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 the 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 Edebiri) 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.

THE LADY IN THE FAKE

In theaters this weekend:

Fly Me to the Moon--Scarlett Johansson plays a Madison Avenue marketing hustler brought to NASA in Florida in the late '60s to help re-sell the Apollo moon mission to the public, and thus to an increasingly reticent and tight-pursed Congress. Soon the astronauts are sporting Omega watches in print ads, and Tang drink mix is being touted as the beverage of space travelers.

Those of us who go back that far may remember this advertising blitz; I certainly consumed unhealthy quantities of Tang around that time--any quantity was probably unhealthy--because of its supposed outer space connections. But in this lavish period romcom, it's the highly fictitious set-up for the meet-cute between Johansson and Channing Tatum, as a serious-minded NASA launch director.

He falls for her at first sight, then when he learns who she is he's outraged at her interference. And it truly is outrageous; she even hires actors to play some of the less charismatic or more camera-shy NASA staffers in TV interviews, Tatum included. But of course, over time his resistance is worn down by her adorableness.

Johansson is pretty adorable, at that. She wears the chic '60s outfits like she was born for them, and her purse-lipped, mischievous little smirk is winning as always. Tatum is in his comfort zone here, too; likably bland and dim and stalwart. The stars have a comfortable romantic rapport, and they're well supported by a roster of character players, like Woody Harrelson as the jovial mystery man who hires Johansson, Jim Rash as a prima donna commercial director and Ray Romano as Tatum's loyal sidekick. There's also a gorgeous black cat.

Between the cast, the vintage atmosphere and retro styles and settings, and a terrific soundtrack, the movie, directed by Greg Berlanti (of Love, Simon) from a script by Rose Gilroy, would be ludicrous and fluffy but inoffensive enough, even charming. But in the middle of this buffoonish burlesque of NASA history, there are attempts to generate genuine drama and poignancy over the earlier tragedy of Apollo 1 in 1967 that strike a sour note.

Worse yet, in the severely overlong second half, the plot goes off the rails. Harrelson's government spook makes Johansson stage, you guessed it, a fake moon landing, as a contingency in case the real one fails. She reluctantly goes along with this, unbeknownst to Tatum, as the real landing is taking place, even though she feels like she's betraying him.

This extended finale is clumsily staged, but that's not what's offensive about it. The "Fake Moon Landing" narrative is one of the quintessential paranoid American folk legends, likely arising, I've always suspected, among the many people who insisted that the moon landing was a ridiculous folly and would never succeed--arising, like so much else in our toxic national discourse, from the common American inability to admit it when we're wrong. Fly Me to the Moon means it all facetiously, of course, but this doesn't strike me as the most auspicious time in our country's history to lend even that much credence to a conspiracy theory.

DUMB AND PLUMBER

Last night I finished watching the HBO limited series White House Plumbers...

...about the Watergate break-in, with Woody Harrelson as E. Howard Hunt and Justin Theroux as G. Gordon Liddy, presenting them both as buffoonish boneheads. Lena Headey is quite sexy as Hunt's ill-fated wife Dorothy, clearly much the smarter half of the marriage.

The Wife mostly lost interest in the show after the first of the five episodes, finding the tone too farcical for the subject matter. But I have a feeling that most of the absurd incidents it shows us are based on fact, or at least on stuff those assholes claimed actually happened.

It is broadly played, but I feel like the best, albeit posthumous, revenge against those traitorous twits is to depict them as stooges, self-impressed, amateurish wannabes. Playing them as steely-eyed villains is probably exactly what they'd get off on.

Anyway, it's mentioned several times in the course of the series that Hunt was a hack novelist on the side; it reminded me that I'd had one of his books on my shelf for years and had never gotten around to it. It was a 1972 hard-boiled noir/horror hybrid called The Coven...

...written under the pseudonym "David St. John" (the names of both his sons) and set in D.C. neighborhoods where I used to live and work. It's full of borderline-parody prose like this:

"From there I drove through a city well-lighted for the most part, but largely deserted, for honest people tended to stay indoors after dark in recent years. Out Rhode Island Avenue to a part of the District tourists seldom saw. Hell's Bottom it had been called in the early days. Murder Bay. Old, rundown, and shabby. Condemned windowless buildings, vandalized by gangs of homeless boys. By day a rude, brawling area where liquor stores cashed more relief checks than the few remaining banks. By night a furtive, shadowy zone whose sounds were the crash of liquor bottles, the bang of overturing trash cans, and strangled cries in dark allies. Where love and heroin were traded over barroom tables and stolen cars screamed around the nearby corner...A sprawling raucous quarter slated for demolition when the City Fathers could get around to it. A dying, decaying area where hope was as rare as a starched white shirt."

