STATUE; GESUNDHEIT

Hope everyone has had a safe and happy Veterans Day, and thank you to all veterans for their service!

Before this day was called Veterans Day, it was of course known as Armistice Day, and specifically marked the end of World War I; it was changed, in the U.S., to a day honoring all veterans in 1954.

A month or so ago I was in Washington, D.C. for The Day Gig, and with a few hours to kill I visited the recently-dedicated World War I Memorial, in Pershing Park not far from the White House. Incredibly, D.C. didn't have a general monument to that war until now. I took a few pictures that do it absolutely no justice at all...

Titled A Soldier's Journey, it's the work of figurative purist sculptor Sabin Howard. His technique is magnificent and the horrors of war are emotionally depicted, but the piece could be seen as perpetuating a square-jawed romanticism about war along with the horror. It's a masterpiece, but it made me feel ambivelent.

Wandering around nearby I also saw this statue of late D.C. Mayor Marion Barry...

I lived there in 1990, when Barry was arrested for drug use in an elaborate sting operation; I can only imagine how we would have laughed at the idea that there would ever be a statue of him in D.C. But he became Mayor again in 1995, proof of a much less ominous sort than what we're going through currently that sometimes there are, indeed, second acts in American politics.

A little farther away I found this statue of Jose Artigas, father of Uruguayan independence...

Coming across stuff like this is one of the pleasures of that town. At least, it is if you're nerdy.

GRANT US PEACE

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Heretic--One rainy day two American LDS missionaries, young women, go to the door of an ugly, rambling house in Scotland. The resident is what would be called, in door to door sales, a premium lead: he's expressed interest in the product.

The gent in question, Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), solicitously invites the young ladies in out of the rain. They explain that, for safety's sake, they aren't allowed to go inside without a woman present, but he charmingly insists, saying that his wife will join them once she's finished baking a blueberry pie in the kitchen. So Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) follow him into the oddly cheerless front sitting room--it looks like the waiting room of a funeral parlor--and he locks the door behind them. But they can smell blueberry pie, so they aren't too alarmed, yet.

Needless to say, the two of them aren't going anywhere anytime soon, except farther into the house. This shocker, co-written and co-directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods of A Quiet Place, belongs to the horror subgenre in which one or more women are held prisoner by a maniac. Earlier examples include The Collector (1965), with Terence Stamp and Samatha Eggar, Crawlspace (1986) with Klaus Kinski tormenting Talia Balsam, the notorious Human Centepede (First Sequence) (2009) by Tom Six, or Room (2015) with Brie Larson. Heretic has echoes of all of these, but it's highly original all the same.

Although it seems to safe to safe that there's a sexual subtext to the motivations of all the captors in these movies, the overt reasons vary. In The Collector, for instance, there's a class element; in Crawlspace there's a Nazi guilt angle, and so on. In Heretic, the crazy derives from religious studies.

Mr. Reed, you see, is a fanatical questioner of all religious "iterations," and debunker of the idea that any of them represent the "one true religion" as they claim to. As the facade that his guests are free to leave whenever they like gradually but steadily melts away, he lectures them, in the manner of a raffish college professor, about the innumerable links and parallels between modern mainstream faiths and ancient religious traditions, using pop culture and popular music as analogies.

It would be a rather agreeably stimulating summary of Comparative Religion 101, if they weren't being held hostage and all. Sister Paxton even makes a brave attempt to debate her self-appointed pedagogue, but while there may be arguments against Mr. Reed's theses, the ones Beck and Woods place in her mouth seem thin and non-sequitur, which, in context, makes her desperation all the more touching. Mr. Reed, however, remains affably unmoved.

The heart of Heretic is Grant. I've always been a fan, but I've especially enjoyed his work as a comic villain in recent years in stuff like Paddington 2, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. His Mr. Reed is a good deal darker than any of these, to be sure, but the performance is still based in the diffident, apologetic, wryly sheepish Grant persona familiar from his romcom work. It's one of the best roles he's ever had, and you can feel his pleasure in it.

His two young costars are also strong. Chloe East, hilarious and adorable as the girlfriend in Spielberg's The Fabelmans, gives Sister Paxton some of the same gushy avidity. Balancing her is Sophie Thatcher as Sister Barnes, of more worldly background and thus more reserved and alert. Thatcher also sings a haunting cover of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" over the end titles.

Eventually Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton are offered a "Lady or the Tiger" type of choice, and find themselves in the basement. From here, Heretic goes full-on gothic, and gory, and the blueberry pie re-enters the tale. And as so often when thrillers tip over from literate tension into gruesome grappling, it seems to shrink the movie a bit.

Not enough, however, to diminish the value of these performances, or of the rising dread, shot through with chilling wit, that infuses the film. The sexual politics would seem to have some slight relevance at this moment in our history, too; Mr. Reed's practice of what he considers the One True Religion appears to be devout, zealous mansplaining.

By the way, as we left the press screening I attended in the Valley, the marketing company handed us small blueberry pies, custom made for the evening by Süss Pastries here in Phoenix. I took mine home and passed it on The Wife, who proclaimed it good. I can't say, however, that Heretic particularly gave me an appetite for blueberry pie for a while.

RING MAN

Even though I'm not the world's biggest Tolkien fan, for some reason I keep thinking about this today.

K

Time again for my official ask. Against my usual habit on this page, I'll try to keep it short:

If you haven't already, please cast your vote for Kamala Harris for President of the United States, and for Tim Walz for Vice President. I also ask you to vote for as many down-ballot Democrats as you can.

But if for whatever reason you simply can't do it, can't bring yourself to vote for a Democrat, or for a woman, or for a person of color, or whatever it is that's holding you back, then I ask you, for your own sake as well as for the country's and the world's: Don't vote. Seriously. Don't put that on yourself. I genuinely believe that, whatever happens, you'll be glad later if you didn't help try to send the Republican candidate back to the White House, or for that matter to empower his enablers.

Beyond that, there's not much else to say. Even if you're a staunch conservative, if you can look at the behavior and words of the Republican candidate, at any point but especially in the last couple of months, and believe that putting him anywhere near power is remotely a good idea, than our views of reality are too divergent for discussion to be helpful.

