Review: In documentary 'Dick Johnson Is Dead,' a daughter contemplates her father's old age and helps him have fun with dying

Director Kirsten Johnson’s intimate, funny and vital documentary “Dick Johnson Is Dead” is a living testament to a daughter’s love for her dad and the best “hug your family” message one can imagine.

Dick is Kirsten’s dad, and he’s not dead yet. But he’s in his mid-80s, and showing the signs of Alzheimer’s, and Kirsten knows it’s only a matter of time that Dad will be gone, mentally and then physically.

What does a filmmaker do with this heavy information? Fake his death. Over and over again. With her dad’s willing participation, a few make-up artists and some stunt doubles to make it look realistic.

Johnson (“Cameraperson”) also stages a funeral for her dad’s friends to pay their respects while he’s around to hear them. And she creates, on a soundstage, a version of heaven for him to enjoy — complete with dancers, confetti, and his favorite easy chair and ottoman.

In between the fabricated moments are real, raw and honest conversations about what it means for the Johnson family to watch their patriarch slowly fade away, to be gone before he’s gone. That happened with Kirsten’s mom, Katie Jo, and Dad knows that the same is likely for him.

Still, if one has to go — and dying is the one thing we’re all going to do someday — going in a fun way like this, surrounded by happy grandkids and lots of chocolate cake, is the nicest way to go. It’s the supreme irony of “Dick Johnson Is Dead” is that it shows how, in spirit, he’s never been more alive. 

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‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, October 2, streaming on Netflix. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements and macabre images. Running time: 89 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 29, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Possessor' is a violent and mind-twisting thriller about identity, sex and bloody murder

With his second feature, the mind-twisting and relentless thriller “Possessor,” writer-director Brandon Cronenberg shows that the razor-filled apple doesn’t fall far from the twisted tree — his father, the legendary horror director David Cronenberg.

The younger Cronenberg seems to share some of his dad’s interest in body-horror suspense, and he wraps that gory tension around a thriller that explores the madness of messing with one’s identity.

The science-fiction premise Cronenberg imagines here is a smart one, even if it sounds akin to Christopher Nolan’s “Inception.” Tasya Vox, played by Andrea Riseborough, is an assassin with a special technique: Using machinery set up by a shadowy syndicate, Tasya can insert her consciousness into another person’s body, and use that person to get close enough to the mark to kill. Cronenberg sets up the premise with an efficiently brutal example, when Tasya takes over the body of a hostess (Gabrielle Graham) to murder a bigwig, then dissolves the link to make the hostess a patsy when the cops arrive.

Even in this prologue, Cronenberg leaves clues that Tasya is getting too good at this work, and is taking risks to make it fun for her. For example, though she arranged for her hostess to use a pistol in the killing, Tasya opts to dispatch her mark with a steak knife, stabbing him gleefully and repeatedly.

After that job, Tasya protests to her boss (Jennifer Jason Leigh) that she needs time off to reconnect with her estranged husband, Michael (Rossif Sutherland, son of Donald) and their boy, Ira (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot). But the boss has a big job ahead — and she needs her best killer, Tasya, on the job.

The new mark is Jonathan Parse (Sean Bean), founder of a major tech company that’s data-mining vast amounts of the country. The person Tasya must inhabit to pull off this assassination is Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), the put-upon boyfriend of Parse’s daughter, Ava (Tuppence Middleton). Tasya’s mission is to get inside Colin’s head, make him look like a disgruntled future son-in-law, then kill Jonathan and Ava. The glitch in the plan comes when Tasya has trouble keeping her personality separate from Colin’s, and vice versa.

Cronenberg makes the future-imperfect technology appear plausible, and thinks through the ramifications of such ego-shredding brain manipulation. He also deploys a trippy visual palette to make Tasya’s identity struggle come to vibrant, unsettling life. It’s not for the squeamish, with copious amounts of blood spilled and some raw sex scenes. (The movie is cleverly being marketed as “Possessor Uncut,” though I can’t find any evidence that the film, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, has been exhibited in any “cut” form.)

Behind the spectacle, though, are a linked pair of sharp performances by Riseborough and Abbott, who are essentially playing the same characters, in one way or another. Their mounting confusion over who they are — Colin or Vasya or something else entirely — keeps the tension of “Possessor” like a tightrope all the way to the unsettling finale.

