DIAL, THOUGH YOUR HEART IS ACHING

Opening this weekend:

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny--The first sound we hear is the ticking of a clock. Thus the fifth and valedictory entry in the series about Harrison Ford's globetrotting, whip-cracking archaeologist establishes Time, and its persistent shadow, Mortality, as the theme.

The movie starts with a lengthy and rather splendid act set in France in 1944, with Ford made young via some impressive CGI alchemy. Indy and a brilliant sidekick (Toby Jones) are snooping around a mountain stronghold, trying to filch back some artifacts from the plunder of retreating Nazis, among them a coldly businesslike SS Colonel (Thomas Kretschman) and a reptilian physicist (Mads Mikkelsen) who identifies the title gadget, a clockwork contraption built by Archimedes himself that supposedly can be used for time travel.

From here we fast forward to New York in the late '60s, where Indy is a grumpy and bereaved old man on the verge of retirement from teaching, separated from his beloved Marion, annoyed by the Beatles blasting from the hippie pad neighboring his cluttered apartment. His goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who he affectionately refers to as "Wombat," pulls him into one more adventure, chasing the Dial from Tangiers to the floor of the Mediterranean to Sicily. The unrepentant Nazi prof, who went on to help NASA get to the moon, is looking for the Dial too, with his murderous goons.

The first Indy flick, 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, is a favorite of mine; tight and witty and curiously modest, it genuinely felt like a Republic serial of the '40s, maybe directed by William Witney. It was also built around a terrific Jewish joke, with its Nazis arrogantly supposing they could co-opt cosmic Jewish power unscathed. The lavish, overstuffed sequels were enjoyable enough, but all of them fell far short, for me, of that snappy, surefooted original.

Dial of Destiny falls short of the original too, but even so it may be the best of the sequels. It's the first that Steven Spielberg didn't direct; the duties here went to the always proficient James Mangold, who was also among the many screenwriters. And for the first half--the 1944 scenes, and the stuff in '60s-era New York, with Indy on the run against the backdrop of war protestors and astronaut ticker-tape parades--it's sensational.

The trouble is that, like so many contemporary blockbusters, it's outrageously overlong, at least thirty or forty minutes longer than it really needs to be. As MacGuffins go, the Dial doesn't have the same stirring imaginative power and poetry as the Ark, and its implications get the narrative in a little over its head in the later acts. For a story that starts with urgent ticking, the movie manages time very poorly.

Still, there's a lot to like here. Ford is wonderfully on point. He seems to have grown into the curmudgeonly manner that's always been part of his persona, but he's also emotionally present to a surprising degree, truly connecting with the other characters. Mikkelsen is a top-notch, quietly megalomaniacal villain, and Toby Jones, Antonio Banderas and John Rhys-Davies could all have warranted more screen time as Indy's allies, as could Shaunette Renée Wilson as an exasperated U.S. intelligence agent. Ethann Isidore is likable as Helena's street urchin pal.

Maybe best of all is Waller-Bridge's Helena--headlong, fearless, smiling, eyes full of self-delighted mischief. She even shows a hint or two of lewdness, welcome in this largely asexual series. It would be okay with me if they gave her more movies.

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken--At the very least, one must admit that this is a take on teen angst we haven't seen before. Ruby and her family are Krakens, the fearsome tentacled sea creatures of Nordic lore, but they're passing themselves off as humans; Ruby's Mom has a good career as a realtor in a seaside town. Ruby is under orders never to get wet in the ocean, lest her giant Kraken-ness be revealed to her classmates. This means she's forbidden to go to prom, as it's being held on a boat.

Soon enough Ruby (voiced by Lana Condor) learns that her Mom (Toni Collette) and her Grandma (Jane Fonda) are giant Kraken as well, and their backstory includes a feud with the mermaids. Indeed, the story is sort of The Little Mermaid in reverse, with many of the same psychological and sexual subtexts at work. And like an earlier DreamWorks Animation effort, Shrek, the snarky shots at Disney are amusing, in an inside-baseball way.

