Ashby starts off like most schoolyard coming-of-age story’s as our main character Ed Wallis (Nat Wolff) arrives at a new town and attempts to fit in at school. When called upon by his teacher on the first day, Ed reveals his extensive knowledge of Ernest Hemingway—instantly earning him nerd status among his classmates. It’s an exaggerated classroom setting for sure, one where chants from the football team can happen at any moment and homosexual slurs are said aloud in front of the teacher. But it does get across the stereotypical slacker personalities of the upcoming Generation Z. In an effort to encourage students to take a break from narcissism, the teacher assigns the class to interview an “old person” and write a 2,000-word report on them. And just so happens that Ed moved in right next door to an older gentleman.

This is when Tony McNamara’s script begins to sound a lot like the plot of last year’s St. Vincent starring Bill Murray and Melissa McCarthy. It turns out that Ed is neighbors with a dry-witted crackpot named Ashby (Mickey Rourke) who enjoys drinking and smoking by himself. Ashby is reluctant to answer any of Ed’s questions at first, but maybe because he sees a little of himself in the young kid, the crotchety old man slowly opens up. Ed soon discovers Ashby is a retired CIA assassin with nearly a 100 kills credited to his name, and by driving him around to various locations, he unknowingly gets caught up in the middle of Ashby’s assassin life.

The biggest nuisance of Ashby is that it tries to combine two very different narratives into one cohesive storyline. In one corner is a dark story about a man attempting to absolve his sins and overcome his wrongdoings. And in the other corner is a story of a teenager trying to build enough courage to stand up for himself by trying out for the football team. But there’s no graceful transition between them. So a scene featuring a silly pep talk from the high school football coach is followed by a bloody shootout between Ashby and his next target.

Ashby could’ve been better had it focused on just one of its storylines. While both threads contain a story worth exploring, the attempt to blend the two ends up being a jarring mismatch of tones. This makes it difficult to figure out which audience the film is targetting. Half the time it seems like the film caters to high schoolers, while other times the aim is more towards adults.

Furthermore, by not narrowing the scope of the story, McNamara leaves some interesting subplots unresolved. The most notable example is the abandoned subplot of Eloise (played by a nerdy looking Emma Roberts). For most of the film, she’s determined to study how football players’ brains are impacted by hard hits on the field. But the results of this experiment are left unanswered and completely vanishes from the storyline. In the end, her character merely serves as a love interest of Ed and a much too convenient tie-in with the football theme.

On a positive note, Ashby contains great performances from its cast. Rourke is excellent in portraying a lonely misanthrope who can somehow be redeeming in certain moments. Wolff continues his trend of playing a relatable, yet average high schooler as he has now in recent films like Paper Towns and The Fault In Our Stars. The standout of the film might have been Sarah Silverman had she been given a larger role than the recently divorced sexually active mother. Roberts is excellent too, but also underdeveloped.

Ultimately, if any part of Ashby sounds remotely interesting, you’d be better off watching St. Vincent instead. Not only does it contain a very similar story as Ashby, but the film better in just about every way.

Unremarkable teens panic over non-problems in Paper Towns, a flatlined adaptation of a John Green YA novel that makes The Fault In Our Stars look like an Abbas Kiarostami masterpiece. Good teen movies are about recognition, assuring awkward adolescents that the freak-outs and crushing disappointments that define their pained existences are actually totally normal and quite surmountable. But the key to making this game plan work is the same key to making all character-driven stories work: good characters. Paper Towns has none of those.

It’s nice that portraying normal-looking teens on-screen has become so fashionable as of late (the days of 35-year-old models playing high-schoolers are all but a distant memory), but for goodness’ sake, just because they look ordinary doesn’t mean they have to be the dullest kids on the block. Our proxy and narrator is Q (Nat Wolff), a well-behaved, unassuming high school senior living in suburban Orlando. He’s the kind of kid who TPs a house for the first time and considers it the wildest night of his life.

