"A LITTLE WHITE LIE" (2023)

A LITTLE WHITE LIE (2023) will make you doubt Michael Shannon, but not the way it wants to

Directed by Michael Maren
Written by Michael Maren (based on the novel Shriver by Chris Belden)
Starring Michael Shannon, Kate Hudson, Don Johnson
Running time 1 hour, 41 mins
Rated R for language

By “Doc” Hunter Bush, Podcast Czar

I am a bit bewildered by A Little White Lie, but not in the ways this mistaken identity film aims for. The film, adapted from a novel and directed by first time feature director Michael Maren, is being described as a romantic comedy and while those elements are somewhere in the meandering story, they’re never emphasized effectively.

Based on the novel Shriver by Chris Belden, it stars Michael Shannon as a guy named Shriver - a New York City janitor - who is invited to speak at a west coast college campus’ annual literary conference because they believe he is the reclusive author of the polarizing novel Goat Time, a man who is also named Shriver. Instead of playing up the mistaken identity angle, Janitor-Shriver immediately tells conference organizer Simone (Kate Hudson) the truth, but since she is desperate to keep the annual event going, year-to-year, she opts to have him perpetuate the lie to avoid controversy and embarrassment.

Once at the conference he refuses to be cool or to keep a low profile. He almost immediately tells a reporter that he is in fact not the writer. He insults two members of the conference’s inner circle and we have no idea why. He asks Blythe (Aja Naomi King), a female poet, if she has ever considered writing from a male perspective, which she understandably rankles against, becoming confrontational and suspicious towards him. He insults Sophie (Peyton List), a sculptor who is also Blythe’s partner, by saying that her medium (cake) is “odd”. She justifiably calls out what seems like bigotry from him - he has been exposed to the works of two queer women, and had nothing to offer aside from “Why can’t you make it something I would like?”.

When Blythe disappears after an impromptu late-night party in Janitor-Shriver’s room, instigated by the classics-quoting, Canadian tuxedo-clad T. Wasserman (Don Johnson), Janitor-Shriver becomes the prime suspect because apparently Goat Time includes allusions to the murder of the main character’s ex-wife. This information doesn’t receive much ado for the audience. Janitor-Shriver just mutters something along the lines of “oh, really” and never really treats it like a big deal despite a suspicious Sophie calling in an investigator (Jimmi Simpson) to get to the bottom of things.

Eventually, after showing an affinity for poetry and off-hand, even wry humor, Janitor-Shriver decides that he is, in fact, Writer-Shriver …just in time for a man claiming to be the real Writer-Shriver (Zack Braff) to show up. When I say that none of these scenarios or revelations are treated like a big deal, what I mean is: this movie is described as a romantic comedy. The romance feels completely perfunctory but that’s nothing special - I could throw a rock at my movie collection and hit a dozen comedies with relatively useless romantic subplots, but those still function as comedies, because they take a scenario and emphasize the comedy in it.

Janitor-Shriver pretending to be an author who may have killed his ex-wife and confessed to the crime through his work? That could be funny. Him deciding that he IS the author, only for someone else to show up making the same claim? That could be funny. But neither thing is inherently funny.

Inherently, those two scenarios could be ANYTHING: a John Grisham-esque thriller where the art circle are analyzing microfiche for clues; a Kafkaesque nightmare of confused identity and occulted legal repercussions; it could even BE a romantic comedy, but that takes direction. The film and filmmaker have to steer things to where they want them to go. That’s why there are so many “When you really think about the events of (some comedy film) it’s really a horror film” posts that get reposted across the web all the time. Not just that there are many different ways to view events, but that most people wouldn’t have considered the alternative angles because these other films are doing their job.

As an example: Groundhog Day (1993) - a film which also features Michael Shannon, btw - takes a much crazier scenario (a man repeating the same day over and over with no idea how or why) and continually steers it towards comedy, leaning just enough into the existential horror of things for contrast, to make the comedy work even better. A Little White Lie never takes the reins, so events just kind of happen.