I think that Kamala Harris is an excellent candidate who stands a very good chance of being a capable President. But even if you have reservations about her, the choice between the candidates, for a reasonable person, isn't really a choice. This isn't the difference between, say, a gourmet dinner and fast food; it's not even the difference between a gourmet dinner and garbage. It's the difference between an edible meal (Harris/Walz) and toxic waste (the Republican candidate).

I spent the last two weekends canvassing here in Phoenix...

My paltry efforts amounted, I think, to pretty much the definition of The Least I Could Do. But I want to give a shout out to my terrific partners each of those days: Megan, Sue Ellen, Noah and Tim, and to all the volunteers who do this thankless, demanding work for weeks, months, years. I'm in awe of you.

EVERYTHING EVERY TIME ALL IN ONE PLACE

Opening wide in the multiplexes this weekend:

Here--A spot in a living room in an upscale eastern Pennsylvania suburb--that's the title locale of this latest from Robert Zemeckis. It's our static vantage point for, essentially, the whole movie, looking across the room through a picture window that offers a view of the big brick colonial-era house across the street. 

We see the view there before it was a living room--long, long before. As in, we see it during the extinction event that ended the Cretaceous Period, sixty million years ago. We see it as a woodland make-out spot for indigenous lovers (Dannie McCallum and Joel Oulette), and as a burial site. We see it as part of a dirt road leading up to the aforementioned historic manse, which once was occupied by William Franklin (Daniel Betts), estranged Loyalist son of Benjamin (Keith Bartlett).

After the house is built, we get glimpses of the lives of its early 20th-Century inhabitants, like an enthusiastic aviator (Gwilym Lee) whose wife (Michelle Dockery) frets about his flying. They're followed by a whimsical inventor (David Fynn) and his sexy flapper wife (Ophelia Lovibond). This guy is trying to perfect a reclining chair; his working title for it is "Relax-y-Boy." And we see the house's early 21st-Century occupants, an African-American family; Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird are the parents, and Anya Marco-Harris is the beloved housekeeper.

But the movie's main focus is the midcentury family that takes the place over after WWII: Dad (Paul Bettany), a combat veteran and a seething, disappointed functional alcoholic, his sweet, quietly unfulfilled wife (Kelly Reilly), and his oldest son (Tom Hanks), an aspiring artist. The son gets his beautiful girlfriend (Robin Wright) pregnant, so there goes both art school and her college dreams. They move in with the parents, and stay for decades.

So the movie packs in a lot of history (and prehistory), a lot of longings fulfilled and unfulfilled, and cultural references ranging from the Spanish flu to the Spanish Inquistion sketch from Monty Python. But I'll admit that when I realized we were going to be parked in one place for the whole thing--I went in not knowing this--I panicked for a moment.

I needn't have worried. Zemeckis has always been a skillful showman, and while the audacious experiment of Here is by no means an unqualified success, it certainly never bored me. The script, by Eric Roth and Zemeckis, is based on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, and Zemeckis employs comic-book techniques like overlapping inset panels to interweave the various timelines and bounce them off each other thematically. It's an impressive and confident exercise in narrative, and it does carry a cumulative emotional punch.

There are downsides, however. The fixed point of view means that the actors tend to seem a bit far away from us a lot of the time, and when they are brought up into the foreground it somehow feels forced. Zemeckis may have been worried about this distancing too; Alan Silvestri's music, though pretty, is ladled on a bit thicker than it should be, as if to telegraph what we're supposed to be feeling.  

Much more jarringly, though, the people in Here often have an ersatz, CGI "Uncanny Valley" look to them. The leads were taken all the way back to teenaged through some sort of real-time computer tech, and while the results are tolerable, they aren't perfected in realistic terms.

It must be admitted, however, that Hanks and Wright transcend this limitation, especially Hanks. The other actors sometimes feel like cyber-phantoms, but Hanks is so vibrant that he can project his humanity right through the program. And after Apollo 13, Castaway, Captain Phillips and Sully, it's also a relief to see the poor guy stay put.

BABBITT STEW

Closing this Sunday, November 3, in Washington, D.C. is Babbitt, Joe DiPietro's stage adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel.

None other than Matthew Broderick plays the title role in the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production, which I was lucky enough to see a couple of weeks ago when I was in D.C.

Strange to think that Ferris Bueller is old enough to play George Babbitt. We might tend to picture the role as the province of actors like Guy Kibbee, who played it in a 1934 movie version, or the grinning, wolfishly genial Edward Andrews, who played the character...

...in the 1960 movie version of Elmer Gantry.

But time marches inexorably on, and carries even an antic high school hustler like Ferris into the realms of complacent bourgeois middle age. And Broderick, who was born five days before I was in 1962, makes the role his own with a sort of dreamy, disassociated voice, as if he's halfheartedly playing at being an adult.

Even though it's in the third person, the book depends so much on describing its hero's sometimes barely conscious internal narratives that I wondered how it could really make the transition to the stage. DiPietro was way ahead of me. He locates his play in a library--the lovely, pristine set is by Walt Spangler--where a variety of attractive actors in contemporary clothes, in a variety of ages and races, are browsing.

The cast eventually starts reading aloud from Babbitt. Then a return cart is pushed onstage, with a large object on top, under a sheet. Said object turns out to be Broderick as we first see George Babbitt, rising from bed in the morning, brushing his teeth, having his breakfast. As George's day progresses, the readers, or "storytellers," assume the other roles. The device ingeniously allows for a diverse cast, and it allows them not only to narrate but sometimes to comment, omnisciently and often ironically, on the action. 

I was very keen to see this show, as I've been fascinated by all things Babbitt in recent years. In the early 2020s, I noticed an old Signet Classics edition of the book...

...in one of those little take-one leave-one libraries in an Italian ice place my family and I frequent, and reflected that I had never read the celebrated yarn, even though I love Lewis, and like so many people was astounded at the terrifying prescience and relevance of his 1935 It Can't Happen Here.

So I picked Babbitt up. A year or so later, I read it.

