In Review: ‘The End of Oak Street,’ ‘The Wrong Girls’

The End of Oak Street
Dir. David Robert Mitchell
99 min.

When it comes to choosing the best summer movie season, there’s really no counterargument against the summer of 1982, the miraculous stretch that yielded everything from Blade Runner to The Thing to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. But 1982 also serves as the high point of a whole idealized late-1970s/mid-1980s era dominated by crowdpleasing films either directed or produced by Steven Spielberg or doing their best to match Spielberg’s gift for combining wonder, thrills, and affection for the American suburbs. The Spirit of ’82 has lived on and the last couple of decades have given us attempts at homage set squarely in the summer blockbuster’s golden age, most notably Stranger Things and J.J. Abrams’ Super 8. 

Add to that list the Abrams-produced The End of Oak Street, the latest, and biggest, film from writer-director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows, Under the Silver Lake), which opens with idyllic images of a Michigan suburb accompanied by new wave hits and Detroit Tigers news updates that squarely establish it is 1982 all over again. It doesn’t remain that way for long. A handful of strange events, like the mysterious sprouting of a seemingly prehistoric plant and the sudden appearance of a pile of excrement far too big to be produced by any of the local housepets, prove to be mere opening acts for the main event, when the neighborhood wakes one morning to find the power has gone out, the water has stopped running and, oh yeah, dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures now freely roam the streets.

At the center of this is the Platt family, which has troubles even before they find themselves shifted in time. Dad Greg (Ewan McGregor) has secretly lost his job and now delivers pizza to make ends meet. Mom Denise (Anne Hathaway) is a frustrated unpublished writer working on a story of suburban discontent that sounds more than a little autobiographical. Their teenage daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) knows she’ll never have enough money to study at Cornell with her idol Carl Sagan and her younger brother Brian (Christian Convery) has reached the painful stage where he’s old enough for first crushes but young enough to still have to worry about bullies on bikes. But perhaps fending off dinosaurs while trying to find their way back to their own time is just what the Platt family needs to repair itself?

Mitchell doesn’t have any loftier ambitions for The End of Oak Street than spinning a tale of familial bonding through dino fighting. (Even the “scientific” explanation is mostly a few handwave-y lines about wormholes.) And that’s mostly OK. The movie clips along at a brisk pace, the four leads (plus a heroic dog named Starbuck) establish a believable family dynamic, and the effects—which include some feather-covered dinosaurs in line with the current science—are impressive throughout. But it’s ultimately one of those movies that’s good enough to make it hard not to wish it was just a little better, that the marital difficulties seemed a tad less rote or the encounters felt a bit more perilous, or that there were just a few more truly memorable setpieces to match one standout scene in which a giant snake silently makes its way through the Platt family home. From its fun premise to its winning characters, The End of Oak Street doesn’t offer much about which to complain (though the logistics and chronological implications of its final scenes are a bit puzzling). 1982, it turns out, was a long time ago and time travel isn’t easy. —Keith Phipps

The End of Oak Street opens tonight.

The Wrong Girls
Dir. Dylan Meyer
100 min.

If nothing else, The Wrong Girls, the first feature directed by Dylan Meyer, deserves credit for fully committing to being a stoner comedy from its psychedelic title font to its smoke-filled post-credits gag. Unfortunately it also plays like a film conceived, constructed, and filmed in the same thick, easily amused haze that envelops its protagonists throughout the film. Alia Shawkat and Kristen Stewart (Meyer’s wife) co-star as, respectively, Molly and Frankie, a pair of low-ambition Los Angelenos who spend their days staring up at nature documentaries playing on a TV they’ve mounted on the ceiling. It’s a friendship based on love and sloth, but one not without threats both real—overdue rent—and perceived, like Frankie’s fear that Molly’s boyfriend Josh (Zack Fox) will lure her away, leaving Frankie alone in an apartment in which a device called the “Bong-O-Matic” serves as the centerpiece. Further complicating matters: through convoluted circumstances involving her doppelganger and a highly skilled security professional named Dave (LaKeith Stanfield), Frankie comes into a briefcase filled with powerful experimental psychedelic drugs, which wind up  giving Frankie and Molly psychic powers.

If a playful spirit and game cast were enough to make a movie work, The Wrong Girls would be one of the year’s best films. But those elements can’t offset the film’s painful pace and misplaced confidence in the hilarity of gags like Molly and Frankie’s attempt to blackmail a rich snob with old photos that capture him sticking his penis in dips at parties and Frankie’s insistence on calling Dutch people “Hollish.” It’s packed with stars—Tony Hale plays the dip pervert, Kate McKinnon shows up as a heavily accented scientist later joined by Geena Davis, and Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani supply the voices of Frankie and Molly’s cats Dio and G.G. (respectively)—but that just makes the film feel even more like an in-joke that somehow escaped into theaters. —Keith Phipps

The Wrong Girls begins sparking up theaters this week.