SHOW BUZZ

This year Santa—through the agency of The Wife—brought me The Fly Collection, a DVD boxed set of The Fly (1958) & its sequels Return of the Fly (1959) & Curse of the Fly (1965) plus abundant bonus goodies. I was most excited to get this, especially when it occurred to me that I’d never actually seen the original Fly, even though I’d read & heard about & seen clips & stills from it to the point where it almost seemed like I had.

Now I have. Good flick! So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week our honoree is the hapless title character of this classic, a Montreal scientist experimenting with teleportation who transmits himself across his laboratory, not knowing that there’s a fly along for the ride. En route, man & insect swap their heads, plus a forelimb:

Al Hedison (later redubbed David Hedison) plays the poor fellow, & Patricia Owens his devoted wife, who starts chasing flies around the house & garden, trying to retrieve the one carrying a diminutive version of her husband’s melon. Vincent Price plays our hero’s brother, who witnesses something unpleasant in a spider web in the famous finale.

This really is a pretty effective picture, shot in lush color & played with an entirely straight face—a bit of an acting challenge, Vincent Price later claimed. The script, based on George Langelaan’s 1957 Playboy short story, was by James Clavell, & while most of his dialogue is reasonably literate, there are passages of hilarity. My favorite comes after the scientist has disintegrated his pet cat, who has failed to re-integrate. Asked where the cat went, he replies: “Into space…a stream of cat atoms. It would be funny, if life weren’t so sacred.”

WINNER WONDERLAND

The Phoenix Film Critics Society has announced the winners of our 11th annual awards:


Best Picture

The King's Speech

Top Ten Films

127 Hours

Inception

Never Let Me Go

Shutter Island

The Kids Are All Right

The King's Speech

The Social Network

True Grit

Toy Story 3

Winter's Bone

Best Director

Christopher Nolan, Inception

Best Actor in a Leading Role

Colin Firth, The King's Speech

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Christian Bale, The Fighter

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Melissa Leo, The Fighter

Best Ensemble Acting

The Social Network

Best Screenplay - Original

Inception

Best Screenplay – Adaptation

The Social Network

Best Live Action Family Film

Alice in Wonderland

The Overlooked Film of the Year

Never Let Me Go

Best Animated Film

Toy Story 3

Best Foreign Language Film

Biutiful

Best Documentary Film

Restrepo

Best Original Song

Burlesque, "You Haven't See the Last of Me"

Best Original Score

Inception

Best Cinematography

True Grit

Best Film Editing

Inception

Best Production Design

Inception

Best Costume Design

Alice in Wonderland

Best Visual Effects

Inception

Best Stunts

Inception

Breakthrough Performance on Camera

Chloe Moretz, Kick-Ass

Breakthrough Performance behind the Camera

Debra Granik, Winter's Bone

Best Performance by a Youth in a Lead or Supporting Role – Male

Kodi Smit-McPhee, Let Me In

Best Performance by a Youth in a Lead or Supporting Role – Female

Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

RAD SKELTON

Hope everybody had at least as good a Christmas as the Arizona Cardinals!

After a promising showing two Sundays ago, newbie quarterback John Skelton...

...had a lousy game last weekend, then managed a win over the Cowboys yesterday. But far cooler than any of this, for me, is the fact that young Skelton shares his name with 16th-Century English poet John Skelton...

...who wrote wonderful, hip-hop-like run-on rhymes like this one, about a skull that somebody had given him as a gift:

Skelton Laureate, upon a dead man's head that was sent to him from an honorable gentlewoman for a token, devised this ghostly [spiritual] meditation in English, covenable [sacred] in sentence, commendable, lamentable, lacrimable, profitable for the soul.

YOUR ugly token
My mind hath broken
From worldly lust,
For I have discuss'd
We are but dust
And die we must.
It is general
To be mortal:
I have well espi'd
No man may him hide
From Death hollow-eyed
With sinews widered*, [withered]
With bones shidered*, [shattered]
With his worm-eaten maw,
And his ghastly jaw
Gaping aside,
Naked of hide,
Neither flesh nor fell.
Thou by my counsel
Look that ye spell
Well this gospel,
For whereso we dwell
Death will us quell
And with us mell*. [intermingle]
For all our pamper'd paunchis* [pauches]
There may no fraunchis* [franchise]
Nor worldly bliss
Redeem us from this:
Our days be dated
To be checkmated
With draughts of Death,
Stopping our breath;
Our eyen sinking,
Our bodies stinking,
Our gums grinning,
Our souls brinning*. [burning]
To whom, then, shall we sue
For to have rescue
But to sweet Jesu
On us then for to rue?
O goodly Child
Of Mary mild,
Then be our shild*, [shield]
That we be not exil'd
To the dyne dale* [dark valley]
Of bottomless bale*, [sorrow]
Nor to the lake
Of fiends black.
But grant us grace
To see Thy face,
And to purchase
Thine heavenly place,
And thy palace
Full of solace
Above the sky
That is so high,
Eternally
To behold and see
The Trinity.
Mirres vous y

