GOOD NABORS

RIP to Jim Nabors, passed on at 87.

He's most remembered, rightly, as the guileless, sweet-souled Gomer Pyle from The Andy Griffith Show and its spinoff Gomer Pyle, USMC. But how many people remember him from the short-lived and fairly painful 1975 Sid & Marty Kroft series The Lost Saucer, in which he and Ruth Buzzi played wacky androids?

Well, in his honor...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...here's The Dorse...

...a half-dog, half-horse from that show.

IN MY RUMBLE OPINION

Playing Tuesday night:

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World—The “Rumble” in the title refers to the classic, greatly influential instrumental single of 1958 by Link Wray. Iggy Pop claims to have decided to pursue music in earnest after Wray’s thundering power chord air, as did Pete Townsend and other rock giants.

But this documentary by Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana, which screens Tuesday night at Third Street Theater in Phoenix as part of the “No Festival Required” film series, isn’t just about the influence of Native Americans on rock. It’s also about their influence on jazz, blues, roots, folk and heavy metal. There are episodes on Charlie Patton, Jimi Hendrix, Pete La Farge, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Jesse Ed Davis, Mildred Bailey, Howlin’ Wolf, Robbie Robertson and Randy Castillo, among others. The talking heads include Robertson, Iggy Pop, John Trudell, Steven Van Zandt, Taj Mahal and Martin Scorsese, among many others.

This smoothly made, graphically engaging movie makes a really convincing case, not only that many individual artists of Native American ancestry made a profound impact on popular music, but also that their contribution was itself heavily influenced by indigenous musical traditions, often in combination with African-American traditions. We see footage from Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or ensemble singing from Native communities in the southeast, that startlingly demonstrate the connection between these styles and pop forms. We even see Redbone on The Midnight Special back in the ‘70s, staging native dances before striking up “Come and Get Your Love.”

But while the case feels persuasive, Rumble isn’t a dry piece of ethnography. It’s a lively collection of show-business stories, some funny, some heartbreaking, all of them memorable. Music and cultural history buffs are strongly advised not to miss this one.

OFF-BROADWAY TURKEY

Hope everybody is having a joyous, yummy Thanksgiving! In honor of the day...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...the nod goes to the murderous, foul-mouthed turkey from ThanksKilling the Musical...

...the stage version of the notorious low-budget 2009 horror indie. It's had productions in Seattle, New York, Atlanta, Columbus and Orlando, and a cast recording is available on Amazon, too, with cuts like "Gobble, Gobble, Motherf***er" and "The Jock and the Hick and the Nerd and the Slut (and Me)." The perfect stocking stuffer!

LAWYERS & MISERS & DREAMBOATS, OH MY!

Opening today:

Roman J. Israel, Esq.--The title character is an L.A.-based civil rights attorney who makes a bad first impression. With thick glasses and a sad, moppy Afro, dressed in an ill-fitting old suit and clip-on tie, making unfiltered (if usually justified) insulting remarks, barking loud derisive laughter, Roman is a brilliant lawyer but a socially awkward misfit without family or close friends.

When his beloved, legendary partner dies, Roman lands at a hotshot criminal defense firm run by the slick Colin Farrell. Farrell's exasperated by his new associate, but too aware of his gifts, and maybe too conscience-haunted about his own lost idealism, to get rid of him. When one of Roman's cases goes tragically wrong, he yields at long last to the temptations of cynicism, and winds up in real trouble.

Writer-director Dan Gilroy is trying for a gripping legal drama in the vein of The Verdict. But while the story has its interesting aspects, it's too loosely structured and rambling to keep us on the edge of our seats, and Roman's plight in the movie's final quarter is unconvincingly dramatized.

While the film falls short as a thriller, however, it succeeds as a character study. Washington taps the prickly side of his own persona to create this maddening and lovable nerd-warhorse, who decides, disastrously, to try wealth and luxury on for size. If the plot were as vividly rendered as the title character and his moral lapse, Roman J. Israel, Esq. would be a classic. As it is, it's an interesting misfire.

