GAME OF THORNS

Check out my review of The Roses...

...a new version of The War of the Roses, online at Phoenix Magazine.

BAG TIME

Monday evening my friend and I braved an apocalyptic-looking haboob to attend the memorial service in Chandler for the powerhouse actor-director-playwright Ben Tyler, who departed earlier this month.

I only appeared with Ben once, in The Comedy of Errors at Southwest Shakespeare Company in the mid-‘90s, but he was a pleasure to work with.

I arrived in the Valley in the early '90s, and was baffled when I would hear Zonies complaining, sometimes bitterly, that they "never got a Ladmo Bag." The Wallace and Ladmo Show--for which Ben had written, and which he later adapted into a successful stage show--had ended its long, beloved run on KPHO (1954-1989) a few years before I got here. It wasn't until I later saw some reruns on Channel 8 that I realized how good, how genuinely funny and creative the show was. It's quite probable that it was the best local kids' show in TV history.

So it was an unexpected honor, as I was leaving Ben's service, to receive, at the age of 63, my very own Ladmo Bag. My friend, a lifelong Zonie, told me that the Ladmo Bag he got was his NINTH.

The contents of mine:

One Wallace and Ladmo postcard
One bag of Jelly Bellies
One Tootsie Pop (orange)
One Moon Pie
One Twinkie
Crackerjack (in old-school box)
Bazooka Bubble Gum (one piece)
Pixie Stix (2)
One can Mug Root Beer
One "Official State of Arizona Commemorative Folio celebrating Arizona's Quarter issued as part of the United States Mint's 50 State Quarter Program"

An awesome haul; greatly appreciated Ben!

MAIDENHEAD REVISITED

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Judd Apatow's comedy classic The 40-Year-Old Virgin...

...now getting a re-release in the multiplexes in celebration its 20th anniversary, if you can believe that.

ORIGINAL SHIN

Your Humble Narrator caught up with a couple more, still in the multiplexes:

Shin Godzilla--For some reason, this 2016 Japanese monster spectacular has currently received a wide release in the multiplexes. Like 2023's Godzilla Minus One, it's a free-standing entry, unconnected to the other films in The Big G's franchise. Also like Godzilla Minus One, it's marvelous, and worth taking the trouble to see on a big screen.

It's a very different film than the ruminative, chastened period piece G-1, however. Shin Godzilla is contemporary and feverishly-paced, with a satirical edge. Apparently taking inspiration from the Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, directors Hideaki Anno (who wrote the script) and Shinji Haguchi focus on what it would be like if something like this really happened; the political and bureaucratic minutiae of the response to a gigantic creature rising from Tokyo Bay and wreaking mayhem in the city.

In rapid-cut sequences, plastered with ironically detailed subtitles, we see the prime minister and his civil and military advisors weighing options and glumly wishing the problem would go away. At least as much of the film unfolds in offices or conference rooms, or in corridors with long West Wing-style "walk-and-talks," as in the rampaging monster's wake.

Eventually the burden of stopping the titan falls to Rando Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa), leading a team of "lone wolves, nerds, misfits" from different government departments who drop decorum and speak candidly with each other. There's also a lovely and cheeky American envoy (Satomi Ishihara) trying to help before the U.S. decides to hit Godzilla (and Japan) with another nuke.

The special effects sequences here, though sparing, are superb. When we first see the title character, he's crawling on all fours and has a slack jaw and buggy fish eyes. As the movie progresses, he gradually evolves into a dark, radioactively glowing, thuggish-looking version of the familiar icon. He's less endearing than previous versions, but I couldn't help it, when his attackers start getting to him toward the end, I still couldn't help but feel a pang of sympathy for the poor guy.

Also, Shin Godzilla employs passages from Akira Ifukube's unforgettable score for the original 1954 Gojira. In Japan, that music must be as familiar as the Jaws or Rocky themes.

Weapons--In the middle of the night, a bunch of little kids in a prosperous-looking middle class Pennsylvania suburb get out of bed and leave their homes, running through the streets with their arms out to their sides like wings. It turns out they're all from the same 3rd-grade class. Only one kid shows up at school the next morning. Not surprisingly, their young teacher (Julia Garner) falls under suspicion from their panicked parents; before long somebody has painted the word "WITCH" on the side of her car.

That's the set up for this horror tale from writer-director Zach Cregger, and it's undeniably a strong hook. It's so strong, indeed, that as the movie progressed, I found myself thinking "this better be good." I was prepared to be furious if the compelling premise dribbled away into ambiguity, offering no clear explanation of the mystery.

