LONG STRANGE TRIPS

Opening this week:

Doctor Strange—Once he’s fully decked out in the cloak and amulet, with the neatly trimmed goatee, Benedict Cumberbatch really looks and sounds the part of the title character, one of Marvel’s more agreeably metaphysical superheroes. This is an origin story for the “Master of Mystic Arts,” conjured up in 1963 by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee for the pages of Strange Tales.

As in the comics, he’s a brilliant but selfish and arrogant surgeon who loses the use of his hands in a car accident. In desperation, he travels to Nepal to seek out “The Ancient One” (a droll and courteous Tilda Swinton) in hopes of being healed. Instead she recruits him as a new student of sorcery, teaching him to leave his physical body and use his astral form, travel through the “multiverse” and battle evil psychically. Reality-bending adventures across M.C. Escher-ish cityscapes ensue, as Strange and Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor)—a villain in the comics; here sympathetic—take on the sinister Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen), who has purloined a spell from one of the Ancient One’s books.

On the whole, I found this the most enjoyable comic book movie since Ant-Man in 2015, and Guardians of the Galaxy the year before that. Despite the cosmic scope of the material, director Scott Derrickson takes a straightforward and coherent approach to the narrative, which goes pleasingly easy on tired action-movie conventions.

Technically speaking, there’s little physical violence in the film at all. There’s plenty of martial-arts fighting, to be sure, but most of it takes place outside the physical realm, so for once the superhuman feats are justifiable. Better still, as we were leaving the screening, my friend pointed out “No guns,” and he was right—unless I missed it, there isn’t a single gunshot in Doctor Strange, and I didn’t feel cheated by this in the least.

Toward the end, the forces of darkness are unleashed, and buildings start to crumble in Hong Kong. I sighed. Again with the crumbling buildings, like in just about every other big action blockbuster of recent years—blocks literally being busted. But then Strange and his allies do battle with the bad guys while time runs backwards around them, and we get to see the buildings reassemble. This inversion of the sad, frightened post-9/11 subtext of the genre is very refreshing.

Trolls—Like the Smurfs flicks of recent years, this movie doesn’t shy away from its own potential to be annoying. The kitschy, cloying cutesiness of the “Good Luck Trolls” developed in the mid-20^th Century by the Danish toymaker Thomas Dam is built right into this CGI musical from Dreamworks Animation, in the hope that it can be turned to ironic, self-deprecating advantage. For the most part, this works, or at least it worked for me.

The Trolls, who have long shocks of prehensile hair sticking up above their elfin faces, live like perennial glam clubbers. Led by Princess Poppy (voiced by Anna Kendrick), they spend their days singing, dancing and partying, under a philosophy of life as “Cupcakes and Rainbows,” not to mention hourly scheduled hugs.

Twenty years earlier, they narrowly escaped from the “Bergens,” a race of miserable snaggle-toothed ogres who believe they can only attain happiness by eating Trolls. The lone Troll dissenter from constant cheerfulness, the glum Branch (Justin Timberlake), is sure that the Bergens are still a threat, and that Princess Poppy’s blithe insistence on noisy partying increases the danger. He’s proved right, of course, and he and Poppy must team up to rescue a group of captured Trolls in danger of becoming a Bergen banquet.

A variety of allegorical interpretations are possible here, from a straightforward vegetarian reading to an evaluation, at times surprisingly subtle and nuanced, of pessimism versus optimism. But in any event, the movie is a silly good time, with inventive, laugh-out-loud gags and a generous heart.

Also, the music’s pretty good. In part, this is a jukebox musical—Zooey Deschanel, as a lovesick Bergen, gets to sing Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” for instance. But there are some original numbers as well, and a couple of them are sung by Kendrick, in her singular steely yet sweetly plangent belt. Her presence on the soundtrack biases me in favor of Trolls, I admit—not to put too fine a point on it, I could listen to her sing all day. 

Coming Through the Rye—It’s 1969, and Jamie Schwartz (Alex Wolff) has written a stage version of Catcher in the Rye as his senior project at a private school in Pennsylvania. He hasn’t been able to secure permission from J.D. Salinger to produce it, however, so one weekend he and a free-spirited girl (Stefania Owen) head to New Hampshire to seek out the man in person.

This slight coming-of-age yarn is ostensibly based on the real-life experience of writer-director James Steven Sadwith. It’s pleasant, and sometimes poignant, and Wolff and Owen have a sweet chemistry. But there wouldn’t be much to the movie without the brush-with-reclusive-celebrity encounter.

Eventually Jamie manages to get a few minutes with Salinger, sharply played here, in two brief scenes, by the always-commanding Chris Cooper. Brusque and irritable but not unkind, the author endures another kid telling him about the connection he feels with Holden Caulfield. Momentous as this was to him, Sadwith is under no illusions that the episode was at all significant (or even unique) for Salinger, and this modesty gives Coming Through the Rye its rueful charm.

THEY'RE ALTOGETHER OKIE, THE AIKEN FAMILY

August: Osage County—Beverly Aiken, a poet, drinks too much, while his wife Violet, who’s struggling with mouth cancer, is addicted to pain pills. When the former, played by Sam Shepard, disappears one day, the latter, played by Meryl Streep, summons their daughters (Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis) as well as her sister (the superb Margo Martindale) to the family manse in rural Oklahoma.

