Running on Empty

RUNNING ON EMPTY   **1/2

Sidney Lumet

1988

IDEA:  On the lam for a near-deadly act of anti-war activism they committed over a decade earlier, two parents raise their children as fugitives and grapple with their eldest son's growing independence.

BLURB:  Running on Empty is a political film that tries not to be political, and in the process, becomes more political than it ever needed to be. There are certainly a myriad of intriguing possibilities inherent in the premise of two former hippie activists who now find themselves leading a nuclear family while on the run from the law. But Naomi Foner is not interested in most of them. Instead, she uses the incident that turned them into fugitives - the protest bombing of a military facility during the Vietnam War - as merely a catalyst for a pretty typical family melodrama. Running on Empty works quite well as a family melodrama, its uniformly strong performances and frequently sharp writing deftly navigating the sorrows and ambivalences created by a child’s burgeoning independence from their parents. The sense of cyclical and universal intergenerational tension is brought powerfully home in the late scene between Annie and her estranged father, which highlights how so much of what a parent goes through with their children has been experienced in some variation by their elders, with them. Yet it’s also this scene that reinforces the film’s troubling subtext, positing liberalism as a threat to family unity. How much more interesting and productively complicated would Running on Empty be if Danny’s growth hinged on the development of political consciousness, of any ideological leaning, rather than puppy love and the bourgeois pursuit (inherited from his mother and grandmother, of course) of being a pianist at Juilliard? It would be much more interesting, and challenging. As is, Running on Empty is very much a product of Reagan-era Hollywood, slickly affecting and reactionary at heart.

Challengers

CHALLENGERS   ***

Luca Guadagnino

2024

IDEA:  Two former best friends and tennis doubles teammates - now bitter rivals for the affection of a former tennis prodigy, who's married to one of them and used to date the other - face off in a Challenger match.

BLURB:  Tennis, lust, power, and cinematic form are inextricably bound up in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, an often unwieldy but clever and energetic relationship melodrama. In Justin Kuritzkes’s script, tennis serves as a metaphor for the love triangle between Tashi, Art, and Patrick, its constant volleys and shifts in advantage echoed in the trio’s push-and-pull seductions and attacks. They all take turns as both player and ball in a torrid erotic game that’s all about scoring the winning point. This sort of amour fou gamesmanship is fairly rote stuff, and there’s disappointingly little depth to the characters to make their affairs transcend the petulant devices of a group of affluent, insecure, self-absorbed children (which is, to be fair, what they are). But it’s ultimately less the story than the visual and sonic language of Challengers that teases and thrills, the ways in which Guadagnino extends the tennis metaphor into the structuring principle for his film’s very form. The back-and-forth gameplay of tennis inflects everything from the narrative’s ping-ponging jumps in time to the swish-panning camera movements to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score, which sounds like a techno translation of a tennis ball caught in an endless rally. For better and worse, Challengers fully embraces the repetition that’s an essential characteristic of the game; it has no wariness about how often it rehashes the competition between its protagonists, nor is it timid in its copious use of slow motion to protract a moment or linger sensuously on a face (or chest). Yet these formal expressions viscerally serve a thematic purpose, locating in repetition, frustration, fatigue, and calisthenic pleasure the ingredients of tennis as much as desire.

Dreadnaught

DREADNAUGHT   ***1/2

Yuen Woo-ping

1981

IDEA:  A timid laundry man must rise to the occasion to take on a vicious, mute fugitive who will stop at nothing to kill him. 

BLURB:  As an unfettered showcase for ingenious, virtuosic martial arts choreography, Dreadnaught is pretty much impossible to fault. Without anything resembling a lull in its 95-minute runtime, the film serves up a breathless parade of action sequences that execute seemingly impossible acrobatic maneuvers with unpretentious, kinetic grace. A few standouts: a dance-fight between two pairs of men in Chinese lion costumes; a doctor’s visit in which the patient’s malady is treated with a dizzying flurry of slaps to the abdomen by hands aflame; and a battle on a dark stage with the literally two-faced villain, whose masked heads flip around like Janus on speed. Nearly every action in Dreadnaught is carried out in the fashion of kung fu, including a laundry-drying routine and a tailor’s fitting - literal fashion statements! It’s not only Yuen Woo-ping’s signature elaborate choreography that wows, but the way he edits the action in staccato rhythms to create a sense of crackling and ceaseless energy; the energy of bodies in motion, and of film as their conduit.