EIGHT MEN IN

Merry Christmas everyone! Now in theaters:

The Boys in the Boat--The 1936 Berlin Olympics was a highly satisfying episode for the good guys. Most famously, when Der Fuehrer said his was the Master Race, Jesse Owens heiled (phfft!) heiled (phfft!) right in Der Fuehrer's face. It wasn't enough to prevent the war that was coming, but it was a great foreshadowing of who would win.

Yet alongside that glorious debunking of supposed Aryan racial superiority, right under the noses of its promulgators, was another splendid underdog story. Briefly played by Jyuddah Jaymes, Owens is a minor figure in this period spectacle about the improbable rise of the University of Washington's eight-man crew to compete for the U.S. in those same games. It's directed by George Clooney from a script by Mark L. Smith, based on Daniel James Brown's 2013 book.

The story was remarkable before the crew got to Berlin. The UW boys were already upstarts in the sport, long associated with elite, affluent Eastern schools. This crew included working class, Depression-era grunts; the focus here is on Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), who when we first meet him is literally homeless. He lives in a junked car in a Seattle hobo jungle, patching the holes in the soles of his shoes while trying to eke out an engineering degree. He joins the crew for the stipend and the roof over his head.   

"Eight-man crew is the most difficult of all team sports," the coach here pronounces to the aspirants. "The average human body is just not meant for such things." I once had occasion to learn first-hand that my below-average human body wasn't meant for such things. Two of my nieces rowed crew, and back in the '80s I myself had the opportunity to take a one-man shell out onto the Potomac River; my near-helplessness in managing to get the thing to go anywhere gave me a small taste of how much delicate skill the sport requires, even setting aside its physical demands.

The Boys in the Boat gets across hints of this subtle precision; Clooney shows us, for instance, the hiccup-y little wrist-flip that precedes the return stroke. There's a great deal to like about the film, really, starting with what a wonderful, heartening story it tells. It's handsomely produced, with lustrous cinematography by Martin Ruhe, crisp editing by Tanya M. Swerling, another lovely score by Alexander Desplat. And it has rich, sometimes fascinating period detail, like the swanky spectator trains that run along the river banks at the fancier courses.

But as with several of Clooney's earlier directorial efforts, this movie is well-made, well-intentioned, good-hearted and generally enjoyable without being entirely satisfying. And unlike, say, The Monuments Men or The Tender Bar, it doesn't even have vivid star character actors to liven things up.

Joel Edgerton as Coach Al Ulbrickson and Peter Guinness as master boat-maker George Pocock are authoritative presences, but not complex characters. The guys playing the crew aren't, as in the standard sports movie template, a ragtag band of misfits with distinctive oddball personalities; they're just pleasant, good-looking young men. Rantz's coed love interest (Hadley Robinson) tries to generate some playful, mischievous heat, but she's rowing upstream opposite her bland leading man.

Overall, this film has the flavor of a feature length Super Bowl commercial. Like the best of those commercials, it can raise an inspirational tingle. But I don't know that it does much more in two hours than a good Super Bowl commercial can do in sixty seconds.

MALL WONDER

Last-minute shoppers will be relieved to know that The Millcreek Mall...

...serving my beloved hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, was named "Best Hideout for a Zombie Apocalypse" last March by gambling site JeffBet, beating out even The Mall of America in Minnesota (which came in fifth on the list). More recently, Millcreek Mall was rated the seventh-best mall in America for Christmas shopping.

You can read how both distinctions come together in my novel, The Night Before Christmas of the Living Dead...

...which is set at the Millcreek Mall, and whose hapless hero is indeed a frantic last-minute shopper.

A safe, zombie-free and Merry Christmas to all from Less Hat, Moorhead!

barbenheimerflowermoonemmaryanjustken…

The Phoenix Film Critics Society, of which I'm an enduringly proud founding member...

...has announced its 2023 Award winners and Top Ten list. As always, some of the selections represent my voting--I'm especially glad my colleagues agreed with me about Da'Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers--others do not, but there's a lot of good acting and moviemaking represented on this list.

While I'm on the subject, I think the PFCS Awards need a name. The Pheenies? The Nixies? The Dry Heaties? Just spitballing...

I'll post my own Top Ten list after the New Year. Happy Holidays everybody!

FEEL THE BERNSTEIN

Now in the multiplexes; opening December 20 on Netflix:

Maestro--Bradley Cooper's imitation of Leonard Bernstein conducting is uncanny. Cooper captures Bernstein's histrionic, self-dramatizing, ecstatic style perfectly, and gets across how he used his gestures and facial expressions and body language not just to lead his musicians through a score but to tease the interpretation and intensity he wanted out of them.

The conducting scenes in this film, directed by Cooper from a script he wrote with Josh Singer, also suggest that the podium gave Bernstein a sense of liberation which he may have known in few other areas of his life. Cooper's performance, in general but particularly in these passages--especially a lengthy recreation of a celebrated performance of Mahler's "Resurrection Symphony"--is luminous.

I'll admit that it's taken me a while to come around where Bradley Cooper is concerned. But after A Star is Born and Nightmare Alley it was impossible to deny both his talent and the intelligence and heart with which he deploys it. Aided here by Kazu Hiro's amazing (and laughably controversial) prosthetic makeup, he gets across the conductor's mix of authority, of self-conscious, performative sophistication and of boyish wonder, and makes you see what made him beloved, both publicly and by his friends and family. You see what made him difficult, too.

Very wisely, Cooper chooses not to direct in the same florid manner that Bernstein conducted. Despite some flashy transitions, most of Maestro unfolds in long, sustained takes, beautifully shot by Matthew Libatique from a discreet distance; we're made almost into eavesdroppers at times. This directorial reserve balances the extravagant acting superbly.

The movie isn't a conventional biopic; there are no explanatory dates or places onscreen, no follow-up summary at the end, and only incidentally does it trace Bernstein's career highlights. The focus is on the relationship between Bernstein and the Costa Rican-born stage actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), who married him in 1951. The other characters, though well-drawn and convincingly played--Sarah Silverman is a good fit as Bernstein's sister Shirley--are decidedly subordinate to the leads.

According to the film, Montealegre was well aware, going in, that Bernstein was a gay man (though his affairs were not exclusively same-sex even before she came along). "Let's give it a whirl," she says breezily to him toward the beginning, and you think, uh-oh.

On the whole, they don't seem to have done too badly; they had three lovely kids, sensational careers, countless friends, and they seem to have profoundly loved each other. But entering into a marriage with somebody of uncongenial sexuality cannot come without turbulence, and this can only be compounded when they're a titanic cultural legend.

It's possible that even the movie itself succumbs to this, a little. With her brittle yet mirthful, keenly observant, wholeheartedly engaged line readings, Mulligan is marvelous; the spine and centering force of the movie (she's top-billed in the credits, even over Cooper). But we learn far less of Montealegre's remarkable career or her activism than we do about Bernstein. The movie sees her in relation to him, and doesn't always make clear how formidable she was in her own right, not just within the marriage but in the world at large.  Even when part of the point of the movie is the perils of putting yourself in the shadow of a legend, the person at the podium tends to get the attention.