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‘Possessor’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, October 2, at Megaplex Valley Fair (West Valley City), Megaplex Legacy Crossing (Centerville), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex at The District (The District), and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Not rated, but probably R for strong sexuality, violence and gore, and language. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Save Yourselves!' is a timely comedy about hipsters in isolation, fending off an alien attack

It’s the end of the world as the characters of “Save Yourselves!” know it, as this roughhewn comedy gleefully skewers urbanites’ over-reliance on technology.

Su (Sunita Mani) and Jack (John Reynolds) are a Brooklyn couple in a rut, and locked onto their screens. Su freaks out when Jack uses her laptop and messes with her browser tabs, which she keeps organized for her job as an assistant to an exceedingly demanding boss. Even a furtive make-out session gets sabotaged by the text-message alert.

After meeting up with an old friend, Raph (Ben Sinclair) — a former investment banker who now makes 3D-printed surfboards from algae in Nicaragua — Jack and Su talk about trying to shake up their lives. Their plan is to spend a week at Raph’s grandpa’s cabin upstate, turning off their phones to disconnect with the internet and reconnect with each other.

The trip gets off to a rocky start, as Jack criticizes the overly prepared Su for repeating lists of conversation starters she Googled and wrote in her notebook. During the argument, Su impulsively turns her phone on for a minute — which is when she gets the first hints that Earth is being invaded by aliens.

Then there are the killer pouffe balls — think a mix of “Star Trek’s” tribbles and the horror movie “Critters” — that show up around the cabin.

The writing-directing team of Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson set up a scenario as a vessel for semi-improvised panic comedy, as Su and Jack try to apply city skills to an end-of-the-world situation — and then freak out when they realize such skills have no practical applications. Their argument about whether to use the rifle Raph has in the basement is a miniature master class in comedic banter.

Fischer and Wilson paint themselves into a corner before the unsatisfying ending, but the ride before that is engaging — and the visual effects, considering the indie budget, are effective. The reason to watch, though, is to appreciate the comic gifts of the scruffy Reynolds (“Search Party”) and particularly the wide-eyed Mani (“Glow”) deployed to their fullest.

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‘Save Yourselves!’

★★★

Opening Friday, October 2, at Megaplex Gateway (Salt Lake City), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex at The District (South Jordan), and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Rated R for language. Running time: 93 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 26, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Glorias' is a sprawling biography of Gloria Steinem, with four actors capturing the feminist icon's different facets

Director Julie Taymor takes the expansive route of biographical drama with “The Glorias,” trying to capture the sweep of the whole life of its subject, writer and feminist icon Gloria Steinem — which is both its strength and its weakness.

It’s a slight weakness because going from Steinem’s childhood in Toledo, Ohio, in the early 1940s to her appearance as an elder stateswoman at the Women’s March in Washington in 2017 is a long haul, and Taymor takes two-and-a-half hours to walk it. But the strength comes in Steinem’s world-changing story, and the flourishes Taymor — the woman who made “Frida,” “Across the Universe” and the Broadway version of “The Lion King” — brings to bear.

In the opening scene, Steinem — played by Julianne Moore — gets off a Greyhound bus in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and steps into a biker bar. She’s headed to the Lakota Sioux reservation, and the bartender informs her that 300,000 motorcycle enthusiasts are about to descend on the town. This would seem to be enemy territory for the world’s most famous feminist, but Steinem’s take-it-as-it-comes attitude comes to her aid unexpectedly.

In the early going, Taymor and co-writer Sara Ruhl show where Steinem got her adventurous streak, and her drive to fight for women’s equality. Taymor intercuts between Steinem’s childhood in Toledo and a college fellowship that took her to India.

In Ohio, an 8-year-old Steinem (played by Ryan Keira Armstrong) learns resilience from her father, Leo (Timothy Hutton), a happy-go-lucky traveling salesman with a scheme for every occasion. As a teen (played by “The Haunting of Hill House’s” Lulu Wilson), Gloria watches her mother, Ruth (Enid Graham), once a journalist before marriage, become diminished as she satisfies the social strictures of marriage. In India, Steinem (played by Alicia Vikander), rides the third-class trains with the poor Indians, and learns how to listen as women in villages tell their horrific stories of oppression, inequality, rape and abuse.