I'm glad to say that this doesn't happen. The secret at the heart of the story, told Tarantino-style in lengthy chapters from the point of view of various characters--the teacher, a devastated father (Josh Brolin), the principal (Benedict Wong), a cop (Alden Ehrenreich), a petty criminal (Austin Abrams), the remaining kid (Cary Christopher)--finally is revealed. It's a conventional horror movie explanation, I suppose, but at least it's coherent, and it leads to a potent, gruesomely funny climactic payoff.

Cregger's characters are particularly sympathetic because none of them are paragons; Garner shines as the teach, who drinks too much and is empathetic to her students to a degree that her mealy-mouthed principal thinks is unprofessional. Brolin gives a convincing portrait of the kind of parent whose fear makes him highly vocal. But the most memorable performance is by Amy Madigan, who doesn't show up until about midpoint, then easily steals the movie with a hilarious yet spellbinding turn.

RANSOM, KIND OF WONDERFUL

Opening in the Valley today at RoadHouse Cinemas in Scottsdale:

Highest 2 Lowest--In Spike Lee's latest, Denzel Washington feels very authentic as David King, a superstar music producer known as "the best ears in the business." You get the impression the performance may reflect a  showbiz type Washington has encountered more than once.

David is a reflexive glad-hander, smiling and chuckling and bantering, yet with a show of underlying gravity, easygoing yet earnest. He's a master of listening, or at least of looking like he's listening.

As the movie starts, David is maneuvering to buy back the record label he founded before it's taken over by a consortium that wants to make music with A.I. The early scenes have the feel of a glossy, glamorous show-business melodrama. But when David gets a call telling him his son has been kidnapped for ransom, the movie quietly downshifts into a thriller.

Then the story takes yet another, even more unsettling twist that puts it into the realm of a moral thriller (stop reading now if you don't want to know it). The kidnapper, it turns out, has napped the wrong kid; not David's son but the son of his beloved ex-con chauffeur and confidant Paul (Jeffrey Wright).

Just that quickly, David's sense of urgency to pay the multi-million-dollar ransom, with money otherwise slated for his business deal, simply evaporates. Eventually, David starts to grasp that not only is Paul's son's life at stake, so is own soul.

You may recognize the basic plot as that of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low (1963), of which this is a heavily embellished but unmistakable remake, with Washington in the Toshiro Mifune role. Time has shown that Lee attempting his own take on Kurosawa is not hubris; he's a master too.

Working from a script by Alex Fox, Lee keeps us on the edge of our seat even while he takes the time to explore character, and to use the New York locations for all they're worth. His approach is charged yet discursive, and the movie glides and swerves and rattles along like a subway ride, unpredictably but never incoherently, to a satisfying destination.

I well remember when Lee first showed up in American movies in the late '80s, and how brashly innovative his techniques seemed. He moved cinema forward. But here, as in his intriguing 2006 bank heist thriller Inside Man, his style seems old-school, loose, adaptable, almost classical.

Of course, none of this stylistic prowess would amount to much if Lee wasn't hugely abetted by Washington, Wright and the rest of the cast, including Ilfenesh Hadera as David's wife, Aubrey Joseph as his son, ASAP Rocky as a mysterious young rapper and John Douglas Thompson, Dean Winters and LaChanze as the cops. Also, Highest 2 Lowest is full of great songs and a driving, at times almost Riverdance-ish score by Howard Drossin. It's maybe the best soundtrack of the year, or possibly a close second to that of Sinners.

MUST BE THE SEASON OF THE SWITCH

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Freakier Friday--Any movie with Jamie Lee Curtis has something going for it right off. Freakier Friday is no exception. Curtis is exuberantly unafraid of looking silly, and this Disney sequel to their 2003 version of the Mary Rodgers novel Freaky Friday gives her plenty of opportunity. Intrepidly mugging and pratfalling in age-inappropriate costumes, Curtis helps the movie, certainly, but not enough to save it.

The 1972 novel, oft-remade for movies and TV since the 1976 version featuring Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster, is one of the many, many stories, possibly starting with F. Anstey's Vice Versa (1882), in which a youth exchanges bodies with an older person. It's a common fantasy for kids, and not uncommon for adults too, even though the ostensible point of such yarns is usually that being any age comes with hassles and stresses that aren't easily seen from other ages.

Back in 2003 Tess (Curtis) and her daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan) accidentally found themselves in each other's bodies. In this version, the grown up Anna has a surf-loving teen daughter of her own, Harper (Julia Butters), as well as a fiancé, Eric (Manny Jacinto) whose fashionista Brit daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons) doesn't get along with Harper.