PROPHET SHARE

Opening this weekend:

The Oath--The warrior Moroni lives in a cave in a primordial forest. The strapping fellow is the last surviving member of his clan, exterminated by Aaron, the King of a rival tribe. One day he comes across Bathsheba, a beautiful concubine who has escaped Aaron's clutches. He gives her shelter from the storm, and they gradually bond. But of course, the cruel Aaron isn't done with either of them.

From his name alone, you may recognize that this film's hero is based on a figure from The Book of Mormon. The last of that tome's prophets, Moroni is supposed to have stashed the gold plates on which it was written, and after his death is supposed to have revealed them, as an angel, to Joseph Smith near Palmyra, New York in 1823.

In this movie, he's played by director-co-writer Darin Scott, buffed and bearded and armored in a reasonable approximation of the Viggo Mortensen-Alexander Skarsgård mold, but with little sense of barbaric danger (despite some broadsword combat, the movie is only rated PG-13). He's a studly but saintly paragon; at one point Bathsheba playfully tells him "You are boring." She's not entirely wrong, alas--he murmurs his lines, and spends a lot of his footage meditating or gazing into the spiritual distance--but he has a dash of guileless, unassuming Mormon sweetness that makes him endearing anyway.

Besides, the heavies liven up the picture. Most amusing is Billy Zane as the rotten Aaron, belting out his lines from behind a Muppet-like ball of frizzy beard in what at times sounds for all the world like an Irish accent. Karina Lombard is formidable as a lethal archer, as is Eugene Brave Rock as Aaron's henchman. "Why fight for a soulless coward?" Moroni wails at them at one point; it struck me as a good question for the contemporary Republican party.

Whether any of this is scripturally accurate or doctrinally sound in LDS terms, I'm clearly in no position to say. But taken simply as a sword-and-sandal romance-adventure, the movie is pleasant, using breathtaking New York State locations to (mostly) belie its budget limitations. The first half is sort of slow going, and the New-Agey music gets a little oppressive at times, but when we finally get to the confrontation between hero and villains, it's pretty satisfying. It's certainly no sillier in any way that I could see than, say, Conan the Barbarian or the Lord of the Rings flicks. And it's at least as heartfelt.

G, SPOT ON

Now in theaters:

Godzilla Minus One--To paraphrase Yeats: What rough beast, its hour come round again, slouches toward Tokyo to kick ass?

Who else? This new kaiju flick, from Godzilla's home studio Toho, celebrates the title character's 70th anniversary. Released in the U.S. with minimal fanfare (no screening for critics in my area), this entry tells a standalone story, unrelated to the earlier Japanese or American films, and it feels very different from either series.

For one thing, it's a period piece. It begins in 1945, with Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a young kamikaze, first shirking his suicide mission, then freezing up when he's confronted with the supposedly legendary sea monster at a small airbase in the Odo Islands. This lapse results in horrifying losses. Then when Shikishima gets back to the ruins of postwar Tokyo he's a pariah in his neighborhood.

Over the next couple of years, the guilt-haunted Shikishima becomes the reluctant head of an improvised family after Noriko (Minami Hamake), a young homeless woman, takes shelter in his house with an orphaned baby she's picked up. To support them, he takes a job with an oddball minesweeping crew on a small boat, clearing the leftover mines surrounding Japan. Then one day The Big G surfaces, made gargantuan after being irradiated during the Bikini nuclear tests, and heads for Tokyo.

The monster scenes here are spectacular, staged by writer-director Takashi Yamazaki with panache and a feel for dizzying ponderousness. There are some genuine jolts, too, notably Godzilla's first appearance. Best of all, the behemoth's big scenes employ Akira Ifukube's masterly score from the original 1954 film.

But at some level Godzilla Minus One feels less about monster action and more about Japanese society struggling to come to terms with an almost unimaginable defeat. The big scaly guy seems more like a symbol of the magnitude of despondency that had to be overcome for the country to survive and rebuild. This, along with heartfelt acting from an appealing cast and an effective sense of period detail, makes the film unexpectedly moving.

Having a failed kamikaze as the hero set the story up for an obvious payoff that I found troubling from the first scenes of the film: The perceived need for redemption from the eminently sensible decision not to carry out the lunacy of a futile suicide mission. Here, I thought, is the sort of intractable nationalism that makes for good melodrama, but in real life leads countries into war and horror and misery.

I'm happy to say that G-1 is having none of it; while giving full credit to worthwhile self-sacrifice, the film is resolutely life affirming. "This country never changes," one of the characters mutters, about some governmental folly. "Maybe it can't." But that country did change, albeit at a Godzilla-sized price, and this movie gets at the pained yet exhilarating spirit of that change.

My Kid accompanied me to this film, and after checking out the trailer on the way to the theater, she disapprovingly said "I think they're going to hurt him," him being Godzilla. She was right; the monster is not, here, a long-suffering defender of humankind against some bizarre alien or primal abomination, but a rampaging destructive force who must be stopped. Even his roar sounds scarier; it's not the usual nasal, irritable honk. But even so, I too felt sympathy for him during the efforts to destroy him. Something about that big lizard is lovable, even when he's being a bad boy.

SHORT PEOPLE GOT NOBODY

Opening in theaters today:

Saltburn--The title refers to the enormous, somewhat faded English country mansion in which most of the movie unfolds. But it may also suggest the proverbial pain of salt poured into a wound, as might be caused by the very sight of such a residence and the class system it represents.

Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a slight, nebbishy scholarship student to Oxford, is befriended by a classmate, the blueblood Adonis Felix (Jacob Elordi), who invites him home for the summer to the title pile of bricks in 2007. Felix's family is a fairly gothic bunch--abstracted Dad Sir James (Richard E. Grant), blithe, cordial Mom Lady Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike) and addled wreck of a sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), along with the sneering biracial American cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe). Carey Mulligan is also around as Elsbeth's nutty parasitical friend Pamela, as is Paul Rhys as the imperious butler Duncan.

Rather quickly, Oliver finds himself enmeshed with each of the family members, and drawn into the intrigues and occasional casual decadence of their isolated and mysterious lifestyle. While Oliver initially seems like an honest but in-over-his-head parvenu, like Balzac's Rastingnac or Faulkner's Ben Quick, we gradually see that he has his own wormy, calculating, opportunistic side.

This is the second feature written and directed by Emerald Fennell of 2020's Promising Young Woman. If it's a sophomore slump, that probably says more about the incisive brilliance and focus of Promising Young Woman than it does about any shortfalls of its own. The fury that charged Fennell's first film was direct and uncomplicated. Seemingly wanting to get across something more subtle and nuanced about class, Saltburn flails around a bit and sometimes feels confused, overwrought, overlong, even borderline campy.