So you're saying...not a great neighborhood?

There are also loathing caricatures of hippies, Beltway insiders, political staffers, etc. And the hard-drinking lawyer hero is the perfect projection of the cynical badass that Hunt so clearly wanted to be. As an expression of the mindset out of which the abuses of that administration grew, it's a simultaneously fun and depressing read.

NET GAINS

Opening this weekend:

Champions--Just like Gene Hackman in Hoosiers, Woody Harrelson is a hotheaded basketball coach who loses jobs over violent outbursts on the court. Just like Keanu Reeves in Hardball, he has a coaching gig forced on him, in this case as community service in lieu of jail time. In short, Champions follows the standard sports movie playbook plot point for plot point. The variation, this time, is that Harrelson is assigned to a Special Olympics team made up of players with intellectual disabilities.

Thus the obvious worry, going in, is that these characters will be either ridiculed or patronized, or both. The director is Bobby Farrelly, half of the Farrelly Brothers, who in earlier films have indeed derived broad comedy from intellectually disabled characters; his brother Peter Farrelly, who we saw advising the filmmakers with Down syndrome in the documentary Sam and Mattie Make a Zombie Movie, insists that they "revere" such people but refuse to sentimentalize or condescend in their depictions of them.

How does this approach work out in Champions? Well, certainly the quirks and limitations of Harrelson's ballers are played for laughs, but I think no more insultingly than in, say, The Mighty Ducks or Dodgeball or, for that matter, Major League, or any other formula sports flick about the triumph of a ragtag bunch of misfit underdogs.

It helps, too, that the coach is generally the butt of the jokes. More importantly, the actors who play the team members are spirited, ebullient, confident performers with vivid personalities. They also bring out the best in Harrelson, who responds to them with what appears to be genuine warmth and delight.

Aside from the charming engagement between these actors and the star, the movie, set in Des Moines but mostly filmed in Canada, is pretty by-the-numbers, though it's pleasant and watchable (it's a knockoff, by the way, of a 2018 Spanish film called Campeones, a hit in that country). Ernie Hudson and Cheech Marin turn up in supporting roles but have little to do. Harrelson's love interest is Kaitlin Olson as a small-potatoes Shakespearean actor and the protective sister of one of the players, and the bantering dialogue Mark Rizzo provides for them isn't a disgrace. And I'm predisposed to like any movie in which the climax of The Winter's Tale is used to teach the pick-and-roll.

VENOM EMBROIDERY

Now in the multiplexes:

Venom: Let There Be Carnage--The King of the Rumbly Distorted Voice, Tom Hardy, is back in the dual role of Eddie Brock and Venom, the alien "symbiote" with whom he shares body-space. Eddie and Vennie have developed a bickering domestic relationship since the 2018 Marvel movie Venom; Vennie is constantly nagging his host to let him eat the brains of human "bad guys" like a kid begging a parent for permission to get a tattoo.

In this sequel, some of the Big V's genetic material gets blended with serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson), who bears Eddie a grudge. Cletus turns into an uber-Venom-ish monster called Carnage, who looks like he stepped out a Francis Bacon triptych. He busts out of prison and liberates his girlfriend Shriek (Naomie Harris), who can yell really loud, and the two of them go on a wild, vengeful rampage in San Francisco.

With his vague working-class Mid-Atlantic accent (he wears a Detroit Lions jacket even though he lives in the Bay area), Hardy's Eddie is a rather recessive leading man; mostly he's a serviceable straight man to Venom. But Harrelson puts on an entertaining show as usual, and Harris is freaky and memorable. Andy Serkis directed, working in a style of headlong visual shorthand that keeps the story flying forward like a driverless speedboat, and using the San Fran locations to good advantage.

But when I tell you what I liked best about Venom: Let There Be Carnage, it will make me sound just like the old guy that I am: It's an hour and 37 minutes long. That's right, this Marvel movie is a freaking hour and a half long. It doesn't have five endings; it doesn't keep you in your seat for more than two hours in fear that you won't feel like you got enough for your money. Make no mistake, there's plenty of weird, near-surreal action. The movie doesn't skimp, but it doesn't overload our plate, either.