In the wake of these harpies come various spouses, cousins, kids and significant others, played by the likes of Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Abigail Breslin, Dermot Mulroney and the lately-ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch. The Aikens spend the rest of the movie, adapted by Tracey Letts from his Pulitzer Prize-winning Sam Shepard-esque play and directed by TV journeyman John Wells, cutting into each other with blame, ridicule and vitriolic language. Wounding family secrets are revealed, plates get broken. A Cheyenne caregiver (Misty Upham) skulks around stoically, making herself useful; she’s like an ambassador from the world of sanity.

Given its cast and pedigree, it would be tough for August: Osage County to pack no punch at all. There are effective passages of dialogue, and most of the actors get at least a scene or two to shine. Streep goes back to the “accent acting” that so often got her branded a showoff earlier in her career, but here it’s to comic effect—her low, drawn-out syllables are frighteningly funny, especially when she lifts them into a sudden tone of authority.

The whole ensemble squeezes as much grim humor as they can out of this material—it helps that the characters crack themselves and each other up a lot. They seem amused by their own awfulness. As with the 2011 film of another play by Letts, his trailer-park Grand Guignol Killer Joe, the inherent theatricality of the work is unmistakable; you may reflect that it would play stronger live. Even so, the movie is polished and almost never dull.

You may also ask yourself at times, however, how it is that you’re supposed to find the vituperation of this creepy clan enriching. Maybe we’re meant to be grateful for our families by comparison.

Lone Survivor—Mark Wahlberg plays Marcus Luttrell, one of a team of U.S. Navy Seals involved in Operation Red Wings, an ill-fated 2005 mission to locate a Taliban bigwig in a village in northeastern Afghanistan. Luttrell and three other Seals were discovered by locals and attacked by Taliban forces. A badly wounded Luttrell was eventually given shelter by an Afghan family, at great risk to themselves, and got back to safety alive.

Apparently there is some uncertainty about the accuracy of the book, by Luttrell and Patrick Robinson, from which his movie is adapted; the number of Taliban fighters these men faced is disputed. We in the audience are obviously in no position to offer judgment on this, but I can certainly say that the film, scripted and directed by the capable actor turned capable writer-director Peter Berg, is a grim, scary military actioner.

Wahlberg, who was also among the film’s producers, offers one of his more sympathetic acting turns in years. Be forewarned, though, that Berg’s battle scenes in Lone Survivor, though they leave us admiring the Seals for their bravery and endurance, and the villagers for their hospitality, are bloody, horrifying and shot through with a sense of nightmarish futility.

SOCKO BOX OFFICE

“The characterizations were amusing, but they always reminded me of bad carpeting.” Thus did a curmudgeonly friend of mine recently explain why he never liked the Muppets.

It is, to put it mildly, a minority opinion. The Muppets are one of those rare acts that operates squarely in the mainstream of wholesome, family-approved entertainment, yet has just the right edge of pure, irresistible silliness to make them hip—& maybe the faintest hint of kinkiness as well, as in Gonzo’s masochism & his seemingly polygamist interest in chickens. Almost everybody, Your Humble Narrator included, loves the Muppets. Indeed, their low-tech, old-school showbiz tactility is one of the keys to their charm—many of us love them because they remind us of bad carpeting.

For the newest film version, however, the Muppets have been recast as underdogs, has-beens. The premise of The Muppets is that Kermit, Fozzie, Piggy, Animal et al are forgotten relics of the ‘80s. When Kermit, lonely behind the gates of his faded Bel-Air mansion, learns that a rotten one-percenter named Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) wants to tear down the old Muppet Studios to drill for oil, he gets together the old gang to put on a telethon to save them.

This formula Let’s-Put-On-Show plot is really secondary, however, to the story of Walter, a fanatical Muppets fan who is, manifestly, also a Muppet himself (voiced by Peter Linz). This is doubly odd because Walter’s brother Gary (Jason Segel, who also co-scripted, with Nicholas Stoller), is human, as is Gary’s girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams), as is everyone else we see in their smalltown home. So when the three of them travel to L.A. & get caught up in the Muppet’s adventures, Walter feels truly at home for the first time.

At one point Walter gushes to the Muppets that they give people the greatest gift, laughter, & the Muppets protest, pointing out at least two greater gifts. But the third-greatest gift is nothing to be sneezed at, & The Muppets delivers a generous dose of it. The screening audience with whom I saw the film received it rapturously; I enjoyed it greatly but I think it’s the third-greatest Muppet movie, after the sublime Muppet Christmas Carol of 1992 & the original 1979 effort, The Muppet Movie.

The script is laced with in-jokes & period references & parodies of dramatic clichés, genuinely witty but aimed more, perhaps, at nostalgic adults than at the kids in the audience, as are the many, many celebrity cameos. Also, the movie seems—and this isn’t a criticism I find myself handing down very often—a little talky.

Don’t get me wrong—the upsides of The Muppets far outweigh these minor reservations. They include: Cooper, who’s pretty droll in the obligatory bad guy part, & who delivers a sensational rap; the new songs, by Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords, working in the style, if not quite on the level, of Paul Williams, & the old songs, including “The Rainbow Connection” & Piero Umiliani’s unshakeable “Mahna Mahna.” This movie even found, at last, a redemptive good use for that horribly catchy ‘80s embarrassment “We Built This City.”

Finally, there’s Kermit, pained & sheepishly idealistic as ever. Steve Whitmire still reproduces Jim Henson’s voice characterization flawlessly, & whoever actually operates Kermit gets extraordinarily fine shades of feeling on his face. Many a highly-paid non-amphibian star doesn’t have nearly as expressive a pan.