The Least Crusade

My thoughts on Fountain of Youth, Friendship, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life and Sister Midnight

Some day in the future, some brave soul will find themselves charged with writing a history and analysis of films produced by streaming services as a way of luring prospective viewers to their systems. I would like to offer my deepest condolences to whoever that poor bastard may be on the basis that they will at some point be forced to watch and grapple with the blood-curdling inanity of Guy Ritchie’s Fountain of Youth, which may not be the worst such movie in existence but my guess is that few comparable titles will come to mind as you watch it gracelessly clunk across your screen. John Krasinski and Natalie Portman star as Luke and Charlotte Purdue, the children of a world-renowned archaeologist who used to work with their dad on his globe-trotting mission before going their separate ways—Luke continues uncovering and liberating lost treasures with a devil-may-care attitude and his father’s old crew while Charlotte went the more boring path by taking a job as a museum curator, getting married and having a kid. Now estranged, the two siblings are reunited when Luke turns up to seek Charlotte’s help on his latest quest—he has been hired by a dying billionaire (Domhnall Gleeson) to piece together some ancient clues and perhaps indeed find the Fountain of Youth. After the inevitable initial reluctance, she agrees and even brings her son (Benjamin Chivers) as they travel the globe, including stops at the wreck of the Lusitania and the pyramids in Egypt, in search of their prize while a mysterious woman (Eliza Gonzalez) follows them in order to stop them from finding the prize and to engage in increasingly stilted would-be flirtatious banter with Luke.

Even amidst the glut of such terrible streaming movies as The Gray Man, Ghosted and Argylle, the sheer crumminess on display in virtually every scene of Fountain of Youth is something to behold. Here is a film with a screenplay that feels like one of the numerous cheap-jack movies and TV shows that attempted to ride the coattails of Raiders of the Lost Ark—things like the Cannon-released “classics” Treasure of the Four Crowns, the Richard Chamberlain version of King Solomon’s Mines and Firewalker—and fails to offer up a single smart idea, witty piece of dialogue or inspired action set piece in its seemingly endless two-hour-plus running time. Unable to utilize the over-the-top violence or elaborately foul language that have helped, however dubiously, goose many of his recent efforts, Ritchie is literally just going through the motions here and the result is a film that looks and feels like a collection of cut scenes from a video game that you have no real interest in playing. While I presume that the actors were all well-paid for lending their names to such nonsense, none of them do their careers any favors with their work here—Krasinski is so smugly annoying throughout that it seems at times as if he is doing an homage/roast of Ryan Reynolds, Portman delivers the kind of stricken performance that is usually only seen in hostage videos in which the victims try to pretend that everything is okay and reliable players like Gonzalez and Stanley Tucci (who briefly turns up as “The Elder”) do things that I suspect they aren’t especially proud of either. Bereft of laughs, thrills, surprises or even a single memorable visual to speak of, Fountain of Youth is an absolute embarrassment from start to finish, one that will quickly disappear and be forgotten, though not quickly enough those aforementioned historians who will have to experience its idiocies for themselves

.Friendship, the debut feature from writer-director Andrew DeYoung, is ostensibly a comedy—and a very funny one at that—but it is one where the sense of humor on display is so tense and strange throughout that if you do not find yourself precisely on its particular humorous wavelength, there is a very good chance that you will find yourself squirming in your seat for a good portion of its running time. It stars Tim Robinson as Craig, a guy who appears to have it all, at least to those whose aspirations aren’t exactly sky-high—he has a white-collar job working to develop habit-forming technologies designed to keep people glued to their smartphones, an inexplicably loyal and loving wife in Tami (Kate Mara) and a seemingly endless string of upcoming Marvel movies to get excited over. What he doesn’t seem to have is a genuine male friend and that threatens to change when he meets new neighbor Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd), a super-cool guy who works as a TV weatherman, leads his own band and seems incapable of doing anything that isn’t awesome. Inevitably, Craig is determined to become friends with Austin and the guys that he hangs out with and while Austin is initially amused by Craig’s attempts, Craig’s obsession with being part of the group (which we have already experienced in the opening scene where he attends Tami’s cancer survivor meeting and literally makes the discussion all about him) goes way too far and Austin finally has to tell him to step back for a while. As you can probably surmise, this does not set too well with Craig and his determination to put himself back into Austin’s good graces.

