Paws To Reflect

My thoughts on Freaky Tales, The Friend, The Luckiest Man in America and Wake Up.

Freaky Tales is a semi-anthology film featuring a quartet of vaguely intertwining stories, all set in Oakland circa 1987, that the opening narration breathlessly assures us are all “hella wild,” a promise that proves to be first of many ways in which it fails to live up to expectations. “Strength in Numbers” centers on a trio of young punk fans (Ji-young Yoo, Marteen and Jack Champion) whose favorite music venue is violently attacked by a group of skinheads because of its all-inclusive policies regarding race, sex and gender. After healing up, the regulars decide that the time has come to fight back and score a gory victory when the skinheads return for more a few nights later. “Don’t Fight the Feeling” follows a couple of aspiring female rappers (Normani and Dominique Thorne) who are invited to participate in a rap battle with local legend Too $hort (Symba) and fight to win over the crowd in the face of their opponent’s overtly sexist taunts. “Born to Mack” stars Pedro Pascal as a former mob debt collector whose attempt to get out of the business for good with the imminent birth of his first child takes a number of unexpected turns. Finally, “The Legend of Sleepy Floyd” takes its inspiration from the real-life basketball player (Jay Ellis) to tell a story in which he takes bloody, Enter the Dragon-style revenge on a group of criminals that broke into his house while he was off scoring against the Lakers in a playoff game and killed someone close to him in the process.

With its combination of flashy visuals, wild gore, constant references to other movies and big names on both sides of the camera—it was written and directed by the team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, their first film since shifting to the big leagues with Captain Marvel, and the cast also includes Ben Mendelson, the late Angus Cloud and a cameo turn from none other than Tom Hanks—Freaky Tales feels like a film that was designed specifically to serve as one of the Opening Night films at Sundance, which it did in 2024. Alas, after only a few minutes, it becomes painfully obvious as to why it is only coming out now in what could politely be described as reduced circumstances. The film is little more than another one of those overt Pulp Fiction knockoffs that glutted multiplexes and video stores in the wake of that title’s startling success and the only new flourish that Boden and Fleck add to the proceedings is some Repo Man-style weirdness here and there. None of the stories are particularly impressive—none of them last long enough to allow us to develop any interest in the characters, the twists are not particularly inspired and the attempts to tie them all together are more contrived than clever—and while the cast is certainly game, most of their efforts are wasted on threadbare narratives more interested in empty shocks than anything else. (Normani and Thorne deliver arguably the most compelling performances but are unfortunately stuck in the thinnest story of them all.) Bay Area residents of a certain age may get a kick out of all the local shoutouts, I suppose, but unless you fall within the 510 area code, I cannot imagine most viewers having the patience or energy to stick with Freaky Tales to the end

.Based on the best-selling 2018 novel of the same name by Sigrid Nunez, The Friend stars Naomi Watts as Iris, a writer who is already reeling from the recent suicide of her friend and mentor, acclaimed author Walter (Bill Murray), when she discovers that she has been entrusted with Apollo, his beloved 170-pound Great Dane whom he happened upon at the Brooklyn Bridge Park in an encounter that makes up the film’s opening sequence. For any number of reasons, taking in Apollo would seem to be an impossibility for her—even if she weren’t more of a cat person in the first place, her cherished rent-controlled apartment (which previously belonged to her own late father) does not allow pets of any sort—and to make matters worse, he doesn’t appear to be quite as well-behaved as she was told. As it soon becomes clear, Apollo is mourning the loss of Walter, an activity that Iris has not allowed herself to do yet, even as she works on compiling a book of his correspondence with his once-estranged adult daughter Val (Sarah Pidgeon)—one of a number of women that he appears to have left in his wake, including one current wife (Norma Dumezweni) and two exes (Carla Gugino and Constance Wu)—but as she inevitably begins to bond with the dog, it allows her to begin the process of grappling with her own unresolved feelings of love, grief and anger regarding her former friend and his mysterious decision to end his life.

I must confess that while I don’t have anything against dogs per se, I have never had much of an affinity for movies about them, especially the ones where they end up teaching precious life lessons in between the shedding and slobbering. That said, I will concede that Bing, the canine performer who portrays Apollo, definitely belongs in the pantheon of all-time cinematic pooches—beyond being undeniably photogenic, he is convincing both in portraying his grief at the loss of Walter and his gradual acceptance of Iris as his new caretaker without having to rely on any cinematic gimmicks to get those feelings across. The problem is that outside of the scenes specifically involving the relationship between Apollo and Iris (Watts is particularly good in these scenes as well), the rest of the film is as big of a mess as the ones that Apollo presumably leaves around, a tonal mishmash that veers between heartfelt sentiment and dark humor without quite landing either one. Having not read the source novel, I cannot say for sure but watching the film, you get a sense that it contained a lot of narrative threads (including what appears to be a pattern of bad behavior in Walter’s life) that writer-directors Scott McGhee and David Siegel never quite deal with properly and characters (including, in addition to those already mentioned, Ann Dowd as a concerned neighbor of Iris and Owen Teague as one of the students in her writing class) who are introduced and then quickly abandoned. That said, if you are a dog lover—especially in regards to Great Danes—The Friend will no doubt make you say “Awwwww” throughout. For everyone else, though, it will doubtlessly come across as an example of Good Dog, Meh Movie