This movie has a glitzy, primary-color sensibility, like a fever dream after bingeing on My Little Pony and Powerpuff Girls and eating too much cioppino. And it feels about that ephemeral. But it's a sweet-natured fish tale, and undeniably original.

CRATER LOVE HATH NO MAN

Opening in theaters today:

Asteroid City--In Golden Age of Television black and white, a stentorian TV host (Bryan Cranston) tells us that we're about to see a documentary about the writing and staging of a new play. The drama in question is titled Asteroid City, and it's set in a tiny desert community near the impact crater from an ancient meteorite. It's the Cold War mid-'50s in this, Wes Anderson's latest; mushroom clouds blossom in the distance from the occasional nuclear bomb test.

Soon we shift to color, and to a stylized milieu that looks like Midcentury travel-poster art of the southwest. A large roster of characters assembles in Asteroid City, many of them for the convention of the Junior Stargazers, an organization of youthful science prodigies and inventors.

At the center of this ensemble, insofar as it has a center, is a bereaved young photographer (Jason Schwartzman) who hasn't yet broken the news to his kids that their mother has passed on; he's one cabin over from a movie star (Scarlett Johansson) with whom he bonds, as do his son and her daughter. Along with these familial tensions, the gathering sees military intrigues, scientific experiments, quarantine and even alien close encounters.

I really wish I liked this movie better than I did. Anderson is a one-of-a-kind comedic artist, and his 1998 Rushmore is one of my favorite films of the last thirty years. His debut feature Bottle Rocket is a gem as well. Most of his subsequent films have been brilliant but uneven; the best of them, like The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, have been flawed near-masterpieces, dazzlingly imagined and acted but marred by heavy-handed touches of sour violence and labored narrative conceits.

All of this is regrettably at work in Asteroid City. It has a beautiful look, the title setting is beguiling, there are patches of funny dialogue (by Anderson and Roman Coppola) and strong visual gags. The cast is without peer for current Hollywood prestige, glamour and chops. The star power is almost too abundant to name; check the poster above for the listing. It's the sort of bunch that only Woody Allen used to be able to command. But all of this, alas, falls short of overcoming Anderson's misguided habits.

Most ruinous is the frame story, about the play. It looks great, but it distances us from the main story while adding no perspective on it that I could see, is of minimal amusement in itself, and diffuses the later part of the picture into hazy anticlimax. But even within the Asteroid City story, Anderson strikes a curiously flat tone. Deadpan is a wonderful comic technique, unless everybody's deadpan, and then it just becomes monotonous.

A couple of the actors, like Liev Schreiber, Tilda Swinton, Hope Davis and Steve Carrell, manage to escape the Jack Webb Sound-Alike Contest and texture their performances a bit. And Tom Hanks, as Schwartzman's dour father-in-law, somehow finds a tone that's fully in keeping with the movie's style but also seems entirely naturalistic. Hanks seems to be indestructible.

I'M RADIO ACTIVE

A couple of weeks ago Your Humble Narrator enjoyed chatting with Mark Brodie of The Show on KJZZ...

...about summer blockbuster season, and the future of the blockbuster at the multiplexes. It aired yesterday; give a listen.

THE PEOPLE UNDER THE SCARES

In theaters this weekend:

The Blackening--Eight attractive African-American college friends gather at a fancy cabin in the woods for a Juneteenth reunion. After a short stretch of playing spades and drinking over-sugared vodka Kool-Aid, they quickly find themselves at the mercy of a maniac, forced to play a twisted board game called "The Blackening" with their lives as the stakes. The game is focused on black identity; the questions involve black history and culture, and the group is forced to single out a victim on the basis of which of them is "the blackest."

The director is Tim Story, who helmed the Ride Along movies. Here he's working with a really well-crafted, intricately funny script by Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins (based on a short by the sketch-comedy group 3Peat) that teases the long and intense love-hate relationship between black audiences and horror movies. It does this less subtly, perhaps, than Jordan Peele's films do, but with a solidly higher ratio of out-loud laughs.