The Man Who Invented Christmas--The man in question is Charles Dickens, played by Dan Stevens in this adaptation of Les Standiford's 2008 nonfiction book. Standiford's thesis is that by writing his "Ghost-Story of Christmas" A Christmas Carol in 1843, Dickens helped to bring the holiday, which had fallen somewhat into disuse in Britain, to something of the social importance it now holds, and particularly to its association with charity and liberality.

If this is true, then I think we can forgive him for the long-term downside of this. It's doubtful that Dickens, with his genial vision of helping the needy and partying with family and friends, could have foreseen Black Friday riots and holiday depression.

This is a fascinating story, but while the movie, adapted by Susan Coyne and directed by Bharat Nalluri, is watchable and amusing enough, it seems to me to have been dramatized in the most conventional and heavy-handed way. Like Shakespeare in Love, the film depicts literary inspiration as a direct line from what an author witnesses or overhears on the street to what he promptly runs home and scribbles into his work. But while Shakespeare in Love made a borderline-campy joke of this idea, The Man Who Invented Christmas suggests that it's getting at the Dickens psyche, as the author's imagination conjures up Scrooge, Marley, Fezziwig and other figures, and gets heckled by them.

The film tries to generate suspense over whether Dickens will allow Scrooge his change of heart and spare Tiny Tim at the end of the story, and further tries to link the Scrooginess in the author's own personality to his lifelong conflict with his big-talking, perennially broke father. Both of these ploys feel thin--it's hardly likely that Dickens ever conceived of A Christmas Carol ending with Scrooge unrepentant.

Still, there is plenty of enjoyable acting here. Christopher Plummer, who lent his voice to Herod the Great in last weekend's The Star, is such a natural as Scrooge that it seems odd he's never played the part before. Stevens is exuberant as Dickens, and gets across some of the frustration that anyone who writes for a living feels at interruption. Justin Edwards is likable as the long-suffering Dickens pal John Forster, and it's great to see vets like Miriam Margoyles as a housekeeper and Simon Callow as the illustrator John Leech. The best performance, however, is by Jonathan Pryce as the sweet, cadging fraud John Dickens, genuinely pained by his son's shame over him, but not about to let it stop him from having a good time.

Monday night The Kid and I went to Comerica Theatre for a concert by One Direction alumnus Niall Horan; you can check out my review on Phoenix Magazine online.

MANGER DANGER

Opening this weekend:

The Star—The hero of this animated comedy is a donkey named Bo. Bo and his friend Dave the Dove and a sheep named Ruth and others band together and have wacky adventures in their effort to warn the Virgin Mary, who’s on the road to Bethlehem with Joseph, that the agents of Herod the Great are out to get them.

Funny versions of The Nativity go back in the Western tradition at least as far as The Second Shepherd’s Play in the 1500s. I also remember a surprisingly satirical holiday TV special called The Night the Animals Talked back in the early ‘70s that focused on the creatures around the manger, including Mary and Joseph’s goodhearted donkey.

Even so, you may not always believe what you’re seeing in this Sony Animation release—the standard cute talking animal template, complete with an underdog (underdonkey?) hero who longs to see the wider world, played out against this sort of pious tableau. It’s easy to imagine neither the secular nor the devout being altogether comfortable with it.

This movie’s camp reaches its highest level, perhaps, not with the critters but with its depiction of The Annunciation. The green-eyed, freckled Mary (voiced by Gina Rodriguez, star of TV’s Jane the Virgin), who talks like a Disney Channel heroine, receives word from the Angel that she’s to be the Messiah’s mother with less emotion than a contemporary American teenager might show at the news that she’d won tickets to a Niall Horan concert. “Thank you,” she says mildly, and then, to herself, “Do I say thank you?”

