NOODLE SCENE

Happy Friday everybody! Check out my review of the sweet film Ramen Shop...

...online at Phoenix Magazine, where you can also read my interview with Deborah Muller, founder of the T-shirt firm Schmattees.

'SAUR SPOT

Check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom...

 
...and Bruce La Bruce's The Misandrists...

LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN

Opening this weekend at Harkins Valley Art in Tempe:

  
The Endless--Brothers Justin and Aaron fled the Heaven's Gate-style cult commune in which they were raised years ago. Now they live in poverty and loneliness, and Aaron is wretchedly homesick for Cult Sweet Cult. After they receive a mysterious videotaped greeting from the old gang, Justin very reluctantly agrees to go back to the isolated, mountainous compound in southern California for a day and a night, to let Aaron say goodbye and get some closure.

Needless to say, things do not go smoothly. The cultists, with their oily, knowing grins, welcome the brothers back all too eagerly, even seductively, and Justin can see Aaron being drawn back in. More disturbing still are the increasingly freaky signs that the group really is connected to some otherworldy force involving time and dimensional warps.

The guys who play the brothers, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (no relation, as far as I know), also wrote, directed and shot this indie sci-fi creeper, and created its special effects, and their precise, confident touch not only overcomes their very low budget but turns it into an advantage. The film has a hazy, overexposed look at times which may or may not have been intentional, but which adds to its atmosphere either way. At other times the sound seemed fuzzy and the dialogue was hard for me to catch, but that might have had more to do with my hearing than with any technical shortcoming.

In any case, The Endless is genuinely tense and weird and uneasy, yet it also has an edge of oddball comedy that I didn't see coming, and a warmth I wasn't expecting, either. Although it's a very different movie, in its general flavor it reminded me of another low-budget sci-fi indie, 2015's wonderfully strange Ethiopian post-apocalyptic saga Crumbs.

The idea of being trapped in a revolving time loop has an allegorical link to the idea of inescapable patterns of behavior, like those that might be found between a pair of bickering brothers. What makes The Endless special is it shows us the glimmers of love and kindness and humor that makes those time loops tolerable.

TALL TALE

Ah, October. Scary movies back in the theaters. Opening this weekend at Harkins Valley Art, on alternating showtimes with the handsome new remastered version of the original, is… 

Phantasm: Ravager—Reggie (Reggie Bannister), the pony-tailed ice cream man turned supernatural warrior, stumbles out of the desert at the beginning of this fourth sequel to Don Coscarelli’s 1979 classic Phantasm. Within minutes, he’s behind the wheel of the “black ’71 ‘cuda” [Plymouth Barracuda] so beloved by the series, and is again battling the lethal flying silver spheres.

The wild adventures that follow, directed by David Hartman from a script by Hartman and Coscarelli, take Reggie across multiple dimensional realities, stalking and stalked by the malevolent metaphysical mortician The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm). Intercut with this are scenes at a nursing home in which Reggie is told that he is suffering from early-onset dementia—a Ravager far more terrifying to most of us than The Tall Man—so he, and we, can’t be sure what’s real and what isn’t.

Where the ‘79 film was full of witty, ingenious low-tech special effects, Ravager is wall-to-wall CGI, and thus lacks the original’s funny yet unsettling spookiness. Making up for this, however, is the presence of the original cast members, not just Bannister, who gives a genuinely touching star performance, but also A. Michael Baldwin as Mike, Bill Thornbury as Jody, and even Kathy Lester as the “Lady in Lavender.” They still have the warmth and offbeat, real-life attractiveness that made the first film so distinctive—these people are definitely not from central casting.

Although the movie leaves open the possibility of a sequel, it does close a chapter for Phantasm: it was the swansong of Angus Scrimm, who passed on in January at the age of 89. His glowering Tall Man is as baleful and perversely lovable as ever; his manner here toward Reggie, with whom he tries to strike a bargain, seems almost fond. 

Ravager also retains some of Coscarelli’s startling, imaginative eccentricity. I missed some of the direct-to-video Phantasm sequels over the years, and it’s possible that this is why I didn’t understand some of the movie’s more puzzling elements, like, say, the Bulgarian farmhand named Demeter (Daniel Roebuck). But even if there’s a perfectly logical explanation for him, movies with Bulgarian farmhands named Demeter don’t come along every day.

SCRIMM VISAGE

The new Phantasm sequel, Phantasm: Ravager, opens tomorrow at Harkins Valley Art, alternating showtimes with the original 1979 Phantasm. So…

Monster-of the-Week: …here’s the ultimate honoree from that series: the body-snatching, shape-shifting, yellow-blooded mortician known as The Tall Man...