Even those who have never read Babbitt may have some idea of what it's about. The book was a sensation when it first came out in 1922, to the extent that the title character's name became a byword for a person of George's type, and his sort of behavior became known as "babbittry." 1945's Ziegfeld Follies even includes a duet between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly to a song by George and Ira Gershwin called "The Babbitt and the Bromide," in which two gents exchange the same mindless pleasantries in all of their meetings, separated by decades, the only variations being costumes and dance styles.

The book itself, however, is the chronicle of two years in the life of George Babbitt, a real estate man and loyal Republican, Presbyterian and civic booster in the midwestern city of "Zenith." A husband and father, George is a happy consumer--proud to own "the best of the nationally advertised brands"--and an unquestioning social conservative and conformist.

Lewis follows him in painstaking detail as he goes through his days, exchanging commonplaces with colleagues and lecturing his son, venturing into public speaking and local politics, throwing parties angled at social climbing and going on camping trips and business trips. A shocking crime committed by his best friend shakes him up; he has an affair and eventually even flirts with socialism, but he never really grows much as a person. 

What an extraordinary work. I had a funky reaction to it, though; I'm guessing I can't be the only person who ever felt this way about it. I can't think of one episode in the book that didn't ring true, and still relevant, to me. It's amazing and appalling, for instance, when you read the scene of the racist talk between Babbitt and the guys in the smoking-car and you realize that you could set the same scene today, one hundred fucking years later, between a bunch of awful old white guys talking among themselves, and you wouldn't need to change a word. (This scene is omitted from the play, by the way.)

But as to the general method that Lewis uses to observe his hero, I had to wonder whether, if you followed anybody around--certainly including and maybe especially me--on our daily routines and our little adventures, and accurately reported our nattering internal monologues, you wouldn't get largely the same results: the same platitudes and evasions and self-justifications. Sure, the political and social values would shift a bit, but using the banality of Babbitt's inner life as Exhibit A in your indictment of his specific values seems specious to me. It had the odd effect of making me feel a little protective of old Georgie against the snarky God's-eye-view narration with which Lewis describes him. Or is it possible that was the intention? In any case, to paraphrase Flaubert, "Georges Babbitte; c'est moi."

The stage version had some of the same effect on me; listening to a D.C. audience chuckle condescendingly at George's hypocrisies, I had to wonder how many of us, if any, saw ourselves up there, at least a little bit.

By the way, I was astounded by another detail about the book's influence. Apparently J.R.R. Tolkien, of all freaking people, was among its admirers; he claimed that the word "Hobbit" derived from "Babbitt" because "Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place." I'd love to see a sequel to Lewis in which Babbitt has to infiltrate a dragon's lair.

SWEET SISTINE

Opening in theaters this weekend:

Conclave--Ralph Fiennes plays the Dean of the College of Cardinals, who has the unenviable job of presiding over a contentious election to replace a recently deceased Pope. With liberal, conservative and shifty middle-of-the-road candidates and their factions jockeying, the sequestered old fellows can't arrive at the needed two-thirds majority.

Stanley Tucci is a liberal who insists, demurely and unconvincingly, that he doesn't want the gig, but is willing to take it and will embrace a broad spectrum of progressive reforms if elected. Sergio Castellitto is a cheerfully reactionary, Italo-centric Cardinal who still resents Vatican II. John Lithgow, playing the middle, is all wounded innocence when told that there's a bad report about his last meeting with the late Pontiff. Then there's the mysterious Cardinal (Carlos Diehz) of Kabul, who shows up out of nowhere, having only recently been appointed by the deceased Pope unbeknownst to the College.

This tale of an improbable papal ascendancy almost challenges Fr. Rolfe's Hadrian VII  for far-fetched wishful thinking. How possible, let alone plausible, any of it is I can't say. Nor do I much care. High ecclesiastical dramas are fun. Movies ranging from the naïvely pious Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) to the campy Monsignor (1982) to the wild and woolly Angels & Demons (2009) have all taken advantage of the splendor and grand theatrical ceremony of the Vatican, and the intrigues of its sumptuously outfitted habitués.

So too does Edward Berger, the German director of Conclave, adapted by Peter Straughan from the 2016 novel by the Brit Robert Harris. The movie starts a little slow, but very soon, abetted by the cinematography of Stéphane Fontaine and the fevered strings of Viktor Bertelmann's score, it becomes an exciting spectacle, swept along by Berger in a manner reminiscent at times of the great silents; he gives us carefully composed tableaux of clerics skulking about shadowy stairwells, or Eisenstein-ish masses of nuns under umbrellas, surging like tides into high-angle shots.

But Berger's eye on the settings also cuts through the superficial lushness and opulence to find an oppressive cheerlessness. The marble-paneled hallway into which Fiennes and his fellow Cardinals emerge from their austere dorm rooms during the conclave's lockdown has an institutional dreariness.  The figures in Michelangelo's Last Judgement glower down in reproach upon the Cardinals as they vote. Somehow the most hopeful presence in the film is a rather intrepid turtle.

Berger's skill is impressive, but it's the acting that makes Conclave lively and juicy, and ultimately even moving. Fiennes, always good at suffering, has rarely been so woebegone, or so wryly likable. Tucci and Lithgow could do roles like these in their sleep, and they're both crisply on point. Lucian Msamati and Brian F. O'Bryne are strong as a Nigerian Cardinal and as the Dean's sheepish aide, respectively. And as a large-and-in-charge, baleful-looking nun, Isabella Rossellini's role is almost wordless early on, but then she brings off her one big moment so flawlessly that her punctuating gesture wins applause.

REDIALING

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Arizona Theatre Company's production of Dial M for Murder...

...which plays through November 3 at Tempe Center for the Arts. I was fascinated to see ATC's production, which is revised for a contemporary audience by playwright Jeffrey Hatcher.

I've always had a soft spot for this show, having played Inspector Hubbard in it back in the '80s at the Peak'n Peek Dinner Theatre in Clymer, New York, directed by the late lamented Ben Agresti. It wasn't necessarily the best show I ever did, but it was certainly one of the most fun.

GIRL POWER

Check out my quick article, online at Phoenix Magazine...

...interviewing Vince Kelley, left, who plays Blanche in Golden Girls: The Laughs Continue. The touring show continues through October 27 at Herberger Theater Center in Phoenix.