Story generates a fine ensemble buzz with his excellent cast, all of them unknown to me except for SNL veteran Jay Pharoah, and Diedrich Bader as the token "Ranger White." The comedy outweighs the terror here, although the masked, crossbow-wielding killer is a creepy presence. Overall, this movie is the meta-slasher send-up that Scream only thought it was--truly witty, and truly about something.

The Flash--This feature vehicle for the venerable DC superhero has a terrific opening. It involves [spoiler!] a collapsing hospital building, and our harried hero's efforts to corral a maternity ward's worth of newborns plummeting from a window. There's an inventive panache to the multi-tasking gags here that Buster Keaton himself might have appreciated. But the exhilaration of this set piece isn't reflected in what follows.

Launched in 1940 as Jay Garrick with a Mercury-like helmet and rebooted, with the winged cowl, as Barry Allen in the '50s, The Flash can move so fast that he can not only dodge bullets or cross a continent in seconds, he can literally do what Cher only wishes she could do: turn back time. In this story, Barry (a charmingly callow Ezra Miller) decides to go back and prevent the murder of his mother (Maribel Verdú) which of course screws up the space-time continuum. As a result he must team up with a slacker version of himself from a different time-stream to undo the mess he's made, and deal with multiple versions of iconic characters, including Michael Keaton enjoyably returning to the role of a rather Howard Hughes-like Bruce Wayne/Batman.

If all this sounds to you a lot like the "Multiverse" from over at Marvel, I can only tell you that it seemed that way to me too, and not to this movie's benefit. Despite some playful uses, the Multiverse's bottomless stockpile of do-overs and variant replacement characters was already getting on my nerves in the Marvel flicks, and this DC spin on it has the same effect: a dilution of the dramatic stakes.

There's some amusement, I suppose, in the many cameos by various versions of the characters, but it's a dorky, narratively inert amusement, more like a Renaissance masque or pageant than an epic. It feels like fan service, of a particularly OCD kind; like Charles V winding and re-winding his clocks, it's a futile effort to synchronize different versions of pop myths that should simply be enjoyed in their wonderfully irreconcilable diversity.

PANGOLIN FOR ATTENTION

Opening today in limited release in theaters in New York, L.A. and several other cities (not Phoenix); also streaming on demand...

The Secret Kingdom--A troubled family moves into a beautiful old manse. The early scenes here have an unsteady feel; the period detail (it's supposedly the early '60s) is somehow unconvincing, and the atmosphere almost seems closer to that of a '70s scary-house movie, like Burnt Offerings or The Amityville Horror.

But then the two kids (Sam Everingham and Alyla Browne) drop through the bedroom floor into a fantasy world called the Below. A tribe of armored talking pangolins immediately sends them on a quest across this land of chatty animals and Maxfield Parrish ruins to acquire parts of some magical thingy or other that will save the realm from some sort of shapeless evil. Something like that.

After that unpromising real-world beginning, this Australian family film, written and directed by Matthew Drummond, starts to take hold, with images of considerable fanciful splendor. Along with the pangolins, who have an endearing habit of dropping to their sides and curling up when they feel threatened, Drummond gives us a clockwork oracle operated by a tarsier-like creature, a mechanical lightning bug, a freaky army of clockwork-doll soldiers, a bickering two-headed pack rat turtle, a lair of giant talking gauntlets and an impressive dragon with a T-Rex-like body, among other striking, whimsical imaginings.

It's reminiscent of 1984's The NeverEnding Story and of the Narnia flicks, but The Secret Kingdom nonetheless has its own invigorating flavor. The kids--Everingham as the fretful brother; Browne as the carefree sister--are agreeable, and the film rings a touching twist on the tiresome "Chosen One" prophecy trope from stories of this sort; I appreciated that the ultimate criteria for a Chosen One here was simply friendship.

JANE'S ADDICTION

Yesterday I had the opportunity to interview the extraordinary Jane Goodall, about the new IMAX movie in which she stars, Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope...

Check out my short article about it, online at Phoenix Magazine.