After that, the story goes roughly in chronological order, meaning Vikander gets to portray Steinem as a young journalist pitching stories and battling sexism in the 1960s — her exposé of working conditions as a Playboy bunny made her famous — while Moore takes over in the ‘70s, forming Ms. magazine, shifting from journalist to activist, and helping spur the drive for the Equal Rights Amendment.

These sections are dotted with Steinem’s friendships with leading figures of the women’s movement. These include: The activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes (Janelle Monaé), who helps Gloria get over her fear of public speaking; the firebrand lawyer Flo Kennedy (Lorraine Toussaint); Cherokee Nation leader Wilma Mankiller (Kimberly Guerrero); United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta (Monica Sanchez); and — the most fun cameo of all — Bette Midler as the loudmouthed New York congresswoman, Bella Abzug.

It’s a sprawling biography, spanning decades and locations, and sometimes Taymor lets the pace slacken moving from moment to moment. As a connecting device, Taymor brings back that Greyhound, a metaphor for Steinem’s constant traveling and a place where all four actors playing Steinem can occasionally confer — the younger self admitting the doubts the older self long ago forgave, and so on. The bus metaphor strains a bit in places, but Taymor’s final shot on the bus is exhilarating.

The four actors all capture facets of Steinem perfectly, particularly in Vikander’s distillation of the young Gloria’s wide-eyed enthusiasm — which pairs perfectly with the middle-age perspective Moore adds to the mix. When the four tag-team a sexist TV interviewer, casting him into a vortex of his own chauvinism, it’s a capstone to a movie that displays the ferocious power of Steinem’s wit and hard-won wisdom.

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‘The Glorias’

★★★

Available starting Wednesday, September 30, streaming on Amazon Prime. Rated R for some language and brief lewd images. Running time: 147 minutes.

Review: Miranda July hits the heartstrings in 'Kajillionaire,' an eccentric ode to parents and their rebel children

One cannot choose their parents, but the eccentric polymath Miranda July makes the point in her unique way in the whimsical and wise “Kajillionaire” that one can choose how to live with them.

July’s story centers on one family in Los Angeles — the parents, Robert (Richard Jenkins) and Theresa (Debra Winger), and their adult daughter, Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood). They spend most of their days engaged in small-time scams, like stealing packages from people’s post-office boxes or trying to get cash refunds for non-cash gift certificates.

The family spends a lot of time doing these kind of hustles, trying to scrounge up enough money to pay their landlord, Mr. Stovik (Mark Ivanir). The rent is already cheap, because of the unusual living arrangement: The space is an office, the family sleeps on the floor amid the cubicles, and one of their daily chores is removing the pink foam that seeps through the back wall from Mr. Stovik’s bubble factory next door. The pink ooze is a fitting symbol for a Miranda July film: Light and frothy, but also menacing and potentially overwhelming.

To pay their back rent, Old Dolio comes up with a bigger-than-usual con. The three of them fly to New York (tickets provided by a sweepstakes reward they stole in the mail), then fly back to L.A. pretending to be strangers. Robert and Theresa will “steal” Old Dolio’s suitcase off the luggage carousel, and Old Dolio will collect $1,575 in travel insurance.

On the flight back, Robert and Theresa confide this plan to their seatmate, Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), who’s excited about meeting people who live on the edge of life, and wants to join in the con. Old Dolio becomes jealous that Robert and Theresa show Melanie the sort of parental affection they’s always denied Old Dolio, which Theresa says was an insult to her intelligence. 

Equally distressing, though, is that Old Dolio — whose sexual orientation seems a mystery, especially to herself — finds herself attracted to Melanie, and wondering whether a life with her would be preferable to the one she has her parents.

July — whose “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005) remains one of the singular masterpieces ever to come out of the Sundance Film Festival — has always been fascinated with notions of self-identity in contrast to the image we show others, and the breaking point between how people embrace the former and disregard the latter. Old Dolio (whose very name, it’s explained, is residue of a long-ago con) is a perfect vessel for July’s thoughts on identity, and Wood captures the character’s confusion and awkward attempts at liberation with soul and spunk. (About Old Dolio’s oddly deep voice: In interviews, July has said that’s Wood’s natural voice, and she uses a higher register for roles like the robot in “Westwood.”)

