CHAN-DO ATTITUDE

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Karate Kid: Legends--The 2010 reboot of 1984's The Karate Kid took a new kid from the U.S. to China to be trained in martials arts by Jackie Chan. This new entry reverses the process; our teenaged hero is reluctantly dragged from Beijing to New York.

Played by Ben Wang, Li Fong is the son of a doctor (Ming-Na Wen) with a family tragedy in his past. When we first see him, he's living, and training in Kung Fu, at the school of his Uncle Han (Jackie Chan). Mom doesn't want him fighting, so she pulls him out of school to live in Manhattan.

He promptly meets a friendly girl, Mia (Sadie Stanley), at the local pizza shop; he also meets her bullying jerk of an ex-boyfriend (Aramis Knight), who happens to be a local martial arts champ. Mia's ex-boxer dad Victor (Joshua Jackson) is in debt to a loan shark who runs the jerk boyfriend's school.

The various villains, goals and obstacles thus hurriedly shoved into place, the stage is set for a big showdown between Li and the jerk at a citywide elimination tournament. Before that, of course, comes extended sequences in which he's trained not only in Kung Fu by his Uncle Han, but in "Miyagi Karate" by Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), the title character from the '84 film, still carrying on Miyagi's legacy in California. (The movie comes up with some belated backstory claiming an ancient link between the Japanese Miyagi and the Chinese Han.)

Directed by Jonathan Entwistle from a script by Rob Lieber, this is pretty basic stuff, dramatically speaking. But the young leads have a sweet rapport, and the fan service of connecting the the old film series with the reboot is warmly received; Macchio's first appearance got a round of applause from the audience with whom I saw the film.

Most importantly, the movie features Jackie Chan, one of the great movie stars of all time, in a relaxed emeritus role. We don't get to see much of him in action here; but he seems to enjoy working in friendly rivalry opposite Macchio. And there's a scene in which Li takes on some thugs in an alley in which young Wang seems to be channeling Chan's desperate, hanging-on-by-a-thread comic style. I had to wonder if Chan had a hand in the choreography.

THERE AIN'T NO CURE FOR THE SUMMERTIME CRUISE

Opening this weekend:

Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning--It's pointless to complain that the action sequences in this movie are preposterous. They are, of course, but if they weren't, the audience would presumably feel cheated. It's what this franchise is about--wildly exaggerating the stamina, adroitness and durability of which humans are capable.

Or, rather, of which one particular, superior human is capable: Tom Cruise, as hero Ethan Hunt. Toward the end, Ethan crawls around outside the cockpits of two different biplanes--changing planes in mid-flight!--to grapple with the bad guy (Esai Morales). It's one of the more spectacular airplane stunt sequences since the finale of 1977's Capricorn One, but it makes the Marvel movies seem like gritty realism by comparison.

Mind you, by this time we've already seen Ethan enter a wrecked Russian sub at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean to retrieve some gizmo; he needs it stop a rogue AI program from launching a nuclear holocaust, so no pressure. He then rises to the surface without a wetsuit.

And it isn't just his physical prowess, of which, at 62, Cruise can be justly proud. Ethan is also morally superior. Canoodling with his leading lady (Hayley Atwell) in the decompression chamber after his arctic dip, he asks what human could be trusted with the power to control the world's nuclear arsenals, and the wide-eyed, worshipful woman unhesitatingly suggests that he's just the right guy. Ethan demurs, all modesty.

It's been a while since a star has treated himself to quite this shameless a Stations of the Cross tour. The opening credits announce this eighth film in the series as "A TOM CRUISE PRODUCTION," and the producer certainly shows reverence for his leading man.

But as usual when he plays one of his hyperconfident man of action roles--he can be excellent when he plays desperate, out of his depth pipsqueaks, as in Rain Man or A Few Good Men--at some level I can't take Cruise seriously, despite his obvious great capabilities. He's youthful in the wrong sense onscreen; other stars, say, Henry Fonda or James Stewart, had a boyishness which they never lost, even as they added the gravitas of maturity. But try as he might, Cruise always comes across like a kid dressed up in his dad's clothes.

To be fair, this movie and its predecessors aren't really any sillier than most episodes of Bruce Geller's Murphy's-Law-defying TV series (CBS; 1966-1973). But that show played it cool and laconic, with long, dialogue-free sequences of sneaky spy mischief, sustained by quiet, tense, repetitive musical cues and almost no backstory. The movies are loaded with heaving psychodrama and bombastic music and extended fight and chase scenes, often featuring Cruise doing his adorable little stiff-armed, wind-up-toy run, right up the middle of a conveniently empty road.

