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 working 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.