FLYING SOLO

Opening this week:

Solo: A Star Wars Story--Fair warning: I'll try to keep what follows free of significant "spoilers," but if you want to go in with no foreknowledge whatsoever, stop reading now.

For those still reading: This one, set years before the events of the original 1977 Star Wars, is an origin story for dashing pilot Han Solo, played back then by Harrison Ford, and arguably the best-loved character in the franchise. When we meet Han, played here by young Alden Ehrenreich, he's a runaway who has fallen into a Dickensian life of street crime on a dreary industrial planet, in servitude to a sort of giant tomato worm (with beautiful diction).

He escapes, albeit at a painful price, and we're shown his first meetings with Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and his beloved spaceship the Millennium Falcon. Han and Chewie fall in with a gang of space bandits including Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton and a little multi-armed dude voiced by Jon Favreau, who are working for odious crime boss Paul Bettany and his beautiful consigliere Emilia Clarke. The gang, along with Lando and a revolutionary-minded robot (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) end up on another crazy, daring exploit.

As an audience member, I may be in an unusually fortunate position where Star Wars is concerned. I've always liked Star Wars, liked it a lot, really, but it was never the gold standard of entertainment for me. Probably because I came to it as a teenager rather than as a child, I never had the emotional investment in the franchise that so many in the generation after me did (and that I have in, say, Star Trek), so I can take pleasure in the movies on their own merits, and if something feels a little off to me, it doesn't seem like a desecration.

Within that context, I found Solo very authentic, and enjoyed it thoroughly. The credited director is Ron Howard, who reportedly took over late in the shoot, after the directing team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were fired (they're credited as executive producers). Whoever's work predominates in the finished product, it has that inimitable Star Wars feel, with one possible exception: It's a bit dark, in the literal sense, especially early on. To emphasize the grittiness of Han's background, the initial planets we visit are on the gray, overcast, or even downright murky side. While this is appropriate enough to the story, the loss of some of the color and visual vibrancy we expect from a Star Wars movie mutes the effect a bit.

That's about as much of a criticism as I can muster. Solo is a rambling, rollicking space opera, with all the chases and dogfights and shoot-outs and monsters and double-crosses and noble sacrifices one could wish for, supported by a truly engaging cast.

Ehrenreich, who jumped off the screen a couple of years ago as the cowboy star in the Coen Bros. comedy Hail, Caesar!, is even better here as the cocksure but likable Han. He has a no-kidding movie star's face, and dare I say it, I thought he came across here as less aloof, more openhearted than the young Harrison Ford did in the original film (Ford grew much warmer as an actor as he matured). Ehrenreich and Suotamo, the Finnish basketball player who takes over the role of Chewbacca from Peter Mayhew, generate an easy and touching rapport from their first scene together.

Glover channels the suavity of Billy Dee Williams as Lando, and adds a welcome touch of comic vanity and youthful overconfidence. Clarke has the English hothouse-flower charm that seems to recur so often among the leading ladies in the series in recent years, Bettany's bad guy has an unctuousness that's very easy to hate, and the brash line readings of Waller-Bridge are amusing. Best of all among the supporting cast, though, is Harrelson as the wearily cynical leader of the bandits: In the midst of all this Buck Rogers silliness, he manages to create a complex character.

Part of the credit for this must go to the dialogue, by the father-and-son team of Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan, with its touches of humane anti-authoritarian idealism, little riffs on loyalty and selflessness that pop up here and there as if smuggled in. If the movie was made in the '50s, you wouldn't surprised to learn that the script was the work of some blacklisted writer, toiling behind a front.

Always at the Carlyle--George Clooney, Wes Anderson, Anthony Bourdain, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Goldblum, Tommy Lee Jones, Paul Shaffer, Condoleezza Rice, Fran Leibowitz, Lenny Kravitz, Bill Murray: These are just some of the famous people who gush to the camera in this documentary about the tastefully swanky Deco hotel at 76th Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan. What's striking is how the Carlyle's staff, the maids and waiters and bell captains and elevator operators, and maybe especially the august yet sportive concierge Dwight Owsley, don't really come across as any less glamorous than the stars they serve.

These staffers are asked, from behind the camera, to share juicy stories of what they may have witnessed working at the hotel, opened in 1930 and the haunt of movie stars and rock stars and presidents, of Princess Di and JFK and Jackie O and Jack Nicholson and Michael Jackson and Woody Allen and Warren Beatty and famed resident Elaine Stritch. Again and again they refuse to gossip, citing the place's long-held tradition of discretion. Director Matthew Miele turns their tight lips into a running gag, but the result is that we don't get any really juicy stories in the length of the movie.