Since Q was a kid, he’s been under the spell of Margo Roth Spiegelman (Cara Delevingne), the girl from across the street (his crush is his sole defining personality trait). They were friends in elementary school, but have grown apart as Q’s mild-mannered, obedient nature has caused the adventurous, rebellious Margo to leave him in the proverbial dust; she leads a nocturnal, untamed life while Q gets straight-As and hangs out with his buddies in the school band room. Seemingly out of the blue, Margo finally takes notice of him for the first time since they were kids and invites him out for a late-night revenge mission against her ex-boyfriend and ex-best friend. Thinking it may be his last chance to spend time with the girl of his dreams before he goes off to college, he lets go of his inhibitions, holds his breath and takes the dive.

It’s the best night of Q’s life, but he’s jerked back to reality when Margo mysteriously vanishes, leaving a trail of crafty clues in her wake. From highlighted passages in poetry books to tiny notes hidden in the easiest-to-miss places, Q obsesses over Margo’s breadcrumbs, determined to rescue her from wherever she’s run off to (her parents aren’t as concerned; she’s been known to run off for weeks at a time). Once he deciphers the clues and figures out where she’s gone, he gathers four of his equally uninteresting friends and saddles up for a road trip to find his lost love.

The plot is so unoriginal and uninspiring that I was actually aggravated watching it. The worst thing about Paper Towns isn’t that it’s poorly made or majorly flawed; it’s that it’s so humble and plain and unexciting that it saps the life out of you. It even sucks the life out of its talents. Director Jake Schreier made a charming, inventive movie in 2012 called Robot & Frank that had me excited about his forthcoming work. Alas, Paper Towns seems to only have Green’s fingerprints on it, and none of his. Wolff was a standout in Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto as a bratty, sexually abusive teen with a mean streak (he was good in The Fault In Our Stars, too), but in this movie he’s virtually impossible to pick out of a lineup of other teenage male leads.

Some scenes in Paper Towns are so uncomfortably contrived and cheesy that I scanned the theater for a moment, positive someone would get up and leave out of impatience and disgust (I had the urge myself). When Margo’s clues lead Q and company to a spooky, abandoned convenience store in the middle of the night, they start singing a song to ease their fears. They start singing the Pokémon theme song. This scene isn’t painful because of how nerdy it is (I actually quite enjoy the Pokémon video games, thank you very much), but because it’s disingenuously presented as some kind of classic coming-of-age movie moment. Simply put, it’s not funny and it’s a waste of time.

When you boil Paper Towns down, it’s about a boy who learns to let go of lofty idealizations and appreciate what he’s got right under his nose. It’s actually not a bad life lesson to base a movie on, but the movie Schreier’s built around it is so unambitious that it’s hard to absorb the message, considering the mind-numbingly boring the road to get there is. Like its hero, Paper Towns needs to grow some balls.

Is it really possible that Lily Tomlin has gone this long without a starring vehicle of her own? The iconic actress has decades of perfectly timed, naturalistic punchlines under her belt, yet for years her parts have been largely reduced to limited arcs on TV shows or small, supporting roles in middling movies. Writer/Director Paul Weitz clearly saw the enormous potential in this market gap. Following his 2013 Tina Fey comedy Admission, in which Lily Tomlin played Fey’s mother, Weitz wrote an entire movie with Tomlin in mind.

Grandma premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival to slew of praise for Tomlin (Way Too Indie caught up with it at Tribeca and had glowing things to say, too). Despite its title, Tomlin’s character is far form a withered, weakened old lady. In Grandma, Tomlin plays Elle Reid, a misanthropic lesbian poet, whose granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) shows up broke and in need of an abortion. Together, the two journey to collect cash, confront their pasts, and hit Nat Wolff in the balls with a hockey stick.

