By Susan Granger
Special to WestportNow
Reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock mysteries, “Searching” is a cool, computer-centric, psychological thriller, detailing how a distraught father attempts to find his missing millennial daughter.
As shown in a photographic montage, the Kim family of San Jose, California, has always been close, even when terminal cancer takes Pamela (Sara Sohn), leaving David (John Cho) a widower raising 16-year-old Margot (Michelle La).
When she doesn’t come home one night after supposedly attending a study group and skips school the next day, David realizes he’s missed Margot’s calls and she doesn’t pick up when he returns them.
That’s when he contacts the police. Detective Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing) is quick to respond, but there are no clues to follow.
Increasingly desperate yet determined, David delves into his daughter’s laptop, where all her secrets are kept. Step-by-step, he traces her digital footprints, hoping she won’t disappear forever. That leads him though her emails, YouTube videos and into Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, even her bank account.
When David calls her so-called ‘friends,’ asking when they last saw her, he realizes how socially isolated she’s become, joining a sinister site called YouCast, communicating with strangers online.
Soon, Margot’s disappearance goes viral on Twitter with the #Find Margot hashtag. There’s even a suspicious #DadDidIt follow-up.
First-time director Aneesh Chagantry and his producing partner Sev Ohanian wrote the suspenseful, cleverly constructed screenplay which is revealed through a tricky, visually seamless techno-tapestry of digital devices, like cursors, desktop alerts, text messages, and Google Maps, plus social media.
Cho’s compelling performance propels the drama. After “Crazy Rich Asians,” this is the second 2018 film to feature a primarily Asian-American cast. This whodunit won Sundance’s Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize for works tied into science/technology.
And kudos to editors Will Merrick and Nick Johnson for evoking urgency, delineating just how technology has become an integral part of our lives — for better or worse.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Searching” is an ingenious, innovative 8. You can’t log off.
Since Holocaust deniers and Flat-Earth believers keep emerging from the dark recesses of society, perhaps the historical drama “Operation Finale” has more relevance that one might suspect.
The true story depicts the covert operation about how — years after World War II and the Nuremberg trials — Adolf Eichmann, the feared architect of the Nazi’s Final Solution, was finally captured.
Tipped off that Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) was living under the alias ‘Ricardo Clement’ in Argentina, Israel’s Mossad was at first skeptical.
Apparently, when an Argentine teenager, Sylvia Hermann (Haley Lu Richardson), brought home her new, outspokenly Aryan boyfriend, Klaus Eichmann (Joe Alwyn), her father (Peter Strauss) made the connection. But it took a while for Israeli authorities to verify that he was, indeed, Eichmann.
Then in May 1960, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (Simon Russell Beale) sent an undercover team from Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires, noting, “For the first time in history, we will judge our executioner, and we will warn off any who wish to follow his example.”
Led by Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac), they must quietly abduct Eichmann and hide out in a ‘safe house’ until an El Al plane lands — and their extraction plan is fraught with unexpected complications.
Chronicled by Hannah Arendt in “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” it popularized her phrase “banality of evil,” referencing the war criminal’s quiet complacency.
Working from Matthew Orton’s screenplay, director Chris Weitz gives a subtle nod to his mother, actress Susan Kohner, having “Imitation of Life” (1959) at the theater where Sylvia first meets Klaus. The only discordant detail is referencing romance between Malkin and the Israeli doctor (Melanie Laurent).
After portraying Simon Wiesenthal (“Murderers Among Us”), businessman Itzak Stern (“Schindler’s List”) and Otto Frank (“Anne Frank: The Whole Story”), Ben Kingsley cleverly embodies wily Adolf Eichmann.
On the Granger Gauge, “Operation Finale” is a seriously unsettling 7. Today, one of Eichmann’s sons, a staunch Nazi sympathizer, still lives in Argentina.
“The Happytime Murders” is a seedy, noir-drenched case involving the puppet cast of a beloved ‘80s children’s TV show who are being murdered, one-by-one, prompting a disgraced LAPD detective-turned-private detective puppet to investigate.
Phil Phillips (voiced by Muppet vet Bill Barretta) is hired by femme fatale Sandra White (Dorien Davies) to stop the killings, which he’s eager to do, since one of the stars was Phil’s brother Larry (Victor Yerrid) and the show’s only human actress, Jenny (Elizabeth Banks), was once Phil’s lover.
Complicating matters is Phil’s troubled relationship with his former LAPD partner, Det. Connie Edwards (Melissa MCarthy), who — after being seriously injured during the incident that destroyed Phil’s career — underwent emergency abdominal surgery in which she received a puppet liver.
As a result, Connie has developed a serious sugar addiction, prompting her to gulp huge quantities of maple syrup.
The Sesame Workshop sued STX Entertainment’s “deliberate effort to appropriate its SESAME STREET mark, and its trusted brand and goodwill, to promote their R-rated movie.” They objected to the bawdy use of explicit, profane, drug-using, misogynistic, violent, copulating, and even ejaculating puppets, along with the tagline ‘NO SESAME, ALL STREET.’
But Judge Vernon Broderick turned down their plea, deciding that tagline distinguished this film from Sesame Street in “a humorous, pithy way.”
Written by Todd Berger and directed by Muppets creator Jim Henson’s son Brian Hansen, it’s not funny except, perhaps, when it focuses on comedian Maya Rudolph, playing Phil’s lovelorn secretary.
Instead, the most interesting aspect is the lengthy, end-credit blooper reel showing how the green-clad puppeteers are digitally erased in order to seamlessly integrate puppets with humans — doing porn.
On the Granger Gauge, “The Happytime Murders” is a crude, trashy 3. Stale vulgarity.
(Editor’s Note: Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has been on radio/television as an anchorwoman and movie/drama critic for many years. See her reviews at www.susangranger.com.)