Michael Shannon’s choice to play Janitor-Shriver as awkward - not really making eye contact, muttering a lot of his dialogue - would be fine if everyone else was dialed up a few notches higher on the caricature scale. Kate Hudson for one, plays things far too straight; more Gossip (2000) than Glass Onion (2022). Simone could conceivably be frazzled from trying to keep a lid on things while also coordinating an entire conference, and then potentially lovestruck with Janitor-Shriver because I guess that’s a thing. Which isn’t to say the two don’t have chemistry, but there’s no moment that shows sparks flying between the two. Janitor-Shriver just thinks Simone is better looking than Mark Boone Junior who plays his only real friend back in New York. Simone in turn likes that Janitor-Shriver reads some of her writing and is very complimentary. I don’t really think either of these things constitute real “romance”, but that is admittedly a judgment call.

A Little White Lie suffers from a very common problem in first films: lack of a clear voice. Everything I’ve pointed out above is just an example of mediocre-to-bad filmmaking which feels like the production lacked a deft hand. It’s a romantic comedy where the romance is undeveloped and the comedy at times feels actively avoided. The cast’s performances aren’t calibrated to any specific tone or style, or to play well off of each other, so while there are winning moments and interactions, the movie doesn’t know what to do with them. I can’t even tell what the POV of the story is. What is the script saying by juxtaposing the working class Janitor-Shriver with the comparatively frivolous personalities of the California aspiring artist community? Not much.

For a brief moment, I thought this might borrow from Being There (1979), a film also based on a novel with a similar fish-out-of-water set-up. In Being There, a socially insulated gardener is suddenly thrust into the world of politics where his non sequiturs about plant care are viewed as elegant and insightful political metaphors. When Janitor-Shriver asks if Blythe has considered writing from a male perspective, or calls Sophie’s choice to sculpt in cake “odd”, it would have been an opportunity for them or someone else to see some koan of logic within these critiques, but no one does.

The greatest sin of A Little White Lie is that it made me doubt Michael Shannon, who I sincerely view as one of the best actors around. Here, he's completely unengaged as an actor, and gives an unengaging performance as a result. I worried: Had the man known as ‘Big Chicago’ lost a step after decades of under the radar dynamite performances? Thankfully, I immediately watched George and Tammy (a six episode miniseries on the lives of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, on Showtime) which not only gets my heartiest endorsement, but features top tier acting from Shannon.

A Little White Lie features brief shining moments - the camaraderie between T. Wasserman and Janitor-Shriver; the performance of Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Delta, a fellow conference attendee and author - which get drowned out in a muddled mix of also moments and also characters. Maybe the book is better? Just watch George and Tammy, you’ll thank me.

A Little White Lie is available in theaters, and on digital, and on demand on Friday, March 3rd.

"BULLET TRAIN" (2022)

Bullet Train (2022)
Dir. David Leitch
Written by Zak Olkewicz, based on a novel by Kôtarô Isawa
Starring Brad Pitt, Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, (Michael Shannon)
Running time 2 hours, 6 minutes
Rated R for bloody violence, pervasive language
In theaters August 5th

By “Doc” Hunter Bush, Podcast Czar

Boy howdy did I have a good time with Bullet Train! While it’s not going to leave any lasting emotional imprint on you, or win accolades for its stunt work or choreography, David Leitch’s latest is a big, candy colored actioner with hit after hit of instant gratification, like pumping dollar after dollar into a gachapon machine. It does some really interesting things with music, and running gags and in its best moments genuinely approaches the avant-garde. BUT. Fair warning (and my biggest point of criticism) There’s not enough Michael Shannon. Not by damn sight.

Brad Pitt plays a mercenary returning to the job after some time off while he’s been seeing a therapist and generally trying to self-actualize past his belief that he is cursed with unending bad luck. To that end, his handler has christened him Ladybug as his new codename, drawing on the belief that Ladybugs are lucky. He’s non-violent and only took this particular job because A) it’s supposed to a basic Grab-The-Briefcase-And-Leave job, and B) the other guy called out sick.

