Bigger (George Gallo, 2018)

Tyler Hoechlin, Calum Von Moger, and Aneurin Barnard in Bigger

Cast: Tyler Hoechlin, Julianne Hough, Kevin Durand, Aneurin Barnard, Robert Forster, DJ Qualls, Victoria Justice, Steve Guttenberg, Calum Von Moger, Max Martini, Colton Haynes, Tom Arnold. Screenplay: Andy Weiss, George Gallo, Brad Furman, Ellen Furman. Cinematography: Michael Negrin. Production design: Stephen J. Lineweaver. Film editing: Sophie Corra. Music: Jeff Beal. 

There is probably a good movie to be made about bodybuilding and fitness, but Bigger isn't it. A good one would deal with the ongoing questions about supplement use and abuse, the influence of steroids and other performance enhancers and practices, and the role of LGBT people in popularizing the bodybuilder image. Bigger ignores the role of supplements and enhancers almost entirely, and reduces the effect of gays on bodybuilding to just one of the stigmas Joe Weider (Tyler Hoechlin) encounters on his way to success as a promoter. What we get instead is a cliché rags to riches story, in which Weider battles antisemitism and a ruthless publisher-promoter called Bill Hauk (Kevin Durand) in the film, but based on fitness entrepreneur Bob Hoffman, to become a leading magazine publisher, fitness equipment and supplement manufacturer, and promoter of professional bodybuilding competitors, most notably Arnold Schwarzenegger (Calum Von Moger). Unfortunately, the film generates no real tension in tracking Weider's rise: The ugliness of the antisemitism he encounters feels incidental, rather than pervasive, and the tension with his apparently mentally disturbed mother (Nadine Lewington) feels like hack psychology. Hoechlin is a good, attractive actor, but he's forced to deliver his lines in a strange, tight accent that is, I suppose, meant to be Montreal-Canadian, but just manages to be distracting, especially since it doesn't match the one used by Robert Forster in the scenes in which he plays the older Joe Weider. Durand goes way over the top as the movie's villain, but there's some fun to be had in Von Moger's imitation of Schwarzenegger. It's a little hard to see who the film is for: People into bodybuilding won't learn anything they didn't already know -- and will probably take issue with what the film tells them about the actual people involved -- and people who aren't will take issue with the uncritical approach to the subject. 

Palm Springs (Max Barbakow, 2020)

Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg in Palm Springs

Cast: Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, J.K. Simmons, Peter Gallagher, Meredith Hagner, Camila Mindes, Tyler Hoechlin, Chris Pang, Jacqueline Obradors, June Squibb, Tongaya Chirisa, Dale Dickey, Conner O'Malley, Jena Friedman, Brian Duffy. Screenplay: Andy Siara. Cinematography: Quyen Tran. Production design: Jason Kisvarday. Film editing: Andrew Dickler, Matt Friedman. Music: Matthew Compton.

Maybe it was John Keats who invented the now-familiar trope of the "time loop." The figures on the Grecian urn celebrated in his ode seem to be stuck in one: The lovers "cannot fade," but will be "For ever panting, and for ever young." Of course, they don't know that; only the observer of the figures does, and the fact teases him "out of thought, / As doth eternity." And it was Shakespeare who noted that "our little life is rounded with a sleep," just as the day of the characters in Palm Springs is. The concept of the time loop, as established for most moviegoers by Harold Ramis's great 1993 movie Groundhog Day, is that it actually exists only for an observer who happens to be caught in it, as Bill Murray's character was in the film. The task of this observer is either to persuade others to recognize his plight or to find a way out of it. In the 1992 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Cause and Effect," written by Brannon Braga, the crew of the Enterprise is caught in a time loop that ends with the destruction of the ship and the crew, but everyone on board begins to have feelings of déjà vu as the event repeats itself; they eventually figure out a way to end it. Andy Siara's screenplay for Palm Springs takes a direction more in line with Groundhog Day by having three people aware of the loop: the wedding guests Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti) and the enraged Roy (J.K. Simmons), who blames Nyles for getting him caught in it. Eventually, Nyles and Roy give up and decide to seize the moment and endure an eternity of a single repeated day, but Sarah spends her time learning quantum physics to break the loop. Palm Springs doesn't break any new ground for the time loop trope, but it's engagingly conceived and entertainingly played, and it occasionally teases us out of thought about eternity, too.  

Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater, 2016)

Watching Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! a day or two after Yasujiro Ozu's Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? reminded me that one of the essential characteristics of a great director is a compassionate interest in human beings. It's not that they are both comedies about college students: They are also both "coming-of-age" films, although Linklater lets us extrapolate the course of his characters' potential maturity (or lack of it), while Ozu lets his characters mature before our eyes. Ozu and Linklater have been called "sociological" filmmakers because their movies tend to be about what happens to their characters in a given cultural context: in the case of Linklater's film a group of young jocks at a Texas college in 1980; in Ozu's, Japanese college students in the early years of the Great Depression. Linklater has acknowledged that Everybody Wants Some!! is a kind of coda to Dazed and Confused (1993), the action of which takes place four years earlier on the last day of high school. The newer film is more narrowly focused than the earlier one, which had a sampling of all types of high schoolers, male and female, from brains to jocks, from bullies to victims. Everybody is centered on a group of horny young men, highly competitive college baseball players, all of whom have dreams of making it as pros. But it's still an ensemble work, with a gallery of good young actors, mostly familiar from TV: Blake Jenner from Glee, Tyler Hoechlin from Teen Wolf, Ryan Guzman from Pretty Little Liars, among others. Linklater forces us to see through the jock stereotypes and find the brains and hearts intentionally hidden behind the bravado and braggadocio of hormones and muscles. He's interested primarily in his characters' intense competitiveness and in their swiftly fading innocence. As in Dazed and Confused, in which the older stoner Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey) exhibited the Peter Pan syndrome, unwilling to leave adolescence behind, in Everybody we meet Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), a 30-year-old who masquerades as a transfer student from San Luis Obispo, trying to prolong the blissful innocence of a life spent smoking dope and playing ball. The adult world rarely intrudes on the film's characters: The coach's prohibition of alcohol and women in the residence houses is quickly ignored. But Linklater neither preaches responsibility nor sentimentalizes immaturity. In the last scene, the freshmen Jake (Jenner) and Plummer (Temple Baker) finally get to their first college class after a weekend of partying and promptly put their heads down to sleep through the history professor's lecture. They're young and have no history, or as Willoughby puts it, they're there "for a good time, not for a long time." As good as it is, Everybody "underperformed" at the box office, perhaps because it looks too much like a routine teen sex comedy for discerning audiences and didn't have enough gross-out humor or marketable stars for the usual audience for that genre.