But stick with it. It ultimately adds up to a potent piece of moviemaking, and of storytelling. Shot with hallucinatory garishness by the marvelous Linus Sandgren, the movie brings its setting vibrantly to life; there's none of the comforting stodginess of, say, Downton Abbey to it. Better, Fennell's narrative is involving. Even as we sense the influence of everything from The Shining to Risky Business, we're also pulled into investment in a yarn we haven't seen before. And she doesn't let us down; despite the movie's gratuitous thrashing about, in the end the plot snaps together to a satisfying and fairly devastating point.

Fennell also gets uniformly superb performances from her cast. Probably the wittiest and most endearing is Rosamund Pike, but Barry Keoghan, maybe the single best thing about The Banshees of Inisherin, is spectacular here, giving a tour de force turn in a role that is not only wildly mercurial on an emotional and psychological level, but also required physical fearlessness. Saltburn may end up being most remembered for literalizing a common expression for finding somebody extremely attractive, but Keoghan's draining performance makes a splash. 

Napoleon--Returning to France, uninvited, from exile in Elba, the title character is confronted with a regiment of soldiers he used to command. "I missed you," he tells them, seemingly sincerely. Soon he's back in charge.

Apparently there is some historical basis for this scene; Napoleon is said to have had a fond and comradely relationship with his troops, despite his willingness to get them slaughtered. But to the casual viewer of this Ridley Scott epic, the moment may come as a surprise. Nothing in the movie prepares us for it. Played by Joaquin Phoenix, this Napoleon shows little affection or even interest toward anyone or anything apart from himself, and a certain almost adolescent erotic fixation on Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). In between campaigns, he makes rather unromantic attempts to impregnate her, and reacts with sullen outrage when they don't succeed.

Scott's movie, based on a script by David Scarpa, is largely a pageant of carnage. It begins with a graphic depiction of Marie Antoinette's meeting with Madame Guillotine, then shows us Napoleon navigating the deadly mayhem of the Revolution and the First Republic. It then traces him from battle to battle: Toulon, Austerlitz, Moscow and some of his other greatest hits, culminating, of course, against Wellington (Rupert Everett) at You-Know-Where.

This Napoleon isn't boring. It's entirely watchable and well-staged. Scott deploys his forces with the care of a child playing with toy soldiers on his bedroom floor. But it doesn't really hit hard emotionally; something is missing from it. Early on, we see a cannonball splat into the chest of a horse, and the resulting explosion of gore is so obviously computer-generated that, for me at least, it carried little shock (it has this in common with the splatter effects in Thanksgiving, which, exhaustingly enough, I saw the same day). This sort of detached unreality hangs over the movie's horrors, and the same detachment extends to the central character. 

While Phoenix holds our attention with his movie star charisma, it's as if he's working in a vacuum. Except here and there in his scenes with Kirby's drolly unflappable Josephine, Phoenix seems to be anomic, walled off from the other characters by his own narcissistic self-regard. Maybe that's deliberate; maybe Scott is trying to dramatize the Napoleon of Walter de la Mare's unforgettable poem:

What is the world, O soldiers?

It is I.

I, this incessant snow,

This northern sky.

Soldiers, this solitude

Through which we go

Is I.

In any case, the movie has a point to make about the appetite for an autocratic "strongman" leader that seems to inevitably arise in reaction to the messiness of democratic movements. It's a theme which would, admittedly, seem to have a slight smidge of relevance to our current times. It should be noted that, warmongering megalomaniac though he was, Napoleon was also a tremendously intelligent and curious person, which puts him in a very different category than our most notable current would-be Emperor.

TROUBLE WITH THE CARVE

Opening this week:

Thanksgiving--Slasher movies of the '70s and early '80s were often holiday-themed. Black Christmas, Halloween, My Bloody Valentine, Silent Night, Deadly Night, New Year's Evil and April Fool's Day are all examples, while Friday the 13th and Happy Birthday to Me, though not strictly about holidays, are still tied to special dates and the convenient unity of time they provide. But Thanksgiving was somehow the major holiday the genre seemed to miss.

There actually were a couple of little-remembered attempts--Home Sweet Home in 1981 and Blood Rage in 1987. But neither seemed to count, perhaps because they didn't use the holiday in the title, or perhaps because they didn't sufficiently exploit the gruesome possibilities offered by the day's rituals. Whatever else may be said about it, the newly-made but self-consciously old-school slasher picture Thanksgiving works hard to include every classic Turkey Day trope.

A shoppers' riot and stampede at a store that shouldn't be open on Thanksgiving leads to bedlam and grisly death in a small Massachusetts town. "One Year Later"--as a subtitle traditionally informs us--a figure in the mask and garb of a Pilgrim skulks around exacting vengeance on those deemed responsible for the disaster. Everything eventually converges in a ghastly sit-down dinner.

The film traces its inception back to 2007, when two movies, the Robert Rodriguez shocker Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino's stunt thriller Death Proof, were released as a double feature under the joint title Grindhouse. In and around the two features, the show included several "fake trailers" for fictitious grindhouse-style movies. Two of these have already wagged the dog as the basis for real features, Machete (2010) and Hobo With a Shotgun (2011); Thanksgiving marks the third.

Directed by Eli Roth, the Thanksgiving trailer in Grindhouse captured the nastiest, most low-rent atmosphere of a vintage gore movie, complete with scratched, faded footage, some really sleazo shocks, and the smarmy, glottal tones of the narrator (Roth himself?). You could almost believe it wasn't a put-on.

The new feature, directed by Roth from a script by Jeff Rendell, doesn't try for this level of faux-authenticity. The setting is contemporary, the budget clearly comfortable, and cell phones and social media figure prominently in the plot. But the movie still has a nice old-fashioned pace and structure and flavor, and the nostalgia of this is much of what makes it unsavory fun.

I'll admit that in recent years I've largely lost my stomach for slasher flicks. Moreover, I thought Roth's 2002 debut feature Cabin Fever was an interesting misfire at best, and I took a pass on his 2005 torture flick Hostel. But he strikes an affectionate tone here, and he employs techniques that distance us from compassion for the victims. Most simply and effectively, he makes many of them, especially the early ones, deeply and amusingly unsympathetic.

The cast is livened up by some veterans, like Patrick Dempsey, Rick Hoffman and Gina Gershon, and the "final girl" (Nell Verlaque) has a lovely presence, and unlike so many heroines back in the day, she fights back, resourcefully and successfully. It was also great to see Lynne Griffin, the first victim from 1974's Black Christmas--and the Hamlet figure in the Bob and Doug McKenzie movie Strange Brew--in a bit here.

Most notably, the film keeps it light. As with two other movies from earlier this year, Cocaine Bear and Renfield, Thanksgiving goes in for extreme, over-the-top splatter effects, and they aren't scary, nor do they seem meant to be. They aren't even all that gross. There's no visceral substance to them; the bodies of the victims go to pieces like gingerbread men, and the effect, seemingly deliberate, is cartoonish slapstick. We're about as likely to take their suffering seriously as that of Wile E. Coyote.