Unfortunately for him, the briefcase is located on the titular bullet train traveling to Kyoto which is positively bursting with other, much less pacifistic mercenaries. As they make themselves known to the audience, and/or Ladybug, the film jumps around in time explaining how and why they’re all unknowingly convening on this train. Some are working, some are seeking revenge. The twins, Lemon and Tangerine (Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson respectively) are escorting the son of a crime boss, recently rescued (by them) from kidnappers. The briefcase Ladybug is after was the ransom money, but he doesn’t exactly know that.

Also on the train is Kimura (Andrew Koji), a father whose son was pushed from the roof of a department store. He was lured to the train by the person responsible, who intends to use Kimura as a weapon against the same crime boss whose son is now on board. This crime boss is Michael Shannon, a Russian who rose through the ranks of a Japanese crime family due to his sheer brutality, despite his outsider status. His name is White Death, and his shadow looms large over the entire film but, despite getting a bunch of his backstory early on, Bullet Train is disappointingly light on Shannon.

Michael Shannon, as the folks at the bus stop are tired of hearing me say, is one of our greatest living actors. He chooses projects sparingly, so any time he shows up in something, I crave a full film’s worth of the man some call “Big Chicago”. By that metric Premium Rush, The Shape of Water, and Take Shelter are all great Michael Shannon movies while Bullet Train is a great movie with a Michael Shannon deficiency. And hey, I get it: White Death is a great, extremely fun role to see Shannon play and the story is structured in such a way that he shows up the perfect amount for the character. It’s also just not the right amount of Mike Shannon. Both of these things can be true.

The flick isn’t lacking in characters by any means, and they’re of the big, colorful variety that all but demand trading cards. As opposed to something like Atomic Blonde (also directed by David Leitch) where the characters are a little more grounded in a reality, everyone in Bullet Train could almost have wandered out of the world of The Venture Bros. The Wolf (Bad Bunny, né Benito A Martínez Ocasio) for example, is a Mexican knife pervert still wearing the bloodstained suit from his wedding, seeking revenge on the persons responsible for the death of not only his wife-to-be, but the entire wedding party. He has about ten minutes total screen time, yet I have a good handle on his character and motivations. There doesn’t need to be any more of him in the movie than there is, but he’s such a fun character that I wouldn’t have minded if there was.

The same goes for pretty much all the characters. Some get more development and screen time than others, but only one feels underserved - Zazie Beetz as The Hornet. She serves more as a plot device than a character which would be a problem in any case but here, it’s doubly so for wasting Beetz, though I presume that her cameo is more of a favor to David Leitch who directed her in Deadpool 2.

There’s a certain visual flair to Bullet Train that really works. It’s not something wholly original, it’s just being done here better than in a number of similar films that attempt it: the totemizaton of objects. Certain items become tied to the characters and can be tracked throughout numerous interactions and fight scenes so much so that, late in the film, there’s a ten second break where we follow the adventures of a particular inanimate object from its boarding the train to the then-current moment. It’s a sequence that really shines and feels like something you’d expect from more narratively experimental directors like Daniels, for example. And somehow, despite happening in the middle of a semi-climactic battle, it doesn’t do anything to upset the flow of the movie or the dramatic build of the scene.

If there’s one thing that I can say Bullet Train did better than most any other film I’ve seen this year, it’s creating pleasantly modular action sequences. In an era where big, messy, sprawling (heavily CGI) fights are the soup du jour, Bullet Train relies on clever choreography and contained spaces. For example, Ladybug and Lemon have a fight where they never leave the booth they’re sitting in on the train’s quiet car, but it’s fun, and inventive, and the action is easy to follow and unpredictable. The geometry of the train lends itself perfectly to choreographic reinvention and creative camera work.

