover and Basterd loses his anarchist edge and conforms to a comfortable normal. It's problematic enough for Patti to go through such a transformation – the idea of a woman's value being related to appearances is cliché and damaging – but having Basterd undergo the same process reinforces the problem.One of Patti Cake$ major themes, being true to oneself despite the problems that may arise, is undercut unnecessarily.

It is also troublesome for Patti Cake$ the way Patti handles the jeers and taunts directed at her by a number of characters. When people spit out insults concerning her weight and the impact that has on her sexuality, Patti – and Jasper by extension – plays into the game instead of shooting down the barbs launched at her. The film doesn't allow her to spit back insults mocking the people who are calling her ugly; rather, it embarrasses them for possibly being attracted to her. Her sexuality is a joke even to Patti herself, and that betrays what should be the deepest part of her character. That’s to speak nothing of the issues with cultural appropriation and racism.

Once those thoughts start entering your head the appeal of Patti Cake$ falls apart. There's really nothing worth overly hating about it, as this is far too genial of a movie to get properly upset at. But the emptiness of the whole endeavor is a clear letdown; with more thought and care this movie could have been something special.

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 108 minutes

Genre: Comedy

Ask Away

Target audience: Audiences down for a feel good story with little substance to it.

Take the whole family?: The rating is more for the language than any explicit sex or violence. Parents a little more sensitive to vulgar language should keep kids at home, but this won't bother the average 13 year old.

Theater or Netflix?: Eh, might as well wait for it to stream.

How is Danielle Macdonald's rapping?: At least serviceable, a step up in quality from certain other female Australian rappers. What is weird is the content she's rapping about, which is heavy with pop culture references from before her character's birth. Rap is heavy on obscure and old references – hell, Lupe Fiasco dropped a line about Lupin the Third – but the references she makes are far more obscure.

Watch this as well?: 8 Mile is leagues better than this, featuring a more nuanced ascent and a pretty solid performance by Eminem. Also check out Hustle & Flow, which shares elements with Patti Cake$ but, again, does them better

Plaza shines in thoughtfully odd Ingrid Goes West

Elizabeth Olsen and Aubrey Plaza in Ingrid Goes West. Image courtesy Neon Rated.

What makes Ingrid Goes West fun in a strange way is how it makes audiences feel and think as the credit rolls. It’s entirely fair to have an icky feeling when leaving the theater, perturbed by the oddness of Aubrey Plaza's eponymous social media stalker, her easy ability to manipulate herself into the life of the seemingly perfect Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen) troublesome in many ways. The movie is designed in part to cause the viewer to feel a little off from enjoying it, whether it is the awkward humor or the hints of sympathy directed toward Ingrid. This movie excels at being enjoyable awkward.

Ingrid Goes West is ostensibly a comedy about a stalker who inserts herself into a stranger's life out of a need for some love and affection. Along the way Ingrid disrupts the lives of Taylor's husband (Wyatt Russell), brother (Billy Magnussen) and a landlord who has a severe crush on her (a charmingly nerdy O'Shea Jackson Jr.). That this movie still classifies as a comedy and not a horror/thriller like Single White Female (a movie that gets a name drop in this one) is due to a solid script from writers David Branson Smith and Matt Spicer (Spicer also directs) and a killer lead performance by Plaza. Best known for as the dour April Ludgate, Plaza finds the right balance between subtly strange and completely off kilter, keeping what could be a caricature very human and pretty funny. She makes it funny and sad to watch Ingrid scroll through Instagram and like every post she sees, a meaningless gesture that is heartbreaking in the loneliness it projects.

Scenes like that make it easy to paint Ingrid Goes West as some sort of parable about the dangers of social media and how much the spread of otherwise useless personal information to a mass audience lessens the importance of personal connection. And it sort of is a warning of sorts, although it is less about how someone like Ingrid can sidle her way into someone's life and more about what social media allows people to do. Several post modern writers have made this point before, but the downside to social media is the emptiness it promotes. Taylor is defined largely by her social media presence, enough to replace any semblance of personality she had prior to becoming an Instagram star. Her intellectual strummings are gleaning by slight readings of important work, the image of being intelligent and thoughtful just as valuable as actually being so. Quoting Norman Mailer or Joan Didion means nothing if there's no understanding of why they said it and what that quote means on a personal level. So it makes sense for Taylor to feel repulsed by Ingrid as the film progresses. Ingrid is a facsimile of the Instagram starlet whose attempts at copying result in her becoming a slightly more real version of Taylor herself. Taylor pretends to read the texts she flaunts; Ingrid does so and finds meaning to it. That Ingrid is better at being Taylor than Taylor is a little horrifying on its own merits, as it exposes Taylor for being a shell of a free spirit. Even if Ingrid's obsessive nature hadn't been revealed, Smith and Spicer make it clear there is no way the relationship could last beyond a few fleeting moments.

Then again, a person can only achieve a certain level of fame if they haven't provided their audience at least a modicum of honesty to go with it. Despite being a failed attempt at simulacrum, Ingrid is at least honest about her emptiness and tries to find something to fill the void that is her life. She does show a few moments of honest sympathy, more than Taylor musters, and Ingrid Goes West concludes with the most honest moment of her life. The result is a sad and terrifying happy ending, a moment in which a character wins and it remains unclear what she'll do with her victory. What little growth Ingrid shows in the film isn't rooted in the firmest of soil, and the glow of joy on her face is disturbing and a testament to Plaza's performance; she sells the ambiguity of the moment perfectly.