“Kajillionaire” is chockablock with July’s idiosyncratic touches, and there are moments where a viewer might wonder if the point of the movie is getting lost in the weirdness. July is building up to an emotionally resonant finish, where a seemingly mundane act dissolves into a moment of transcendent, heartbreaking beauty. Hold on for that moment; it’s one for the ages.

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‘Kajillionaire’

★★★★

Opening Friday, September 25, in Megaplex Legacy Crossing (Centerville), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex at The District (South Jordan), and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Rated R for some sexual references/language. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: Alzheimer's drama 'The Artist's Wife' benefits from strong acting and authentic details

The details of the glossy and well-acted drama “The Artist’s Wife” may be a bit odd at times, with its setting among the super-elite of New York artists, but the themes are familiar ones: The push and pull of a relationship between a temperamental artist and the spouse who has repressed her dreams in service to his.

The couple in question here is an acclaimed painter, Richard Smythson (Bruce Dern), and his second wife, Clare (Lena Olin), who share a luxurious modern house in the Hamptons. (Dern’s character has no resemblance to the soundalike Richard Smithson, the “land art” pioneer who created Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Great Salt Lake.) Clare has noticed that Richard, who is preparing for what could be his last great gallery exhibition, has become more irascible than usual — though she finds it hard to accept his doctor’s diagnosis, that Richard is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

Faced with a deadline, of getting Richard through his gallery opening before his mind goes too far down for him to paint, Clare sets herself a pair of major tasks. One is to reconcile the distant relationship between Richard and his daughter, Angela (Juliet Rylance), who runs a girls-who-code nonprofit in New York. The other is to rent a barn near the house to rekindle her long-buried passion for painting.

Some of the movie’s peeks into the art world get a little weird, most of them embodied by Clare’s friend Ada, an avant-garde video artist who poses with nude for a photo shoot. Ada is played by Stefanie Powers — yes, from “The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.” in the ‘60s and “Hart to Hart” in the ‘80s — and I’ll say this much about the 77-year-old’s first full-frontal nude scene: It’s very brief and, no lie, not as bad as you might have feared.

Director/co-writer Tom Dolby seems to have been inspired by his parents — the legendary sound engineer Ray Dolby, whose battle with Alzheimer’s ended with his death in 2013, and Ray’s widow, Dagmar — and there are details infused in the story that feel authentic to the experience. The paired performances, by Dern as the painter losing control and Olin as the helpmeet trying to keep him together, have a lived-in quality that put “The Artist’s Wife” a rung or two above the average melodrama.

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‘The Artist’s Wife’

★★★

Available starting Friday, September 25, on the Salt Lake Film Society virtual cinema. Rated R for language, some graphic nudity and brief sexuality. Running time: 96 minutes.

Review: Slavery-focused 'Antebellum' is as gory as a horror movie, but without any of the thrills

“Antebellum” is being marketed as a thriller, even a horror movie — and while it has enough gore to qualify for the latter, it’s too sluggish to generate any real thrills as it deploys shlock effects to make its points about racism past and present.

The movie begins with a long tracking shot — an opening bit of showing off by the writing-directing team of Gerald Bush and Christopher Renz — from a Southern plantation’s front steps, through a Confederate military courtyard, to a cotton field where slaves are laboring under a hot sun and cruel overseers. The camera lands on the face of Eden (Janelle Monáe), who knows she doesn’t belong here.

Bush and Renz, music-video directors working here on their first feature, show more horrors inflicted on Eden. She’s beaten for not giving her name to her tormenter, a man in a Confederate officer’s uniform (played by Eric Lange), whose face the audience doesn’t see clearly at first. Eden is also burned with a branding iron, and regularly raped by the officer.

When a new Black woman (Kiersey Clemons) arrives at the plantation, Eden is quick to tell her to be silent, for her own good. But the warnings aren’t enough when the woman, Julia, attempts an escape and is brutally brought back to the compound.

After 38 minutes of Eden’s painful, seemingly hopeless plight, the movie changes abruptly. We cut to the present day, and a rich, successful woman, Veronica, preparing for a business trip to New Orleans, to promote her book, a Black feminist manifesto. Veronica has a loving husband (Marque Richardson) and cute-as-a-button daughter (London Boyce), and is enough of a success that she’s debating old white men on cable news and turning down a job offer from a Southern-accented corporate headhunter (Jena Malone).