Perhaps it’s a reaction to the gravity of the last few years, but 2022 has already had so many Big Fun movies released. With that as a barometer, Bullet Train fits nicely alongside things like Everything Everywhere All at Once, RRR, The Princess, The Lost City, and even Elvis. Regardless of their differing aims as far as meaning, you’ll find yourself smiling and engaged the entire time. In execution, Bullet Train comes off somewhere between James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad (2021) and any of John Woo’s ‘90s output (Face/Off, Broken Arrow, etc.). I’m a physical media supporter, so when I tell you I can’t wait to own a copy of this, I hope you know how much I mean it.

Bullet Train is in theaters Friday, August 5th

"12 Strong (2018)"

The following is my review of 12 Strong, written for Moviejawn.
This is the unedited version, so any spelling or grammatical errors or vagueness is my own.
Plus, I Googled up some pics for added pizzazz.

I was instructed by Moviejawn HQ to focus solely on Michael Shannon for the duration of my viewing of the film 12 Strong; his performance, how his character's actions help move the story along, etc., etc. But bad news: there isn't nearly enough Michael Shannon in this flick.

Don't get me wrong now, I know this is based on a true story (and the book Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton) but it's still a movie, not a documentary and I intend to talk about it from that perspective. As such, I will reiterate: I am sorely lacking in Michael Shannon in this movie. That isn't to say that the other performances aren't enjoyable. Chris Hemsworth does the stoic action movie thing as Captain Mitch Nelson just fine. Michael Peña is inexorably likable as the sarcastic Sgt First Class Sam Diller, joking about buying timeshares in the middle of a crossfire; Trevante Rhodes makes his performance as Sgt First Class Ben Milo shine through a familiar tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold shtick; and Navid Negahban takes you from distrusting his General Dostum to admiring his willingness to make peace amidst a war. All these performances are very engaging.

But none. Of them. Is Michael Shannon.

Shannon (as Chief warrant Officer Hal Spencer) enters in the second scene of the movie. We've opened with pre-9/11 terrorism news footage (for context) and seen Thor's family (his daughter turns off the 1987 Chipmunk Adventure movie to find 9/11 happening), but Michael Shannon and the rest of his team were on a training exercise, waist-deep in a river in full camouflage, complete with face paint, when the attacks happened. Shannon speaks for all of America at that moment in time:

MS: "What happened?"

Back at the military base, Shannon and his crew are trying to process everything and sort out what to do next when Thor shows up. They had been a unit until recently, when Hemsworth had requested a desk job to be near his family but now he's itching to defend America. Only problem is Colonel Bowers (Rob Riggle) doesn't think he can cut it. Luckily, Michael Shannnon is there to go to bat for him, telling Bowers:

MS: "You pull this team, you're cutting the head off of your most venomous snake."


Shannon's wife (Allison King) finds him packing thermal underwear in the garage and, cliche though it may be, Shannon definitely sells the idea that none of these men want to leave their families, but are duty-bound to it. His face when he tells his son he loves him is heartbreaking.

After that, Shannon does what he does best, apparently: standing behind Thor, lending him gravitas through sheer proximity as Thor takes a meeting with Colonel Mulholland (William Fichtner) to pitch himself as the right man to lead the task force into Afghanistan. Perhaps thanks to Shannon, Mulholland agrees. They'll be the first team into the region after 9/11, using (at the time) cutting edge technology to call in precision airstrikes. Hemsworth equates them (through sheer volume of unknowns) to the first men in space, to which Shannon unleashes a charmingly unhinged laugh:

MS: "You know what they sent into space first? A monkey!"


Thor picks his team (spoilers: there's 12 of them) and they find out that they'll be using a sandstorm as cover to fly in to meet their escort, travelling at 1,500 feet in a chopper designed for a third that height, exposed to the elements and without the benefit of oxygen tanks, at the risk of hypoxia. Michael Shannon is the defacto Chopper Cheerleader in this scene, reassuring everyone that they kind of have no choice so why not just get it over with. They land, make their rendezvous, and are lead to an outpost nicknamed The Alamo to await a meeting with Afghan warlord General Dostum (Negahban) who will be their guide in the region, helping them locate Taliban factions.

