WIRE YOU DOWNCAST?

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Dead Man's Wire...

...Gus Van Sant's latest, in theaters this weekend.

A SPACE OY-DYSSEY

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of the documentary short Fiddler on the Moon: Judaism in Space...

...a virtual offering of the Tucson J International Film Festival, through January 18.

LISTIN' THE NIGHT AWAY...

A Safe and Prosperous and Happy New Year to everybody! Check out my 2025 Top Ten Movies List...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

Compare and contrast to this year's honorees from Phoenix Film Critics Society...

...of which I am always proud to remind everyone I'm a founding member.

NEIL AND PREY

A Merry Christmas to all! Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Song Sung Blue...

...and Anaconda...

...now in the multiplexes.

ONE PADDLE AFTER ANOTHER

In the multiplexes on Christmas Day:

Marty Supreme--The Marty here is Marty Mauser, a Lower East Side kid of the early '50s. The supremacy in question is at, of all things, table tennis, or ping pong. He is already an insolently prodigal talent at the sport, with designs on becoming a world champ.

Marty himself wouldn't limit his supremacy merely to table tennis; he's already intolerably cocksure about his ability to do pretty much anything he wants. Even though he could, by his own estimation, "sell shoes to amputees," he despises his job in his uncle's shoe store, regarding it as far beneath him. When some journalists in London point out a retired has-been movie star (Gwyneth Paltrow) of the Norma Shearer or Grace Kelly sort, now respectably married to a rich businessman, he decides to seduce her, not because he's ever heard of her--he hasn't--but because why not?

Directed by Josh Safdie from a script he wrote with Ronald Bronstein--loosely based on the exploits of real-life table tennis master Marty "The Needle" Reisman--this film chronicles a little less than a year's worth of Marty's chaotic, farcical yet sometimes sinister misadventures. The task of reviewing it gives rise to glib descriptions like: It's as if Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Mordechai Richler and David Mamet were locked up together and forced to write a sports movie without being allowed to sleep.

This doesn't quite do Marty Supreme justice; the movie is a true original. But it gives a hint of the flavor. It's a comic, shocking, inspirational epic of midcentury Jewish hustling. And it's built around another jolting, instant-classic performance by Timothée Chalamet in the title role.

Although he's ably supported by Paltrow, Fran Drescher, Abel Ferrara, Kevin O'Leary, Odessa A'zion, Sandra Bernhard, Emory Cohen and many others, it's Chalamet's party on an acting level. Pasty and zit-pocked, his Marty is somehow both shameless and recklessly heroic, a liar with a streak of the sociopathic--he may carry a touch of Sammy Glick from What Makes Sammy Run? as well--alongside a passionate sense of self-regard and integrity. I couldn't help but root for him.

Safdie's storytelling is similarly expansive. The movie delivers antic, slapstick violence, eroticism and tragedy while sustaining a unified tone. Marty can make scandalous quips about the Holocaust, and minutes later Safdie gives us a bizarre Holocaust flashback that's disturbing and moving. Safdie uses anachronistic musical selections, yet he maintains a sense of period. It's a remarkable achievement.

It's also a very loud, abrasive, unrelenting movie--even though it covers months, it has almost the feel of real time--and I wouldn't blame anyone who found it a bit much. But it explores a great subject: brash, self-promoting American hustlers. And it gets at a great truth: that for better or worse, brash, self-promoting American hustlers have a way of getting what they want. For a while, at least.

ROBBED

It's been a week since the arrival of the wretched news that Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were murdered in their home in L.A.

This news would have been a gut-punch in any case, but it was magnified coming on the heels of several days of high-profile violence, like the shootings at Brown University in Providence and the antisemitic massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.

It was magnified further, of course, by the President's loathsome online response, in which he stated that the Reiners deaths were caused by "the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS."

Although it now appears that the perpetrator was a family member and the crime had nothing to do with the President or with Reiner's politics at all, the President seems to have jumped to the conclusion that it was the act of one of his followers, similar to what happened to Nancy Pelosi's husband.

I admit that this thought crossed my mind as well.

What's astounding is our Scumbag-in-Chief's suggestion that it was Reiner's own fault if some MAGA maniac did this to him. It's an epic achievement in the annals of blaming the victim.

Even many of the President's supporters seemed to find this disgusting, and grateful as I am whenever anything somehow moves the needle with them, I have to wonder--this is what did it? Disappearing people off the streets, extra-judicially blowing up boats, turning our back on Ukraine, you got no problem; making the tragic death of a beloved Hollywood star all about him is the bridge too far?

Also: "Trump Derangement Syndrome?" Enough with that crap. It's not a thing, when applied to opponents of the President. It's another attempt by the President and his followers to use grown-up words without the intellectual equipment. Just to be clear: there is nothing whatsoever irrational, let alone deranged, about being horrified, sickened, frightened and enraged by this President.