A VERY STING-Y CHRISTMAS

Merry Christmas!

Here's a beauty from Sting.

STOCKING STUFFERS

George Bailey chucking a snowball at Mr. Potter's office. Kris Kringle holding court at Macy's. Der Bingle and Danny Kaye lip-syncing "Sisters." The Grinch and Max dangling off Mt. Krumpet. Rudolph and friends among the Misfit Toys. Charlie Brown and his little charity-case tree. Poor Flick's tongue, frozen to the flagpole.

For many Americans--those of us who've grown up since the advent of TV--these moments are more a part of the holiday season than spiced hot cider or caroling. But familiarity can breed boredom. No one disputes that these are classic movies and shows, but what if you want something heartwarming and festive that you haven't seen a hundred times, or that you haven't seen in many years?

Here are some road-less-taken holiday videos -- the underappreciated, the too-often-forgotten, the just plain odd:

The Muppet Christmas Carol: Relative to its quality, this may be the most underappreciated Christmas movie in many years. Combining the sweet melodies and lyrics of Paul Williams, the bottomless invention of the Muppets and the brilliantly non-campy performance of Michael Caine as Scrooge, it's a genuinely funny, genuinely touching original. While we're on the subject of the Muppets: a friend of mine makes an annual ritual of the neglected Emmett Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, a delightful down-home Muppet musical from 1977.

Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol: How many years since you've seen this gentle, eccentric take on the tale? Even if it's been decades, you may find that the catchy tunes, by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill (the team that brought us "Funny Girl"!), come back to you—I was able to sing right along with "We're Despicable." My mother-in-law loved this show, especially the young Scrooge’s poignant song “I’m All Alone in the World.”

The Life & Adventures of Santa Claus: This stop-motion animated special from 1985 is an adaptation of a book by L. Frank Baum. It's like a Christmas show for Wiccans, or maybe Wagnerians: A group of forest Immortals meet to decide whether Santa should be admitted to the club. It's available on DVD, paired with 1977's Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey. (Careful with that one—tear-jerker alert!).

The Gathering: It's not for kids, but this 1977 TV movie, with Ed Asner as a husband and father trying to reconnect with his family on what he knows will be his last earthly Christmas, has a lovely wistful atmosphere and fine, understated acting. Long unavailable on DVD, it came out in 2006, with its sequel The Gathering Part II thrown in.

Saturday Night Live – Christmas: Don't overlook this inexpensive 90-minute compendium of holiday sketches from SNL. You may be surprised at how many of them qualify as classic--Adam Sandler's "Hanukkah Song," Jon Lovitz saving Christmas as Hanukkah Harry, Alec Baldwin's notorious visit to "Delicious Dish." The DVD dates from 2003, however; it may be time for a second volume.

BLUE CHRISTMAS

Merry Christmas Eve eve everybody!

In observance of the occasion...

Monster-of-the-week: …today let’s honor the redoubtable Cookie Monster, seen here singing “Silver Bells” with Jeff Bridges on last weekend’s Saturday Night Live.

GRITTY REALISM

The first film version of True Grit, directed by Henry Hathaway in 1969, is one of those movies beloved of squares & hipsters alike. Even more than Stagecoach or The Searchers or The Quiet Man or Rio Bravo, it’s probably the movie with which John Wayne is most associated—if somebody tells you to picture John Wayne, there’s a good chance you’ll conjure him up in middle age, wearing the eye-patch of “Rooster” Cogburn, perhaps riding with the reins in his mouth & guns blazing in both hands.

Thus the decision by the Coen Brothers to make a new version of True Grit, one closer in plot, language & tone to the 1968 novel by Charles Portis, ran the risk of comparison to a film toward which many people feel protective. But while their version need not (& likely won’t) replace the Wayne version in anyone’s affections, it’s still a fascinating & grimly funny picture.