When Dostum arrives, he mostly ignores Thor, focusing instead on Michael Shannon, who he kisses on both cheeks. Dostum tells Thor that he doesn't have killer's eyes, like Michael Shannon and the others do. Clearly Michael Shannon is the teacher's pet (warlord's pet?).

Up until this point, I though I knew what the drinking game for this movie would be: Drink every time Michael Shannon stands around a little behind Hemsworth, looking like the Serious Man he is, which Shannon has done quite a bit. But General Dostum apparently has other plans: he only brought 6 ponies meaning Thor has to split Task Force Dagger in twain! So, I mean, of course you want Michael Shannon in charge of the Bravo team (who are staying behind at the Alamo) because he's your right hand man, but it sucks for me and any other Shannon-heads because he's effectively out of the movie for half of it!

Eventually the two halves do reconnect, but Shannon's Hal Spencer suffered a slipped disc from riding the horses and spends a lot of the back end of this movie laying down! (For Pete's sake! I came here for the Michael Shannon and now you're just teasing me!) On the positive side, Shannon does have the line: "That's the great thing about air strikes, you can call 'em in laying down!" and in the final action sequence, we get some nice Michael Shannon: Sniper action, but then to add injury to insult, Spencer gets injured.

This is where the movie and I really gelled because at that point Hemsworth's sole focus becomes taking out this big honkin' multiple missile launcher the Taliban has mounted on a pickup because as long as it's active, they won't be able to get a rescue chopper in to save Michael Shannon. And, as though the movie knew it had to make it up to me, it saved the best action sequence for the Shannonless gap right here: Hemsworth, on horseback, leading a group of General Dostum's men directly through a war zone to take out this Rocket Thing. It's a sequence that could have felt very much like a video game, but managed not to. The direction is all very close, showing how all the man on horseback were essentially rubbing shoulders with each other in this assault.

I do have to give this movie props (do the kids still say props?) in one regard though: their treatment of the horses. There were a lot of instances of CG gunfire and explosions, which would usually bug me, but I believe in this instance it was done in service of the animal actors; obviously a CG explosion is preferable to scaring holy hell out of some poor unassuming horse actor who only knows he's supposed to do his "falling down trick" now. There were also two shots of kind of hilariously fake horses presumably getting shot and throwing their riders. Director Nicolai Fuglsig and / or DP Rasmus Videbæk shot around them very well, but I was specifically looking for these type of effects.

In case you couldn't tell from my inability to call the Rocket Thing by whatever its proper term is, I'm not a big military guy and when I do watch a war movie, I tend to go for the older films or the ones about the older wars. Maybe that's because they're over? I'm not sure. Regardless, this movie does a good job of keeping things in perspective. Obviously this is a war that we, as a country, are still involved in so it would be impossible to give the movie some kind of grand scale view of the whole thing, as that would require distance we couldn't possibly have. So keeping everything focused on this team and what they accomplished is smart and effective.

It also avoids pandering to patriotism, which I find incredibly distasteful. "Because America" is never really used as a justification for anything, or a rallying cry, and things aren't as oversimplified as they could've been. Instead the situation with what's known as the Northern Alliance (basically all the disparate military groups that want the Taliban out of that region) is depicted as being a tenuous and complex lacework of smaller alliances; that old adage "My enemies enemies are my friends" is touched on with the caveat that they may not all be friends with each other.

All in all this isn't quite the military movie I was expecting, for better or worse. In my head, it was a wild, horse-ridin', gun shootin' adventure called Them Horse Boyz but the reality was a fairly measured film about soldiers being incredibly good at their jobs and accomplishing one groundbreaking feat after another. If this movie even kind of seems like your thing, I'd recommend it, just don't expect to get enough Michael Shannon.