UNCURED HAMNET

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Hamnet...

...opening Thursday.

A safe and happy Thanksgiving to all!

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE BIRD

Check out my quick column, online at Phoenix Magazine, about the "NOIRvember" film series at Phoenix Art Museum...

...featuring one of the all-time greats--and arguably the "original" film noir, John Huston's 1941 The Maltese Falcon, and also, posting here belatedly, the John Hughes favorite Planes, Trains and Automobiles...

TRIUMPH OF THE BILL

Last March, for my birthday, The Wife gifted me a ticket to William Shatner Live at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Phoenix, preceded by a showing of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Thursday night was the big night!

Great to be at the Orpheum, and among my people: Boomer nerds!

My pal Gayle was there...

Among other friends and costumed fans...

There were many great Star Trek t-shirts, but I also saw one guy wearing a black shirt with "DENNY CRANE" in white letters across the chest. That's a serious Shatner fan, I thought.

Walking up the aisle I saw a woman that I know, who has never struck me as the Star Trek type.

"I never knew you were part of this particular dorkdom," I said.

"It's [my husband's] thing," she quickly assured me. "I told him I wanted to walk around saying 'Nanu, Nanu' to everybody."

Great also to see Wrath of Khan again. I hadn't seen it from beginning to end in some years; it holds up most entertainingly. Not only as a ripping adventure yarn but as a rumination on age and youth and mortality and the needs of the many and of the one, it felt far more meaningful to me now than it did when I was in my twenties.

And then there was the star of the evening. As soon as I entered the Orpheum's lobby, I was urged to get into a second line to sign up for a post-show VIP experience of a meet-and-greet, autograph, picture and access to exclusive merch. I resisted, but hundreds of people (including Gayle) lined up.

After the film, two hosts, local radio morning man John Holmberg and the talented comedian and impressionist Frank Caliendo came out, both doing pretty respectable Shatners. Then the man himself, now 94, came bounding onstage. At very little provocation from the emcees, he started talking...

...and talking and talking...

...and talking. His talk ranged from knock knock jokes ("Who's there?" "KHAAAAN!") and stories of using the men's room at the Denny's in Quartzsite to extended riffs about his conversations with Neil deGrasse Tyson and his (Shatner's) belief that the Universe is sentient, to a strange story about DeForest Kelley's dog, to a stranger story about his own dog, in his barnstorming theatre days in Cape Cod. Among much else. He rambled, losing the track of one story and shifting to another, often searching for words which the audience called out to him.

It was wonderful to be there, because there he was, up on stage: Captain Kirk himself. Of course he isn't Captain Kirk, and never was; by most accounts he was always a hyper, frenetic fellow. Now he seems like a crazy old man, but with the energy and exuberance of a man at least forty years younger.

All of which is well and good and enjoyable, as long as he isn't being exploited by this tour. It was almost 11 p.m. when the main show was over, and as I walked back to my car it occurred to me that he still had those hundreds of VIP fans to work through, after which, he said, they were headed on to Anaheim for a Friday show.

The next day I asked Gayle how the experience was, and she texted back "quick. he didn't say a word. he just smiled when i said he was my first crush...they ran us through there like a streamlined machine."

This was the second time in my life I saw Shatner, by the way. For many decades I have been "collecting" meetings with the original series Star Trek cast: I interviewed DeForest Kelley and Walter Koenig and, by phone on my KTAR radio show, Grace Lee Whitney. And I got an autograph from James Doohan. Alas, I missed Leonard Nimoy, Majel Barrett and my first crush, Nichelle Nichols. And I'd still like to catch up with George Takei.

But I saw Shatner first. In 1973 my Mom took me and my Trek-loving cousin Debbie to the Kenley Playhouse in Warren, Ohio, to see Shatner in Arsenic and Old Lace, supported by Sylvia Sidney as one of the lethal Aunts and by Peter Lupus of Mission: Impossible as Johnny Brewster (I later learned that this role was originally cast with Lon Chaney, Jr., but he died just before the production and was replaced by Lupus at the last minute; I've often thought that if I saw both William Shatner and Lon Chaney Jr. on the same day my head might have exploded).

 

Seeing that show was a big, formative highlight of my childhood. My memory is that Shatner was genuinely first-rate as the panicked hero Mortimer Brewster. As with Wrath of Khan's themes of age and youth, to see Shatner scramble around farcically onstage when I was 11, and then to see him do it again now that I'm 63 certainly gave me a circle-of-life feeling.

WHEN MV MET SALLY

RIP to the glorious, goddessy yet sweetly vulnerable Sally Kirkland, departed at the age of 84.

Your Humble Narrator got to meet her once. Back in '93 or '94, one of the first attempts at a Phoenix film festival was held downtown at the Herberger. Co-sponsored by Hotel San Carlos, it was a pretty scrappy, underfunded affair, but it did have a celebrity guest. As the newish young film critic for the Phoenix New Times, I was greeted effusively by the festival folks and proudly introduced to their guest star: Sally Kirkland.

I meet celebrities quite often, so I'm not usually starstruck, but meeting Sally Kirkland left me stammering more than meeting Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise would have. Nonetheless, I was able to express my worshipful devotion to her, and she seemed to take it rather well; she gripped me by the hand and dragged me into the theater with her.

Sally was there in support of Double Threat, an excruciating "erotic thriller" of the Cinemax-at-three-in-the-morning sort.