Maybe it's how entertainment like this works best: as a sort of anarchic Punch and Judy show, using humans instead of puppets. Like Thanksgiving dinner, it wouldn't be healthy to consume this sort of thing every day, but about once a year, it can hit the spot.

FORECASTING DIRECTOR

As prestige movie season approaches, Your Humble Narrator had the chance to chat about Oscar-bait movies with Lauren Gilger for this morning's edition of The Show on KJZZ...

You can listen to the interview here.

UP AGAINST THE WALTZ

Check out my short article, online at Phoenix Magazine, about the 45th Anniversary of Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz...

...presented at various theaters by Fathom Events.

(CHRISTMAS) BREAK MASTER

Opening this weekend:

The Holdovers--Nobody does bitterness like Paul Giamatti. From his earliest noticeable roles, as "Pig Vomit" in the Howard Stern movie Private Parts or as a pit bull owner on Homicide: Life on the Streets, he made his mark as a vessel of bristling, eye-bugging, impotent rage, and this has carried over into his best lead roles, in American Splendor or Sideways, or even in his miniseries as John Adams.

His seething high dudgeon generally is played for comedy, but even then this great actor brings it a stinging, near-tragic undercurrent; he makes his pained ineffectuality moving. With this latest from Sideways director Alexander Payne, Giamatti gets another vehicle for splenetic, barely-contained fury and defeated disgust. It's one of his best.

The time is 1970; the setting is a blueblood boys' school in Massachusetts. Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, a brilliant, exacting Ancient History teacher. Paul is single and friendless in his personal life; in class he brims with acerbic, sarcastic contempt for his lunkheaded, entitled rich-kid students.

On the eve of Christmas break, Paul gets stuck with a miserable detail: supervising the "holdovers," the handful of students stranded on campus with nowhere to go for the holiday. Perhaps the unhappiest of this unhappy lot is Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a bright kid with a troubled past whose Mom has excluded him from her holiday plans with her new husband. Paul's only adult ally is Mary (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), the cafeteria manager and chef, who's in mourning for her son, recently lost in Vietnam.

It likely won't astonish you to learn that as this little group clash, and then get to know each other and their backstories better, bonding and compassion start to develop between them. Working from a script by David Hemingson, Payne shades this process carefully, generating genuine and plausible warmth without slipping into holiday-movie sentiment. Not only is the film set in 1970, Payne seems to be trying for the modest, unassuming style of a Hal Ashby or James Bridges flick of that period, right down to the opening rating card and production company logos (even the movie's trailer was crafted as a throwback to this time).

The Holdovers is perhaps a bit on the poky side; little in the story gives much urgency to the pace. But the actors bring their connections to life. Giamatti's initial bile is highly entertaining and his gradually rising empathy is touching. Tall and tousle-haired, with a look of stricken perplexity on his handsome features, Sessa has a pleasing, callow awkwardness as Angus. Carrie Preston gives the movie a lift in each of her couple of scenes as a sunny-natured school administrator. And as Mary, Randolph steers around any hint of overt pathos, and as a result makes the character heroic.

LITTLE MORE THAN PUMPKIN, AND LESS THAN KIND

A safe and Happy Halloween to all from Less Hat, Moorhead!

The Wife gave me a Dracula PEZ and Frankenstein Peeps...

On another note: Recently I found this rather badass hornworm in the backyard...

As I escorted him into the alley behind the house, I was startled by how muscular his flexing against my thumb and finger was...

It made me sympathize with poor Ida Lupino, attacked by the giant hornworms in 1976's The Food of the Gods...

A couple of other odds and ends:

I was very saddened to hear that Matthew Perry has passed on. He was possibly the funniest of the Friends, but I also loved him as White House Counsel Joe Quincy, one of the increasingly mythical-seeming "good Republicans" that The West Wing liked to optimistically depict. Nobody could deliver a line like "Sure, we'd never want to compromise the aesthetic integrity of the Steam Pipe Trunk Distribution Venue" with the effortless aplomb of Perry. A real loss.

RIP also to Richard Moll, best known as towering but sweet-natured bailiff Bull on Night Court. He was one of the first celebrities I ever interviewed, for the Erie Times-News back in the early '80s when he was in town for a convention or something. Very nice guy. In his MeTV obit, he's quoted saying that when he was auditioning for Night Court and they asked if he would shave his head for the part, he said "I would shave my legs for the part!" He told me the same story back in the day.

Here's a sample of the Halloween decor at Chez Moorhead...

And finally: Let's go D-backs!

THE BEAR MINIMUM

In theaters this weekend:

Five Nights at Freddy's--The Freddy's in question is Freddy Fazbear's, a defunct and long-shuttered pizza joint and game arcade of the Chuck E. Cheese or Peter Piper sort. Our down-on-his-luck hero Mike (Josh Hutcherson) accepts a job as a third-shift security guard there. Before long, he finds that the gone-to-seed animatronic animal characters featured in the place may still have some murderous life in them.

This chiller is based on a popular 2014 video game that has given rise to a series of sequel games, novels and other spin-offs. I've never played the games or read the books, so I can't remotely say if the movie is faithful to its source material, or if it should be.

On its own terms, it's okay at best. Like Cocaine Bear from earlier this year, it has a nice '80s throwback flavor in its look, editing and music. Director Emma Tammi manages a few amusingly staged sequences, and Freddy and the other animal characters, products of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, have the repellent horror of deliberate, calculated cuteness gone decrepit. They're legitimate additions to the stable of Universal Monsters.

But the script, by several hands including Tammi and game creator Scott Cawthon, feels overcomplicated. The premise, right down to the title, would seem to suggest a simple approach: A guy stuck in a bummer job, alone in a creepy setting, finds things getting creepier and creepier and more and more perilous every night, until at last he knows he's not imagining it; the cartoony animal robots really are trying to kill him. Five acts of rising tension.

Instead, Mike is given flashbacks concerning a family tragedy which he's still trying to solve via dream therapy--which means sleeping on the job--as well as a little sister (Piper Rubio) he's trying to keep custody of. This backstory is genuinely poignant and disturbing, to the point that it makes the overt spookhouse horror stuff seem trivial and unfrightening. It's like a Goosebumps movie was mixed with a grim Dateline NBC episode.

The smallish cast is capable; Rubio is a sweet presence as the sister and Matthew Lillard gets some laughs as the guy who offers Mike the job. It should be said that the former child and teen actor Hutcherson (from the Hunger Games flicks and The Kids Are All Right) shows impressive chops in this grown-up lead. He brings Mike an understated but believable aura of lifelong anguish. For me, again, he was too potent for the fun, silly shocker that this should have been.

FLOWER MOON SHADOW

Opening this weekend:

Killers of the Flower Moon--In the 1870s the Osage Nation settled on a large reservation in northeastern Oklahoma consisting of land thought to be of little value. But in the late 1890s, it was discovered to be sitting on an ocean of oil. Because the Osage had retained mineral rights to the land, by the early '20s they found themselves to be the wealthiest people, per capita, on the planet.