.The title The Luckiest Man in America refers to Michael Larson, a real-life ice cream truck driver who, in 1984, appeared as a contestant on the then-popular TV game show Press Your Luck and went on to win a then-record prize of over $110,000 by somehow managing to master the supposedly random game mechanics with what appeared to be plain luck. As it turns out—and the case is well-known enough that this should not be considered a spoiler—luck had little to do with his success. While studying VHS recordings of the show, Larson discovered that the mechanics were not quite so random—there were only five different patterns employed—and after memorizing them, he was able to react in ways that always paid off big for him. As the taping progresses and the payout grows larger, the powers-that-be behind the show, including Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn), the executive producer who overrode his casting director (Shamier Anderson) to book Larson on the basis of his oddball charm, figure out what he is doing but are stymied by the fact that he is not actually cheating. Since they cannot shut it down, they start using some underhanded tactics in an attempt to throw Larson off his game and discover other things that he has hidden about his background.

Because this particular story is fairly well-known—there have been at least two documentaries on the subject and a narrative version featuring Bill Murray as Larson was discussed for a number of years without coming to fruition—the film does not go to heavily into the mechanics of how Larson was able to break the show’s code and use that knowledge to his advantage. Instead, the focus leans more onto the show’s producers and how they conspire to take an ordinary guy who found a way to beat their system by exploiting its inadequacies and punish him for his transgressions—there is a chance that this might be a metaphor. When the script by Maggie Briggs and Sarah Oliveros sticks to that, it makes for reasonably gripping viewing, thanks in no small part to the performances by Hauser and Strathairn that manage to channel a convincing battle of the minds despite sharing relatively few scenes together. However, when the narrative shifts into more overtly surrealistic areas as Larson’s paranoia begins to take hold—particularly in an extended bit where he wanders onto the set of a talk show taping and ends up being interviewed by the host (Johnny Knoxville)—the film begins to lose both its focus and the tension that it had been building up. The Luckiest Man in America does have its elements of interest, to be sure, but in the end, viewers interested in the case and its various twists would be better served by checking out one of the more straightforward documentaries instead

.The early scenes of Wake Up show a group of young activists arriving at a giant home furnishing store whose similarities to IKEA are not exactly coincidental—there is even a scene involving meatballs being flung around—as the place is closing for the night, spreading out and hiding amidst the sprawl. The plan is to bring attention to the store’s part in the environmental crisis by filming themselves wreaking havoc on the inventory after hours with paintball guns while wearing masks representing the animals they claim are being killed off as a result of the store’s practices. There are only two security guards on the premise as they are doing all of this but while Jack (Aidan O’Hare) is already a few drinks in before his shift has even begun, his brother, Kevin (Turlough Convery), is a deeply disturbed hardcore hunting nut who is already on the edge over losing out on a pricey primitive hunting trip in a last-ditch effort to keep his job. When the guards discover the intruders, an accident occurs that pushes Kevin over the edge, inspiring him to seal the place up entirely before constructing weapons made up out of store inventory to hunt the kids down and dispatch them in any number of ways.

While this is bad news for those kids, I suppose it is good news for anyone who has gone through life waiting to one day witness a hybrid of Scott Spiegel’s cult horror film Intruder (1989), in which the overnight crew at a supermarket was killed off by a psycho locked in with them, and Nocturama (2016), Bertrand Bonello’s drama about a group of young activists who plan a bomb attack in Paris before hiding out for the night within an otherwise empty shopping center. That sounds kind of interesting, I suppose, and the fact that Wake Up was made by RKSS, the filmmaking collective behind the delightful 80s-style fantasy pastiche Turbo Kid (2015), only increased the film’s promise. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite come off because while there is certainly carnage aplenty throughout and a decided lack of sentiment in regards to whether anyone will manage to survive the night, all of the characters are so colorless and unpleasant that few viewers will find themselves caring as the cast gets bumped off in increasingly gruesome ways. Presumably the film is trying to riff on those who undertake showy but ultimately meaningless acts of performative activism but that point is increasingly lost as the body count grows. Now if all you want to see is 80 minutes of largely senseless bloodletting involving everything from knives to bookshelves, Wake Up sort of delivers the goods but if you are looking for anything else, whether it be a point or just a vaguely sympathetic character, you are advised to search elsewhere.