The story is roughly the same, though harsher. In Arkansas in the late 19th-Century, a precociously strong-willed & articulate 14-year-old named Mattie Ross engages Cogburn, a drunken, shoot-first Federal Marshal, to hunt down the man who killed her father. The two of them, in company with a Texas Ranger, track the man, now riding with a dangerous gang, into the Oklahoma Territory, where they face various perils, & gradually bond.

But the flavor of the Coen’s film, shot in chilly shades by Roger Deakins, & with a fine score by Carter Burwell (using “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” as his main theme), is entirely different. In part, this has to do with their use of the language—that same ornate, curlicued, contraction-free dialogue that makes their contemporary-setting films seem stylized makes their True Grit feel pretty authentic to its period & place.

The film’s originality, however, has even more to do with the performance of Jeff Bridges. Wayne’s great strength as an actor, especially late in his career, was his larger-than-life warmth, & he was at his most ebullient as Cogburn. Bridges makes the Marshal a crusty, muttering old ruin, not without laconic wit, not even without moments of dignity & sympathy, but still a killer, & not lovable in the usual sense.

It’s a fine performance, but it’s not the only fine performance. The Coens keep their directorial touch more austere & restrained than usual here. Not everything in the movie works; the midsection sort of sags, & a shooting contest between Cogburn & the Texas Ranger isn’t as amusing as it’s meant to be. But the Coens focus on the performances, & the movie offers, pound for pound, maybe the highest concentration of enjoyable acting I’ve seen all year—by Matt Damon as the uppity Texas Ranger, who speaks in the same lofty manner as Mattie, by Josh Brolin as the whiny, self-pitying killer, by Dakin Matthews as the waspish, aggrieved horse merchant, & especially by Barry Pepper, who, as the gang leader, looks like he stepped out of an old photograph.

Still, the real story, perhaps, is Hailee Steinfeld, who gives an almost unearthly poise to the role of Mattie. As with Bridges, she brings a subtly different tone to the role than Kim Darby, who was quite wonderful in the Wayne version. Steinfeld’s line readings carry a touch of avidity, a sense that even though her anger about her father’s murder is very real, there’s also a bit of adventuresome enthusiasm in her attitude toward the project, a sense of chivalric play.

This makes the Coen’s True Grit, for all its jocularity & macabre comedy, tragic in a way that Hathaway’s version was not (& didn’t want to be), & more truly a coming of age story—Mattie learns that, however righteous her cause, what she’s doing is no game. Unrelated parties suffer & die so she can have her revenge.

CHRISTMAS, DAY

Here’s the weirdest Christmas video The Wife & I have encountered in a while…

It’s three holiday episodes of Doris’s corny, format-shifting ‘70s-era sitcom. Strictly as comedy, the show hasn’t aged at all well, but Day’s natural, sexy warmth still comes across, there’s a kitschy nostalgia to the mod fashions and décor, & there’s a gallery of great character actors like McLean Stevenson, Rose Marie, Kaye Ballard, Jackie Joseph, John Dehner, Bernie Kopell & Denver Pyle. The freak-out, however, is the third episode, an actual, no-kidding murder mystery, in which Doris must figure out who framed a local Santa Claus for shooting an old man! The half-hour includes a remote-control flying saucer, & Charles Nelson Reilly as the guest star. It’s like some fruitcake-and-eggnog-spawned pop-culture fever dream.

RIP to the hilarious Steve Landesberg, the deadpan Det. Dietrich of Barney Miller, passed on at 65.

STUTTER ISLAND

Three opening here in the Valley this weekend:

Colin Firth is a master—at the moment, he’s the master—of raw emotion behind a dour, reserved exterior. As a gay college professor in the early ‘60s in last year’s A Single Man, he had a scene on the telephone, learning of his lover’s death but unable to express his full grief, that may be the greatest piece of sustained acting confined to one shot I’ve ever seen in a movie.

The King’s Speech offers him another superb chance to be miserable behind a stuffy façade. In this lavish historical drama, he plays Albert Frederick Arthur George, Duke of York, known to his family as Bertie & to history, very reluctantly, as King George VI of the U.K. High on the list of what made Bertie the Man Who Would Rather Not Be King was his severe stammer, which made public speaking—a frequent duty even as a junior prince—a terror for him. I’ve heard that many people rate the fear of giving a speech higher than the fear of death, & Firth makes Bertie look like he’d prefer death hands down.