CABINET POST

If the blessed, long-delayed drop in Valley temperatures isn't enough to get you in an October kind of mood, maybe a spooky movie can. Playing SUNDAY ONLY at 3 p.m. at Phoenix's Orpheum Theatre is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, one of the seminal cinematic creepshows, with live musical accompaniment.

Robert Weine's 1920 saga is sometimes called the first horror movie. It probably isn't, but it's a very early one, and it would be hard to find a much more influential work for the genre. This German nightmare offers iconic horror tropes--the mad scientist, the plodding enslaved monster carrying the beautiful heroine in his arms, the angry mob of villagers--probably for the first time.

The not-so-good Doctor, played by Werner Krauss, is a shabby, troll-like mountebank who works a sideshow, exhibiting a pathetic somnambulist, Cesare, played by Conrad Veidt, later memorable as the Nazi major in Casablanca. Cesare normally resides in the titular coffin-like cabinet in a perpetual snooze, interrupted only when Caligari wakes him up to feed him...

...or send him on some nasty errand. For instance, near the beginning the Doc is treated rudely by a town official when he applies for an exhibitor's license; the next morning the man is found murdered in his home. Courtesy pays.

Although these and other melodramatic devices undoubtedly seemed less corny and cliched when the movie was released, more than a century ago, than they do now, they aren't really what gives this dreamlike flick its charge. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari's true power derives from the weird visual atmosphere Weine and his designers, Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Rohrig, bring to almost every shot through boldly stylized, expressionistic sets and camera angles, externalizing a skewed, neurotic mental state and imposing it on the movie's settings. It can mess with your head.

If you've never seen the film, or never on a big screen, the Orpheum show, featuring live music by Tetra String Quartet, is a terrific opportunity. Tickets range from $11 to $20. For details go to orpheumphx.com

HOPPY DAYS

This week The Day Gig took Your Humble Narrator to Washington, D.C. for a couple of quick, eventful days. I found myself giving a short speech at the German Embassy...

...and hanging out with the likes of Robert Edsel, author of The Monuments Men...

(Courtesy of Monuments Men and Women Foundation / © David Trozzo, All Rights Reserved)

I also made it to Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of Babbitt...

...a remarkable new stage adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel, with Matthew Broderick in the title role.

Best of all, I got to hang out and chow down with my awesome nieces and their husbands...

For Taco Tuesday, I was taken downtown to Oyamel Cocina Mexicano, where I partook of...

...a taco filled with Oaxacan grasshoppers, aka chapulines. It was okay at best. I've since read that chapulines are said to have a tangy flavor; I couldn't detect it, or any flavor, really. It was like eating a taco full of empty popcorn kernel husks. Luckily I was able to follow it with two other tacos, one lengua and one pescado, both scrumptious.

SKETCHER ON THE RISE

Opening here in the Valley today; wide October 11:

Saturday Night--The evening in question is October 11, 1975, and we're at 30 Rock in Manhattan, watching the final rehearsal for the very first episode of Saturday Night Live. Out on the sidewalk an NBC page (Finn Wolfhard) is trying to scare up an audience for the show, but passersby aren't interested in free tickets for this moment in broadcast and cultural history. Up in the studio, the camera darts and weaves through the chaos backstage and onstage as the minutes tick down to 11:30 p.m. in something approximating real time.

Through most of the movie, director Jason Reitman follows the frantic pipsqueak Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) as he scurries from one absurd crisis to another. These range from getting a live llama up from the loading dock to getting bricks laid on the stage while union stagehands refuse to help to getting John Belushi (Matt Wood) to sign his contract.

Belushi is immobilized by anger at having to wear the silly bee costume, until he's taunted by his cocksure castmate and rival Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), at which point Michaels must keep the two men from pummeling each other. There are also executives and affiliates for Michaels to schmooze, with the diplomatic help of his long-suffering, appeasing Programming Executive Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), and technical difficulties to solve, and sketches and musical numbers to be cut; the earlier rehearsal ran three hours. And Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun) would like somebody to write a script for his Muppets to perform. 

And so on. At heart this is an old-school "hey kids, let's put on a show" movie, with Michaels in the Mickey Rooney part. But like it or not, this isn't just any show. Even in its formidable best vintages, Saturday Night Live has never been the finest sketch comedy show on TV. But it has almost certainly been the most directly and widely influential, and Reitman's movie makes the case that its very existence was a tenuous fluke, borne of a squabble between the network and Johnny Carson over weekend airings of reruns of The Tonight Show.

The script, which Reitman co-wrote with Gil Kenan, feels romanticized, but it also ingeniously finds ways to incorporate references to classic bits that came on later episodes, like Julia Child's kitchen accident or Garrett Morris singing "Gonna Get Me a Shotgun." When these and countless other iconic gags are spun past us in such a concentrated way, we realize the degree to which SNL has inhabited our generational psyches.

Not everything works, but like the show it's celebrating, Saturday Night barrels along even when jokes fall flat, largely through remarkable acting. LaBelle, from Spielberg's The Fabelmans, is willing to play Michaels as a bit of a pretentious, self-important young ass, which goes a long way toward holding sentimentality at bay. It helps you buy into the hero's determination to get the show on, both because he believes his vision could be great and because he knows this night might be his only chance to take over the asylum.

Rachel Sennott strikes a strategically seductive tone as writer Rosie Shuster, the insufficiently-recognized wife of Michaels. The huge supporting cast includes impressive work by Dylan O'Brien as a handsy Dan Aykroyd, Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal, Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman, Kim Matula as an alluring Jane Curtin, Lamorne Morris nailing the voice and body language of Garrett Morris (no relation!) and Ella Hunt coming about as close as a mortal could to capturing some of the enchantment of Gilda Radner. Some of these work better than others, but none are embarrassments.

Amusing in smaller turns are Matthew Rhys as George Carlin, J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle, Jon Batiste (who also wrote the score) as Billy Preston, Tracy Letts as Herb Sargent, Willem DaFoe as forbidding NBC exec David Tebet and Robert Wuhl as director Dave Wilson. There's also a startlingly chameleon-esque double role; see if you can spot it.

With Batiste's insistent jazz pushing Michaels along through the halls and dressing rooms, the film often recalls Inarritu's Birdman, from 2014. But I found Saturday Night much more enjoyable than Birdman; it's Birdman with a heart, and without the sour, unearned cynicism.