It need hardly be said that opportunistic white folks moved in fast to snatch this bounty through a variety of schemes, perhaps the vilest being the practice of marrying into an Osage family and then murdering the spouses and other heirs. Because the case was eventually broken by the nascent FBI, the story was briefly dramatized as one episode in The FBI Story, Mervyn LeRoy's 1959 chronicle (and whitewash) of the Bureau, starring James Stewart.

Martin Scorsese's account is not so brief. Scripted by Eric Roth and Scorsese from David Grann's 2017 book, the director's three-hour-plus Killers of the Flower Moon is an epic nightmare, solemn and heartbroken yet charged up with a fierce and sweeping vitality. The style feels different from his previous work, yet somehow it's still unmistakably a Scorsese picture.

The focus here is on Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI vet who arrives in Osage country to work for his uncle, the cattle rancher William King Hale (Robert DeNiro). Ernest soon marries an Osage woman named Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and starts a family with her. A dull, malleable sort, Ernest seems to genuinely love Mollie, yet all the while they're married he's secretly serving as a thuggish henchman for the sanctimonious Bill Hale, who condescendingly professes love for the Osage while conspiring in the deaths of Mollie's mother and sisters and others in the community. Eventually and inevitably, Mollie also becomes a target of Bill's plans.

Killers is shot in chilly shades of gray and sepia by Rodrigo Prieto, edited by Scorsese's longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker and moved along by a brilliant, pulsing score by Robbie Robertson, to whose memory the film is dedicated. Yet despite the presence of these cronies, this isn't business as usual. Scorsese doesn't give us the kinetic flashiness of his gangster sagas here. There's no darting, antic camerawork, no wall-to-wall narration.

But this isn't a staid historical drama either; the tone is feverishly immediate and chaotic, almost hallucinatory at times, and there's a tinge, especially in the scenes between DiCaprio and DeNiro, of deeply grim comedy. Scorsese's comic edge doesn't distance us from the horror, either, as perhaps it could be accused of doing in Goodfellas or Casino. The murders and other violence are presented with an angry bluntness, as nothing but sordid, wasteful and evil.

Essentially, what Scorsese gives us here is a vision of life in hell, not just a hell of butchery and menace, though this is amply depicted, but of the fractured spirit and toxic guilt generated by racial terrorism and piracy. The agony of this life is reflected in the superb performances of DiCaprio and the serene, gravely beautiful Lily Gladstone. DeNiro is at the top of his form as the genially satanic Bill Hale, and the enormous cast includes fine turns by Tantoo Cardinal, William Belleau, Cara Jade Myers, Brendan Fraser, Scott Shepherd, Sturgill Simpson, Katherine Willis and Barry Corbin, among many others. John Lithgow appears as a prosecutor; he's always welcome but gets less of a chance than usual to flex here.

There's also a strong supporting performance by Jesse Plemons as Tom White, the Texas Ranger turned G-Man who led the BOI (later FBI) investigation. The case was an early success for the Bureau, depicted here as a largely unknown agency at the time (Grann's book is subtitled The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI), and Plemons, speaking softly and politely but firmly from under his Stetson, lightens this bleak and grueling movie's mood just enough to get us through; we at last feel a dawning of hope for justice and salvation. He shows up just in time.

One more note: I was expecting, and hoping for, the usual afterword before the end credits, explaining what ultimately became of these people. Kudos to Scorsese for coming up with a more creative and witty way to present this information. It's an ingenious coda to this great and terrible American tale.

SPORT CLIPS

Check out my quick article, online at Phoenix Magazine, about this year's edition of the Peoria [AZ] Film Festival, today through October 22...

...featuring, along with some intriguing new stuff, a series of favorite sports movies.

LOST ANGELA

Our dog Othello was a fan of Angela Lansbury.

My mother-in-law would often dogsit him, and she, like many people of her generation, was a devoted viewer of Murder, She Wrote, Lansbury's series that ran from 1984 to 1996 on CBS, and for decades thereafter in syndication. So she and Othello would sit happily on the couch together and enjoy the adventures of mystery novelist and small-town slueth Jessica Fletcher.

This is how many people will remember Lansbury. But her remarkable career is far from defined by the hugely successful Murder, She Wrote.

Sometimes the death of a famous person who has attained great age can be oddly more startling than that of a younger celebrity. This was the case, for me, with Lansbury, who passed on last October; today would be her 98th birthday. She was around so long, and so vitally, that she had become almost a symbol of geriatric health, agency and relevancy. She was on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in 2005, and was still acting as recently as Mary Poppins Returns in 2018; she also had a cameo as herself in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. It seemed like she might outlive us all.

A native of London, Lansbury came to the U.S. in her teens when her family fled the Blitz. She studied at the American Theatre Wing, then made her movie debut, at the age of 17, in support of Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer in 1944's Gaslight. Her role as a shifty maid in that film got her the first of three Oscar nominations. The second came a year later, when she played Sybil Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

Many other film and television roles followed, from The Harvey Girls to The Court Jester to The Long, Hot Summer to Bedknobs and Broomsticks to Death on the Nile, but in the '60s and '70s Lansbury ascended to legendary stardom on the Broadway stage, with leads in productions of Mame, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd and others. She won a total of six Tony Awards, from eight nominations. In the  '90s, she provided the voice of Mrs. Potts in Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast, probably the role by which younger audiences know her the best, and sweetly sang the title song.

An impressive career by any standard. But none of the above achievements are what I think of first when I think of Angela Lansbury. No, for me her most memorable role is the one that brought her a third Oscar nomination, in one of my top ten all-time favorite movies: that of  Eleanor Iselin, mother of poor Laurence Harvey's hapless brainwashed Raymond Shaw in John Frankenheimer's 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate.

Lansbury's Eleanor is the true power behind the title character, buffoonish McCarthy-esque Red-baiting Senator Johnny Iselin (James Gregory), and she's more than willing to conspire with Communists and to sacrifice her son Raymond's mind and heart to steer Johnny to the White House. Her performance is hard-edged and scary and despicable, but also strong, intelligent and witty, with a touch of wry lechery toward her husband and an unsavory Oedipal undercurrent toward her son.

It's strange to think that the same Angela Lansbury who played Jessica Fletcher and Mrs. Potts could also have created one of the great villains in American movies. But watch The Manchurian Candidate and you'll see the iron behind the sweetness.

UNBELIEVABLE

Opening in theaters this week:

The Exorcist: Believer--Two 13-year-old girls go missing one day after school. Their panicked parents, single Dad Victor (Leslie Odom, Jr.) and evangelical couple Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz) frantically search their Georgia suburb, but three days later the girls turn up alive.