But as royalty buffs & Anglophiles know, the abdication of Edward VIII, Bertie’s older brother, flipped the crown onto his head in 1936. Not long after, Hitler’s troops marched into Poland, & the new King found that his job description included the delivery not just of the occasional few words at a factory or public ceremony, but of eloquent, inspiring wartime oratory over the radio.

Through all of this, or so we’re told by this movie, the poor fellow was coached by a pioneering speech therapist named Lionel Logue, a self-taught Australian working & living with his wife & sons in shabby quarters on Harley Street. Logue, played here by Geoffrey Rush, had a familiar manner—it was part of his therapeutic method—& seemed stubbornly (though never discourteously) unimpressed by his patient’s rank, & this initially met cranky indignation from the Prince. But Logue’s methods got results, & eventually his kindness did too, & he & the shy, short-tempered royal gradually became friends.

Directed by Tom Hooper from a script by David Seidler (the ultimate source is a book by Logue’s grandson), The King’s Speech is a smooth, well-turned piece of high-end Masterpiece Theatre. The film offers a fair amount of pomp & pageantry, & a gallery of entertaining supporting performances, by, among others, Helena Bonham-Carter as the young Queen Mum, Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill, Guy Pearce as Edward, Eve Best as Wallis Simpson &, especially good, Michael Gambon as the cantankerous George V. The cinematography by Danny Cohen is rich, & there’s an almost distractingly beautiful score by Alexander Desplat.

Whether the ability of a monarch, by then an almost completely ceremonial figurehead, to deliver a speech well had any real importance in the grand scheme of 20th-Century history is debatable at best. The drama in The King’s Speech is more personal than political—for all its spectacle, it’s finally the story of a man struggling with an abusive childhood, & the wary bond he forms with the man who helps him. I would have liked the film to get a bit more specific on the pathology of stuttering, & of the nuts & bolts of Logue’s methods for curing it, but even without the details, the connection between the two leads makes the movie touching.

Rush, an actor not known for his underplaying, underplays Logue to great effect. He gives us a portrait of a pedant & frustrated Shakespearean who, though decent down to his bones, is also overconfident, slightly smug & by no means unambitious—dismissive as he is of titles, he isn’t above dropping hints about knighthood when his patient’s in a grateful mood. He doesn’t milk his sympathy for Bertie; when the King discloses some unhappy memory, you see it register in Logue’s eyes, but he knows very well that obvious pity will get him nowhere. It’s one of Rush’s best performances.

That said, The King’s Speech is finally Firth’s movie. There’s no whisper of the technical acting exercise to the performance—the rage & sadness & bewilderment that blaze in the King’s eyes & bubble up into his buzzing, gargling voice are so palpable that at times it feels almost improper to watch. Yet he has tender moments, too, as when he impersonates a penguin for his daughters. Firth makes his wounded George VI both a convincing psychological study & a fairy-tale king, under a terrible enchantment.

The true story of Micky Ward & his older half-brother Dicky Eklund forms the basis for The Fighter, an engrossing boxing melodrama. Dicky (Christian Bale), once the pride of Lowell, Massachusetts for going the distance in 1978 with Sugar Ray Leonard in one of the very few fights in which Leonard even briefly hit the floor, is now a pathetic crackhead.

Quiet, sweet-natured Micky (Mark Wahlberg) nonetheless keeps Dicky as his trainer, & their dominating mother Alice (Melissa Leo), who favors Dicky, as his manager, even though it means screwy, uneven match-ups in which Micky must allow himself to be pummeled so that his family can get a payday. The parallel storylines detail Dicky’s struggles with drugs & Micky’s struggle to break away from his family’s crazy influence & start a stable life with his tough-but-loving new girlfriend (Amy Adams).

Without any obvious use of old-movie tropes, The Fighter, however true, has an old-Hollywood feel, in a good way. The director, David O. Russell (of Three Kings) works with a loose, effortless style—his footwork is fast & fancy but not flashy. I loved, for instance, how the subtitle announcing a bout appeared on screen a second or so before he cut to the fight—just a detail, but it’s one of several strategies Russell uses to give the movie a splendid forward momentum. At least some effort is made to present the boxing with technical authenticity, & Russell has a fine touch with the actors, too, letting us enjoy the company of these people even when they’re behaving despicably.

