SLED ASTRAY

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Red One...

...the silly but fun holiday action comedy with Dwayne Johnson, J.K. Simmons, Chris Evans and Lucy Liu, now in the multiplexes.

STATUE; GESUNDHEIT

Hope everyone has had a safe and happy Veterans Day, and thank you to all veterans for their service!

Before this day was called Veterans Day, it was of course known as Armistice Day, and specifically marked the end of World War I; it was changed, in the U.S., to a day honoring all veterans in 1954.

A month or so ago I was in Washington, D.C. for The Day Gig, and with a few hours to kill I visited the recently-dedicated World War I Memorial, in Pershing Park not far from the White House. Incredibly, D.C. didn't have a general monument to that war until now. I took a few pictures that do it absolutely no justice at all...

Titled A Soldier's Journey, it's the work of figurative purist sculptor Sabin Howard. His technique is magnificent and the horrors of war are emotionally depicted, but the piece could be seen as perpetuating a square-jawed romanticism about war along with the horror. It's a masterpiece, but it made me feel ambivelent.

Wandering around nearby I also saw this statue of late D.C. Mayor Marion Barry...

I lived there in 1990, when Barry was arrested for drug use in an elaborate sting operation; I can only imagine how we would have laughed at the idea that there would ever be a statue of him in D.C. But he became Mayor again in 1995, proof of a much less ominous sort than what we're going through currently that sometimes there are, indeed, second acts in American politics.

A little farther away I found this statue of Jose Artigas, father of Uruguayan independence...

Coming across stuff like this is one of the pleasures of that town. At least, it is if you're nerdy.

GRANT US PEACE

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Heretic--One rainy day two American LDS missionaries, young women, go to the door of an ugly, rambling house in Scotland. The resident is what would be called, in door to door sales, a premium lead: he's expressed interest in the product.

The gent in question, Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), solicitously invites the young ladies in out of the rain. They explain that, for safety's sake, they aren't allowed to go inside without a woman present, but he charmingly insists, saying that his wife will join them once she's finished baking a blueberry pie in the kitchen. So Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) follow him into the oddly cheerless front sitting room--it looks like the waiting room of a funeral parlor--and he locks the door behind them. But they can smell blueberry pie, so they aren't too alarmed, yet.

Needless to say, the two of them aren't going anywhere anytime soon, except farther into the house. This shocker, co-written and co-directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods of A Quiet Place, belongs to the horror subgenre in which one or more women are held prisoner by a maniac. Earlier examples include The Collector (1965), with Terence Stamp and Samatha Eggar, Crawlspace (1986) with Klaus Kinski tormenting Talia Balsam, the notorious Human Centepede (First Sequence) (2009) by Tom Six, or Room (2015) with Brie Larson. Heretic has echoes of all of these, but it's highly original all the same.

Although it seems to safe to safe that there's a sexual subtext to the motivations of all the captors in these movies, the overt reasons vary. In The Collector, for instance, there's a class element; in Crawlspace there's a Nazi guilt angle, and so on. In Heretic, the crazy derives from religious studies.

Mr. Reed, you see, is a fanatical questioner of all religious "iterations," and debunker of the idea that any of them represent the "one true religion" as they claim to. As the facade that his guests are free to leave whenever they like gradually but steadily melts away, he lectures them, in the manner of a raffish college professor, about the innumerable links and parallels between modern mainstream faiths and ancient religious traditions, using pop culture and popular music as analogies.

It would be a rather agreeably stimulating summary of Comparative Religion 101, if they weren't being held hostage and all. Sister Paxton even makes a brave attempt to debate her self-appointed pedagogue, but while there may be arguments against Mr. Reed's theses, the ones Beck and Woods place in her mouth seem thin and non-sequitur, which, in context, makes her desperation all the more touching. Mr. Reed, however, remains affably unmoved.

The heart of Heretic is Grant. I've always been a fan, but I've especially enjoyed his work as a comic villain in recent years in stuff like Paddington 2, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. His Mr. Reed is a good deal darker than any of these, to be sure, but the performance is still based in the diffident, apologetic, wryly sheepish Grant persona familiar from his romcom work. It's one of the best roles he's ever had, and you can feel his pleasure in it.

His two young costars are also strong. Chloe East, hilarious and adorable as the girlfriend in Spielberg's The Fabelmans, gives Sister Paxton some of the same gushy avidity. Balancing her is Sophie Thatcher as Sister Barnes, of more worldly background and thus more reserved and alert. Thatcher also sings a haunting cover of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" over the end titles.

Eventually Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton are offered a "Lady or the Tiger" type of choice, and find themselves in the basement. From here, Heretic goes full-on gothic, and gory, and the blueberry pie re-enters the tale. And as so often when thrillers tip over from literate tension into gruesome grappling, it seems to shrink the movie a bit.

Not enough, however, to diminish the value of these performances, or of the rising dread, shot through with chilling wit, that infuses the film. The sexual politics would seem to have some slight relevance at this moment in our history, too; Mr. Reed's practice of what he considers the One True Religion appears to be devout, zealous mansplaining.