I'm predisposed to like show-biz stories, and I well remember watching, at 13, that baffling but entertaining first "cold open," between Belushi and headwriter Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey). So Saturday Night admittedly had an advantage with me. But it wouldn't have held me without Reitman and his cast's skillful execution of Hawksian overlapping dialogue and manic ensemble hum. SNL has turned many of its performers into stars, and this film could do the same.

GREENDAY

Happy October everybody! Your Humble Narrator must confess that I am all too vulnerable to seasonal marketing for this, my favorite month. Recently I tried...

...Fanta's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice tie-in pop, Haunted Apple, and also...

...Hostess Limited Edition FrankenCakes, "with SCREAM filling!"

The FrankenCakes tasted, to me, exactly like a regular, tasty cupcake. Perhaps the SCREAM filling would have had more creepy impact if, like the frosting, it was green. As for the pop, at least it commited to the macabre conceit; it had an elusive flavor that I might describe as "very sweet, but moldy." I finished one bottle but I suspect I am unlikely to buy a second.

GOOD COPPOLA, BAD COPPOLA

Opening this weekend:

Megalopolis--The buzz on this long-cherished, finally realized project by Francis Ford Coppola is that people either love or hate it. But you may find that duality stifling. I kind of hated this movie, and I also kind of loved it.

It's an epic with sci-fi, fantasy and surreal elements, set in a city called "New Rome." New Rome looks exactly like New York, if New York was shot in exquisitely burnished metallic tones by the Romanian cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., and if the men wore '90s-George Clooney haircuts. Against this backdrop, Coppola develops a story that very loosely parallels the Cataline Conspiracy of 63 B.C., as chronicled by Sallust.

Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) still wants to take over Rome, but in this version he's a visionary architect and urban planner who wishes to create a new utopian downtown full of futuristic, even surreal amenities, made possible by a building material called Megalon. His rival Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) has, one might say, more modest ambitions for his town.

Trouble brews when Cicero's beautiful daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) goes to work for Cesar, and despite a dark secret involving Cesar's late first wife, he and Julia begin to fall in love. Into this basic conflict, rafts of supporting players and subplots and sub-subplots and digressions are interwoven, on the whole pretty chaotically.

The movie opens with a breath-quickening sequence in which Cesar stands on the ledge of the New Rome version of the Chrysler Building, leaning out, tempting gravity and stopping and starting time with the power of his will. The movie that follows seems to be Coppola trying to do the same with his art, and struggling with the awareness that time can't be suspended indefinitely.

It's potent start, but after that Megalopolis splutters and flails for quite a while, with short, scattered, over-edited scenes that fail to draw us in, or sometimes even to communicate what's happening and who's who in relation to who. A half-hour or so in, I was starting to squirm, thinking this could be a really punishing disaster. Very gradually, however, a story begins to take shape that we can invest in.

The intent seems to be satirical, but Coppola's tone comes across as too earnest, even naive, for any real bite. The writer-producer-director sees our society as in decline, and he wants to have "A GREAT DEBATE ABOUT THE FUTURE." This seems like a worthy goal; our current debates about the future seem pretty lacking in greatness, with one side regarding the future as a place where Jesus will come back and then all the elitists will be sorry, and the other side regarding the future as a place where maybe we'll get people's pronouns right.

Coppola certainly has broader, more robust, more soulful hopes for the future than these. But his utopian ideals are unspecific, beyond a sort of technocratic optimism. Cesar's "Megalon" (no relation, apparently, to Godzilla's old rival) is a conveniently vague plot device, and much of what Coppola shows us as evidence of our decline are lots of nubile young women partying too hard.

All this and more undoubtedly makes Megalopolis seem dubious, even campy. It's the kind of grand, glittering cinematic folly that we rarely see any more, because perhaps regrettably we don't have as many auteurs with the same level of delusional hubris as we did half a century ago. Yet it's hard to shake the sense that, at bottom, Coppola is right about contemporary society; that it is time for us to pull our collective heads out of our asses. And his sense of spectacle can get to you. His style here recalls everything from Orson Welles to Abel Gance to Koyaanisqatsi to Things to Come, and after he settles down, his movie begins to get exhilarating.

In no small part, undoubtedly, this is due to the uncommonly glamorous and vibrant cast. The roles are grievously underwritten--Dustin Hoffman in particular makes a fine, energetically weaselly entrance, but then his part seems unceremoniously truncated. But these actors inhabit their pageant figure roles and flesh them out with their own personalities.

Driver is excellent, again showing his ability to be eccentric and vulnerable while retaining the commanding presence of a leading man, and Esposito's pensive, wary eyes make a perfect, puny-spirited contrast to Driver's virility. Emmanuel is able to keep Julia from becoming too much of an idealized love object despite Coppola's gauzy presentation of her.

Shia LaBeouf has a juicy turn as Cesar's cousin and enemy Clodio, and Laurence Fishburne is a reassuring presence as Cesar's chauffeur, who also serves as the movie's Greek Chorus narrator. As Cesar's rich uncle Crassus, Jon Voight, despite his real-life political leanings, gives what seems like a gleeful parody of a certain recent president from the Big Apple, and it's fun to see veterans like Balthazar Getty, James Remar, Jason Schwartman, D.B. Sweeney and even Talia Shire among the supporting players.

It's possible that the strongest performance in the movie, however, is that of Aubrey Plaza, in the role of Wow Platinum, a TV financial reporter who has snaked her way into the lives of both Cesar and Crassus. Plaza isn't subtle as the lewd, scheming Wow, and from the beginning the character refuses to get buried by Coppola's grandiose conceptions. Every time she gets up to some juicy mischief, the audience comes happily to life.

BOT WAIT THERE'S MORE

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Transformers One--The Hasbro toy line debuted in 1984, when I was in college; I knew the Transformers only slightly, through my nephews. As with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or the Power Rangers or Pokemon, I never had a personal sentimental attachment to them.

For the uninitiated: The Transformers are elegant anthropomorphic robots capable of folding themselves up into vehicles: a truck, a car, a tank, a drone. Or, are they sleek vehicles that can unfold themselves into robots? It's all rather Zen, but it was also brilliant toy marketing; not only was it two toys in one, it took kids beyond the childhood power fantasy of having a truck or a tank to being a truck or a tank.