Bale & Leo—& maybe Amy Adams, who seems delighted at the chance to swear & brawl—are all highly entertaining, & their flamboyance may overshadow Mark Wahlberg’s quiet excellence. His Micky ironically belies the movie’s title—he may be a boxer, but he’s a lover, not a fighter. He just wants the people he loves to get along. When Micky at last begins to assert himself, both in & out of the ring, it’s immensely satisfying.

One other note [minor “spoiler alert” here]: At the beginning of The Fighter, we see a TV documentary crew following Dicky around. We’re led to believe that the film they’re making is about his dreams of a comeback, but eventually we learn it’s about his crack addiction. When it airs, Dicky & his family are suddenly confronted with the squalor & wretchedness of his life, & the contempt in which their neighbors hold him, & they’re horrified & humiliated.

This is the mid-‘90s, & it occurred to me that these scenes show the difference that nearly two decades of “Reality TV” as a dominant form of American entertainment has made—nowadays, I’m not sure this film would embarrass its subjects. They’d just be glad it got them on TV.

In 1982, a generation of nerds got their minds blown by Disney’s Tron. This film made the fantasy of disappearing into the world inside your computer seductive, & said nerds have spent the last three decades doing their best to make it a reality.

I saw it back then, but while I was a certainly a nerd, I wasn’t a computer nerd, & very little of it stayed with me. This, combined with my already minimal grasp of computer-ese, may be why I felt a little lost at times during Tron: Legacy, the long-belated sequel.

In the new film, we learn that software designer hero Flynn (Jeff Bridges) disappeared for real years earlier, leaving behind his young son Sam (as an adult, Garrett Hedlund). Disney’s standard psychological template firmly in place—mother gone & barely mentioned, father absent & yearned for—the story takes Sam into “The Grid,” a Dante-esque virtual world of anthropomorphic “Programs” perpetually engaged in gladiatorial fights & races. The Grid is now tyrannically ruled by Clu, a doppelganger of the young Bridges (some impressive computer trickery here).

Sam is rescued from this peril by a cyber-cutie, Quorra (Olivia Wilde), who takes him into the wilderness Off the Grid. There he's reunited with his Dad, now middle-aged & living pretty comfortably with Quorra as his protégée. The three of them must then brave Clu & his forces to get back to the real world.

That’s about as coherently as I can summarize the plot. I didn’t really “get” Tron: Legacy, but I can’t deny that the neon-on-black palette of the Grid scenes gives it a spooky visual beauty, & that the elder incarnation of Bridges, now robed & bearded like Obi-wan Kenobi, gives a fine, relaxed performance, despite the banal dialogue he’s stuck with. He brings the only heart to Tron: Legacy—otherwise, it’s like watching the world’s longest Super Bowl commercial. It’s made with craft & artistry & even visionary imagination, but the movie’s emotional core feels as simulated as the setting.

Director Blake Edwards, whose career spanned from Breakfast at Tiffany’s & The Great Race to the Pink Panther movies to Victor/Victoria & the underrated Hollywood satire S.O.B., has passed on at 88. RIP.

PAINT SCREAM

To my bitter disappointment, I wasn’t able to make it to the screening last week of the new big-screen version of Yogi Bear. But the movie, opening Friday, has me thinking about Hanna-Barbera cartoons, & in particular one of the pleasures of the late-Boomer era, Jonny Quest. The great half-hour adventure show was a treasure trove of monsters—everything from pterodactyls to Yetis to deep-sea freaks to daddy-longlegs robots to plodding mummies to giant crabs. But…

Monster-of-the-Week: ..one of the most memorable of the worthy company that menaced Dr. Quest, Race, Bandit & the boys was this week’s honoree, the shapeless, cyclopean, electricity-craving banshee known as the Invisible Monster, even though it becomes visible (& slightly endearing) when it’s pelted with bags of paint…

You can watch the wailing horror’s Waterloo in the episode’s thrilling conclusion, here.

NOMINEE GRITS

Phoenix Film Critics Society, of which I am a proud founding member, has announced its 2010 Award Nominations. You can read the whole list here, but here are the ten Best Picture nominees (in alphabetical order):

127 Hours

Inception

Never Let Me Go

Shutter Island

The Kids Are All Right

The King’s Speech

The Social Network

True Grit

Toy Story 3

Winter’s Bone

As usual, some of the nominees reflect my voting, & some don’t. I was disappointed, for instance, that Ben Affleck’s terrific The Town—out on DVD next week, by the way—didn’t receive a single nomination.