As for Reiner himself, it turns out he's one of those celebrities so ingrained in our collective experience of pop culture that we may have taken him for granted. For those of us who came of age during his long run as Mike "Meathead" Stivic on All in the Family, he was more like a family member than an actor.

Then he switched to directing, and rolled out, arguably, the most successful string of durable, quotable popular hits in American movie history: This is Spinal Tap, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally..., Misery, A Few Good Men and The American President. He certainly proved he was far more than just Carl's son, or Archie's son-in-law.

A day or two later came word of the passing of a far less prominent show business figure: actor, collector and "gorilla man" Bob Burns, at 90.

I interviewed Bob in 1999 for what turned out to be maybe my favorite story I ever got to do for the Phoenix New Times. I chatted with him several more times thereafter but never managed to get to Burbank to see his famous collection. But his book, It Came From Bob's Basement...

...has been on my shelf since 2000; he repeats the same story in it that he told me about a troubling experience he once had in Phoenix. Really nice guy.

RIP, Rob and Bob.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE; THE MOODY BLUES

Opening today:

The Housemaid--Desperate for a job, Millie, played by Sydney Sweeney, applies as a maid to a rich young housewife and Mom, Nina, living in a spacious Long Island manse. At first Nina (Amanda Seyfried) is impossibly nice, friendly and welcoming, but within a day of starting the gig, it's clear she's given to scary acting out. Her hubby Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) is both hunkalicious and solicitously apologetic for his wife's behavior, while their daughter Cece  (Indiana Elle) is aloof, to say the least. There's a creepy groundskeeper (Michele Morrone) skulking around as well, glaring at Millie but not speaking.

Also, the door to Millie's snug little A-frame garret bedroom locks from the outside, not from the inside.

All of this would be more than enough for most people to see that they should get the hell out while the getting is good on day one. But director Paul Feig and screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshire, adapting the smash 2022 novel by Frieda McFadden, give Millie understandable reasons to stay in her place. Both Nina's outbursts and the attraction between Millie and Andrew escalate.

This feels something like a contemporary spin on the "hag horror" classics of the '60s, like Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and also of later domestic thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Single White Female. Feig tightens the tension skillfully and then, in the last third or so of the film, executes a pretty good twist.

It's probably a hair longer than it needs to be, and it's hard to say how much scrutiny the plot logic could bear. But it's a polished production, the three leads are improbably pretty, and the rip-snorting gothic comeuppances of the homestretch are satisfying. I understand it's hard to get good help these days, but on balance, this Housemaid gets a good letter of reference.

Then again, before I start complaining that The Housemaid is too long, maybe I should consider it in comparison to...

Avatar: Fire and Ash--On the long list of James Cameron's strengths as a filmmaker, knowing when to quit is notably absent. Toward the end of Cameron's 1994 True Lies, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis kiss while a mushroom cloud erupts in the distance behind them. Most directors would grasp that this meant the movie was over; Cameron insisted on one last grapple on a harrier jet. He's like a little kid who wants to keep playing army when it's time to go home for dinner.

This trait--and I'm clearly in the minority for considering it a weakness--reaches an apex in this third Avatar epic, Avatar: Fire and Ash, which runs to well over three hours, well over an hour longer than Citizen Kane. It's the next clash between exploitative colonizing humans and the Na'vi, the tall, tailed, blue, holistic, new-agey inhabitants of the lush, idyllic distant world Pandora. I'd say it was the climactic clash, but apparently two more sequels are planned.

As someone who liked but didn't love the first Avatar, back in 2009, and also as one who tends to get grumpier the longer a movie runs over two hours, I must admit I wasn't the ideal target audience for this. So perhaps it carries extra weight when I say that I found it...well, too long, certainly, but still a compelling sci-fi spectacle, loaded with grand scenes that recall sources as venerable as the New and Old Testaments.

The dialogue isn't poetry ("Dude, they're fighting!") but the dialogue isn't the point; the shimmering, immersive visuals and mythic yarnspinning are what the movie is for. In the last hour or so I was fully invested; I wanted to see the good guys win and the bad guys lose.

Among many others, Sam Worthington, Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver--particularly good as a starry-eyed young Na'vi--lend their voices and motion-capture presences to the movie; Giovanni Ribisi, Jemaine Clement and Edie Falco are amusing among the humans. But easily the most striking performance is by Oona Chaplin as Varang, a hissing warrior Na'vi who sides with the earthlings against our heroes. She's fierce and seductive.

The Na'vi always remind me of blue-skinned Anne Coulters; nevertheless they have a certain glamour and sexiness. My favorite Na've trait was their ears; I love how they move expressively when they speak, or even change expression. If there was an Oscar for best ears, Fire and Ash would be a shoo-in.