These early scenes of this sixth Exorcist follow-up are tense and gripping, convincingly dramatizing a dread familiar to parents, but also deploying a few well-executed cheap scares. Soon after the girls reappear, they start showing unmistakable signs of demonic possession. The nonbelieving Victor is skeptical at first, but before long he has enlisted the aid of Chris McNeil (the radiant Ellen Burstyn), who went through a similar experience with her daughter Regan up in Georgetown half a century earlier.

Act Two of Believer is mostly devoted to a rather ecumenical exorcism, with Catholics, Evangelicals and what appear to be Voodoo practitioners all participating, among others. This section falls flat. We get all the obligatory stuff--levitation, projectile tummy trouble--but none of the elliptical yet grueling intensity that the late William Friedkin brought to the 1973 film. Put simply, the second half of the movie just isn't very scary.

Part of what made the first film so potent was its harsh, judgy small-c conservative Catholicism. It seemed to suggest that Chris McNeil's worldly career and single life left the door open for the devil to take her daughter. The new film almost gets this right; it implies that Victor's daughter's yearning to communicate with her dead mom gives the demon a foothold, as Regan playing with a Ouija board invited in "Captain Howdy" back in the original.

But the kum-ba-yah sensibility of Believer's interfaith exorcism weakens this blood-and-thunder atmosphere. Don't misunderstand; I agree, on the whole, with the sentiments expressed in this movie's mild little homilies about faith and community and hope. But I don't think they're the most effective way to scare an audience. Decades ago I had a girlfriend, a lapsed Catholic, who found the original Exorcist so terrifying that she could barely stand to have it mentioned (I used to tease her by imitating the demon's voice).

The new film lacks the ruthlessness that could create that sort of reaction. Nor did I really find it plausible that these staunch traditionalist faiths could practice this archaic rite in harmony. As soon as anything went wrong, wouldn't they start blaming each other?

The director, David Gordon Green, works from a script that he wrote with several hands including Danny McBride. They were the team behind 2021's Halloween Kills, another honorable but unsuccessful revival of a classic horror franchise. The cast here is capable, with one standout--that splendid, always reliable warhorse Ann Dowd as a nurse with a relevant past who befriends Victor.

This much more, if little else, can be said for Believer: although the insolently absurd yet imaginative spectacle of John Boorman's 1977 Exorcist 2: The Heretic has its fascinations, Believer can probably still claim to be the best of the Exorcist sequels. But that's a low bar.

FETCH A FALLING STAR

Opening in theaters this weekend:

PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie--"They're cute little pups that drive around in cars. I know it sounds weird, but just go with it." So says a character near the beginning of this second PAW Patrol feature, by way of describing the premise.

More specifically: The little pups live in palatial digs in "Adventure City," where each of them specializes in some form or other, vaguely breed-appropriate, of public safety. Chase the German Shepherd is a police dog; Marshall the Dalmatian is a firefighter; Skye the Cockapoo pilots a rescue helicopter; Bulldog Rubble does construction and demo; Zuma the Lab does water rescues, mutt Rocky handles recycling, and Liberty the Dachshund, introduced in 2021's PAW Patrol: The Movie, has a gift for training the members of the Junior Patrollers, a trio of Pomeranians. Ryder is the human boy who leads the gang.

I'll confess that moment-to-moment, I have some trouble keeping them all straight in my mind; the characters don't, for me, have terribly distinct personalities. But to their intended audience, the pups have been beloved figures since the Canadian TV cartoon, developed by Keith Chapman of Bob the Builder fame, was launched on Nickelodeon in 2013.

If you thought it was weird before, wait until you get a load of Mighty Movie. The story takes a sci-fi/fantasy twist this time that puts it more in the realm of a Marvel or Power Rangers flick than a Boy-and-his-Anthropomorphic-Dogs story. Drawn in from space by a mad scientist villain with a magnet, a meteor crash lands in Adventure City, and fragments from it give the pups superpowers. Some of these seemed counterintuitive to me. Marshall, for instance, gains the power to conjure fire from his paws; shouldn't he command water or flame-retardant foam or something?

Anyway, as with the first feature, The Mighty Movie is not an experience to seek out if you don't have a five-year-old who requires it, but it's not disagreeable to sit through if you do get stuck at it. The dialogue has funny, self-aware touches, including another fourth wall gag about the film's transparent merchandising strategy. The voice cast includes some name players, including Serena Williams, Kristen Bell, James Marsden, Chris Rock and most notably Taraji P. Henson as the rather chic, green-haired mad scientist.

Ron Pardo is also back, as Humdinger, Adventure City's narcissistic former mayor. I thought perhaps the first film was using the character to reference a certain real world public figure; my suspicion was strengthened in Mighty Movie when Humdinger, sensing public hostility toward him, remarks "This is why I hate free and fair elections."

Humdinger's entourage of cats seems intended as further evidence of his villainy. A suggestion: In the spirit of inter-species equity and amity, perhaps in the next PAW Patrol movie a heroic kitty should be introduced to the team. Cats have paws too, after all.

DUMBDOG MILLIONAIRE

Opening in Phoenix today; wide on October 6:

Dumb Money--As with 2015's The Big Short, there were plenty of twists and turns in this movie that my finance-challenged brain had to struggle to keep up with. Also like The Big Short, this chronicle of the weird January 2021 boom in GameStop stock is waggish fun. But it's easier to root for the heroes here, because, as least as this movie tells it, they're ordinary people sticking it to rich hedge fund jerks rather than rich hedge fund jerks sticking it to all of us.

GameStop, a Texas-based video game retailer that had been a mall mainstay since the '80s under one name or another, had been in decline since the rise of online game purchasing. The COVID pandemic seemed like the death knell for the company, and hedge fund short sellers were moving in.

Dumb Money's focus is on Keith Gill (Paul Dano), a small-potatoes analyst and broker from Brockton, Massachusetts. Gill had a day gig at MassMutual but spent his evenings in his basement making funny YouTube videos on investing, and posting on other social platforms that I don't understand. He believed that GameStop stock was undervalued, and his enthusiasm helped to cause an explosion in its price that made the short sellers sweat.

But the "dumb money"--apparently that's what hedge fund folk call individual small investors--was sweating too, of course. The movie, directed by Cruella's Craig Gillispie from a script by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo (based on Ben Mezrich's's book The Antisocial Network), jumps around among a variety of GameStop investors who were riding the wave with Gill, and resisting the temptation to sell as a matter of economic principle, to the horror and bafflement of their families and friends. These include America Ferrera as a struggling Pittsburgh hospital worker and single mom; Talia Ryder and Myha'la Herrold as Texas college students besotted both with the investment and with each other, and Anthony Ramos as a GameStop employee who buys in.

I presume that some or all of these people are fictional "composites" representing the online rabble who collaborated on the short squeeze. They're nicely played and sympathetic. The millionaire and billionaire vultures are based on real players: Seth Rogen as Gabe Plotkin and Nick Offerman as Ken Griffin and Sebastian Shaw as Robinhood's Vlad Tenev and Vincent D'Onofrio, extra-creepy, as Steve Cohen. A scurvier bunch of parasitical cruds you'd have a hard time finding. Shailene Woodley is touching as Keith's supportive wife, Kate Burton and Clancy Brown are believable as his parents, and Pete Davidson is a perfect fit as the idiot brother.