Along with the toys, the franchise has spawned comics, cartoons, novels and several previous feature films, some animated, some live action. I haven't seen them all, but the couple I did were overstuffed and silly, though they also offered some gorgeous imagery.

This new animated feature is an origin story for the two central figures in the Transformer pantheon, Optimus Prime, leader of the good-guy Transformers, and Megatron, leader of the bad-guy Transformers, or Decepticons. It follows the pair, then called Orion Pax and D-16, as young mining robots, without transforming powers, on their home planet of Cybertron.

Pax is forever snooping around old archives, looking for clues to the whereabouts of some McGuffin that will give him and his overworked comrades equality. D-16 resents his oppression at least as much as Pax does, but he's less of a daring, chance-taking sort. Eventually they end up, along with a couple of other allies, on an adventure on the planet's bleak and mercurial surface.  

I couldn't always follow all this, not just because I was unfamiliar with the references but because the movie, directed by Josh Cooley from a script by several hands, is presented in the Michael Bay manner, with scenes so rapidly cut that you sometimes have to take the dialogue's word for what's happening onscreen. That said, it's a great-looking movie, not quite as beautiful as the recent Ultraman: Rising, but close. Along with the strangely passive harlequin faces of the robots, there are lovely planetscapes and herds of cybertronic deer and vehicles that generate their own roadways and tracks before them as they sail along and other magical sci-fi flourishes.

It has a voice cast of stars, too; along with Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry in the leads we also hear from Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Jon Hamm, Steve Buscemi and Laurence Fishburne. And somewhere amidst the fan service, along with a hard-to-miss Christ allegory, the plot probably carries a pretty nuanced and complex parable of radicalization and the manipulation of media.

ASS THE WORLD TURNS

Opening Friday in Scottsdale:

My Old Ass--18-year-old Elliot lives on an idyllic Canadian cranberry farm, but can't wait to head to college and start her life. She confesses her feelings, successfully, to her summer-long crush, and then she and her friends camp out on an island and take 'shrooms.

Under this fungal influence, Elliot, played by Maisy Stella, finds herself sitting next to the Old Ass of the title, her 39-year-old self, played by Aubrey Plaza. Younger Elliot is eager to hear dish and glamour about her future, but Older Elliot is cagey; she just advises her to avoid anybody named Chad. Soon after, Younger Elliot meets a nice young man while swimming. Guess what his name is.

The wish to go back and offer guidance and comfort to your younger self is a human perennial, perfectly expressed in the Faces anthem "Ooh La La." My Old Ass, written and directed by Megan Park, works the premise ingeniously by taking it, one might say, ass-backwards. Thus we see the story from the younger heroine's point of view; that is, from the version of her who, being young, knows everything and is unlikely to consciously accept an older person's counsel. Yet we also see Older Elliot's healthy influence on her behavior.

Stella carries the movie sweetly as Younger Elliot, with a suggestion that she's trying to present as more daring and sardonic and above-it-all than she really is. Her supposed mortification at her provincial circumstances is a less than convincing pose. In the much smaller role of Older Elliot, Plaza's guarded, pained manner complements Stella's performance amusingly, and credibly.

Percy Hynes White, as the amiable Chad, is the other standout of the small cast. The settings--the film was shot in Muskoka Lakes, Ontario--are breathtaking, and the movie glides very agreeably through its brief running time. There's one sequence, involving a Justin Bieber song, that's truly hilarious, but otherwise My Old Ass feels, really, a little mild and undemanding.

This, paradoxically, may be what's most striking about it. Elliot identifies as gay, you see; the crush with whom she makes out early on is a (slightly) older woman. Park doesn't make a big deal about this, and she's almost equally nonchalant when Elliot finds herself attracted to Chad and begins to question her long-held assumptions about her own sexuality.

In the real world, of course, and in this day and age, this probably really does reflect normal teen development. But I couldn't help thinking about the tizzy that this would have stirred up from a teen flick even ten years ago, much less twenty. Like 2018's Love Simon, the sunny, breezy My Old Ass may be most remarkable for how unremarkable it is.

HAUNT GENERATOR

Opening this weekend:

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice--To the list of Gen X-era movie favorites getting very belated sequels, the sweetly macabre 1988 comedy Beetlejuice may now be added. You may remember the title character (spelled, outside of the title, like the red giant star in Orion) is a manic ghost who specialized in exorcizing the unwelcome living from haunted houses. Like Clive Barker's Candyman, he could be conjured into the world of the quick by speaking his name aloud three consecutive times, after which he would wreak havoc.

It's one of the signature roles of the great Michael Keaton; probably his greatest comedic triumph. The film also featured a breakthrough performance by Winona Ryder as the endearing, self-consciously "goth" heroine Lydia, and was a showcase for the visual and comic style of director Tim Burton. It's unquestionably a classic of '80s popular cinema, and it gave rise to a TV cartoon, video games, comics, a long-running stage show at Universal Studios theme parks, and eventually a Broadway musical that put Representative Lauren Boebert into an uncommonly good mood.

None of which necessarily means, of course, that a sequel was required. But one has been made, directed by Burton, starring Keaton, Ryder, and Catherine O'Hara, and scored by Danny Elfman. It has, in short, the stamp of authenticity, and this many years later it's a bit surprising that the original makers have managed to infuse, if anything, even more craziness into it.

Ryder's Lydia, now widowed, is still able to see ghosts, including the occasional startling glimpse of her old nemesis. She's the host of a paranormal TV show produced by her intolerable boyfriend (Justin Theroux). Relations between Lydia and her teenage daughter Astrid (Jenny Ortega) are tense, but circumstances bring the two of them and Lydia's stepmother Delia (O'Hara) back to the old house in picturesque small-town Connecticut. Before long, the boundary between our world and the Kafkaesque, DMV-style bureaucratic afterlife has been breached, and the title ghoul is trying to insinuate himself back into the picture.

