Film Shorts: Valley Cinemas and Beyond

Paper Towns is another teenage love story, in this case about a boy who sets out to help the girl next door, whom he has always loved.

The film is directed in a conventional manner by TV director Jack Schrier, who previously did Robot and Frank, but the main attraction is the story the book author tells. Like Nicholas Sparks, Mr. Green is the real star of the show, and his films are almost actor- or director-proof. Therefore the characteristic theme of the film is Mr. Green’s. These are teens stories anchored with interesting themes, observational humor, and dedicated servants to the author, but at the end of the day these films are TV level works.

As mentioned last week, Minions is an origin story. After emerging from primordial soup, they unintentionally sabotage one desired evil genius after another, from a hapless T-Rex onward to Napoleon. After a series of plot complications, they finally are in a position to meet with Gru, so that Despicable Me can happen. Thus if you love minions, the circle is complete. If only your small kids love minions, then you will lurch from island of wit to island of nostalgic song, possibly insulted by the film’s crass attempts to keep you barely interested.

Meanwhile in the world of alternative media streams, several new films are coming to your local RedBox dispensary. For horror and science fiction buffs, there is the terrific suspense tale It Follows, which introduces a new and intriguing gimmick and monster myth into the teen slasher genre, which would make a good double bill with Ex Machina. This is the story of a computer genius who uses one of his stand out employees as a guinea pig to test the humanity of his latest invention, a lady robot (like the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner). This is one of those rare sci-fi films that isn’t a covert war story but an intelligent treatment of complicated ideas in the sciences and technology. For the art house crowd there is the grown up western Slow West, which is indeed slow, but has a great shoot out sequence at the end, and the latest film by French director Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours). Called Clouds of Sils Maria, it’s about an aging actress (Juliette Binoche) returning to a play that made her famous in her youth, but this time playing a different character, as she tussles with her personal assistant, played beautifully by Kristen Stewart.

Over at Netflix, new films this week include the weirdly addictive private school soap opera Rebelde. Amazon is showing Above Suspicion, an engrossing four season British crime show starring Kelly Reilly (Vince Vaughan’s wife on True Detective) and Ciaran Hinds, and from the mind of Lynda La Plante, who created the series Prime Suspect.