Driven forward by a lot of stately, foul-mouthed hip-hop on the soundtrack and tricked out with split-screens and montages, Dumb Money cruises along absorbingly and, despite copious comedy, with an ambiguous tension--I wanted to see the hedge fund guys squirm, but I was anxious for the everyday people when they didn't sell. They, after all, need the money. The incidental backdrop of COVID adds to the unnerving atmosphere; the masks and empty malls and streets create an almost sci-fi flavor at times. It may be the first pandemic period piece.

Although the GameStop boom had fans as diverse as Elon Musk and AOC, I was never sure, watching this movie, that I wasn't falling for a simplistic interpretation of the events--the little guys banding together to take the big boys, who have rigged the system so only they can win, down a few notches. Is there another side here? I mean, no doubt GameStop was undervalued, but was it really that undervalued? Did this amount to a whimsical, sentiment-based pyramid scheme, even if it was motivated altruistically rather than as a con job?

One of the posters for the film reads "THE TOP 1% THINKS YOU'RE DUMB." No doubt they do, and as far as finance is concerned, in my case they aren't wrong. So if there's another, more negative, legitimately dumb side to this story, I'm not smart enough to see it.

In any case, I'm not prepared to shed a tear for the hedge funds. Despite the hit some of them took, in the end, the well-connected big investors appear to have pulled strings and avoided ruination; the film resigns itself to the game being rigged. But it also suggests that the big boys will think twice before they ignore the dumb money again, and it claims this as a triumph. As the movie presents the story, it's all but impossible not to invest in it--invest emotionally, that is.

PHANTOM VENICE

Opening today:

A Haunting in Venice--Kenneth Branagh returns as Hercule Poirot in this gothic, which he also directed. It's 1947 here, and the vain, dapper sleuth with the elaborate mustache has retired from detective work in gradually reviving postwar Venice. He's pulled back into the game by his old acquaintance, mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), who asks him to debunk, if he can, a supposed clairvoyant (Michelle Yeoh) at a seance after a Halloween party in a beautiful but decaying palazzo.

The seance is intended to conjure the ghost of the daughter of the opera singer hostess (Kelly Reilly), drowned the previous year, but the palazzo has a sinister history beyond this; it's supposedly cursed and haunted. The nonbelieving Poirot naturally is buying none of it, but his skepticism is rattled by the unsettling events of the evening, which include an attempt on his own life.

This is Branagh's third lavish outing as Agatha Christie's elegant gumshoe, after Murder on the Orient Express in 2017 and Death on the Nile in 2022, all three of them scripted by Michael Green. Though Green borrows a few memorable elements from Christie's unusually nasty 1969 novel Hallowe'en Party, Haunting is essentially an original tale; in his amusing preface to the tie-in paperback re-issue of Hallowe'en Party (published under the movie's title), Green preemptively braces himself for the lambasting he's expecting from the hardcore Christie faithful for the movie's liberties.

I've been a Christie reader since high school, and can only say that much as I enjoy her work, I certainly don't regard it as sacred and inviolate. So Green and Branagh's alterations--made with the blessing of the Christie estate--bothered me not in the least. These include changing Ariadne Oliver, Christie's apple-addicted semi-autobiographical alter ego, into an American as a showcase role for Fey, who's a nervy, mischievous hoot and a fine foil for Branagh's sober Poirot. At one point she lets out a scream that could make Fay Wray proud, too.

The rest of the cast--including Reilly, Jamie Dornan,  Riccardo Scamarcio, Camille Cottin, Emma Laird, Ali Khan and Jude Hill, the kid from Branagh's Belfast--all commit to their skulking and lurking and exchanging of pregnant glances, and Yeoh really lets it rip as the medium. The sumptuous, shadowy palazzo setting, designed by John Paul Kelley and shot by Haris Zambarloukos, is properly both gorgeous and claustrophobically oppressive.

I'm generally very dense at whodunits, but about three-quarters of the way through A Haunting in Venice, I correctly guessed who the culprit was. Still, there were plenty of cunning revelations in the story that I didn't see coming. I don't think the mystery is as central to this picture, anyway, as the woozy, nightmarish atmosphere. In many ways this film seems to owe less to Christie than to Don't Look Now, Nicolas Roeg's great Venetian fever dream of 1973.

Despite the sly, enjoyable old dark house trappings, Branagh and Green decline to tip the material into overt camp. Green's literate dialogue--there's even a quick throwaway cribbing from Love's Labor's Lost--allows Branagh to deepen Poirot's response to the situation into a faith-versus-reason internal conflict, without letting the movie slide the other way into pretentiousness. I found Branagh's performance moving; he presents a convincing long dark night of the soul.

FETA-CCOMPLI

Now in theaters:

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3--This chapter of the jovial family comedy has the distinction of being the first to contain an actual Greek wedding. That is, it has a wedding that happens in Greece, not just among Greek-Americans in Chicago.

Toula (Nia Vardalos) and her WASPy husband Ian (John Corbett), hitched in the original 21 years ago, here lead their rowdy clan on a trip back to the old country. They've been invited to a reunion in the tiny hometown of Toula's beloved late father Gus (Michael Constantine), up a series of switchbacks on a mountainside overlooking the sea.

There they meet variously dour and/or wacky relatives and locals in the gloriously beautiful but depressed and underpopulated village. Much food and booze is consumed, and family secrets are revealed. Among these is the love between a handsome young cousin and the radiant Syrian immigrant he wants to marry.

None of these conflicts feel terribly stressful. Written and directed by Vardalos, Big Fat Greek 3 moves forward in long montages of travelogue footage interrupted at times by short, disjointed bursts of dialogue. It's not suspenseful and it's only occasionally funny, but I enjoyed it anyway; it's about familial and generational issues that connect with most of us, especially as we get older. And it's a relaxing hour and a half vicarious vacation in scenery that looks (onscreen) like paradise, in the company of an agreeable cast, and driven along by a soundtrack full of irresistable Greek songs.

Along with Vardalos and the good sport Corbett, the returning players include Louis Mandylor, Joey Fatone, Gia Carides, Maria Vacratsis and, very briefly, Lainie Kazan, all sweetly and amusingly disappated since the first film, along with the apparently indestructible Andrea Martin as the unshakeably self-impressed Aunt Voula. Elena Kampouris returns from Big Fat Greek 2 as Paris, Toula and Ian's unfathomably college-age daughter.

The wild card character is Victory, the town's ebullient self-proclaimed mayor and booster, puckishly played by the Greek theater actress Maria Kotselou. She's quite a find.

ALIENATED

Now in theaters:

Jules--Ben Kingsley plays Milton, a widower pushing 80. A mild-mannered guy, he putters around his small Pennsylvania hometown, making inane proposals at city council meetings, tending the flowers in the backyard of his beautiful home, and resisting the efforts of his fretful daughter (Zoë Winters) to make him get a checkup.

Then one day Milton finds that a flying saucer has crash-landed in his backyard, wiping out his azaleas and shattering his birdbath. Soon the craft's silent alien occupant, dubbed Jules, is staying in the house, watching TV and eating apple slices between shifts repairing the saucer.

Initially, Milton doesn't make a secret of any of this. He calls 9-1-1; they think it's a prank. He mentions it to the guy at the supermarket (while buying apples) and it gets back to the daughter, who assumes it's a sign of early onset dementia.

That's the best joke in this wistful, extremely low-key sci-fi comedy--the idea that elderly people are so ignored in our society that an alien visitation could go unnoticed if it happened among seniors. Eventually two ladies (Harriet Sansom Harris and Jane Curtin) from the council meetings learn about and befriend Jules, and advise Milton to secrecy, but there's little urgency to the situation.

Kingsley starts out very deadpan and reserved; it may be that Milton is being careful to hide a cognitive decline. But the performance opens up as the story progresses, and both Jules and the two ladies draw out Milton's perceptive, hospitable warmth.

Harris and Curtin are both lovable as lonely, bored women who know they are, just by virtue of longevity and experience, a resource that's being wasted. Curtin even gets to sing "Free Bird." Under the prosthetics, stuntwoman Jade Quon brings a stoic gravity and woebegone sweetness to the bluish-white, earless, hairless, black-eyed Jules. Standing next to the saucer, wearing an old Spuds Mackenzie t-shirt, this visitor is an absurdly endearing figure.

Director Marc Turtletaub and screenwriter Gavin Steckler seem to have a little trouble figuring out how to end the movie; the last few scenes have a fitful, uncertain quality. But overall, this is a small gem--sort of an E.T. for the other end of the life span.

BIGFOOTNOTES

 Now streaming:

Summoning the Spirit--A young couple living in a beautiful, isolated house in the forest find themselves neighbors to a hippie commune led by an obsequious creep.  Emotionally vulnerable after a recent heartbreak, the couple (Krystal Millie Valdes and Ernesto Reyes) are increasingly drawn in by the insufferable cultists. Meanwhile, off in the distance, a glowering Bigfoot keeps an eye on things from the woods.

Bigfoot has had a long if largely low-rent history in movies, from 1972's redoubtable The Legend of Boggy Creek to the amusing 1976 Creature from Black Lake to the big-studio Harry and the Hendersons in 1987, and on TV from Bigfoot and Wildboy on '70s Saturday mornings to the "Messin' With Sasquatch" commercials for Jack Link's jerky. The best Bigfoot movie may have been a startling, too-little-known 2007 chiller by David Blair and Adam Pitman called Paper Dolls, later re-released as The Sighting. But the micro-budgeted Summoning the Spirit, directed by Jon Garcia from a script he wrote with Zach Carter, can probably lay claim to being the weirdest Bigfoot flick yet.

It has an undeniable atmosphere of unease, however, deriving more from the human than from the cryptid element. The movie is hampered by a sluggish pace--pauses between the actors' lines big enough for the creature's foot to fit through--and a frustrating vagueness, but the growing sense of unsavory menace generated in the group scenes within the repellent yet somehow plausible cult is quite distressing. 

Jesse Tayeh is effectively loathsome as the leader, and Isabelle Muthiah makes an impression as an intense, seductive flower child. When you watch their overtures to the hapless couple, you're likely to think that you wouldn't tolerate these people for ten seconds, but of course, in life, politeness and group compliance really might overrule wisdom.

Toward the end, after the cult's connection to Bigfoot is explained--sort of--the movie finally downshifts all the way into horror and some rather half-hearted gore, and much of its eerie mood is dissipated. But the final reveal is sort of sweet.

CASING THE JOINT

It was a bucket list moment for Your Humble Narrator this past week; I was given a ride on the Oscar Mayer Frankmobile!

The vehicle was formerly known, of course, as the Wienermobile; it's been redubbed to showcase the company's All-Beef Franks. Predictably, I found considerable squealing online that the name change is somehow "woke," calls to stop buying Oscar Mayer products, etc.

Anyway, Frankmobile pilots extraordinaire Ann and Allie were most congenial, telling tales of Ridin' the Dog from Madison, Wisconsin to Jacksonville, Florida to San Juan, Puerto Rico! From here in Phoenix, they were off to new adventures in Huntington Beach, California.

They even presented me with my very own whistle!

I think these two should be the stars of a Gen-Z-era anthology TV road series, a la Martin Milner and George Maharis in Route 66. Maybe it could be called 'Kraut 66?

THE BOUNDING VEIN

Opening this weekend:

The Last Voyage of the Demeter--Just when you might think that there wasn't another drop of cinematic blood to be squeezed out of Bram Stoker's great vampire novel, we get this travel saga of the neckbiter's cruise from Transylvania to England. Smooth sailing it isn't.

From a script credited to Bragi Schut, Jr. and Zak Olkewicz, this is based on a single, brilliant chapter from Stoker, the log of the increasingly desperate Captain of the Demeter, which carries mysterious coffin-like boxes of Carpathian soil in her hold, bound for someplace called Carfax Abbey in England. The Captain's frightened crewmen claim someone else is aboard, and they also keep disappearing.

Schut and Olkewicz embellish the brief material considerably, especially in the addition of a philosophical-minded ship's doctor (Corey Hawkins), an unwilling stowaway (Aisling Franciosi) and a little boy (Woody Norman), the grandson of the Captain (Liam Cunningham). The dialogue is unabashedly melodramatic--"We have found where the Devil sleeps!"--and director André Øvredal, the Norwegian behind the terrific Trollhunter and the occasionally macabre Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, gleefully churns up old-school atmosphere too.

There's something to be said for these sorts of hokey theatrics, and the movie has its merits, including handsome production design by Edward Thomas and cinematography by Tom Stern, and a strong, bombastic score by Bear McCreary. But it isn't as much fun as it should have been.

For one thing, it tips its hand early, revealing its source in the prologue. Admittedly, many people who would go to this movie probably know, going in, the secret of the cargo's identity. But for anyone who doesn't, there's one layer of mystery gone; we also know the crew won't be successful in stopping the menace.

Eventually we get a look--maybe too good a look--at the unwelcome passenger (impressively mimed by Javier Botet), here depicted as a very spectral, bald, pointy-eared, pointy-toothed Nosferatu-style goblin with wings. In himself, he's a pretty cool monster, but he doesn't really fit the context of the legendary story; it's hard to imagine him charming the ladies in black tie and cape.

Worse yet, when it becomes clear that few if any of those aboard will survive the trip, our interest wanes. Even though Hawkins is a sympathetic everyman hero, after certain characters (and animals) met grisly fates, I admit my emotional investment in the story's outcome was mostly scuttled.