Nimrods (c) Inaugural Entertainment
Film: Nimrods
In Cinemas
Up-and-coming actor Mason Thames has fought dragons (and then befriended them) in How to Train Your Dragon and a serial killer in Black Phone, but his biggest challenge in his young film career has to be portraying a teen believing that Green Day wants his band, Analog Dogs, to play a concert with them, on New Year’s Eve in Nimrods. It seems in the world of the film that it’s a given that this teen would believe this crazy offer, so how much you go with it will determine your enjoyment of this fun hangout. The hurdles for Tommy (Thames) to overcome are that he’s underage (his mom, played by Jenna Fischer, expressly forbids it) and he also doesn’t have any way to get to California from Missouri with less than $30 to his name. His bandmates are his high-school best friend, bassist Chad (Kylr Coffman), and his high school “can barely stand him but he can play the drums” Fred (Ryan Foust). Their road trip starts with a stolen car and an emergency-only credit card, and from there we get run-ins with all kinds of characters, including a kindly bar owner (Angela Kinsey), a fellow aspiring singer (McKenna Grace) and a very (very!) strange motel owner (Fred Arminsen). But this is all played with a healthy dose of can-do attitude and a smart screenplay by Lee Kirk (with a story assist by the Green Day band members themselves: Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool) so even though every plot point can be predicted a mile away, it is still an enjoyable ride. Thames is a cool but clueless everyman with an impossible dream while the goofy Coffman and self-serious Foust give ample comedy support in a Superbad kinda way. There’s also Keen Ruffalo, son of Mark, as Tommy’s older brother Wayne, who instigates the whole plot and has a nice emotional moment at the end of the film. To say that Green Day does show up is barely a spoiler, but the concert scenes add a satisfying romp for fans of the band, road-trip movies and those American Idiots who refuse to give up on their dreams.
The Last House (c) Netflix
Film: The Last House
Streaming on Netflix
To say that The Last House is a high concept film is an understatement, but this seems to be the summer of preposterous apocalyptic family dramas with The End of Oak Street opening this week about a suburban neighborhood being overrun by dinosaurs. But nothing compares to the plot of the latest film from Louis Leterrier (Clash of the Titans, Fast X) in which the stories (by writer Matthew Robinson of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die fame) rival the plots of M. Night Shyamalan films, especially Signs. The Delgado family lives in the outskirts of Seattle when the rains come. If you think Seattle and rain are synonymous, it certainly isn’t uncommon, but on this rainy day in particular, things got weird. For some reason, everyone who is inside finds themselves locked inside, while the people outside can’t get in. Doors and windows are stuck and unbreakable (excuse the Shyamalan pun) so the people who are trapped in their house have to make do with what they have, with no internet or news to help them to figure out what’s going on. Dad Jason (Wagner Moura) and Mom Ann (Greta Lee) try to act normal for the benefit of their kids, 12-year-old Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski) and 8-year-old Ruth (Riley Chung), but like our most recent pandemic, they’re worried to death about a situation they have no control over. The film does a good job relating what happens in the house as days turned into weeks with the home schooling of the kids and the non-streaming versions of their limited entertainment options—records for music and only two DVDs (Air Force One and Annie) to watch. If you learn anything from this story, it’s that physical media is very important. What it does less successfully is make sense of what’s happening outside, especially since odds are most people at any given time are not at home but out working, shopping or travelling.
The Last House (c) Netflix
With one creepy exception, we zero in on only the people in this neighborhood, whose only means of communication is to write notes on chalkboard to each other before one by one, bad things start to happen, mostly when it’s raining. The main attraction of The Last House is that it’s hard to categorize. Except for the science fiction instigation, the film drops this aspect and focuses more on family dynamics for the first hour or so. But like most Shyamalan films, creepy elements are always a part of the characters’ lives before exploding into a horror extravaganza for the big finale. Despite strong performances by Moura (The Secret Agent) and Lee (Past Lives), the film never involves the audience with its antiseptic approach. The characters never grow with complex motives but just act the way the screenplay needs them to. The Last House may one day be re-evaluated for its clever parallels to our pandemic isolation, but since that event is still so fresh in our minds, this allegory feels underwhelmingly pointless.
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