What ensues, strung along a script by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar from a story by Seth Grahame-Smith, are more of Burton's elaborate yet non-sequitur slapstick set pieces. The gross-out content is slightly higher here than back in 1988, but it works. The original, you'll recall, had a fixation with Harry Belafonte songs from which its most memorable sequences arose; the new movie is likewise enriched by similarly out-of-nowhere musical interests, even more grandly staged. There are sequence here that achieve true, weapons-grade silliness.

Ortega is touching, and there are other effective new additions to the cast, like Willem Dafoe as an afterlife cop--he was a movie cop in this life--with an exposed brain, or Arthur Conti, excellent as a local kid who charms Astrid. Best of all is Monica Belluci, formidable as the enraged ghost of the leader of a "soul-sucking death cult" who has an unhappy history with our titular hero. The scene in which she pulls herself together with the help of a staple gun is a Burton classic.

Keaton, though used somewhat sparingly, slips easily back into his role, tossing off asides in his muttering natter (or nattering mutter?) with the same moldered aplomb, and moving with the same light-footed exuberance, with which he conducted himself three decades ago. Ryder is also perfectly convincing as the middle-aged version of Lydia; tinged with a hint of emotional desperation in her interactions with Astrid.

I know it sounds ridiculous, and maybe I'm just projecting, but I thought that Ryder, O'Hara and even Keaton brought a subdued, rueful undercurrent to their performances, as if stirred-up memories of the first film's events had awakened genuine emotional pain. Don't misunderstand; if it's there, it's done without the slightest heavy-handed intentionality; it may not even have been conscious on the part of the actors. But it deepens both this film and the original.

BUTT WAIT THERE'S MORE

Last night Your Humble Narrator happened to watch an episode of The Twilight Zone that begins with Joe Maross and Claude Akins as astronauts who have made an emergency landing on a distant and seemingly barren planet...

After the opening teaser, we pan over to Rod Serling, natty as ever in his Eagle or Kuppenheimer suit. He delivers his intro with a cig in his hand.

I couldn't help but wonder if Rod mysteriously left the crushed-out smoke in the sands of that desert world, a cosmic ashtray for nicotine-addicted denizens of...the Twilight Zone.

TEMPLE MINDS

In Valley theaters this weekend:

Between the Temples--A cantor who can't sing sounds like the set-up for a joke. Fate has, indeed, played a pretty nasty one on the hero of this wistful, stinging comedy about grief. Ben (Jason Schwartzman) is the sad-sack cantor of a modest synagogue in small-town upstate New York. A year after an appalling freak tragedy, the devastated fellow can't find his voice.

His Rabbi boss (Robert Smigel) refuses to fire him, possibly in part because Ben's two moms (Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon), with whom he lives, are generous donors to the temple. But all that anybody can think to do to help him is push him to re-marry; the Rabbi's avid daughter (Madeline Weinstein) is a prime candidate.  

Enter, or rather re-enter, Ben's grade school music teacher Carla O'Connor (Carol Kane), who used to be Carla Kessler before she was married. Long widowed in her seventies, Carla would like the Bat Mitzvah she never got when she was young. Reluctantly at first, Ben begins to give her instruction, and gradually they bond.

It's no secret that Carol Kane has been a treasure since the '70s, playing ethereal if often hapless waifs in films ranging from Hester Street to Wedding in White to When a Stranger Calls to The Last Detail to Annie Hall. She made her pixie persona legitimately creepy in The Mafu Cage and she gave a riotous self-parody in Scrooged. Her magic hasn't deserted her in Between the Temples; even though she's playing a believable, realistic character she retains a touch of the otherwordly angelic.

Schwartzman is no slouch either. In probably his most vivid role since his tour de force debut in Rushmore, he gets across the terrible confusions and wrongheaded impulses into which bereavement can lead a person, the way one can rebel against one's own best interests if the alternative is acceptance of an unacceptable loss.

I loved these performances and these characters. I loved the direction by Nathan Silver, from a script he wrote with C. Mason Wells, and the grainy, washed-out, '70s-movie-looking cinematography of Sean Prince Williams (this film seems to share a '70s-cinema aesthetic with last year's The Holdovers). But following the psychology of its central character, Between the Temples does spin out of control toward the end, into a deeply uncomfortable climactic scene and an unsatisfying, incomplete-feeling finale. It's a gem, frustratingly flawed.

There can be little doubt, however, that the Bat and Bar Mitzvah is a potent subject, especially when sought by an older person. In 1997, Ira Wohl's too-little-known documentary Best Man; "Best Boy" and All of Us Twenty Years Later concerned Wohl helping arrange a belated Bar Mitzvah for his developmentally disabled cousin, who was then in his seventies. Then in the 2000s, a late friend of mine had a second Bar Mitzvah when he reached the age of 83.

Carla's rather urgent aspiration in Between the Temples reminded me of all this; sometimes, perhaps, you can't see the value of a rite of passage until after the passage has already been made.

BAR NONE

In theaters this weekend:

Sing Sing--A troupe of actors, all incarcerated, work to put up a show in the notorious maximum security state prison in New York. They're members of the institution's Rehabilitation Through the Arts program (RTA). At the center of the company is John "Divine G" Whitfield (Colman Domingo).

In prison for a crime he did not commit, Divine G not only throws his soul into his theatre work, playing Shakespearean leads like he should be onstage in Central Park, he also assists his fellow inmates with appeals and preparation for parole hearings.

His anger at the injustice of his circumstances is unmistakable, yet it's less scary than the intensity with which he works to control and channel it; he knows too well that giving vent to rage would be futile and harmful to his cause. Besides, he's a true believer. His positivity is an act of faith, sometimes a Herculean one.

Like its hero, the movie, directed by Greg Kwedar from a script he wrote with Clint Bentley, is taut and melodrama-free. Perhaps because so many of the actors were actually incarcerated people--many of them RTA veterans playing themselves--Sing Sing has almost a documentary feel at times. Yet it also has, with almost no violence or other prison-movie cliches, the charge of high drama. Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin and Sean San José are particularly memorable among the other company members. A word should also be said for Paul Raci, who plays Brent Buell, the diplomatic, unflappable director and playwright. 

But the core of the film is Colman Domingo. Rarely does an actor give us so much heart to invest in with so little hamming or telegraphing. It's a classic performance, both for its emotional impact and for its discipline.