It's certainly fair to complain that Final Reckoning, which clocks in just a little shy of three hours, is way too long and drawn out. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie from a script he wrote with Erik Jendresen, the movie is exceedingly well-made on a scene-by-scene basis. But cumulatively, it's too much, and with its heavy, Gotterdammerung atmosphere and plot elements that recall movies like Fail Safe and War Games, it's a little lacking in humor, too.

There is excellent acting here. Angela Bassett brings a moving authority to the role of an intelligent, decent, responsible President of the United States. The French actress Pom Klementieff is amusing as an assassin turned ally; Katy O'Brian from Love Lies Bleeding makes an impression as a Navy diver, and vets like Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Janet McTeer, Rolf Saxon and Nick Offerman, among others, are always welcome.

But the audience is probably most grateful of all to Simon Pegg, who works hard to lighten things up. And Lucy Tulugarjuk, even though her lines are in an Inuit language, connects with the audience pretty much every time they cut to her.

One last snarky shot at a fellow sexagenarian who is possibly holding up better than I am: For all the care lavished on the film in general and the star in particular, Cruise's hair somehow got away from the filmmakers here. It's long, and it seems limp and spiritless; at times it gives him almost a Shemp Howard look. When he's struggling to hang on to the airplane and his face and hair are rippling in the wind, it offers the only other significant laughs in Final Reckoning, albeit likely not on purpose.

THE MINOR THINGS

 A couple of weeks ago, the admirable John Oliver devoted a segment of his HBO show Last Week Tonight to the wonderful weirdness that is Minor League Baseball.

Alas, I can't find a YouTube link to the full segment, but it's hilarious and worth watching if you can (Season 12; Episode 10). It comes at the end of a horrifying, blood-boiling main segment about the current deportation crisis, and it's a heart-lifting cool breeze of American decency by contrast.

In that segment Oliver's only criticism is that some minor league teams aren't pulling their weight with regard to eccentricity and creativity in their branding, merch and promotional stunts. He offered to put the efforts of his staff to the task for one team, provided that the team agreed in advance to have no input into the rebrand, and to do whatever they come up with. In a follow-up on last Sunday's show, also worth watching, he announced which of the 47 teams that applied--about 40% of the league, he gleefully noted--the LWT group would work to rebrand.

After dismissing several teams for being so strange already that LWT couldn't do better, he finally told us which lucky team they had settled on. Sure enough, it was the Erie Seawolves, the AA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers from my beloved hometown of Erie, PA.

Among the problems which they plan to fix with the rebrand is the fact that the city, though an important port on the Great Lakes, is nowhere near the sea. The name and the mascot, piratical lupine C. Wolf, date to the team's earlier affiliation with my father's beloved Pittsburgh Pirates.

Anyway, I was thrilled by this news because, of course, I've been a Seawolves fan for decades. My family and I go to the games at UPMC Park (formerly Jerry Uht Park) whenever we can get back to Erie in season. I've worn the shirts and hats...

The Kid has canoodled with C. Wolf...

...and other canines at "Bark at the Park" night.

We've been witness to a fireworks show at the park that sounded like a full-scale artillery bombardment...

A Seawolves magnet adorns our fridge...

...and The Kid has accumulated a couple of autographed game balls...

But most memorably, I myself was featured in the pre-game festivities at a Seawolves game. Back in 2005, I wrote a sonnet inspired by a wild, field-flooding rainout I saw at the park. The poem was published in 2008 in the baseball literary journal Elysian Fields Quarterly (sadly since defunct).

On the off chance that you don't have the back issue lying around, here the masterpiece is:

In 2009, through the intercession of my friends Tom Maggio and Lory Varo, I was invited to read it before a game, which I proudly did (you can watch it here)...

I was feeling quite triumphant when I returned to my seat after a round of polite but pleasant applause and, you know, nothing flung at me from the stands. But I found The Wife scowling furiously. A guy down the row from us had yelled "GET A LIFE!" at the conclusion of my reading.

Not bad advice, but after getting a look at the guy...

...I'm not sure I thought he was in a position to offer it.

Anyway, I can't wait to see what Oliver and Company come up with for the Seawolves. Maybe the Erie Kleps (after Eddie Klep, an Erie native and the first white player in the Negro Leagues)? The Erie Pepperoni Balls? The Erie Misery Bay Sox? The Erie Blue Pike? The Erie Lampreys? The Erie Hellbenders? The Erie Pizza Bombers? 

The Wife, more of a stodgy baseball purist than I am--she's offended, for instance, by the Globetrotters-esque antics of the Savannah Bananas--is uneasy about the rebrand, and she tells me that internet is full of indignation at the prospect. But the whole thing is likely to be very temporary anyway, of course, and should raise the team's and the town's profile nicely, if fleetingly.  

Maybe rename them, after my poetry fan, the Erie Heckling Philistines? Just a thought...

TOWER PLAY

Opening this weekend:

Final Destination: Bloodlines--The format of the Final Destination flicks is that of the slasher movie; the gimmick here is that the killer is an impersonal force: Death Itself. Each movie begins with a spectacular, lovingly presented disaster in which a bunch of young people meet gruesome ends. In the first film (2000) it was a plane crash; later entries featured a highway pile-up, a roller coaster mishap, a raceway catastrophe and a bridge collapse.

In each case these depictions are revealed to be premonitions, which allow the protagonists to avoid their fate, and to prevent several others from suffering it as well. But it turns out that The Grim Reaper is a bit of an OCD completist. The rest of each film consists of Death, or Fate or Destiny or whatever, conspiring to kill these survivors off, in order, through increasingly elaborate chains of events, something like the "accidents" that claimed Damien's enemies in the Omen movies.

This sixth entry opens in the early '60s in an unnamed city that looks a lot like Seattle, in a tower that looks a lot like the Space Needle. After the usual vision, a pretty young woman (Brec Bassinger) averts a fire and disintegration of the tower during its dedication festivities, thus cheating Death not only of herself but of everybody else at the party.

The variation, this time, is that this woman's granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is being haunted in the present day by her grandmother's experience. Stefani gradually realizes that she and all of grandma's descendants and the bloodlines of everyone spared that day are fated to untimely ends. Her Uncle and cousins and Mom and brother are all on the clock, as is she.

Despite its somehow vaguely Calvinist worldview, the series has had a lightly tongue-in-cheek tone from the start, and it's grown more facetious as it's gone on. The death sequences have become gory Rube Goldberg Mousetrap Game-style slapstick set pieces, and the audience hoots at them happily.

The journeyman actors are pleasant company, but not so much that you overinvest in them as real people, and can't giggle at what happens to them. Besides, as with so many recent splatter movies that seem to rely heavily on CGI (Cocaine Bear, Renfield, Thanksgiving, Heart Eyes), the gore effects feel insubstantial and carry little punch, beyond the comic.

There's no denying the inventiveness that directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, working from a script by Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor and Jon Watts, bring of some of these scenes, presented with the heartless glee of an EC horror comic. I certainly can't claim that none of them made me chuckle. But the movie suffers from diminishing returns, and it weighs the silly premise down with too much literalism. It also cheats a little, killing off a character supposedly exempt from the curse, and then lamely explaining it away. 

I suppose I can also admit that there was an irritating element of hardship duty for me in the tower scenes here; I'm not great with heights. A few years ago I visited the Space Needle and, while my daughter cavorted happily on the glass floors, I could just barely stick a toe out over that dizzying drop. Having my phobias justified by this movie was not especially gratifying.

One actor makes a vivid impression: Tony Todd, a recurring presence in the franchise, shows up to provide some exposition toward the end, and gets to deliver a lovely little encomium to the preciousness of life as his exit speech. Partly because the actor, who looks thin and gaunt, passed on last November, it gives the movie a more touching moment than it probably deserves. Bloodlines isn't without entertainment value, but I hope that this truly is the final destination for this quarter-century-spanning series. Joke's over.

NOIR IN THE WORLD I'D RATHER BE

Now a quarter-century old, the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs remains my favorite film festival in the country.

Held at the Camelot Theatre on Baristo, it specializes in crime movies, mostly from the '40s and '50s, mostly in black and white. Some of them are classics, familiar from Turner Classic Movies or other channels. But I go to see the obscurities, the oddball, forgotten quickies that rarely turn up on TV even in wee hours.

Here are three I caught this year:

Swell Guy (1946)-- The title role, ironically meant, is a celebrated war correspondent who returns to his wholesome small town. His family and the other townies welcome him as a hero; only his Mom (Mary Nash) drops her smile, and drops stitches from her knitting, when no one is looking, because she knows her son is a thieving, amoral creep. Sonny Tufts plays the great man; his name has long been almost a byword for bad actor, but he carries the movie pretty capably as the hale-fellow-ill-met, and he leads a cast that includes Ann Blyth, nearly as unlikable as she is Mildred Pierce, Ruth Warrick, William Gargan, Thomas Gomez and Millard Mitchell, along with Frank Ferguson and Charles Lane among the uncredited bit players. Directed by Frank Tuttle from a clumsy but sassy script by Richard Brooks (based on a play by Gilbert Emery), this uneven but fascinating yarn was presented in a sparkling new 35mm print; we were told that this showing was its debut before an audience.

