Movie Review

Fresh face Julio Torres breaks through with absurd and topical Problemista

Julio Torres in Problemista

Photo courtesy of A24

The best thing about the art of movies is that there will always be someone willing to push the boundaries. Filmmakers like Charlie Kaufman, Yorgos Lanthimos, Wes Anderson, Kelly Reichardt, and more don’t play by the rules of more mainstream people, which makes their films stand out for movie lovers. Joining that list is actor, writer, and now director Julio Torres, thanks to his breakout film, Problemista.

Torres – who looks like a Latino Justin Long - plays Alejandro, an immigrant from El Salvador who’s hanging on by the skin of his teeth in New York City. He has a dream of landing a job with toymaker Hasbro (although his ideas are, shall we say, off-kilter), but takes other less-desirable jobs to maintain his work visa. As the film begins, he’s working for FreezeCorp, which hosts the bodies of people who’ve decided to freeze themselves in hopes of being re-animated in the future.

It’s there that he encounters the manic Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), whose artist husband Bobby (RZA) froze himself after a terminal cancer diagnosis. A mishap results in Alejandro getting fired, and since he needs a job to stay in the country, he soon agrees to be an assistant to Elizabeth, who is desperately trying to sell Bobby’s old paintings – all with an egg motif – in order to keep paying for Bobby’s storage.

Torres, who until this point was best known for writing on Saturday Night Live and co-creating the HBO show Los Espookys, has made a delightfully weird film with all sorts of fun details and slyly observant storytelling. With Alejandro almost always one step away from being deported, it is very much a contemporary immigration story. Torres makes sure to keep this part front of mind with repeated trips to an immigration lawyer and calls back home to Alejandro’s mother.

But the tone of the film is one of barely controlled absurdity, demonstrated in scenes showing Alejandro’s multiple roommates, his attempts at earning cash with side gigs, or, especially, his interactions with Elizabeth. Elizabeth is, to put it kindly, all over the place, with her seemingly ADHD mind never able to keep anything organized – her thoughts, her home, or – in a running gag – her database of Bobby’s paintings.

Somehow, Torres keeps the story on the rails by contrasting the opposite personalities of Alejandro and Elizabeth in highly entertaining ways. The pleasure of seeing the timid Alejandro - who sports a constant cowlick in his hair and has a kind of a bouncy way of walking - match up against the off-the wall Elizabeth - who’s never met a person she wouldn’t confront - has a consistency to it, and the film rarely dips in momentum.

Alejandro is the type of mild-mannered character that normally fades into the background, but Torres makes him eminently watchable with the previously-mentioned quirks and more. He holds his own against the tour-de-force performance by Swinton, who is scarily believable as the frenzied Elizabeth. Plenty of people are sure to know someone who exhibits similar traits, and she nails every nuance perfectly.

With a fun-but-odd story that also touches on a hot-button topic in a sincere-but-light way, Problemista may have a chance to gain a similar fandom to those who liked Everything Everywhere All at Once. Torres has established himself as an actor, writer, and director to watch – not bad for his feature film debut.

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Problemista is now showing in select theaters.

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Movie Review

The End of Oak Street can't live up to its Spielberg inspirations

Photo by Daniel McFadden

Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway in The End of Oak Street.

Steven Spielberg is the iconic director of the last 50 years, so it’s no surprise that many other filmmakers have borrowed from his classic films. But most of the time those come in the form of references or homages, not straight up theft, which is what it feels like watching The End of Oak Street play out in front of your eyes.

Set in the early 1980s in an idyllic suburban neighborhood of an unnamed city, Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor) are parents to two teenagers, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery). They’re also possibly heading toward divorce, as Audrey is secretly writing a novel with a thinly-veiled plot about their life, and Brian is cagey about having to earn extra money with a pizza delivery job.

That all gets put on the backburner when a mysterious event takes their entire neighborhood back to the time of dinosaurs. Armed with little more than a shotgun and sledgehammer, Audrey and Brian do their best to keep the family safe in their house. But the longer the ordeal goes on, circumstances force them out onto the streets and into the increasing danger that’s all around them.

Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, the film tries immensely hard to be like the Spielberg movies its filmmaker clearly adores, but fails at almost every turn. It never earns the broken family in ‘80s suburbia vibes that were prevalent in E.T., going all in right away in the opening scene with a neighborhood block party that feels forced. Other elements like a bully who has it out for Brian, the family dog that disappears, and an angry neighbor come across as the tropes they are and not as organic parts of the plot.

When it finally gets to its dinosaur sequences, they pale in comparison to those found in Jurassic Park. The strange manner in which the dinosaurs appear is a big part of that, but the action involving them forgoes ominous moments that could build tension for those that play up gore in an unexpected way for a PG-13 movie. Many of the attacks have so little emotional meaning that they come off as comical, which is entertaining but in a hollow way.

As if those weren’t enough, Mitchell - perhaps at the behest of producer J.J. Abrams (who made his own Spielbergian film, Super 8) - tries to honor Spielberg in other ways. Just like in Jaws, he employs the use of a split diopter lens, which keeps characters in both the foreground and background in focus. But instead of using it judiciously, it’s brought out in three separate scenes, including a laughable one with the four family members where it turns into overkill.

Hathaway, coming off of a role in The Odyssey that could earn her an Oscar nomination, is the best part of this film. But even her evident skills are dragged down by the ridiculousness of the story, which requires hysterics that even she can’t sell. McGregor can normally be counted on for a good performance, but he gives several line readings with strange cadences that make his already-underwritten character come off worse. Stella and Convery are okay, but their roles are unmemorable overall.

Mitchell and his team can never settle on exactly what type of film they were trying to make, and so even though The End of Oak Street has a few moments that work, they’re surrounded by many others that don’t. In trying to emulate Spielberg - there’s even a blatant Back to the Future (produced by Spielberg) rip-off towards the end - all Mitchell has done is show how difficult it is to be the master.

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The End of Oak Street opens in theaters on August 14.