My Penguin Friend--It's hard to go wrong with penguins. They've been amusing us for a long time, not just in zoos but in movies like George Miller's mad animated musical epic Happy Feet and its sequel, and Surf's Up, and the crack team of penguins in the Madagascar franchise, and Mr. Popper's Penguins, and the 2005 French documentary March of the Penguins, back though the exploding penguin and the giant penguin in Monty Python, not to mention Chilly Willy and Bugs Bunny's friend "Playboy Penguin," who wept tiny ice cubes when he was sad.

It's also hard to go wrong with Jean Reno. Best known as menacing killers in Luc Besson films like La Femme Nikita and The Professional, the rugged-looking French actor projects an air of effortless authority. So My Penguin Friend, which has both Jean Reno and a jaunty, spirited penguin in starring roles, starts out with certain advantages. And it ends up needing both of them.

This family film is, to use its opening titles, "Inspired by a True Story." In 2011, a man named Joao Pereira de Souza living on Ilha Grande, off the coast of Brazil, found a weakened, oil-slicked Magellanic penguin outside his house along the beach. He cleaned the poor flightless castaway up, fed him some sardines, and soon became friends with him. Dubbed "Dindim"--a grandchild's mispronunciation of the Portuguese word for penguin--the bird disappeared back into the Atlantic some months later. But he returned for many years thereafter, to hang out for the winter with Joao along his migratory route.

This fictionalized retelling of the story, directed by David Schurmann from a script by Kristen Lazarian and Paulina Lagudi Ulrich, starts off on the wrong foot with a tragic episode that seemed entirely gratuitous to me. And in its second half, it follows Dindim's encounters with researchers at his other home in Patagonia. These scenes feel very strained, with dialogue so stilted I began to wonder if it had been written by AI. And the movie's final stretch, which attempts to generate some danger and suspense, feels extremely half-hearted.

In between all this, however, we get to see Jean Reno, looking scruffy and soulful and beaky-faced as Joao, tenderly interacting with a penguin. That can carry a movie a long way. Reno seems to enjoy playing a childlike sweetness here, as Joao proclaims that Dindim "comes and goes as he pleases" and is "not my pet...he's my friend." The other humans in the film, including Adriana Barraza as Joao's wife, are all attractive, even when the dialogue coming out of them seems canned.

The movie is visually impressive, too. Dindim was played by several different penguins, and presumably his adventures, particularly underwater, have been at least partly enhanced by CGI, but it's pretty effective and seamless; he comes across as a character. And the scenery, both in windswept Patagonia and idyllic-looking Ilha Grande, is breathtaking.

So it will be a matter of personal calculation for you to decide if a penguin, a bona fide international movie star and gorgeous settings overcome feeble kid-movie devices enough to make My Penguin Friend worth your time. For me, it was; the penguin tipped the scale the farthest.

Alien: Romulus--A band of young scavengers bust into a huge derelict spaceship in orbit around the cheerless, sunlight-free mining planet on which they live. They're hoping to filch equipment that will allow them to escape their indenture, and they repeatedly express confidence that they'll be in and out in half an hour, and nothing can go wrong.

So in they go, get the stuff they need, and sail off to a new world where they live happily ever after. The end.

Just kidding. The result, in this seventh entry in the Alien series, is of course another gory encounter with an infestation of the elegantly spindly, terrifying creatures in all of their various stages of development, from "facehugger" to "chestburster" to full-grown fang-bearer.

Though it's not close to the 1979 original, Romulus is on the more watchable end of the franchise, deliberate and creepy for the first half, and non-stop in the second. It's a little unvaried and dark, however, and until the climactic scenes it doesn't really give us much that's new. Toward the end, the shots of the ice ring around the planet that the ship is approaching have a certain magical beauty, but otherwise we're mostly stuck in the chiaroscuro space dungeon.

The star is Cailee Spaeny, who played the fresh-faced young journalist in Civil War earlier this year. She's sympathetic, but the movie is stolen by David Jonnson as her companion Andy, a sweet, dad-joke-dispensing android who gets a reboot that gives him an upsetting personality change. Andy may be the best robot with divided loyalties since Robby in Forbidden Planet.

One more note: I'm a little over the vogue for gynecological/obstetric body horror. We got a big dose of nasty surgical instruments and moaning, keening young women birthing unnatural spawn earlier this year in The Last Omen; we get more natal splatter here. The gifted director of Romulus, the Uruguayan Fede Alvarez, also showed unsavory interest in coercive pregnancy in his terrific 2016 shocker Don't Breathe. Even the title Romulus refers to one species nursed at the teat of another.

Could all this be a reaction to post-Roe reproductive chaos? I'll leave that to graduate students with stronger stomachs than mine.

UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF A WOMAN

In 2000, I got to briefly interview Gena Rowlands for Phoenix New Times ahead of her appearance at a showing of A Woman Under the Influence in Scottsdale.

At the beginning of this chat, I indulged in a rather shamelessly unprofessional bit of gush:

"You know, I talk to famous people all the time, so I don't get starstruck much any more," I told her. "But talking to you is an exception."

She acted very girlishly flattered. Maybe she really was, or maybe she was just acting. Either way, it was an honor to be on the receiving end of it.

The word awesome gets thrown around a lot, but Gena Rowlands was awesome.

She did a lot of routine roles that seemed like they were just to pay the bills, and she was good even in that stuff, but when she worked with John Cassavetes--in A Woman Under the Influence, in Minnie and Moskowitz, in Gloria, in the underrated Tempest (directed by Paul Mazursky, but opposite a brilliant Cassavetes as her leading man) or in the grueling Opening Night--she was luminous. Potent as they are at their best, the films that Cassavetes directed can also be overwrought and exhausting, but her classic performances make them indispensably worth it.

Just a few days ago I happened to see her, very young, in an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour called "Ride the Nightmare," opposite Hugh O'Brian.

One of O'Brian's criminal cronies, who he betrayed years earlier, has come seeking revenge, and is holding him at gunpoint. But when the crook gets a load of Rowlands, as O'Brian's wife, he can't help but remark "You did alright for yourself; she's a winner."

Indeed she is. Rest in peace and joy goddess.