The most peculiar thing about this peculiar movie is that it works, or at least it worked for me. The high-ticket voice actors, led by Steven Yeun as Bo, Aidy Bryant as Ruth and Keegan-Michael Key as the endearing Dave, create warm characterizations. I’m not kidding when I say high-ticket, by the way: other beasts are voiced by Tyler Perry, Tracy Morgan, Kelly Clarkson, Anthony Anderson, Kris Kristofferson, Ving Rhames, Gabriel Iglesias, Patricia Heaton, Kristin Chenoweth and—gasp!—Oprah herself, as a camel. Even Christopher Plummer lends his sinister purr to old Herod.

The Star is no classic, but this cast makes it vibrant, and the story is about going to trouble for others, putting their needs ahead of your own. It’s a kitschy, sometimes borderline embarrassing movie, and a more genuinely sweet one than I’ve seen in a while.

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY MATTER

Just because it's playing this Saturday afternoon on Turner Classic Movies...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week let's honor the title malevolent cerebrum in the 1953 classic Donovan's Brain...

 
...based on Curt Siodmak's novel of the same title, or, as it's known in Portuguese, O Cerebro de Donovan...

THE RAILS OF JUSTICE

Now in theaters:

Murder on the Orient Express—Sidney Lumet’s tautly made 1974 version of Agatha Christie’s 1934 novel, with Albert Finney as Belgian master detective Hercule Poirot, is a favorite of mine, and I admit I saw no pressing need to remake it. But remade it has been, in a manner sufficiently different from the original that it can be enjoyed on its own terms.

The new version is directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also assumes the role of Poirot. As before, a shady character gets bumped off in a sleeping car of the famed luxury line, which used to run all the way from Istanbul to Paris. The train is derailed by an avalanche somewhere in Croatia, and Poirot, who had been hoping for a quiet holiday, is pressed into service to identify the guilty party from among the shifty types aboard before the trip is back on track.

The cast ranges from Johnny Depp to Judi Dench, Josh Gad to Penelope Cruz, Willem Dafoe to Derek Jacobi, Daisy Ridley to Leslie Odom, Jr. to Michelle Pfeiffer, among others, and they let it rip. Offsetting this is Branagh’s impressively reserved, melancholy OCD turn as Poirot.

As director, Branagh works in his characteristically flamboyant style, sweeping from one melodramatic flourish to the next, even adding in some fights and gunplay. This won’t be to the taste of every Christie aficionado, but I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed screenwriter Michael Green’s distaste for the casual racism that Christie, to judge from her books, would have regarded as quite proper.

But the real stars, perhaps, of this Orient Express are, first, Branagh’s mesmerizing mustache, and second, the lushness of the production—cinematography by Haris Zambarloukos, costumes by Alexandra Byrne, music by Patrick Doyle. The movie may leave you in the mood for a leisurely holiday by train. Allowing for the odd murder or avalanche, it looks like a great time.

DAY AFTER DAY

Check out Phoenix Magazine online for my short article about the OCD Film Festival (for "Outstanding Cinematic Delights"), scheduled for this Saturday at Super Saver Cinemas at 27th Avenue & Bell in Phoenix.

The Kid and I had fun at this one belatedly:

Happy Death Day—Our unlikable sorority-girl heroine (Jessica Rothe) gets murdered by somebody wearing a hoodie and a smiling one-toothed baby mask. Then she wakes up at the beginning of the same day—her birthday—and it all starts over again. As she gets repeatedly re-murdered, and keeps getting do-overs, she starts unraveling the mystery, and also growing as a person.

If, like me, you missed this brazen application of the Groundhog Day premise to the slasher genre when it opened before Halloween, you might want to catch up with it now. The no-name cast is energetic, Scott Lobdell's script is ingenious, and there's plenty of humor along with the chills.

STITCH & FAMOUS

My pal Gayle sent me this pic...