Well, Alan Cumming gives an account of how he obtained a nude photo of himself and two other people for an album cover in the entrance of the Carlyle in the middle of the night. And we're told that Our Current President visited the hotel, and was heard to say "This place is a joke." That's about as indiscreet as things get.

Still, this is a well-made, sometimes amusing hour and a half, with some wonderful music (we hear both Bobby Short and Eartha Kitt perform). But it was hard for me to escape the sense that what I was watching was less a movie than a commercial for very rich people. A frequent (non-celebrity) guest tries to tell us that the appeal of the Carlyle, with room rates running in the tens of thousands of dollars, "has nothing to do with money." Rather, she says, it's "the human touch" it provides. Bourdain tries a similarly disingenuous line, noting that the place could probably be even more profitable if the management abandoned its old-school attention to luxurious detail.

Against this is Jon Hamm, who offers a few respectful remarks about the place in a strangely uneasy manner, then snorts when asked if he's ever stayed there. "You could pay for somebody's school for a year," he says. At that moment he became, for me, the hero of the movie.

THE APE OF THINGS TO COME

Opening this weekend:

War for the Planet of the Apes—The war of the title, between apes and humans, has been going on for a few years as this, the third of the latter-day Apes movies, begins. It’s been long enough that human soldiers write sick jokes like “BEDTIME FOR BONZO” on their helmets, and that slang specific to the war has arisen, like “Donkey” for a turncoat ape who acts as a guide to the humans.

Caesar, still voiced and performed behind “motion capture” by Andy Serkis, is still in charge of the ape stronghold in what used to be Northern California. Initially a wise leader who acts only in defense of his fellow apes, he’s turned bitter and vengeful by a particularly outrageous human attack led by an ape-loathing Colonel (Woody Harrelson). Caesar leads a small band of apes, of diverse species, on a retaliatory mission.

Along the way, their band picks up another ape that talks, and a human that doesn’t. “Bad Ape” (Steve Zahn), a zoo veteran, assumed that was his name because of how often he heard it. A little orphaned human girl (Amiah Miller) is given a name from a piece of Chevy wreckage: Nova. She’s been made mute by a virus that’s starting to afflict the human population, which the Colonel fears is a sign of a downward evolutionary slide for his species. Eventually, Caesar and his pals end up among the cruel Colonel’s prisoners.

I appreciated the nervy, barely-subtextual topical political anger under the material—the Colonel actually forces the enslaved apes to build a wall. There are religious overtones, too; Caesar seems overtly identified with Moses here. Harrelson has a gleeful good time playing the spiteful maniac Colonel, and once again Serkis gives a grave, scowling performance right through the CGI effects. Their big confrontation is the film’s dramatic high point.

This turbulent, overcast movie seemed stronger to me than 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, but not as witty and exciting as 2011’s initial “reboot,” Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Both of the two sequels are pretty somber affairs; they aren’t without some humor, but neither had the same sense of nasty, subversive fun at seeing humankind humbled by our downtrodden simian cousins as Rise—or, indeed, as the 1968 original.

The apes, Caesar included, are really downtrodden here. They suffer mightily in the single-minded Colonel’s brutal captivity, and between this and the movie’s wintry atmosphere and its austere moral scheme—everything gets worse for everybody when Caesar becomes vengeful—it gets a bit grim and wearying. Ultimately, after some POW-escape thriller suspense, the apes do make a stand, and it brings this mature, reflective trilogy to a satisfying, well-earned climax, but it doesn’t give us this payoff easily. War is hell, you might say.

TRIUMPH OF THE WILSON

Opening this week:

 
Wilson—Woody Harrelson plays the title character in this adaptation of the 2010 graphic novel by Daniel Clowes of Ghost World fame. Wilson is long divorced and all but friendless, and it's not hard to see why—he's appallingly socially inappropriate, cheerfully making unsolicited, often bluntly insulting pronouncements to total strangers as he galumphs around Minneapolis. He lives over a karate school, in a small apartment cluttered with popular paperback novels—including, for some reason, two copies of QB VII—and alienates almost everybody he meets.