All of this is a little heavy for a concept, but it goes to show there is a good amount of subtext worth diving into in Ingrid Goes West, a credit to Smith and Spicer for finding depth in a technology rooted in human emptiness. Smith and Spicer understand that the value of Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms resides within that emptiness itself, not just finding the best version of a person but revealing the ugliness underneath the facade. That the exploration of the shallowness is this entertaining and well made is a bonus.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 97 minutes

Genre: Comedy

Ask Away

Target audience: Viewers who want to see Aubrey Plaza go off the rails.

Take the whole family?: This isn't the hardest R film, but still keep the kids at home.

Theater or Netflix?: Not a vital theater experience but worth the trip if it’s playing near you.

What kind of funny is this movie?: While this is a comedy, it isn't quite a guffaw inducing movie. The humor is tied less to antics and more to a mix of awkward humor and outright nihilistic jokes in which the punchline is the action didn't really matter anyway. This is definitely one of those movies in which a personal view of the comedy will define the appreciation of the movie.

Watch this as well?: This is pretty comparable to The Talented Mr. Ripley with more comedy and slightly less homoerotic subtext to work from.

Dark Tower falls apart

Idris Elba in The Dark Tower. Image courtesy Columbia Pictures.

The Dark Tower teases with hints of how great it could, or rather should, be. The Stephen King adaptation has several fascinating magical bits and a typically great, understated lead performance by Idris Elba as weary gunslinger Roland Deschain that it could very well serve as the start of a great fantasy series on par with the Lord of the Ring. But it doesn't come particularly close to reaching those heights, stuck with just those glimmers of quality in an otherwise dire screenplay that lifts elements from, of all movies, Super Mario Bros. courtesy a brain trust led by the inconsistent Akiva Goldsman. What viewers get is a mishmash of concepts and tones, with a story carried by the wrong character and few positives from an abbreviated movie.

At the heart of Dark Tower is a simple good versus evil story between the troubled, tired fighter Deschain and giddy, evil wizard Walter (a wicked hammy Matthew McConaughey). Enough parallels exist to make the two mirror images of the other, the gunslinger's shooting prowess canceling out the sorcerer's epic magic abilities, who seeks some sense of revenge by taunting poor Deschain. Traces of that concept carry the film to as close to watchable as it can get, along with the hints about Walter's true powers and the skosh of mythology about the eponymous tower, the gunslinger legend, and the creatures that serve Walter's orders to destroy the sole boundary keeping the dark from cascading into the light.

Somehow most of that is sidelined to focus on some preteen kid (Tom Taylor) discover his psychic powers, or in King’s terms shine. With so many great options to choose from involving a brilliant gunfighter and a wizard, Goldsman and crew opted to center The Dark Tower on the adolescent coming of age story in which his powers (poorly) represent some sort of awakening. They effectively made an escort mission where Deschain grumpily but still lovingly protects the kid from the evils around him. That the movie doesn't leave enough time for their relationship to grow (let alone enough time to believe how quickly the boy's powers increase) exacerbates the problem. It's not the worst route this movie could have veered toward with its narrative; it just ranks pretty low on the list for what is or is not interesting with a story about a mystical gun fighter.

It's just frustrating watching Dark Tower and waiting for director Nikolaj Arcel and multitude of screenwriters to build some sort of a universe. There are a lot of little elements that crop up hinting at what could have been, some cool little bits of magic performed by an almost unstoppable being, and the general concept of Deschain's gunslinger legacy. What this movie needs more than anything is a well-plotted mythology to explain the movie's machinations and provide viewers some context as to what's happening. The battle between Elba's Deschain and an appropriately enthused McConaughey would make for a remarkable movie, with Elba's quiet intensity contrasting greatly with McConaughey's slightly menacing charisma. Dark Tower offers little aside from formulaic snippets of exposition and a ton of logical leaps the viewer has to make to fill in the gaps otherwise. Little explanation is offered for the existence of the movie's multiple worlds, the eponymous tower, or even the war between the gunslingers and McConaughey's dark wizard Walter. Viewership of what sounds like on paper to be an incredible experience is instead abbreviated to post-battle flashbacks (proper battle sequences are a little too pricy for this movie) and some mediocre world jumping that skimp on the special effects. Some of that would get built upon through the addition of some hypothetical sequels, but Dark Tower leaves viewers wanting far more from the movie they've watched.

Then again, building a world as elaborate as the one required for Dark Tower is difficult for a movie that lasts all of 95 minutes (end credits included). Ninety-five minutes is not long enough to establish a universe appropriate for this movie. Goldsman and company attempt to fill in the gaps with exposition and a whole lot of assumptions, leading to the aforementioned mythological holes and some rather notable plot holes to boot. Cutting corners has its consequences, in this case a less than engaging film and what is probably an early end to what should have been a great franchise.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 95 minutes

Genre: Fantasy

Ask Away

Target audience: People who have read the book series and folks down to watch Idris Elba be awesome.

Take the whole family?: The content is too dark for young kids. Keep it at age 10 and up.

Theater or Netflix?: Netflix if at all.

Should this franchise continue?: Ideally this would be rebooted immediately, with only Elba carried over to whatever comes next. It's easy to appreciate what this movie could have been even without reading the books, so perhaps a new round of talent can maximize this movie's potential.

Watch this instead?: Stephen King adaptations are pretty hit or miss. The Shining, The Dead Zone, The Shawshank Redemption, Carrie and Stand By Me are all pretty great, due in part to the respective directors taking liberties with the material. Also worth a read is The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon