THE FAMOUS MR. EDDINGTON

Opening today in theaters:

Eddington--Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross in this one. He's the county sheriff of the titular New Mexico town into which writer-director Ari Aster tries to stuff all the nightmarish national rage and misery of early 2020. It's all there, or a lot of it, anyway--disbelief in COVID, anti-mask anger, George Floyd protests and calls to defund the police, social distancing, rampaging social media, talk radio conspiracy rants, a quasi-religious cult figure, even a Kyle Rittenhouse type.

Joe lives in a rural house with his distant, psychologically fragile wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her mother Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), a 24/7 wingnut conspiracy receiver. He, too, is indignantly resentful of the mask requirement and refuses to wear one, even on the job. A wrangle over the policy in a supermarket leads Joe to impulsively announce his candidacy for mayor.

The incumbent, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), is Joe's rival in town politics, and also personally; he has a history with Louise. Ted is pushing for some sort of new high tech company to locate in Eddington, despite environmental and logistical concerns.

With the exception of his deputy Michael (Micheal Ward) and a tribal cop (William Belleau) from across the county line, Joe is, initially, the most likable of the major characters. But this isn't a high bar. Eddington isn't like Mayberry or Star's Hollow, one of those fictional small towns you might find yourself wishing you could move to. It's full of shifty characters, idiots and creeps. Ted and his allies seem like phonies and business shills. The kids who organize the protests are preposterously self-flagellating. The cult weirdo (Austin Butler) worming his way into Joe's family is repulsive.

By comparison, Joe Cross seems like a decent sort, obtuse and not especially bright but well-intentioned. Phoenix gives him a plaintive, singsong voice and sad eyes, and Aster makes you feel how overwhelmed he is, both by the baffling times he's in and by his own spiritual desperation over the collapse of his libertarian illusions. It may be Phoenix's best performance. 

As the story progresses, however, Joe descends, by disturbingly believable steps, from misguided and angry to monstrous. Aster, who specializes in grueling horror films like Midsommar and Heredity, spares his protagonist here nothing in terms of defeat and humiliation, yet not in a way that allows us the pleasure of schadenfreude. This long film climaxes with a wild, extended, very bloody shootout in the streets of Eddington, as Joe Cross is stalked by a mysterious killer in black. Mysterious to me, at least--is this gunman, who we see arrive by private jet, meant to be an "ANTIFA" operative? An agent-provocateur? A corporate asset? Does Aster intend him realistically? Satirically?

I'm not sure, and in any case, I'm also not sure this frenzied gunfight doesn't drive this amazing movie off the rails a little in its homestretch. Eddington is unforgettable, but it's all too easy for me to imagine viewers who might share Joe's values seeing this persecution of him as a vindication of his despicable actions. Joe Cross is pitiable, but he's no hero.

THE MOLE SHEBANG

Available to stream:

Superman and the Mole Men--The new Superman flick is "too woke," or so I'm hearing, in the opinion of Fox News and other commentators, mostly because of writer-director James Gunn pointing out in an interview that the Man of Steel is an immigrant. Fox host Tomi Lahren pronounced, without seeing the film, that it "went woke and will probably flop!"

She also sneered that "in his comments Gunn conveniently forgot to delineate between IMMIGRANTS and ILLEGALS, but that's par for the course..." [caps her's] This would be a more withering criticism if Lahren hadn't "conveniently forgot" that, um, Clark Kent aka Superman certainly is an illegal, undocumented alien, by any standard.

Other voices from around the MAGA-verse have similarly squawked, I understand. Why am I taking note of these dimwits rising to Gunn's well-dangled bait? Because I shudder to think what howling accusations of wokeness they would direct at the very first Superman feature film, 1951's Superman and the Mole Men. This very low-budget, 58-minute saga, produced for Lippert Pictures, was intended essentially as a pilot for the long-running syndicated TV series The Adventures of Superman (1952-1958) starring George Reeves. In terms of liberal social and civic values, this movie is woke like a grad student on Red Bull.

The story here unfolds not in Metropolis but in the small town of Silsby, "home of  the world's deepest oil well." Indeed, they've drilled so deep in Silsby that they've encroached upon the underground civilization of the Mole Men. These dome-headed, furry little goobers, who have come to the surface to explore, make whatever they touch glow with phosphoresence (they're played, by the way, by little people including Munchkin veterans Jerry Maren, Billy Curtis and John T. Bambury, and "Philip Morris Bellboy" Johnny Roventini).

Clark Kent (George Reeves) and Lois Lane (Phyllis Coates) arrive in town to do a story for the Daily Planet about the well, only to find the company shutting it down, fearing radioactivity. As word spreads about the Mole Men, the townies quickly start to organize into a mob. Before long, it's clearly a job for Superman. 

While movies don't come much more cinematically bare-bones than Superman and the Mole Men, it's heart-lifting to watch in the context of our current times, because it's clear-eyed about where the real threat in our society lies, when it it comes to aliens and other outsiders: with ourselves. Clark/Superman is sympathetic to the Mole People, and the villains in the story are the reckless, bloodthirsty, xenophobic townspeople, led by a gun-wielding bigmouth played by the great Jeff Corey. It's very easy to picture this guy in a red cap.

The conflict that this movie depicts, however crudely, between seething, reflexive hatred and fear of strangers and openminded welcome of them to our immigrant-made republic seems every bit as ingrained now as it was then, and of course that's depressing. What's cheering, however, is that Superman, at least this vintage of him, has been on the right side of this divide from the start: the side of Truth, Justice and the very best version of The American Way.

SUPER MAX DEAL

Opening in theaters today...

Superman--It's excellent, so a certain poet has told us, to have a giant's strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant. Before James Gunn's Superman has started, the title character (David Corenswet) has pre-emptively interceded to stop the invasion of one country by another, without causalities and in near-certainty that in so doing he has prevented murder and oppression. It's obvious to him that he's done the right thing, but even so, his action strikes some as overbearing, and public opinion of the Man of Steel shifts.

This is all connected, it turns out, to the scheming of Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) to neutralize Superman and consolidate sanctioned power. Superman ends up imprisoned and subjected to torture by kryptonite in an interdimensional "pocket universe" run by Lex. Clark Kent's girlfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and her colleagues at the Daily Planet are on the case, as, with varying degrees of urgency, are Superman's pals in "The Justice Gang."

Best of all, he's got a dog on his side. Krypto, introduced in the comics in 1955, finally gets a proper live action screen treatment here, in a vivid CGI rendering. As in the comics, Gunn depicts the superdog as a sweet-natured and well-intentioned but not always well-behaved creature; he could use a PetSmart obedience class. But he's still a good boy.

Gunn's achievement with this new movie is considerable. The writer-director has managed to make a version that feels original and imaginative, but also authentic; it truly looks and feels like Superman, as much as the George Reeves or Christopher Reeve or Kirk Alyn films or any earlier versions. It's not a perfect movie by a long shot, but it's bold and fun and cheerfully messy; its virtues far outweigh its faults.

Gunn also explores some stimulating ideas here, as if in response to anyone who might wonder if this superficially naive American myth has anything left to teach us. Among these themes is the question--always relevant to interventionist-minded America--of whether omnipotence, even if it was possible and even if it was linked to genuinely good intentions, would inevitably lead to correct action.

It's hard, as it is so often with comic-book and fantasy films these days, not to read contemporary allegorical significance into them. In his spite and resentful envy, Lex seems a lot like our current president; on the other hand, in his calculated efforts to take over our military-industrial power structure, he also seems quite a lot like our current president's biggest donor. As played by Hoult, however, he's more appealing than either of them.

Hoult's performance is one of many in what feels like a truly ensemble cast. Corenswet is one of the few actors to play this role who are at least as charming as Superman as he is in Clark Kent drag. Gunn's attempt to give an explanation as to why nobody sees through Superman's transparent disguise is unnecessary, however; it's just an accepted convention, like a Shakespearean heroine undetectably disguising herself as a boy.

Brosnahan may be the sexiest of all Lois Lanes, or at least since Phyllis Coates back in the first season of the TV show, and she's plucky and loyal and lovable too. Skyler Gisondo makes a fine, competent Jimmy Olsen, Wendell Pierce gets little screen time as Perry White but feels right, and Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Hall are touchingly more rustic than usual as Clark's Smallville parents. On the superhero side, Edi Gathegi is a hoot as a dour, taciturn Mister Terrific; so is Nathan Fillion as a dyspeptic, self-impressed Green Lantern (of the Guy Gardner vintage).

This Superman is overambitious, and more than a little uneven. What I liked least about it was the pocket universe. It gets the movie in over its head, front-loading Lex with too much power. If he can puncture and fracture space and time like this, why should he worry about getting the government's permission for anything?

My distaste for this device goes beyond this point of plausibility, though. If anyone's asking (no one seems to be) I would invite superhero flicks to take a nice long break from dimensional portals, and time/space rifts and alternate universes (except with Dr. Strange, of course; that's his shtick). Also, from crumbling buildings. Enough with the crumbling buildings. It's time to shake off that post-9/11 mentality.

What I liked best about the movie, however, is what it isn't: It isn't "dark." It isn't brooding, or gritty, or cynical. The title character isn't, in the usual sense, cool; Superman uses words like "golly" and "gosh" and Gunn doesn't seem to mean it as camp, or to be more than gently mocking his hero. Even Lois rolls her eyes at Clark's guilelessness here, but he's unperturbed, and so was I, as a viewer. It's taken this genre a long time to work its way around to the idea that being an unabashed, unapologetic good guy is truly punk rock. But it's been worth the trip.

Sorry, Baby--Agnes, a young professor, lives alone in a farmhouse in the Massachusetts woods. It could be the setting for an old-school scary movie, but this film is about a more appallingly common sort of horror.

As the movie starts, Agnes (Eva Victor) is welcoming her best friend and former roomie Lydie (Naomie Ackie) for a visit. The two share a blankie on the couch and catch up on their lives, talking with hilarity about the follies of sex. They're having fun, but it's clear that something heavy from the past hangs in the air. Gradually, in chapters that flash back and forward, we learn what it is: Agnes is a survivor of sexual assault.

Written and directed by star Victor, Sorry, Baby is a spectacular debut, restrained and economical yet emotionally intense, poignant yet frequently funny, unpredictable yet believable from beginning to end. Again and again, Victor catches us off guard, using suggestion and distance to get across an outrage, or undercutting misery with quiet but insistent comedy, or with the unexpected restorative grace of a "really good sandwich."

Agnes is a tour de force role, and Victor is devastatingly good, one minute displaying crisp comic timing, another the depths of psychological distress. The supporting cast is mostly for support, but Ackie is a pleasure as usual. Lucas Hedges is serviceable as the neighbor guy that helps Agnes start rebuilding trust, and John Carroll Lynch, reliable as ever, has an excellent scene as the stranger with the sandwich. As a rabidly competitive professional rival to Agnes, Kelly McCormack may seem a little caricatured, but probably less so if you've spent much time around academics.

Victor seems determined not to let the movie be oppressive; to give full measure to the crime that it's depicting but also to the beauty and joy that Agnes takes in life in spite of her trauma and loss. We see her teaching a lit class, and get a hint of her love of and skill at what she does. We see her find a kitten in the street, and how this relationship jolts her soul awake. Somehow all this makes the crime against her more infuriating, not less.

The sequence at the end that explains the title suggests that Agnes may find the hovering, solicitous worry of her friends almost as much of a burden as what's she's suffered. No doubt that's a common feeling for survivors, but I couldn't help it; the movie made me feel the same way her friends do.

Somewhere, perhaps, some other critic may be writing a dissent, feeling a more graphic, less tacit dramatization of sexual abuse is called for. Maybe they're right. But it's hard for me to imagine a movie that generated more understanding of the impact of sexual abuse on a victim. It's one of the best films of the year.

DINO DIRECTION HOME

Now in theaters:

Jurassic World: Rebirth--Dinosaurs, it turns out, are soooo '90s these days. Having been revived by cloning in 1993's Jurassic Park and eventually loosed on the modern world throughout the sequels, they have become public hazards and nuisances. Worse yet--by Hollywood standards--they've lost their commercial appeal; they've become so commonplace that people are bored with them, and museums are packing up their skeletons.

In this latest, a pharmaceutical company nonetheless sees potential in the beasts to create a medicine that will end heart disease. An exec (Rupert Friend), who is far too handsome not to be rotten, hires a team of soldiers of fortune led by Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali, along with a mild-mannered paleontologist (Jonathan Bailey), to travel to an equatorial area where the creatures still thrive. The mission is to collect blood samples from three of the most massive prehistoric reptiles. First up is the marine Mosasaur, then, on a island, the towering sauropod Titanosaurus, and finally the airplane-sized pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus.

This allows for three big showcase scenes, with many side action sequences. A family unwisely cruising through the area on a yacht--Dad, two daughters, and elder daughter's irritating boyfriend--ends up joining the expedition as well. Maybe the best episode in the movie involves this lot encountering a T-Rex who, having just woken up from a rather luxurious nappy-time alongside a river, chases them down the rapids, grabbing at them as if bobbing for apples.

As usual when reviewing a movie in the Jurassic franchise, or indeed any movie with significant dinosaur content, I feel the need to add a disclaimer: I'm a lifelong sucker for dinosaurs. Any movie with prehistoric creatures in it starts at an advantage with me, just as any movie about, say, auto racing starts at a disadvantage with me.

As objectively as possible, though, I can say that the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies consistently offer good summer blockbuster value, with high-end actors and high-end production values--underwritten, no doubt, with lots and lots of blatant product placement--and dialogue that isn't too much of an embarrassment. Most importantly, they get the dinosaurs right, with seamless special effects and imaginative, sometimes crazy set piece sequences.

Directed by Gareth Edwards from a script credited to David Koepp, who has done tidier work, Rebirth may be the corniest of the series to date, and the least plausible-seeming. The finale, which involves a gargantuan mutant horror and other hideous dino-hybrids, feels like something from another movie, and it's slightly off-key. But overall, the movie is still a hearty and entertaining helping of paleo-action.

Be warned, though: your hackles may raise a bit when the younger daughter befriends a cute little baby dinosaur; the series, you realize, has finally knuckled under and had its Ewok moment. But it isn't really much of a drag on the film, any more than the clockwork owl was on the original Clash of the Titans. It has the feel, rightly or not, of a marketable element imposed on the movie from above. The filmmakers seem to spend as little screen time as they can get away with on the creature, and it's easy to ignore. Besides, the kid names the baby "Delores," which somehow is, if nothing else, a really good name for a dinosaur.

PITT STOP

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

F1--This Formula One racing drama stars Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes. Sonny is a former Formula One driver with a troubled past and a gambling problem, now living out of his van and racing in the 24 Hours of Daytona and other events. Javier Bardem plays Sonny's old rival/pal Ruben Cervantes, who shows up with a Quixotic offer: a spot as a driver in his F1 team, in support of his hotshot young driver Joshua Pearce, played by Damson Idris.

The great Kerry Condon plays Kate,  the team's technical director, a spirited Irishwoman who's massively unimpressed with Sonny's drawly charm. She and the young hotshot and Sonny clash across the circuit, leaving lots of debris on racetracks around the world.

It's only fair to admit, up front, that racing movies leave me cold. The serious, dramatic ones, like Grand Prix, usually feel overlong and pretentious and humorless; the comic ones, like Speedway with Elvis Presley or Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby with Will Farrell, are better, but tend to inanity.

I realize, of course, that this is all a matter of personal hardwiring; show me a baseball movie, where the stakes are exactly as meaningless, and I'll be on the edge of my seat. Show me a racing movie, and I'm bored and cranky. F1 continues the streak, I'm afraid. More than two and half hours is too long to watch people going in circles.

That said, on its own terms, it's an excellently made picture. I tend to appreciate the director, Joseph Kosinki, because he has an old-school, '80s movie approach, serving up a full credit sequence and pulsing music by Hans Zimmer and rapid-cut montages.

Kosinki is a fine hand at this sort of big-canvas action stuff, having previously helmed Only the Brave and Top Gun: Maverick. His touch is crackling and kinetic, he has an eye for corporate swank, and he's superbly abetted here by the dazzlingly deft editing of Stephen Mirrione, who ought to get an Oscar nomination. The movie is propulsive; for all my eye-rolling distaste, F1 never bored me, at least not when the cars were moving. And that's a lot of the movie.

On the other hand, for all the deft skill and lucid precision of the many racing scenes, the movie doesn't add up dramatically. After the screening I saw, someone told me that they liked how the film showed the degree to which Formula One is a team sport. So it does, but when Sonny acts like a maverick and refuses to follow orders and antagonizes his teammate and ignores his team's strategies, I couldn't tell if the filmmakers wanted me to see him a jerk in need of redemption or a clear-eyed individualist hero cutting through the nonsense.

Pitt has the movie star gift: he's amiable almost, it seems, whether he wants to be or not. F1 takes, you should pardon the expression, a free ride on this, since based on his behavior and not on Pitt's charm, Sonny seems, overall, like a selfish, tactless douchebag. The film's prologue ends with Sonny being asked an existential question; at the end of the film he's asked the same question. He doesn't answer it either time. Neither does the film.

Opening at Harkins Shea:

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore--From her movie debut, in 1986's Children of a Lesser God, Marlee Matlin has been a vibrant presence in movies and TV; captivating, funny, sexy, with a streak of righteous anger balanced by a playful touch of mischief. I'm a fan. But after watching this feature-length American Masters documentary, I realized how little I really knew about her, and how important her story is.

Directed by the actress Shoshannah Stern, it chronicles Matlin's childhood with her loving but unprepared, guilt-ridden parents--she was stricken with deafness at 18 months, after an illness. We get her rebellious, drug-fueled teen years, her abusive relationship with Lesser God leading man William Hurt, her nurturing friendship with Henry Winkler, her prolific movie and TV career, and her sometimes fraught relationship with the deaf community. We learn that she had to pay for her own interpreter when she checked herself into Betty Ford.

I didn't realize the fierceness of Matlin's advocacy; the movie makes the case, for instance, that she's a major reason that closed captioning became standard on TV and videos. Reclined on a couch opposite Stern, who is interviewing, Matlin gives an unassuming account that gets across some sense of the difficulty deaf people have in navigating life, and in accessing information and support, even at this comparatively glamorous level.

A VIEW FROM THE RIDGE

Any play that begins with a figure in black brandishing an inflatable pterodactyl on a stick deserves some credit. A Klingon Hamlet, a Ronin Theatre Company production playing for just one more weekend at Stage Left in Glendale, has many such flourishes of very low-tech theatricality.

As the title indicates, it's a version of Shakespeare's Hamlet performed in Klingon drag. The actors are costumed, and made-up with the ridge-browed foreheads, of Klingons, the warlike aliens from the Star  Trek franchise.

The adaptation, by Keath Hall--who also directed, and plays the title role--and E.C. Darling-Bond (who plays Horatio), boils the play down to its bare essentials and substitutes many words and phrases for Klingon references. The duel is fought with Klingon weapons, for instance, and Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent to Earth rather than to England.

Familiarity with the Klingon language, invented by the linguist Marc Okrand for the Star Trek movies, is not needed to watch the show, however. At the beginning the handy "universal translator" is engaged so that we hear the actors in English, except for the play-within-the-play, which is indeed in Klingon, with a projected translation. Hall and Darling-Bond wisely see to it that the whole thing clocks in at under two hours; they don't let the gag wear out its welcome.

They also don't try--again, probably wisely--for any deeply tragic tone. The flavor is droll and facetious, right down to Hamlet singing snatches of contemporary pop songs, or putting on an "antic disposition" by donning a red clown nose, and wearing it for a fair amount of his stage time.

The skill of the actors varies widely, but everyone is game and committed. At ten, however, the cast is too small; the doubling gets pretty awkward at times. The show could have used at least one more actor, possibly two. Maybe there just weren't enough ridge brows for any more.

C.D. Macauley delivers some true Shakespearean music as The Ghost, The Player King and The Gravedigger; he nicely sings Spock's ballad from the original series episode "Plato's Stepchildren" in the latter role. Kate Haas generates some honest emotion in Ophelia's mad scene. Wes Martin's Claudius is commanding and despicably genial.

The star, however, is Hall. His antic approach to the title role works well with his persona, which comes across like a contemporary comic leading man in the movies, a Vince Vaughn or a Jason Bateman. More than many other Shakespearean plays, the success of Hamlet depends on the likability of the lead, our ability to identify with him, root for him, enjoy his company. Even if it had nothing else going for it, and it does, on that score alone A Klingon Hamlet succeeds.

ZOMBIES AND ALIENS AND DETECTIVES; OH MY!

Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of 28 Years Later...

...and Elio, opening in theaters this weekend...

...as well as my review of Arizona Theatre Company's Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson--Apt. 2B...

...playing through June 29 at Tempe Center for the Arts.