The Tall Man was the signature role of Angus Scrimm, the screen name of a music writer turned actor named Rory Guy who passed on in January of this year at the age of 89. Let’s hope his mortal coil received better treatment then the corpses that came under The Tall Man’s care…

ALAN HAIL

Like all sensible lovers of great acting, I was saddened by the death of Alan Rickman, way too young at 69, earlier this month.

Here in the Valley, Harkins Theatres is paying a very cool tribute to Rickman with a mini-festival of his films today only at the Valley Art in downtown Tempe: Love Actually (11 a.m.); Galaxy Quest (1:50 p.m.); Truly, Madly, Deeply (4:10 p.m.) and Die Hard (8:45 p.m.). (They’re also showing Labyrinth at 6:30 p.m., as a David Bowie tribute.) Tickets are only $5, and proceeds benefit Save the Children.

Great choices, but I would have included Sense and Sensibility, and one of my sisters always raves about a TV movie Rickman starred in called Something the Lord Made.

Anyway…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week our honoree is General Sarris, the menacing reptile-arthropod-whatever played by Robin Sachs in Galaxy Quest…

He was insultingly named, by the way, after the late auteurist critic Andrew Sarris.

(INTER)VIEW TO A KILL(ING)

The day after Christmas I was turned away, twice, from sold-out shows at the Harkins Valley Art Theatre in Tempe. The film that was packing them in was, of course, The Interview, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s lowbrow farce involving a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

As you’ve possibly heard, a massive hack of Sony and hints of terrorist reprisals, both thought to have originated from North Korea, resulted in the decision, both by the studio and many theater chains, to cancel the movie’s Christmas Day release. For a couple of days it looked like The Interview might become a “lost” movie, but then Sony reconsidered, releasing the picture both to theaters and to video-on-demand. Perhaps with a thought to the safety of other audiences in the multiplexes, Harkins opened the film only at the chain’s one remaining free-standing single-screen house.

I had skipped the screening, so I decided to go to the Valley Art, but got to the box office too late, for two different shows, to get a ticket. No front row, no standing room. The prescient people who were lining up with pre-ordered tickets were mostly the younger sort one would expect at a movie like this—couples on dates, groups of frat-boy-looking buddies—but people of all ages were represented.

Anyway, I went back Saturday morning and saw the film, with a house that wasn’t full but was still surprisingly crowded for an early matinee. On the way in I was given a pin with a picture of stars Rogen and James Franco. It said “I [picture of a popped kernel of popcorn] FREEDOM! HARKINS THEATRES.”

I was puzzled at first by what this meant: I Pop Freedom? I Snack On Freedom? Slow on the take that I am, it took me a minute to realize that the popcorn kernel was vaguely heart-shaped. I Love Freedom. Indeed I do.

Grateful though I was for the souvenir, however, I declined to pin it on my shirt. Having failed, over the last few years, to take to the streets to demonstrate for or against any of a dozen issues I truly care about, it seemed a little much to congratulate myself for going to a silly comedy.

As for The Interview itself, it’s enjoyable enough of its kind, that kind being the self-consciously raunchy Hangover vein. It goes badly off the rails toward the end, but up until then it has some solid laughs and good performances. Franco plays it pretty broad as the nitwit TV interviewer who scores a sit-down with the tyrant and is pressed into service by the CIA to “take him out.” But Rogen, as Franco’s producer, carries the film with his boyishly commonsensical charm, and Randall Park is excellent as (and much handsomer than) Kim.

After it was over, as we were filing out, I heard an usher thank a middle-aged woman for coming, and she replied, very sincerely, “Thank you for having it. I really appreciate it.” If I had to guess, I’d guess that this lady, and quite a number of others in the audience, wouldn’t have thought of going to this particular movie if North Korea hadn’t told them they wouldn’t if they knew what was good for them.

Certainly I think that in the years since 9/11 fear of terrorism, and exploitation of that fear, and even an odd and carefully cultivated sense that one is being unpatriotic if one doesn’t show enough fear, has led our country into atrocious decisions, including ridiculous and probably futile encumbrances to our travel and recreation. I thought the initial decision to pull The Interview was wrong, for instance.

Having said that, I had sympathy for Sony’s cautious position, and even more so for that of the exhibitors. It’s easy for commentators like me with no real responsibility to decry the cancellation as craven, but if, God forbid, one bomb were to go off in a theatre, you can imagine the invective that would be poured on “Hollywood” for endangering people’s lives for a dumb movie. And if the release, and the packed houses, are a healthy step away from "letting the terrorists win," it’s no more than a baby step.