Lust for Gold (1949)--This gripping, grimly funny western/noir hybrid is set and was partially shot in the Superstition Mountains here in the Phoenix area. It's about the fabled Lost Dutchman Mine, and stars Glenn Ford as Jacob Walz, the "Dutchman" (actually German) who claimed to have discovered gold in the Superstitions but took the location with him to his grave. The movie presents Walz as a slack-faced, dead-eyed rat-bastard, treacherous and murderous and spiteful but also stupid and gullible. He makes the title character in Swell Guy seem like a genuinely swell guy. Ford's not a favorite of mine, but he's excellent here; like a lot of bland nice-guy actors (Fred MacMurray is another good example) the chance to play a louse brings him to life. The presenter warned us that the movie had not one sympathetic character, and right he was; Ford is way outmatched in cool Machiavellian villainy by his leading lady, the exquisite Ida Lupino. The film is oddly structured, with the period western part set within a modern-day frame story of nearly equal screen time featuring William Prince, Paul Ford and Will Geer. The old west story is resolved by a dues ex machina; the modern story is resolved by a serpens ex machina. The cast includes Gig Young as Lupino's weakling hubby, Edgar Buchanan as Ford's partner, and, among the uncredited players, the likes of Arthur Hunnicutt, Will Wright, Hayden Rorke, Percy Helton and Jay Silverheels, among others. Hard to go wrong.

The film's version of the Lost Dutchman story is probably pure fiction, but that's fair enough, as none of the other versions are any more reliable. Nonetheless, the film opens with the following gobbledegook Certificate of Authenticity from Dan E. Garvey, then the Governor of Arizona, on AZ Governor's Office letterhead no less:

"The picture which you are about to see represents, to the best of our knowledge, the true facts concerning this unusual situation, as substantiated by historical records and legends of the State of Arizona."

Nice to know that it isn't only in today's political climate that legends could be used to substantiate facts.

Unmasked (1950)--This brief programmer from  Republic stars a fleshy, pre-Perry Mason Raymond Burr, indolently slimy as the editor of scandal sheet called The Periscope. He impulsively murders his mistress, then frames her husband (Paul Harvey) for it. This was the least of the three movies I made it to, but Burr puts on a good show, as does Harvey, as does Norman Budd as Burr's squirrely sidekick. And near the end, there's a wild fistfight, just to remind us it's a Republic picture.

Lots of fun, but alas, the relentless march of time is not treating this festival kindly. I've been going, not every May but most, since 2007, and for the first few years many of the screenings were attended by actors from the films; over time I got to see June Lockhart, Marsha Hunt, Ann Rutherford, Richard Anderson (not wearing socks!), Norman Lloyd, Robert Loggia and Ernest Borgnine, among others, including grown-up child actors like Billy Gray and Gordon Gebert.

Now that even these kids are getting a bit long in the tooth, the festival has had to resort to offspring. This year's guests included Errol Flynn's daughter and Joel McCrea's grandson.

FEASTIVAL

As in most Mays since 2007, Your Humble Narrator spent this past weekend in Palm Springs, at the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival...

...now in its 25th year; its late founder and namesake, mystery novelist and Palm Springs City Councilman Lyons, was still presenting when I first went there. Like every year, I got to see a couple of obscure gems at the Camelot Theatre this weekend.

More about these movies later, but first: food! Here is some of the yummy stuff we enjoyed. First, mushroom barley soup at Sherman's Deli...

Then sand dabs in lemon sauce with fettuccine at Sammy G's...

Then Rigatoni Capri at Kalura Trattoria...

Then back to Sherman's for knockwurst and eggs...

Plus cookies from Sherman's, and a date shake, as is traditional in that town. For the sake of both our health and our finances, it's probably just as well that we don't have access to these places year-round.

On a column near Sammy G's, we saw this beautiful local...

Some variety of spiny lizard, I think. My miserable photographic skills do him no justice. He looked pretty worn and battle-scarred, and his tail appeared to be stumped; it clearly wasn't his first rodeo.

SURF WAR

 Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of The Surfer...

...and Thunderbolts*.

The asterisk, I'm assured, is an essential part of the title.