Veronica is also played by Janelle Monáe, and we’re supposed to wonder what her connection is to the enslaved Eden. But there’s not much to wonder about, even if one hasn’t seen any of the movie’s advertising — or has never seen an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

The lack of suspense in that central “twist” is what ultimately destroys our interest in “Antebellum,” along with the filmmakers’ creepy attempts at detailing the atrocities afflicted on African Americans in the pre-Civil War South.

It’s too bad, because underneath the faux-Scarlett O’Hara production design and horrific scenes of violence, there is some interesting commentary contrasting the brutal treatment then with today’s racist microaggressions that bubble beneath a crust of etiquette. That attitude is best displayed in a delightful scene where Veronica is on the town with two friends, and one of them — played by Gabourey Sidibe (“Precious”) — raises a righteous objection to the bad table the maitre’d has offered these ladies, two of them Black.

But that’s one well-handled scene in a movie with a lot of mishandled moments. Monáe has been in so many well-made, message-forward movies in the last few years — “Harriet,” “Moonlight,” “Hidden Figures” — that her presence should be a guarantee of quality. In this, the makers of “Antebellum” have let her down, and the rest of us, too.

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‘Antebellum’

★★

Available starting Friday, September 18, as a video-on-demand rental on most streaming platforms. Rated R for disturbing violent content, language, and sexual references. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: In 'The Way I See It,' a photographer recalls his years in the White House, and the 'shade' he's throwing at its current occupant

It’s not often a political documentary is designed to make the viewer smile — righteous calls to action are the norm — but Dawn Porter’s “The Way I See It” elicits grins and laughs, because of the good-natured, happy fella that she profiles.

That person is Pete Souza, who retired on Jan. 20, 2017, from what he says is the greatest job in the world: Chief official photographer for the White House. It’s a job he held twice, first for two years in the late ‘80s, documenting the final years of Ronald Reagan’s second term, and again, starting in 2009, for the entire eight-year run of Barack Obama.

Before and in between those stints, Souza was a photojournalist, mostly for the Chicago Tribune. It was as the Tribune’s Washington photographer that he started an assignment to follow Obama, Illinois’ new junior senator, in his first term. Souza also followed Obama on his presidential campaign, and accepted the White House job after the election.

Souza’s one stipulation to Robert Gibbs, head of Obama’s communications department, was that he get full access, to photograph the private moments as well as the public ones. Obama agreed.

That’s a far different set-up than whoever has the job now, Souza notes in the documentary. He looks at a photo of Donald Trump in the Situation Room in 2019, after some Al Qaeda bigwig was killed, and can see how staged and phony the photo is. For starters, the photographer would have had to have been blocking whatever Trump and his generals were watching.

In his semi-retirement, Souza has become an expert on Trump’s manipulation of images and his administration’s use of the icons and dignity of the White House itself. Souza started reacting to Trump’s daily nonsense by posting photos from the Obama years on his Instagram, with short, snarky comments that conveyed an overall message of “this is how a president is supposed to do things.” Many of the posts were compiled into a book, appropriately called “Shade.”

Porter, through the course of “The Way I See It,” serves two missions. The first is, through Souza’s images, to chronicle the breadth of the Obama administration, and the pay tribute to the reverence that Obama showed to the presidency and the White House during his eight years there. The other is to let Souza point out, from his unique vantage point, how thoroughly Trump has disrespected the office and the building in just four years. (One wishes for an addendum, to ask Souza’s opinion of how Melania Trump redesigned the Rose Garden — where Souza and his wife, Patti, got married, with Obama officiating.)

Though there’s a sense of urgency to “The Way I See It” — Souza says he would be delighted not to contrast Trump’s White House to Obama’s, and hopes Jan. 20, 2021, will be the date he can stop — the overwhelming emotion the movie generates is of nostalgia. Yes, there was a time when the American president wasn’t a raging jerk to vast swaths of the country he was elected to serve. Those were the days.

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‘The Way I See It’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, September 18, in theaters where available. Rated PG-13 for brief strong language. Running time: 100 minutes.