The winners will be announced on Tuesday, December 28.

Out on DVD this week is the startling documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. You can read my review of it here, on JabCat on Movies.

TIRED

Busy but fun weekend for Your Humble Narrator. Friday night The Wife & I went to Scottsdale Center for the Arts & saw A John Waters Christmas. A very funny show, if unexpectedly brief: About an hour of free-form stand-up—basically a dirtier version of his talk-show appearances & essays—followed by maybe ten minutes or so of Q&A.

I also picked up his Christmas compilation CD, which includes jaw-dropping holiday obscurities like Little Cindy’s “Happy Birthday Jesus,” “Sleigh Ride” by Alvin & the Chipmunks, & “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by Tiny Tim.

Then Saturday, we were given a behind-the-scenes tour of Chase Field, as part of a season-ticket pitch. The Wife captured this pic of me, sitting in the very spot where the last-place team in the NL West sat this summer:

Quite a thrill. My favorite detail of the tour was in the hall just behind the dugout—there was a car tire mounted on the wall.

“That’s the Frustration Tire,” our excellent guide Matt explained. He then showed us all the dents in the pipes & doors caused by enraged players, abuse which the tire is now there to absorb. I couldn’t believe that they haven’t used it as a licensing opportunity for, say, Discount Tire: “The official tire of Diamondbacks frustration.”

Then Sunday, with the help of The Wife & friends, I finally got some Christmas lights onto the house:

LIONS & TOURISTS & SNARES, OH MY!

Two opening here in the Valley today:

The Tourist: Angelina Jolie plays Elise, a mystery woman who, because of her romantic connection to a master criminal, is under the gaze of Scotland Yard & Interpol. She receives a note from the wanted man telling her to board a certain train from Paris to Venice & pick out a fellow passenger of his height & build.

The guy she settles on, & aggressively seduces, is played by Johnny Depp, here sporting, in lieu of some whimsical characterization, the flat American accent of a math teacher from Wisconsin, with bedraggled hair & beard & a water-vapor cigarette. He’s like a European’s idea of the perfect patsy—a nice, well-meaning but basically clueless American, down to his hilarious name: “Frank Tupelo.”

Before long Scotland Yard has intelligence on Frank: He lost his wife in a car accident three years earlier. He seems quite ready to get on with his life, though—he has no objection to Elise’s attentions, even though they result in him being chased around Venice both by the authorities, led by Paul Bettany, & by the thugs of a menacing Brit gangster (Steven Berkoff).

Something about the poster for The Tourist led me to expect a heavy existential drama of the Visconti sort, & I confess I wasn’t disappointed to find, instead, an international thriller of the kind that James Stewart or Cary Grant used to star in for Hitchcock in the ‘50s. The film, directed by impressively named Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck from a script he wrote with Christopher McQuarrie & Julian Fellowes (it’s a knockoff of a 2005 French thriller called Anthony Zimmer), is silly from the start, & grows sillier still in its later stretches—around the time that Elise meets Frank, decked out in white, at a fancy ball.

But as usual, Depp gives the movie interest, playing his regular-guy role to the hammy hilt. He’s played a Hitchcockian everyman-in-over-his-head before, in the slightly underrated 1995 thriller Nick of Time. But he puts on a much broader show here as Frank Tupelo—he drops malapropisms, he keeps speaking Spanish to Italians, & he can hold up his end of a bantering conversation with a beautiful woman on a train, but only with visible effort, which rather defeats the purpose. In the real world, he’d be a pretty bright, resourceful fellow, but by the standards of sophisticated romantic thrillers, he’s a bit of an oaf.

Four Lions: This English film is a comedy about Jihadism. It is, to be clear, a broad, knockabout farce concerning the efforts of a handful of self-styled Sheffield Jihadists to plan an act of terrorism. It’s freakin’ hilarious, too.

Directed & co-written by the acclaimed satirist Chris Morris, the film follows four numbskulls as they squabble & blunder their way toward a mission that they can’t quite agree on. Anglo convert Barry (Nigel Lindsay), who has the numbest skull and the biggest mouth, actually favors the idea of blowing up a mosque, in order to provoke an uprising of the faithful. This plan is not endorsed by Omar (Riz Ahmed) the group’s theoretical leader & least obviously imbecilic member. He eventually hatches a plot targeting the London Marathon.

