GOOD TIME HARLEY

Hope everybody is having a great February. Check out this month's issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...for my story "Cooking Out of Bounds," about rogue chefs around the Valley, as well as my "Four Corners" column. Also check out my "Friday Flicks" column, with reviews of Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), The Traitor and the Osgood Perkins-directed shocker Gretel and Hansel...

...and my review of the Filipino historical epic Quezon's Game.

Have a great Valentine's month everybody!

THE DEAD AND THE QUICK

“Movement is life.”

So says Brad Pitt, as the hero of the zombie epic World War Z, to a family he’s urging to evacuate. Director Marc Forster certainly seems to have taken this maxim to heart. Whatever else one can say about this adaptation of the Max Brooks novel, it can’t be called slow-paced. From beginning credits to end credits, the action is pretty close to non-stop.

Death seems to be movement, too—these zombies aren’t old-school slow plodders. In the early scenes, we see Pitt and his wife and daughters flee the viral horde from Philly to Newark, while their undead pursuers run and lunge and leap like wildcats, and charge headlong at their prey so heedlessly that they plummet right off the sides of buildings.

What we don’t see is those spry zombies tearing their victims up, or shedding much blood. They don’t seem, even, to be cannibals, just biters. World War Z, rated PG-13, is the least gory zombie movie I’ve ever seen (though I haven’t seen Warm Bodies). There are no dismemberments or disembowelments; a hand gets chopped off in one scene, but it happens out of frame. Gore enthusiasts may be disappointed by this, but Forster is admirably deft in keeping the splatter offscreen, and the result isn’t really a horror movie. It’s an action-adventure picture, and a fairly exciting one.

Once he’s gotten his family to relative safety, poor Pitt, who’s some sort of vaguely-defined UN investigator, must dodge the ghouls from South Korea to Jerusalem to Wales in search of the key to the plague. He’s very good here—not jaw-droppingly good, like he was as Jessie James or in Moneyball or The Tree of Life. The role is too conventional and underwritten. It’s just a good-guy leading man part, but he executes it with skill, and he gets plenty of support from a large and fine international cast, which includes Peter Capaldi, Ruth Negga and the always cool-looking Pierfancesco Favino as researchers, Mirielle Enos in the thankless role of Pitt’s wife and, for a single creepy monologue about North Korea’s response to the zombie problem, David Morse.

One other actor deserves a nod: Michael Jenn, who plays a twitchy, snappy zombie that besieges Pitt in a hospital lab, turns his small role into an audience-pleasing showcase of grotesque comedy. Also, toward the end there’s a very clever product placement—a soft drink brand comes to the rescue. As with Roland Emmerich’s 2012, apparently even the Apocalypse can’t stop commercials.

VATICAN-DO ATTITUDE

“What a relief, the symbologist is here.”

Thus sneers a haughty Vatican bigshot when he beholds Tom Hanks as the professor hero in Angels & Demons. This was by no means the only time that the film made me laugh out loud, but I think it may have been the only time it did so intentionally.

A sequel to 2006’s The Da Vinci Code, and directed, like that film, by Ron Howard, the movie was a much better time than I expected. The Pope officially steps down tomorrow; if you’d like to mark the occasion with a tale of wild Vatican intrigue, this could be your choice.

Da Vinci Code was well-made but silly and a little slow; Angels & Demons is no less silly but is furiously fast-moving and sometimes surprisingly gruesome. It involves the Catholic Church and the Illuminati and the kidnapping of four Cardinals and a plot to blow up the Vatican right in the middle of a Conclave, using a fragment of anti-matter purloined from the CERN laboratory in Switzerland as the explosive.

Hanks’ symbologist rides to the rescue at the request of the Vatican cops, and follows a string of clues conveniently planted around Rome in Bernini’s sculptures. Hanks takes a deep breath at the beginning and pounds through his movie-star duties here with an award-worthy straight face, belting out exposition on the fly.

Aiding him is a gorgeous CERN physicist, played by Ayelet Zurer, who shows a solid grasp of such other disciplines as pathology and Renaissance art whenever the plot requires—she’s a bit like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. I liked her a lot. Rounding out the cast are Ewan McGregor, as a fresh-faced young priest, Armin Mueller-Stahl as a cold-fish old cardinal, Stellan Skarsgaard as the chief of the Swiss Guard and the very cool-looking Pierfrancesco Favino as the Vatican police inspector.

Crazy and headlong throughout, Angels & Demons chucks any pretence of credibility in its last twenty minutes or so, climaxing in a chaos of helicopter ascensions and explosions and immolations. It’s quite absurd, but Howard kept me happily entertained throughout.

Like Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons is an adaptation, of course, of a best-selling novel by Dan Brown. How faithful it is, I can’t say, because I was completely satisfied, and felt no need to press on, after reading Brown’s stunning first sentence: “Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and knew it was his own.”

Really? He was a physicist? How interesting. I wonder what made him decide to choose physics as a career? I wonder how the lifelong study of the laws of the physical universe molded his outlook on life? Also, why was his flesh burning?