Grandma also stars a collection of familiar faces, many of them in the trailer, including Sam Elliott, John Cho, Marcia Gay Harden, Judy Greer and Laverne Cox. While New Zealanders will get a early chance to see Grandma at the New Zealand International Film Festival in July, Americans everywhere will have to cope with Granmda‘s August 21st release date by watching and re-watching the pleasant new trailer below:

Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto wades through the malaise of modern teen life as well as any movie has in years, reminding us of how dirty and distressing high school life can truly be. Based on a book of short stories by James Franco set in the semi-cushy California city he grew up in, the film depicts everyday-looking adolescents who make bad mistakes and reckon with them. It’s a deceptively truthful approach to the subgenre that few studio productions have the cajones to touch. Coppola does her family name proud and announces herself as an exciting new voice in the cinemasphere.

Coppola takes bits and pieces from Franco’s anthology and strings them together into a cohesive narrative, and the result gels pretty well, structurally. The group of well-off white kids sauntering through their suburban wasteland are all well-drawn and have unique, interesting trajectories. Emma Roberts plays April, a virgin who may or may not have a questionable budding relationship with her soccer coach (Franco), whose son she babysits on the weekends. She also has a bit of a crush on the more appropriately-aged Teddy (Jack Kilmer), a good-natured stoner kid who’s a bit of a screw-up, mostly due to the toxic influence of his reckless, sociopath friend Fred (Nat Wolff). In a sleeper role, Zoe Levin plays Emily, a misguided girl who wants love but doesn’t know how to attract others with anything but her body.

The film opens with Teddy and Fred sitting in a car in an empty parking lot at night, rambling about hypothetical, fantastical teenage boy nonsense because they have nothing else better to do. They accidentally ram the car into the wall in front of them, and with that Coppola has set the tone of the film perfectly. These lost souls are in limbo, too old to stay home all night, and too young to partake in the adult nightlife, so their only option is to shuffle around, drink, smoke, have parties, and break stuff, including themselves.

There isn’t a lot going on plot-wise, which is a good thing, as the film’s identity is more defined as a moving portrait of the modern, suburban teenager. Teddy and Fred are friends not because they’re good for each other (the opposite is true), but mostly because cutting down a tree with a chainsaw tickles them both in the same way. It’s better to be bored together than bored alone, at the very least. When Teddy gets a DUI while driving home from a party, he talks shit to the police officer, establishing again that he isn’t your typical teen movie protagonist, but a confused kid who makes mistakes often.

With a background in photography, Coppola keeps her composure visually, not working too hard to wow us with compositions or colors. As a result the film (which is, in fact, pretty) is tasteful in its imagistic flourishes, flirting with the surreal only at timely, pivotal moments in the characters’ misadventures. For example, when April has her first sexual experience, time seems to stop, and we’re transported to the deepest recesses of her mind as Coppola focuses on her face and heavy breathing, muting out the rest of the world. All of the melodrama that spoils modern teen movies is hushed to almost non-existence here; the film is as moody, dark, and accurately evokes the intensity of teenage bewilderment.

Kilmer and Roberts (both fantastic) are the central characters, but Wolff and Levin have an engaging storyline to navigate as well. The rude, in-your-face Fred finds the promiscuous Emily the perfect play thing for him to exploit and dominate, and their increasingly abusive meetings culminate in a stirring poolside moment that changes them both forever.

What’s significant about Palo Alto is that, even with Coppola’s expressionistic delivery, it’s as accurate a portrayal of today’s teenager you’ll find in movies. It’s an excellent time capsule for future generations. These kids are in limbo, not consumed by future plans like college or careers, but by the most present of issues, big and small. They look and feel real; Teddy plucks on his guitar in his messy room (which is Kilmer’s in real life), April shuts the door and bounces around to music when she gets home from school, and Fred dicks around at the local skatepark. It’s these small, quiet moments in life that Coppola captures so well, moments that seem insignificant at the time but later develop into our most vivid, cherished memories. A shining debut feature.

Originally published on 5/16/2014

Palo Alto trailer