Faisal (Adeel Akhtar) is trying to train crows to carry bombs on suicide missions. Barry’s recruit Hassan (Asher Ali) favors rap & public gestures which he calls “jihad of the mind.” The brainless Waj (Kayvan Novak) just wants to please his pal Omar.

Although the ineptitude & bluster of these men is often laugh-out-loud funny—or maybe because it is—Four Lions is also often highly unsettling, especially when it gives us a look at the mundane side of their lives. It’s chilling when Omar sits around discussing his upcoming martyrdom with his pretty, supportive wife (Preeya Kalidas) & adoring little son as if it was a small business opportunity, or when he tells the boy a bedtime story mixing his own bungled adventures with The Lion King.

Moments like these feel plausibly realistic, & indeed Morris notes that he & the other writers based the script on years of research into the everyday lives of his subjects. But as the movie heads into its homestretch, it grows grimmer & more gruesome, though no less antic. Morris allows the characters to be nagged by their consciences—it would be hard for us to take an interest in them if he didn’t—but he doesn’t let us off the hook by making these guys weekend warriors whose plots are just talk. The film doesn’t go easy on the police or the British government, either. The power of Four Lions is that it manages to be one of the funniest films of the year, & one of the saddest, at exactly the same time.

BEETLEMANIA

Also out on DVD this week is the Criterion edition of Cronos, the Mexican horror film of 1993 directed by the young Guillermo del Toro, from whom Your Humble Narrator, with characteristic brilliant prescience, predicted great things at the time.

So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week we give the nod to Jesus Gris, the hapless antiques dealer played by Federico Luppi, who gets stung by a metal scarab in his shop & becomes a particularly pitiable sort of vampire.

Here’s me on Cronos, from 1994.

LIFE DURING WARTIME

The remarkable war documentary Restrepo is out this week on DVD; you can read my review of it here, on JabCat on Movies.

NEW LEAF

It was an artsy sort of weekend for Your Humble Narrator: Friday evening I stopped by Willo North Gallery for the opening of Grace and Gravitas, a show of buoyantly joyous work by the great sculptor (& great guy) Lawrence McLaughlin (seen here with Moi):

…as well as intriguing work by the young sculptor Eric Cox.

Then The Wife & I spent Sunday wandering around the Tempe Festival of the Arts. While I was there, I got the chance to test-drive the Nissan Leaf, their upcoming all-electric car—the Fest was a stop on the Leaf’s “Drive Electric Tour” (it’s in Tucson next week; you can register to drive it here).

It was basically just like...well, driving a car, except that it was seriously quiet, to the point where, we were told, an artificial motor sound effect is going to be added to the actual production vehicles (these were pre-production) so that people will hear it coming!

Aaargh! The Diamondbacks have traded third baseman & slugger Mark Reynolds to the Orioles, presumably on the petty, unimaginative grounds that he led the team—and the Majors—in strike-outs. Admittedly, he rarely hit the ball, but when he did it looked like it was headed for orbit, & he had some panache on defense, too. I will miss his Godzilla-high homers, & The Wife may just boycott.

STATUARY GAPE

Phoenix-area gallery rats & other such sophisticated types: You may wish to check out Grace and Gravitas, a show of work by major sculptors Lawrence McLaughlin & Eric Cox, & curated by my old New Times pal Robrt Pela.

It opens today at Willo North Gallery on 7th Avenue, as part of this month’s First Friday festivities, & continues through the end of January.

LIMITED VISIBILITY

Once again in honor of the glorious & lamented Ingrid Pitt...

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s acknowledge the horror that makes the sound in 1964’s Sound of Horror (El Sonido de la Muerte). This early Pitt’s credit, a Spanish production shot in Greece, concerns an encounter between a party of treasure hunters—the lovely young Ms. Pitt is one of them—& a ferocious dinosaur, accidentally loosed by an explosion in a cave.

But this is not just any dinosaur. No, this is an invisible dinosaur.

Which is why, one presumes, the title isn’t Sight of Horror.

What the phantom fossil lacks visually, it overcompensates for vocally. Turns out the sound of horror is a slightly louder & more drawn-out version of the sound that a cat makes while having sex outside your house at 4 a.m.

You can hear it for yourself—here is a clip of perhaps the funniest scene in the film, & here is a trailer, narrated by another distinctive sound, that of the great Paul Frees, who provided the voices of characters ranging from Boris Badenov to the Pillsbury Doughboy.