Adventures in moviegoing: A video store visit and "The Spy Who Dumped Me"

Last week I was at a local video store. Yes, I still go to video stores. Yes, I know this is an ancient quest, and that Blockbuster has died. Even with movies available for streaming and download, and on various services, I like the physicality of browsing among the disks, looking at the back covers, checking out the prices. While I could scroll through on-demand options and Netflix lists, I prefer strolling to scrolling.
And I get to witness scenes like the one that day, where a man with what appeared to be his two grandsons was renting "Ready Player One" and letting the kids look around.
"Pop-Pop," the younger one, who looked to be about 7, said, "which is the best Michael Myers movie?"
How the kid knew the "Halloween" epics is beyond me. But his older brother eventually said, "They're all the same."
I think Pop-Pop declined to do any renting for comparison.
As for my own shopping, whether solo or with the wife I have my phone out and on Rotten Tomatoes to see whether a title is worth the investment. Not that it's a big investment -- on this day I walked out of the store with three movies, two on Blu-ray and one only on DVD, for under $6.
And sometimes the RT rating is no deterrent. I rented "Proud Mary" once because, critical disdain aside, it looked like an amusing variation on blaxploitation movies, with the sublime Taraji P. Henson as the new Pam Grier. Unfortunately, it was instead an overly somber variation on the twice-made "Gloria" (Gene Rowlands, then Sharon Stone).
This time around, I settled on three movies all with ratings around 80 percent: "Beirut," a suspense thriller with Jon Hamm; "Game Night," the comedy starring Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, and "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool," a dramatization of the last days of the actress Gloria Grahame (played by Annette Bening). Call it two out of three, and again for less than the price of movie-theater snacks.
"Beirut" was the most satisfying of the three, with Hamm as a former player in Lebanon who has left the country following a family disaster (and before its devastating civil war), only to be called back to the rubble-strewn city to help out an old colleague. As viewers of the later seasons of "Mad Men" know, Hamm can play the ravaged drunk teetering between ruin and redemption, and he does that very well here. In addition, the film -- written by Tony Gilroy, whose work is not always to my liking -- has a fairly tight and twisty plot which muddles near the end as it tries to justify some characters' motivations, but recovers at least partly at the finish. The ever able Rosamund Pike is on hand as Hamm's handler, although the part asks little of her; there's also Dean Norris, far removed from his recent turns on "Claws."
Also on the TV-trivia side, "Game Night" boasts a "Friday Night Lights" reunion, with a cast including Jesse Plemons and Kyle Chandler. (And this post offers a "Breaking Bad" reunion via Plemons and Dean Norris.) Plemons pretty much steals the movie, too, as the police-office neighbor of a couple (Bateman, McAdams) who keep excluding him from their game-night gatherings.
Those gatherings take a scary turn when what is supposed to be a staged kidnapping of Bateman's brother (Chandler) proves to be the real thing. That sends the participants in search of the brother, of clues and of what is part of the game and what is real. When, for instance, you're using a gun.
(OK, one more casting note. Part of the game-night group is Kylie Bunbury, so good in the far too short-lived TV series "Pitch" and the sister of University of Akron soccer standout Teal Bunbury. I'll try to stop this now.)
Anyway, the movie is cleverly manic and well acted (again, Plemons! but McAdams lets it rip and Bateman is well experiences with this kind of comedy). Stretched out more than necessary, it still had enough laughs for an evening at home.
Gloria Grahame was a marvelous actress -- an Oscar winner for "The Bad and the Beautiful," memorable even in small parts such as in "It's a Wonderful Life" -- whose personal life was a mess including four husbands, the last of whom was the son of her second husband from his previous marriage.
"Film Stars Don't Die" brings us a Grahame whose career has waned and whose health is poor, but who is care for in England by a young actor (Jamie Bell) with whom she had an earlier affair. It's a bleak movie made bearable mainly by Bening's performance. The film does try to make clear that the Bening-made Grahame is not the glowing and dangerous-seeming movie star, including by the use of clips of the real Grahame in her old movies to contrast with the fading Bening. And Bening's performance is the main reason to watch this film. Only it's screen Grahame that makes me want to see a movie about her, even about her in decline, and as good as Bening is, I never quite felt she caught some of the forces that made Grahame so fascinating.
I am also a fan of that force of nature Kate McKinnon, who is so often unleashed on "Saturday Night Live" and who was one of the small redeeming qualities in the recent "Ghostbuster" reboot. She is, after all, damn funny and does her best to improve "The Spy Who Dumped Me," an action comedy that is exactly what you'd expect and no more than that.
Mila Kunis plays the dumped one, who with her friend McKinnon gets pulled into international intrigue and some intense violence thanks to her ex (Justin Theroux). It's a pure buddy movie -- no battling between friends here -- but one that faces a basic problem for action comedies: Is it a comedy with action (like, say, the "Kingsman" movies, or "Date Night") or an action film with comedy (where the gold standard is the original "Die Hard")?
(A last digression: "Die Hard" is a Christmas movie. So is "Die Hard 2." Accept no other argument.)
"Spy Who Dumped Me" never settles on what's more important, the action or the comedy, so there are stretches where the humor seems forced (a wacky car chase) or the action involves so many dead bodies that amusement gets lost. Again, this is not an easy task -- as the second "Kingsman" movie demonstrated. But when it doesn't work it strands the actors in tonal confusion.
Maybe we should have waited until it was in the video store.