His only companion is his little dog Pepper—Umberto D is seen on a movie marquee, and Pepper looks very much like Umberto's dog Flike in that film. But when Wilson, even more emotionally adrift than usual after the death of his distant father, tries to broaden his social circle a bit, he reconnects with his ex-wife Pippi (Laura Dern), a recovering addict, and their dour seventeen-year-old daughter Claire (Isabella Amara) that she gave up for adoption after leaving him. Finding himself the head of this forlorn little family unit gives him a sudden giddy, reckless euphoria.

Chaos ensues, both hilarious and painful. Hilarious because of Harrelson's delivery; he makes Wilson's unfiltered assertions rude yet bright and outgoing and friendly (not to mention that he often seems right on the money). He genuinely wants people to benefit from his perspectives, and his smiling manner suggests a congenial warmth and intimacy, as if to say ''no need to thank me."

It's painful because of his utter obliviousness, not only to the offense he gives but to his atrocious bad judgement and its consequences. The rambling story, which covers years, takes turns that are completely unpredictable, yet entirely and cringe-inducingly believable. Director Craig Johnson (of The Skeleton Twins), working from a script by Clowes, unfolds the narrative cleanly and gets strong acting not only from Harrelson but from Dern, Amara, Judy Greer, Cheryl Hines and others.

Not everything about Wilson works, even on its own cracked terms. A couple of scenes that escalate into slapstick violence seem forced and overbearing. And as it progresses, the movie seems to invite us to laugh at Wilson's intolerable behavior at the same time it's asking us to recognize his very real pain in a way that makes our laughter feel ungenerous. But even this response, though possibly unintentional, makes the film complex and interesting.

Personal Shopper—By day, our heroine Maureen works in the title capacity for a famous fashionista in Paris. Maureen’s twin brother Lewis has recently died, and so she’s taken to staying in the beautiful house he shared with his girlfriend by night, in hopes of receiving word from The Great Beyond—she’s a medium, as was he.

Eventually Maureen sees some fairly goosebump-raising ghostly manifestations, and she also starts receiving disturbing, provocative texts on her phone, and wonders if they might have a paranormal origin. Then matters take a more sinister turn.

It’s all very cool and chic and sexy and ambiguous and European. Writer-director Olivier Assayas manages to get Kristen Stewart, who plays Maureen, into some of the haute fashion items she’s been sent to fetch, and also out of them, which does no harm to the picture’s marketability.

But it should also be said that Personal Shopper transcends mere glossy glamour. Stewart comes to life here in a way that I haven’t seen from her in the past. Assayas gets past the blank, slightly slack-jawed quality she showed in the Twilight movies and finds a directness and a sullen, skittish bravery that’s quite touching. She’s in almost every scene of the picture, and she carries it convincingly.

SHE GOT GAMES

Wild turkeys have been a recurring theme in my life recently. I missed the screening of The Hunger Games, still mopping up at the box office, because I was back east. Among other places, I visited a honey farm in West Virginia, where I saw a small flock of the handsome birds trooping past the front windows.

Then, when I got back to Arizona, I received a press release from the National Wild Turkey Federation, noting that they teach young people some of the same bowhunting skills employed by the heroine of The Hunger Games. The organization, which is holding such an event from April 19 through 26 on United States Forest Service land around Flagstaff, Alphine and Christopher Creek (for details call 928-848-4549), would like very much to hook their wagon to the Hunger Games train.

No fools the National Wild Turkey Federation. The Hunger Games, based on the wildly successful novel by Suzanne Collins, had one of the strongest opening weekends in cinema history, and shows early signs that it could be for this generation what, say, Star Wars was for the previous.

Anyway, the wild turkeys seemed to be telling me that I need to see the movie, so I did, and found it exciting, absorbing, disturbingly plausible...and ultimately evasive. For the uninitiated: The Hunger Games is set in a future America in which, every year, each of twelve “Districts” selects two “Tributes,” young people who are sent to the capital to compete in the televised title event, a winner-take-all elimination by combat, to the death. Our heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), who lives in a third-world Appalachian district, volunteers for this revolting duty to prevent her younger sister, chosen by lottery, from having to go.

In the Capitol, Katniss and her District-mate Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) meet their competitors, are schooled for the competition by a mentor, Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), and groomed for the showmanship side of it by Cinna (Lenny Kravitz). Eventually the kids are released in what appears to be a pretty wilderness area, but is actually an arena wired for TV and environmental manipulation, and they start killing each other. Katniss takes to the high country and waits for the fight to come to her.

