GOV STORY

Opening today:

Ella McCay--Emma Mackey shares initials with the character she plays here. The heroine of this latest from writer-director James L. Brooks is the Lieutenant Governor of an unnamed eastern state. When her boss, the beloved incumbent "Governor Bill" (Albert Brooks) is poached by the President--probably not our current President--for a cabinet post, Ella finds herself swept into the Governor's office, even though she comes across like a nervous college freshman at a job interview.

Narrated by Ella's aide Estelle (Julie Kavner), the movie explores the title character's wacky challenges and less wacky, more serious family dysfunctions, past and present. In flashback, we see her obsessively philandering father (Woody Harrelson) and long-suffering mother (Rebecca Hall) leave her to be parented by her adoring, fretful Aunt Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis). In the present, we see her hustler husband (Jack Lowden) go bonkers over the potential power and perks of Ella's new position.

We see her trying to navigate how to respond to her implication in perhaps the most inoffensive political scandal imaginable. And we see her trying to reconnect with her brilliant but reclusive younger brother (Spike Fearn), who suffers from severe anxiety disorder.

This hectic, haphazardly structured movie rattles along from one strand to another and back in the usual Brooks manner, warm and eccentric and open, with appropriate reserve, to the potential for human growth. I think what Brooks is after here is a sketch of what a genuinely virtuous person in modern American politics might look like; a Ms. Smith Goes to the State Capitol. Ella is a sort of American political Princess Myshkin or Doña Quixote, a hapless knight caught up in a whirlwind despite the most unimpeachable of intentions.

It's a great idea, and I enjoyed Ella McCay, but I'm not sure it hangs together convincingly. In part this has to do with Mackey's youthfulness, and the callow and somewhat ditzy nature of the character. The role requires somebody who can play both teenage and thirtysomething; Mackey is perfectly believable as the first, not so much as the second.

Also, not all of the plot strands pay off. The relationship between Ella and the ever-reliable Curtis as Aunt Helen is fully realized; so is the connection between our heroine and Brooks (Albert), hilariously weary as the pre-emptively compromised Governor Bill, and with Kavner's Estelle, and with Kumail Nanjiani as her stolid, loyal State Trooper bodyguard. But the scenes with Harrelson as the squirrelly Dad come off like a dead end, they don't really offer anything unexpected or add anything much to the story.

It's possible that movie's best, or at least most interesting, episode is one in which the title character doesn't appear. When Ella's troubled brother braves going outside to visit a former girlfriend (Ayo Edibiri) with whom he wants to re-connect, and the two struggle mightily to get around their tics and defenses to communicate the simple truth that they like each other, it feels like the essence of exasperating romcom complications boiled down to a single scene.

ROLL OF A LIFETIME

Now in the multiplexes, from Fathom Events:

Merrily We Roll Along--Fanatics of Stephen Sondheim don't need, and anyway wouldn't listen to, advice about whether or not to go see this. Directed by Maria Friedman, the film captures her revival of the musical, starring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, that sold out its Broadway run starting in 2023.

With music and lyrics by Sondheim and a book by George Furth, based on a '30-era play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the show recounts the long relationship between three dear friends, composer Frank (Groff), lyricist Charlie (Radcliffe) and novelist and critic Mary (Mendez). The gimmick is that it traces the story backwards, starting in the mid-70s with Frank as a jaded Hollywood bigshot, estranged from Charlie, and working back until we see the trio's callow, idealistic aspiring days in the late '50s. Love, unrequited and otherwise, ambition, neglect, compromise, disillusionment and resentment are all seen in full bloom before we see their seeds being planted years earlier.

The first Broadway production flopped in 1977. But the show eventually developed a devoted cult across several successful revivals around the world, before triumphantly returning to Broadway at the Hudson Theatre under the Brit Friedman's direction (and revisions). The version that opens in the multiplexes this weekend consists of footage shot from three performances in front of audiences near the end of the run in June of 2024, with some close-ups shot during the afternoons. As a result it isn't just a blunt recording of a performance; Friedman's agile, on-point direction makes it a cinematic experience.

Characteristically for Sondheim, the songs explore timeless, often painful human situations in bright, frenetic patter-song lyrics. They're so manically precise that they could seem facile at times, but Sondheim's direct emotional honesty holds glibness at bay. So, here, do the performers. The supporting cast is full of knockout Broadway workhorses, but Groff, Radcliffe and Mendez are all sublime, with Groff bringing a particularly enraptured intensity to Frank.

It's possible that the timing of the shoot also added to the emotional charge of the movie; we're seeing actors at the end of a run, saying farewell to a smash that's also likely to be one of the better pieces of material they're ever going to get to do. The tears we see running down their faces probably aren't just acting.

Now available on HBOMax:

The Family McMullen--At the end of the 1995 indie fave The Brothers McMullen, the debut feature of writer-director Edward Burns, the major characters seemed more or less happily paired off. This thirty-years-later sequel shows us the mess that divorce, death, kids and life in general has made of those well-plotted courses. For award eligibility, the movie played for just one day in the multiplexes in October; The Wife and I caught it here in Phoenix in a theater empty save for one other couple, but now it's available for streaming.

It begins on one Thanksgiving and closes on the next. The host for the first dinner is the long-divorced Finbar "Barry" McMullen (Burns), an apparently successful writer, to judge by his palatial Brooklyn home. Much to his dismay, said home gets invaded after dinner by his relations, like his sad-sack brother Patrick (the likable Michael McGlone), a mawkishly sentimental, piously practicing Catholic who's reluctantly also in the process of divorcing.

Barry's son Tommy (Pico Alexander) then moves back home to pursue an acting career, followed by Barry's daughter Patty (Halston Sage) who has broken off, or at least temporarily paused, her engagement because the fiancé wants to experiment with more sexual partners. She soon meets her first childhood crush, a handsome Greek-American plumber (Sam Vartholomeos) who makes her wonder if maybe the fiancé isn't on to a good idea.

Meanwhile Barry and Patrick's widowed sister-in-law Molly (Connie Britton) plans to sell the  cherished, frozen-in-the-'80s McMullen home back on Long Island; she also crosses paths with an old crush (Bryan D'Arcy James) from her married days. And Barry learns that the mother of her son's new love Karen (Julianna Canfield) is Nina (Tracee Ellis Ross), an old flame of his. If you're guessing that those two re-connect...

...well, you'll just have to watch and see. Driven along by Seamus Egan's sprightly Irish flute score, The Family McMullen is, like the Brothers, extremely low-key and mild, and I found that to be just what I wanted. The characters gently rib and mock each other over a palpable undercurrent of love and an openhearted desire to be decent, and if nothing terribly dramatic, or even terribly farcical, happens to resolve the plotlines, that relaxing atmosphere itself becomes part of the movie's charm.

It may be that The Family McMullen will have particular appeal for those who came of age as moviegoers during the '80s and early '90s. Burns makes overt visual and verbal references to such faves of the era as Moonstruck, When Harry Met Sally and (most hilariously) GoodFellas, and the whole movie, with its crosscutting storylines, its voice-over asides and its use of a holiday as a framing device, seems heavily indebted to Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters. It's grimmer to imagine where Allen's characters might find themselves, thirty-some years later.

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.