But I had to wonder if, at bottom, the long lines for The Interview not only weren’t about the movie itself, they weren’t even about politics or patriotism or standing up to terrorism. Maybe they were simply a gesture of early nostalgia for the increasingly gratuitous act of actually going to the movies. At any time this weekend, after all, I and just about anyone else at the Valley Art could have seen The Interview in the comfort of our homes, for a couple bucks less than the price of a ticket, and without the hassle of parking in downtown Tempe. Somehow, though, seeing the film in a gathering of strangers turned the experience from sitting through an average comedy into the kind of shared social experience that makes up many of our best movie memories.

CURRENT EVENTS

Opening today at Tempe’s Valley Art Theatre:

 

Watermark—This documentary makes the real world look like science fiction. It’s about the human relationship to water—how our lives revolve around it, often without our awareness, and also what we do to the world in the process of working our will upon and through water.

Directed by Canadian filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Edwad Burtynsky, Watermark begins in the dried, jigsaw-cracked Mexican delta of the Colorado River, its once-branching waters now diverted to the desert farmlands of California’s Imperial Valley. From there, we’re shown dam projects, rice paddies and abalone farms in China, scientists collecting core samples of ice in Greenland, a tannery in Bangladesh vomiting horrifying pollution into the Buriganga River, and the fountains, somehow shockingly decadent in context, at the Bellagio in Vegas.

We’re shown the pristine beauty of the Stikine River in British Columbia, the teeming human spectacle of pilgrims washing away their sins in the Ganges, and the somehow similar sight of competitive surfers at Huntington Beach and sophisticated bathers in geothermal springs in Iceland. There are some interviews, but no narration—mostly we just get long looks at the epic, and epically bizarre, imagery of people’s ingenious, if often crazily reckless, interaction with H2O. The movie is by turns terrifying, beautiful, hypnotic and maddening.

Playing May 2, 3 and 4 only at AMC Arizona Center:

Decoding Annie Parker—Samantha Morton plays the title character, a Canadian woman who believed that the cancer that plagued her, her sister and her mother ran in her family. This may not exactly seem like outlandish conjecture now, but in the ‘70s & ‘80s such a link was unproven, and often dismissed as coincidental by the medical establishment.

The story of Annie’s marriage, family life and friendships is played as an eccentric comedy-drama interrupted here and there by chemotherapy. This is intercut with a parallel strand, set at UC Berkeley, depicting the researches of Mary-Claire King (Helen Hunt), the geneticist who proved Annie right by discovering the BRCA1 gene in 1990.

The film opens with the brief, awkward, touching meeting between Annie and Dr. King, then goes back to the beginning to show how their long sagas eventually converged. The director, Steven Bernstein, working from a script he wrote with Adam Bernstein and Michael Moss, seems determined to banish any trace of the TV-medical-drama pious or maudlin, and he succeeds mostly because of Morton’s comically avid sexuality, which doesn’t shut down even after mastectomy and chemo baldness. Morton is as weirdly magnetic as ever—it’s as if Annie is simply too sexy for cancer to defeat.

THE LIVING TREAD

Quentin Dupieux’s film, Wrong, opens tomorrow here at the Valley Art in Tempe, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s acknowledge the central character of Dupieux’s 2010 film Rubber, a sentient and lethal rubber car tire named Robert…

You can check out my review of Rubber here.

HE'S ONLY JUST BEGUN

The Wife, The Kid and Your Humble Narrator are deep into Olympic mania. Indeed, I even liked Danny Boyle’s unhinged Opening Ceremony spectacle.

The Wife and I did, however, take time out this past weekend to go to the Valley Art for the documentary Paul Williams: Still Alive…

I highly recommend this one, which plays there through at least Thursday; it’s worth the difficult pilgrimage to downtown Tempe. You can read my review of it here, at Jabcat on Movies.

If you have a few million dollars lying around, you should check out my story in the August edition of Phoenix Magazine, about a strange investment opportunity involving the movie business and the treasure of a Spanish conquistador. It’s on pages 33-34, or you can read it here.

RIP to Lupe Ontiveros, who played innumerable maids—perhaps most memorably in As Good As It Gets—as well as the murderess of the title character in Selena, passed on at 69. RIP also to French experimental filmmaker Chris Marker, of A Grin Without a Cat, Sans Soliel and the masterly, chilling photonovela short La jetee, passed on at 91.