You don’t have to be a student of pop culture to know that this premise is nothing really new, that its lineage can be traced from Death Race 2000 (1975) to The Most Dangerous Game (1932), to, alas, the real-life gladiatorial combats of the “bread and circuses” era of ancient Rome. Not even the satire of “reality TV” is new—this movie reminded me a lot of Daniel Minahan’s grim, neglected 2001 thriller Series 7: The Contenders, essentially a low-budget take on the same idea, with one crucial differences, the difference that delivers a 152-million-dollar opening weekend: the combatants in The Hunger Games are adolescent kids.

They’re attractive kids, at that. Lawrence, of Winter’s Bone, is a young beauty with a melancholy face and thick hair which, like the locks of the other female tributes, somehow remains lush and lovely no matter how many days she sleeps outside. Large as the role is, it’s a little underwritten, but she gets more out of it than might be expected—she has a fine moment, for instance, modeling a dress she’s wearing on a TV interview, in which you see she’s simultaneously terrified and, fleetingly, pleased by her glamour. She has a strong rapport with the charmingly wide-eyed, openhearted Hutcherson, and with a younger costar, Amandla Stenberg as the resourceful Rue, but Hunger Games, directed with skill and restraint by Gary Ross, is not an ensemble piece—Lawrence carries it like a star.

The movie, however, gripping though it is, is overprotective—not of its star, but of her character. The story is rigged so that, while Katniss kills, she does so only in self-defense, and she’s excused from ever having to kill anyone she (or the audience) likes. This strikes me as having less to do with plausibility or with strong drama than with the need to market the film to preteens without alienating them, or their parents.

And I have to admit that a hugely successful entertainment about kids slaughtering kids for the entertainment of kids doesn’t strike me as the cheeriest news for humankind. But The Hunger Games seems, at least, humane, in touch with the horror of its own concept, and with its scary proximity to our own pop culture.

COP TO BOTTOM

The movie isn’t much fun, but Woody Harrelson is brilliant in Rampart. He plays Dave Brown, an unraveling Los Angeles cop in 1999, the height of the notorious Rampart Scandal. From the outside, Dave looks like a cocksure archetype of the LAPD at its formidable worst: Crooked, vicious, racist, arrogant, obsessively macho, reflexively self-justifying.

But Harrelson also lets us see how Dave sees himself—as a roguish, vigilante hero—& how his intensity & sexual confidence suck others, women especially, into sharing & enabling this delusion, at least temporarily. His smile is both boyish & predatory, & he speaks with a deliberate, jaunty verbosity, provided in part by James Ellroy, who wrote the script with director Oren Moverman. The movie is a bit like a west coast version of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, with a more specific psychology & social context & minus the Catholic guilt & mysticism. For better & worse, it’s Bad Lieutenant done a la Robert Altman.

Dave Brown feels that his name is too prosaic for a person as remarkable as he thinks he is, but he has a more distinctive nickname: In the department he’s called “Date-Rape,” because he coyly declines to confirm or deny having killed a man known to be a serial date rapist. Early on, we see him bully a (female) rookie & beat up a suspect, then do a full-on Rodney King to a guy who collides with his car & then flees. Later, we’re clearly shown his capacity for murder, not to mention robbery.

He justifies all this brutality with claim that he never hurts any good people. He also uses the familiar line, beloved of racists everywhere, that because he hates everybody he somehow can’t be a racist; he cites his willingness to sleep with black women as further evidence of this.

Some of the most successful scenes in Rampart, however, are concerned not with Dave’s work but with his eyebrow-raising home life. He’s been married, consecutively, to sisters (Cynthia Nixon & Anne Heche), & has one daughter with each, & they all live together, though the exes want him gone so they can get on with their lives. Despite frequent absences for sex with other women, including Robin Wright as a self-loathing lawyer, Dave refuses to move out—his role as paterfamilias is essential to his heroic self-image.

The cast of Rampart is stellar—in addition to the aforementioned, it includes Sigourney Weaver, Ned Beatty, Steve Buscemi, Ice Cube, Ben Foster & Audra McDonald—& they give fine performances, but they have the feel of cameos in a vehicle for Harrelson.

For about half the film’s length, his magnetism keeps it morbidly riveting. But Ellroy & Moverman haven’t shaped the material for a climactic payoff. We’re just expected to stare at the last few loops of this guy’s downward spiral, & it grows very tedious. Even though I felt a certain repulsed pity for Dave, I also began to strenuously wish that someone would put him out of our misery, & his own.