In other hands, a concept like this could have paved the way for an amiable bro-heavy comedy about the perils of male bonding along the lines of I Love You, Man (which also co-starred Rudd, though not with the luxurious stache he sports here) but with Friendship, DeYoung is clearly going for something darker and more caustic, along the lines of the great and still-misunderstood likes of The Cable Guy or Observe and Report. The key to this is in the casting of Robinson, best known for his surreal Netflix sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave, and his willingness to push his overt sense of neediness to the kind of discomfiting heights (or depths) that maybe only Andy Kaufman might have tried to achieve. Right from that opening scene at the cancer survivors meeting, we can sense that there is something profoundly off about him but at that point, he seems relatively harmless (which is perhaps the only reason why Tami sticks with him) but once Austin inadvertently shows him a new way of living, whatever traces of acceptable social behavior he may have quickly fall to the wayside in increasingly dark and funny ways. Amazingly, Robinson presents Craig in such a way so that even though you would easily run away if you encountered anyone remotely resembling him in real life, you still kind of sympathize with his increasingly pathetic, if understandable, need to belong even when he is reduced to breaking and entering and licking psychedelic toads in order to regain that feeling. Although Friendship starts to lose a little steam towards the end as the cringe factor becomes a bit repetitive, I have to say that it gave me more genuine laughs than anything that I have seen in a while, though those without a taste for wince-inducing absurdism may not feel the same way

.The latest film to attempt to pay homage to the works of Jane Austen by appropriating the themes and tropes found in her books to use in the context of a contemporary narrative, the French import Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, the debut feature from writer-director Laura Piani, tells the story of Agathe (Camille Rutherford), a winsome lass with some emotional baggage, a virtually non-existent love life and aspirations of being a writer that she has yet to even begin to fulfill. That all changes when best friend/co-worker/possible romantic interest Felix (Pablo Pauly) surreptitiously sends the first couple of chapters of her novel-in-progress to a Jane Austen writers residency in England and she is accepted. Upon her arrival, she is met by Oliver (Charlie Anson), whose family runs the residency and who—horrors!—doesn’t particularly care for Austen’s work despite being her great-great-great-grandnephew. Unfortunately, once she arrives, she is stricken with a case of writer’s block, which she tries to alleviate with frequent gambols through the countryside, getting to know the other oddballs who are part of the program and—most importantly—trying to decide whether to open her heart at last to Felix, who she knows perhaps too well at this point, or to take a chance on Felix, who she finds to be strangely intriguing despite being annoying and irritating to her whenever they come together.

If you are a fan of Austen—hell, even if you aren’t—it is likely that you will be able to figure out how all of this gets resolved. Of course, if you are a fan of Austen—and again, even if you aren’t—it is equally likely that you won’t particularly care when all is said and done. Piani is far more interested in sprinkling her work with Austen-related references, story points and Easter eggs than in crafting a narrative or characters that might generate interest on their own. Although the opening scenes have a certain light charm to them, once Agathe arrives at the workshop, it starts going all over the place in totally inconsistent ways as it veers between the psychological issues behind her need to be a writer, the aggressive quirkiness of the other participants (including the requisite kindly old man who likes to recite his poetry while pantsless) and the less-than-compelling details of the romantic triangle emerging between Agathe, Felix and Oliver, eventually culminating in a finale that barely bothers to resolve anything in a satisfying manner. As the central character, Rutherford does have some charm but the film is so determined to make her the new Amelie that those efforts end up making her seem tiresome after a while. Unless you are in desperate need for a shot of hard-sell whimsy with a Gallic flavor, you would be better off giving Jane Austen Wrecked My Life a pass and spending the time reading (or re-reading) one of Austen’s actual books instead

.As Sister Midnight, the dynamic directorial debut from Karan Kandhari, begins, Hindi woman Uma (Radhika Apte) arrives in Mumabai to start a new life with Gopal (Ashok Pathak), her new husband from an arranged marriage. Although she has known Gopal since they were kids, she doesn’t know him much beyond that and as she attempts to settle down into her new routine in their extremely modest home, it quickly becomes apparent that there is a profound sense of disconnect between the two. While he spends his non-working hours watching TV in lieu of attempting to communicate with Uma or even consummating their marriage, she tries to fit into the ideal of an ordinary housewife but discovers that she has virtually no aptitude for things like cooking or setting a household budget. Although she take a job as a cleaner as a way of alleviating her boredom but it doesn’t help and as her sense of anger and frustration continues to build, it begins to manifest itself in increasingly strange ways.

Although watching a woman chafing at the constraints of a loveless and unfulfilling marital relationship is hardly anything new in cinematic terms, I can’t recall a variation of that conceit as wild and wooly as this one. Taking inspiration from both Wes Anderson and Roman Polanski, Kandhari offers us a portrait of a disintegrating psyche that is always lively and surprising, thanks to the gorgeous cinematography from Sverre Sordal that finds the strange beauty of Uma’s not-so-pretty existence, a decidedly eclectic soundtrack in which music from the East and West are intertwined to fascinating results and some hilariously grisly moments later on as the line between Uma’s real life and developing psychosis begins to blur in increasingly trippy ways. Best of all is the knockout turn by Apte as Uma, who commands the screen right from the start with her mesmerizing presence and holds it with a performance that expertly balances the character’s more extreme attitudes and behaviors with her profound sense of isolation over her current position. I suppose that some viewers may grow restless with the occasionally rambling nature of the narrative as well as some of the big swings that it takes along the way (including the occasional deployment of stop-motion animation) but not only was I not bothered by these elements, I left Sister Midnight feeling elated and excited over what I had just witnessed and eager to see what Kandhari and Apte have to offer in the future.