...of a display in the San Diego Airport devoted to the worthy subject of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. So...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...just because he's in the foreground, let's give the nod to the towering Land of the Rising Sun version of Frankenstein's Monster from 1965's Frankenstein Conquers the World, as memorably depicted by veteran men's-magazine cover artist Vic Prezio in this '66 Famous Monsters cover...

NORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR

Opening:

Thor: Ragnarok--Superhero movies have been on a roll lately. For the first decade or so of this century, my reviews of Marvel and DC films have amounted to a lot of grumbling that they were heavy, they were overlong, they were sometimes jocular but lacked true humor, and above all that they were repetitively caught up in a post-9/11 fixation with urban destruction, buildings crumbling to rubble. In short, I didn't find them fun.

And then I did. In the last few years, superhero movies suddenly lightened up. Ant-Man, Dr. Strange, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man: Homecoming and (if you count them) the Guardians of the Galaxy flicks were all fine entertainments, and even the more standard, turgid entries like Captain America: Civil War and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Avengers: Age of Ultron had scenes or performances that zapped some life and looseness into them.

This trend reaches its zenith with the latest Marvel release, Thor: Ragnarok. Those who demand seriousness from their superhero flicks may disapprove, as this movie is played more or less entirely for laughs. But it kept me smiling from beginning to end. It's like an antidote to the preceding Thor flick, 2013's chilly Thor: The Dark World. This movie's world is pretty bright.

Chris Hemsworth returns, and remains agreeable, as the Marvel version of the Norse deity with the hammer only he can sling. "Ragnarok" is the term for the prophesied End Times in the Norse tradition, the day when the giant Surtur will lead an attack on Asgard. This does come into play in the movie, but the principal villains here are Thor's long-dormant sister Hela (Cate Blanchett) the Goddess of Death, and a character called simply Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum), who presides over gladiatorial games on a chaotic planet.

Blanchett is an elegant Maleficent type, topped with a chic antler headdress and attended by an impressive monster wolf. But it's Goldblum who steals big chunks of the picture, bringing the same halting, diffident delivery to tyrannically ruling a violent world that he does to pitching Apartments.com on TV. He's hilarious.

The director is the witty New Zealander Taika Waititi, working from a script by Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost. Waititi serves up plenty of other cheeky performances from his large cast. Tom Hiddleston is back as the ever-devious, ever-likable Loki, as is Anthony Hopkins as crusty old man Odin, and Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr. Strange, and Mark Ruffalo as the chagrined Bruce Banner/The Hulk, who has gone soft with cheap celebrity on Goldblum's planet. Tessa Thompson, the love interest in Creed, makes a quite adorable Valkyrie here, Waititi himself is riotous, behind motion capture, as a mild-mannered revolutionary rock monster, and his countryman Karl Urban gets a nice turn as Blanchett's rather sheepish toady.

The talented cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe bathes the movie in cheery colors, and Waititi stages one sly, silly set piece after another. The movie clocks in at over two hours, but just slightly. It's a trifle, but it hit the spot, and with the exception, maybe, of Spider-Man: Homecoming earlier this year, it's the first superhero movie in recent memory that I could imagine wanting to go see again.

PETYR PRINCIPLE

Happy November to all! Check out the latest issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands, for my "Four Corners" column on Valley "fusion" eateries.

With Thor: Ragnarok, directed by the New Zealander Taika Waititi, opening this weekend...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's give the nod to Petyr (Ben Fransham), the most forbidding of the vampire roomies in What We Do in the Shadows...

...the horror comedy co-written (with Jemaine Clement), directed by and starring Waititi. This broad, silly mock-documentary was recently recommended to me, and made me laugh a lot.

"Vampires don't chat," said screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, explaining why he didn't write any dialogue for Christopher Lee in 1966's Dracula, Prince of Darkness (Lee claimed that the character had dialogue, but it was so bad he refused to speak it). In What We Do in the Shadows, however, we further learn that "Vampires don't do dishes."