JOINT SESSION

Opening this weekend:

Kneecap--The title refers to a west Belfast rap trio whose members perform in Irish, as in the Irish language. The members play themselves in the film--two youths, who go by the stage names "Mo Chara" and "Móglai Bap," and an older music teacher, JJ aka "DJ Próvai," who performs in a balaclava to hide his identity both from his employers and from his wife.

The group's bristling, furious, insolently funny music gets them in trouble, not only with the police and  politicians but with scuzzy local gangsters, the Orange Order and their own families. Even the pro-Irish language activists react with distate; they don't want the mother tongue associated with this sort of profanity, obscenity, drug use and anti-Brit sentiment. But the music also, of course, finds an enthusiastic audience.

The trailer calls the film, set in 2019 and directed by Rich Peppiatt from a script he wrote with the stars, a "mostly true story." To what extent the adverb in that phrase is strained, I can't say, though the publicity seems to suggest that this is a tall-tale version of the truth.

What I can say is that the movie is irresistible. The three stars are extremely endearing, and hold their own onscreen alongside veterans like Michael Fassbender as Móglai Bap's father and Josie Walker as a forbidding detective. Peppiatt's direction is fast and graphically playful but never merely slick; there's always warmth in the wit. And it's all driven forward by that marvelous music.

I realize that I come to Kneecap as a total outsider; most of the cultural references were opaque to me, and if there's another, darker angle from which this story can be seen, I'm certainly not in a position to recognize it. Things get a bit melodramatic toward the end, but again, the movie never really tries to claim that it's a documentary. Taken on its own terms, it's a delight.

There's also an irony built into the movie's language: the beautifully-spoken Irish is subtitled; the English dialogue is not, and was thus much harder for my Yank ear to follow. Maybe they should have subtitled both languages for the U.S. market, one in orange lettering, the other in green.

BOO, RIDLEY

Opening this weekend:

Alien: Covenant—Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien was a space Gothic, a sort of Ten Little Indians with a parasitic alien replacing the mystery killer and a dank industrial spaceship replacing the creepy old mansion. There was nothing very new about the plot, but the film’s combination of gory, lowbrow shocks with Scott’s impeccably-crafted direction and the top-notch production values was a major leap forward in making the horror genre critically respectable.

Those of us who saw it in a theater back then aren’t likely to forget the experience. A junior in high school, I saw it with a group of friends, and during the celebrated scene when the baby alien popped out of poor John Hurt’s chest, the young woman next to me repeatedly pounded my right leg with her fist, leaving me with a bruise. Then the little alien let out a little squawk and scampered off, and we all howled with laughter, hysterical but also delighted.

We’d all seen gorier, grosser scenes in other horror movies before. But I don’t think we’d ever seen a scene like this made with the full force of state-of-the-art special effects and high-end designs by H. R. Giger and an award-worthy cast with the likes of Hurt and Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton and so on. It felt like a game-changer.

Then came James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens, more adventure picture than horror movie, and two more sequels, and then two films pitting the Aliens against the extraterrestrial trophy hunters from the Predator movies. In short, the svelte, fanged title characters have proven as durable a movie monster as the Wolf Man or The Mummy.

Then, in 2012, came a prequel to Alien, called Prometheus and directed by Ridley Scott. And this week we get this sequel to Prometheus, likewise directed by Scott. About the most that I can say for it is that it increases my admiration of the original.

The setting is a huge spaceship called the Covenant, headed, like the ship in last year’s Passengers, to a distant colony planet with a cargo of suspended colonists and fetuses. The small crew is woken from their decades-long snooze to deal with a flight emergency, after which they notice a much closer, much more promisingly Earthlike planet, so they make a detour to investigate.

The place initially looks like Paradise, but before long it seems more like Hell: the landing party runs afoul of, well, aliens, who look like pretty close relatives of those from the earlier movies. One supporting player after another is bloodily dispatched. They try to take refuge in the ruins of a city, where Michael Fassbender, as a leftover from Prometheus, tells them to make themselves at home, to the extent they can, “in this dire necropolis.” Love that old-fashioned hospitality.

All this may sound more intriguing than it is. The scare scenes are very gruesome, but they rely heavily on CGI effects, and while they’re unpleasant, they lack the shuddery, visceral punch of the original film’s shocks.

But even this is less problematic than the pace. Alien: Covenant is tediously, ponderously slow, burdened with unnecessary backstory and pretentious rambling dialogue.

The supporting players are mostly generic alien-fodder, but several of the leads manage to come across well despite the leaden tone. Elizabeth Waterston is touching as the bereaved but brave heroine. So is Billy Crudup as the feckless fellow who finds himself unhappily in charge, and Danny McBride lightens the mood a bit as a daring pilot.

Fassbender has a dual role, as David and Walter, earlier and later models of the same lifelike robot, so he spends much of his time playing scenes opposite himself. No actor could ask for a more rapturously infatuated scene partner, but the interminable murmured Miltonic musings that he’s been given are enough to make us long for the gore to start up again.

Also opening here in the Valley this week…

…is Lydia Tenaglia’s foodie documentary Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent, about the California Cuisine master. Check out my review of it on Phoenix Magazine online.