After an encounter with a wacky palm-reader (Vanessa Bayer, who's pretty funny) all four of them switch places; Tess with Lily and Anna with Harper. In this decidedly freakier situation, the stepsisters-to-be, in their hijacked adult bods, call a truce and try to sabotage Anna and Eric's impending wedding, while Tess and Anna try to navigate teen life.

The movie feels well-intentioned, in the vague, general Disney manner, and the four leads are all appealing. The trouble is that their characters here aren't really distinct enough from each another to keep straight when they switch, and the actors don't make more than a half-hearted effort to recreate each other's accents and mannerisms. Combined with the frenetic, hyper-edited approach of director Nisha Ganatra, it leaves Freakier Friday's twisty complications mostly chaotic and confusing rather than hilarious.

TWOFER THE SHOW

Time, or possibly past time, for another edition of my very occasional recurring feature in which I discuss weird-ass old comics from my stacks. With The Fantastic Four: First Steps now in theaters, it's appropriate we check out an adventure of The Thing, with The Human Torch in support, paired with none other than...

...The Man of Bronze himself, Doc Savage. It's an issue of Marvel Two-in-One from November of 1976.

But wait, I hear you object (if you're a nerd), how can such a pairing be? The Doc Savage pulps were set in the 1930s and '40s, while The Fantastic Four began in the early '60s.

Well, Marvel finds a way. As the issue begins, we see storylines in two periods on either side of the pages, ingeniously paralleling each other across the decades...

Apparently this clever conceit wasn't thought sustainable, as a few pages in writer Bill Mantlo trumps up a time warp which drops Doc and his cronies together with The Thing and The Torch.

Perplexed as they are at each other's presence, they team up to take on Black Sun (later known as The Nth Man) in his debut appearance, a supervillain created when a power mad rich guy and his equally power mad son are joined into a single formidable fiend through the power of the stars.

It ends rather anticlimactically. But the beginning is quite an ingenious use of the Two-in-One format; a shame they didn't try to take the parallel plot gimmick all the way through to the end.

GUN AND GAMES

Opening this weekend:

The Naked Gun--It's in the trailer anyway, so allow me a spoiler: "Please, take a chair," says Detective Frank Drebin to his beautiful costar. After politely declining on the grounds that she has plenty of chairs at home, she ends up walking out with a chair.

There are better jokes in the movie, and there are worse jokes, too. But it's a fair representative.

Directed by Akiva Schaffer, this new version of the late-'80s/early-'90s-era series, derived from the short-lived 1982 TV show Police Squad! (the first feature was titled The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!) shows real allegiance to its source. There's some fine silly wordplay and elaborately constructed sight gags. Most essentially, though, the movie keeps a first-rate poker face.

Frank's adversary this time is a rich guy (Danny Huston), boss of a company that sells self-driving cars. He's also the head of a cabal of "evil billionaires" with an ambitious plot to cleanse the earth of mediocrities and rebuild it to their advantage. But the plot is little more than a clothesline on which to hang schtick. 

The old show and the first three movies were the creations of writer-director-producers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams and writer Pat Proft, who in various combinations were also behind the Airplane! and Hot Shots! movies. Their seeming approach was to fling multiple dumb gags per minute at the audience, apparently on the theory that if only one of them landed, the movie would still be a laugh a minute.

But their best trick was to let old-school, stone cold serious actors like Peter Graves, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and George Kennedy deliver those dumb gags. And nobody benefitted from this technique more than Leslie Nielsen. Younger audiences may not remember that Nielsen had been a bland leading man who had graduated to authority figures and shady villains as he matured, until Airplane! allowed him to let out his goofy side. Before 1980, the idea that he would have become a major comedy star would have seemed funnier than most of the jokes in those movies.

Liam Neeson is probably about as close a contemporary equivalent to Nielsen as you could find. In the new film, Neeson takes his cue from Nielsen and plays it utterly, hilariously straight as Frank Drebin the Younger. If you happen to reflect that that's Oscar Schindler, or the avenging middle-aged tough guy from the Taken flicks, up there glowering and deadpanning those absurd dad jokes and acting out that slapstick and potty humor, it deepens the comedic effect.

Pamela Anderson is just as game as Neeson's leading lady, at one point knocking out a jaw-dropping scat number. She keeps her dignity through some major raunch, and through one of the strangest romantic montages ever.

It takes very smart people to craft something this artfully stupid, and while this style of comedy might not be the healthiest as a steady diet, The Naked Gun could be just what we need right at the moment. Maybe smartest of all, it's blessedly short, clocking in at under an hour and a half. Brevity is the soul of wit; it's also the soul of this movie.