By the way, as we left the press screening I attended in the Valley, the marketing company handed us small blueberry pies, custom made for the evening by Süss Pastries here in Phoenix. I took mine home and passed it on The Wife, who proclaimed it good. I can't say, however, that Heretic particularly gave me an appetite for blueberry pie for a while.

RING MAN

Even though I'm not the world's biggest Tolkien fan, for some reason I keep thinking about this today.

K

Time again for my official ask. Against my usual habit on this page, I'll try to keep it short:

If you haven't already, please cast your vote for Kamala Harris for President of the United States, and for Tim Walz for Vice President. I also ask you to vote for as many down-ballot Democrats as you can.

But if for whatever reason you simply can't do it, can't bring yourself to vote for a Democrat, or for a woman, or for a person of color, or whatever it is that's holding you back, then I ask you, for your own sake as well as for the country's and the world's: Don't vote. Seriously. Don't put that on yourself. I genuinely believe that, whatever happens, you'll be glad later if you didn't help try to send the Republican candidate back to the White House, or for that matter to empower his enablers.

Beyond that, there's not much else to say. Even if you're a staunch conservative, if you can look at the behavior and words of the Republican candidate, at any point but especially in the last couple of months, and believe that putting him anywhere near power is remotely a good idea, than our views of reality are too divergent for discussion to be helpful.

I think that Kamala Harris is an excellent candidate who stands a very good chance of being a capable President. But even if you have reservations about her, the choice between the candidates, for a reasonable person, isn't really a choice. This isn't the difference between, say, a gourmet dinner and fast food; it's not even the difference between a gourmet dinner and garbage. It's the difference between an edible meal (Harris/Walz) and toxic waste (the Republican candidate).

I spent the last two weekends canvassing here in Phoenix...

My paltry efforts amounted, I think, to pretty much the definition of The Least I Could Do. But I want to give a shout out to my terrific partners each of those days: Megan, Sue Ellen, Noah and Tim, and to all the volunteers who do this thankless, demanding work for weeks, months, years. I'm in awe of you.

EVERYTHING EVERY TIME ALL IN ONE PLACE

Opening wide in the multiplexes this weekend:

Here--A spot in a living room in an upscale eastern Pennsylvania suburb--that's the title locale of this latest from Robert Zemeckis. It's our static vantage point for, essentially, the whole movie, looking across the room through a picture window that offers a view of the big brick colonial-era house across the street. 

We see the view there before it was a living room--long, long before. As in, we see it during the extinction event that ended the Cretaceous Period, sixty million years ago. We see it as a woodland make-out spot for indigenous lovers (Dannie McCallum and Joel Oulette), and as a burial site. We see it as part of a dirt road leading up to the aforementioned historic manse, which once was occupied by William Franklin (Daniel Betts), estranged Loyalist son of Benjamin (Keith Bartlett).

After the house is built, we get glimpses of the lives of its early 20th-Century inhabitants, like an enthusiastic aviator (Gwilym Lee) whose wife (Michelle Dockery) frets about his flying. They're followed by a whimsical inventor (David Fynn) and his sexy flapper wife (Ophelia Lovibond). This guy is trying to perfect a reclining chair; his working title for it is "Relax-y-Boy." And we see the house's early 21st-Century occupants, an African-American family; Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird are the parents, and Anya Marco-Harris is the beloved housekeeper.

But the movie's main focus is the midcentury family that takes the place over after WWII: Dad (Paul Bettany), a combat veteran and a seething, disappointed functional alcoholic, his sweet, quietly unfulfilled wife (Kelly Reilly), and his oldest son (Tom Hanks), an aspiring artist. The son gets his beautiful girlfriend (Robin Wright) pregnant, so there goes both art school and her college dreams. They move in with the parents, and stay for decades.

So the movie packs in a lot of history (and prehistory), a lot of longings fulfilled and unfulfilled, and cultural references ranging from the Spanish flu to the Spanish Inquistion sketch from Monty Python. But I'll admit that when I realized we were going to be parked in one place for the whole thing--I went in not knowing this--I panicked for a moment.

I needn't have worried. Zemeckis has always been a skillful showman, and while the audacious experiment of Here is by no means an unqualified success, it certainly never bored me. The script, by Eric Roth and Zemeckis, is based on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, and Zemeckis employs comic-book techniques like overlapping inset panels to interweave the various timelines and bounce them off each other thematically. It's an impressive and confident exercise in narrative, and it does carry a cumulative emotional punch.

There are downsides, however. The fixed point of view means that the actors tend to seem a bit far away from us a lot of the time, and when they are brought up into the foreground it somehow feels forced. Zemeckis may have been worried about this distancing too; Alan Silvestri's music, though pretty, is ladled on a bit thicker than it should be, as if to telegraph what we're supposed to be feeling.  

Much more jarringly, though, the people in Here often have an ersatz, CGI "Uncanny Valley" look to them. The leads were taken all the way back to teenaged through some sort of real-time computer tech, and while the results are tolerable, they aren't perfected in realistic terms.

It must be admitted, however, that Hanks and Wright transcend this limitation, especially Hanks. The other actors sometimes feel like cyber-phantoms, but Hanks is so vibrant that he can project his humanity right through the program. And after Apollo 13, Castaway, Captain Phillips and Sully, it's also a relief to see the poor guy stay put.