She starred as an aging actress, a faded bombshell driven to jealousy by her young body double. The movie itself, which also starred Andrew Stevens, Tony Franciosa, Richard Lynch and Chick Vennera, was a laugh-riot; it played like an SCTV noir spoof. But there in the middle of it was Sally, intensely sexy yet baleful, a true movie star presence in a preposterous vehicle, utterly negating her young supposed rival.

Anyway, I sat through Double Threat in the front row, holding hands with the star. After that evening I thought of getting in touch with her to suggest that I ghostwrite what I suspect could have been quite a juicy, page-turning memoir, but I never worked up the nerve. Shame on me; as far as I can tell she never wrote one.

STALK CHARACTERS

Opening this weekend:

Predator: Badlands--Try to hear the line in Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice: "You're one ugly mother[expletive]!"

This rude remark comes near the end of Predator, John McTiernan's sci-fi action flick of 1987, when Arnie finally gets a look at the face of the title character, an alien trophy hunter. Maned with dreadlocks, it's leathery, reptilian and noseless, with an outer quartet of fangs set in a membrane that bells out impressively when the creature roars.

The original saga has spawned numerous sequels and prequels over nearly four decades, as well as a couple of cross-overs with the Alien franchise. The latest, Predator: Badlands, takes the story from the point of view of one of the "Yautja," those selfsame ugly MFs. Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a smaller-than-average Yautja living on their bleak home planet, is protected by his older brother from their contemptuous father, who wants him destroyed as a runt and a weakling.

Fleeing the planet, Dek travels to Genna, an even deadlier and more dog-eat-dog world, determined to show what a badass he is by hunting down a "Kalisk," a huge spiky monster that even his Dad fears. While he's there, he meets Thia (Elle Fanning), a cheerful, chatty robot from an Earth corporation working to exploit the planet's resources (it's the company from the Alien flicks).

Thia, who has emotions and a moral compass, is currently present only from the waist up; she's been ripped in half by a Kalisk. Dek takes her with him for the help, along with a sort of ape-dog creature she calls Bud; gradually they all begin to bond. They eventually tangle with the Kalisk, and also with more robots from Earth, including Thia's less sweet-natured identical colleague Tessa.

The story, which director Dan Trachtenberg concocted with screenwriter Patrick Aison, is about choosing compassion and empathy within a warrior culture--for Dek--and a corporate culture--for Thia--both of which favor power and ruthlessness. Visually, the movie looks like a string of hard rock album covers from the '70s, but for all its violence and blaring music and blood-and-thunder bombast, it has a heart.

Fanning's Thia helps with this. Her guileless nattering lets enough of the Wagnerian air out of the proceedings to keep things light and amusing. Better still is Schuster-Koloamatangi, a New Zealander who somehow manages to connect with the audience through the makeup. A true soulfulness shines out from his wide, stricken eyes; leaving the theater, a friend of mine said he was reminded of Kash Patel.

As the movie proceeds, Dek starts to seem less like an ugly MF; his big fangy head starts to seem...well, sort of handsome. Silly as Predator: Badlands may be, it demonstrates the power of cinema to place beauty in the eyes of us beholders.

HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU, KIDNAP

Opening this weekend:

Bugonia--Pharmaceutical exec Michelle is abducted from her driveway, after vigorous resistance. The unimpressive kidnappers, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a beekeeper and conspiracy theorist, and his affectless cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), shave her head and chain her to a bed in the basement. Teddy believes that Michelle (Emma Stone) is an alien infiltrator from Andromeda, and wants her to arrange a meeting with the Andromedan Emperor during an upcoming lunar eclipse to negotiate a withdrawal from their occupation of Earth.

Michelle stays calm and tries to reason with her captors, explaining that she isn't an alien, but that she is a VIP and the search for her will be relentless. Teddy is having none of it; he's anticipated every argument or play on their sympathies that Michelle can make, and he seethes with barely controlled rage. Gradually, we learn why.

Working from a script by Will Tracy, the mad Greek Yorgos Lanthimos directed this American version of a South Korean satire, Jang Joon-Hwan's Save the Green Planet! It's a bitterly funny, and sad, dramatization of how closed bubbles of belief can shut down the chances for productive human exchange. Michelle and Teddy lash out at each other with confident invective that suggests their positions are unassailable, impregnable.

Stone inevitably evokes sympathy; her eyes seem somehow wider and more plaintive under her shaved scalp, and the lotion smeared on her head gives her the spectral look of a Kabuki character. But she and Lanthimos also make sure we see that Michelle is a passive-aggressive bully, and in the midst of a grapple with Teddy she blurts out her Nietzschean view of their relationship.

Plemons is also superb, and he and Stone volley the dialogue at each other with skill and nuance. Delbis is touching as the apparently neurodivergent Don, who is pushed around by Teddy but at bottom seems to be more openminded and instinctively decent than his mentor.

It becomes clear that Lanthimos, following the Korean film's example, plans to finish Bugonia with a grand satirical topper. The route he takes, though admittedly funny, is heavy-handed, and diffuses the bite of what has gone before. Even so, Bugonia has more than enough brilliance and passion to be worth a look.

THE POD COUPLE

When The Wife--a talented, capable writer--tells me about using AI for her work, I feel like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when he kisses Dana Wynter and she says "I went to sleep, Miles, and it happened...Stop acting like a fool and accept us..."

Check out my non-AI-generated column, online at Phoenix Magazine, about PoeFest's live, non-AI-generated performance of "The Raven" at Rosson House in downtown Phoenix Halloween night...