OVER THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Perry Fanzo, star presenter on Channel 3's Pets on Parade...

...passed on last month, just a few weeks after our beloved Chihuahua Eddie...

...to whom Fanzo introduced us back in 2012. Here's my Phoenix Magazine online tribute to them both.

FOWL PLAY

Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of the great new Zambian film On Becoming a Guinea Fowl...

...and of dueling DeNiros in The Alto Knights...

PITCH SESSION

Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Eephus...

...and Mickey 17...

...now in the multiplexes.

ANORA A DAY, AND THE OSCARS YOU'LL SLAY...

This morning Your Humble Narrator enjoyed conducting an "Oscar post-mortem" with Sam Dingman of The Show on KJZZ...

...you can listen to it here.

You can also check out my review of the PTSD drama My Dead Friend Zoe...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

NO PAIN, NO DANE

Now streaming only on MUBI:

Grand Theft Hamlet--This one flew way under the radar during its very brief theatrical run here in the Valley. I'm glad that it's now available for streaming.

Directed by Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane, it's the story of how in 2021 two young British actors (Crane and Mark Oosterven), sidelined by the COVID lockdown, decided to audition, cast and stage a production of Hamlet within the confines of Grand Theft Auto Online. The film unfolds entirely in the virtual realm of that classic video game, a favorite of armchair criminals since 1997, and played online for more than a decade.

Except for a few arcade games when I was in high school and a simple game called Backyard Zombies that I had on my phone for a while, I essentially don't play video games at all. I was vaguely aware of the existence and popularity of Grand Theft Auto, but I had no idea what an expansive and immersive and visually alluring environment it is.

The online aspect, allowing for interaction, however indirect, with other human beings, adds to its intrigue. I remember being up late reading in my front room one night some years ago when my kid, who had been playing some combat game in her room, emerged tearful because she had lost track of a dude she had been playing online with and had no way to reconnect with him. So the creative and collaborative possibilities of modern videos games, and the potential for real emotional investment in them, seem to be broader than I would have guessed.

On the other hand, I am pretty familiar with Hamlet. That is one seriously good play, and this movie is a testament to the durability and adaptability of the masterpiece. In Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum insists that "life finds a way"; this movie is one of many examples supporting the assertion that "Shakespeare finds a way."

But Grand Theft Hamlet is also an amusing and sometimes touching ode to the vagaries of making theatre. Even in this controlled setting and these narrow circumstances, these guys are still afflicted with herding cats in rehearsal, actors apologetically quitting because they got a better gig, etc. Plus, in this production you never know when strangers are going to show up and shoot you.

RED ROCK FEST

Check out Phoenix Magazine online for my short preview of the 31st annual Sedona International Film Festival...

...and the Harkins "Tuesday Night Classics" showing of Singin' in the Rain.

SO SANE BEAR

Happy Valentine's Day (and Friday) everybody!

Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Paddington in Peru...

...and Captain America: Brave New World...

...and a preview of this year's Greater Phoenix Jewish Film Festival.

HEART OF THE SPLATTER

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of the Valentine-themed slasher romcom Heart Eyes...

...now in theaters.

DOG; DAYS

Happy Friday everybody! Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Dog Man...

...and One of Them Days...

...now in theaters.

FLOW CHART

The Oscar nominations came out earlier this week; Your Humble Narrator graciously waited until afterwards to present my Top Ten List for 2024, so as not to make the Academy's announcement an anticlimax. Here, roughly in order of preference, are the ten films that I think I liked best this year:

1. Flow--No movie last year meant quite as much to me as this wordless, visually exquisite animated feline adventure from Latvia.  

2. Conclave--This Vatican melodrama has the sweep of a great silent, but also humane and lovable performances, especially that of Ralph Fiennes.

3. The Bikeriders--Compelling, beautifully shot wheeler held together by the funny, sensible performance of Jodie Comer.

4. Heretic--Comparative religion debate in horror movie form; it goes a bit too gruesome in the homestretch, perhaps, and it's defamatory toward blueberry pie, but Hugh Grant's performance is a tour de force.

5. A Complete Unknown--Dylan's early years make for a conventional but enjoyable and musically rich biopic.

6. Nickel Boys--The horrors of a Florida reform school for boys, and the triumph of friendship, both seen from the point of view of two of the boys. Heartbreaking but thrilling.

7. A Real Pain--Two Jewish cousins from New York go to Poland together to explore their grandmother's Holocaust experience. Kieran Culkin is marvelous as the loud, nervy inappropriate one; writer-director Jesse Eisenberg's performance as the quiet one would be easy to overlook, but he's also terrific.

8. Kneecap--West Belfast lads stir up trouble performing hip hop in Irish, as in the Irish language; hard to resist.

9. Sing Sing--Colman Domingo is a powerhouse at the center of this drama about the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at the title correctional facility; many of his superb costars are actual veterans of the program.

10. Anora--Brooklyn sex worker marries Russian oligarch's playboy son and imagines it's forever. The movie goes on too long and has a few complications too many, but it's ruefully funny, and Mikey Madison is great in the title role.

A few other titles that I found worth watching in 2024: The Fire Inside, Love Lies Bleeding, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Queer, My Old Ass, Between the Temples, Saturday Night, Thelma, Challengers, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the long-belated Pitch People and Francis Ford Coppola's infuriating yet inspiring Megalopolis. It's also important to note that there are many other major flicks, notably The Brutalist, The Substance, Wicked, Hard Truths, The Last Showgirl and September 5, that I haven't caught up with yet.

You can check out my short article, online at Phoenix Magazine, on this year's Chandler International Film Festival, running today through February 2.

Finally, for the kind few who might possibly care, here's the embarrassingly short list of books I read in 2024 (excluidng, as always, short stories, articles, poems, comics, fridge magnets, instruction manuals, road signs and stuff I'm re-reading):

The Great Time Machine Hoax by Keith Laumer

Prequel: An  American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow

Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again by Shigeru Kayama

Eneas Africanus by Harry Stillwell Edwards

Billy Summers by Stephen King

Playback by Raymond Chandler

Bound to Rise by Horatio Alger, Jr.

My Childhood by Maxim Gorky

She'll Never Get Off the Ground by Robert J. Serling

DYLAN ME SOFTLY WITH HIS SONG

Belated takes on three December releases I've just recently caught up with, prepping for my 2024 Top Ten list: 

Still in theaters:

A Complete Unknown--Directed by the always-reliable James Mangold, this biopic covers Bob Dylan's breakthrough. We see the arrival of the young prodigy (Timothée Chalamet) in the Village, his pilgrimage to a New Jersey hospital to meet the terminally ill Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), attended there by Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who becomes Dylan's mentor and champion, his relationships with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), his rise to stardom, through to his notorious electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

I love Dylan. I saw him perform, sharing the bill with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty, at Rich Stadium in Buffalo, New York in 1986; it's high on the list of the best live shows I've ever been to. And "Like a Rolling Stone," from which this film's title is drawn, may be my favorite song; I've often wondered if it shouldn't be our new national anthem. I'm wondering that especially hard this week.

All that said, I'm not remotely enough of a Dylan worshipper or historian to feel proprietary toward him, or to say how accurate this film is or isn't. All I can say is that I enjoyed it. It's full of good acting, rich period detail and, of course, great music.

Chalamet, for whom I've never previously been able to work up much enthusiasm, gives us a human being as opposed to the bad Dylan impression that any of us can do. Dylan has long been reputed, even by his friends and admirers, to be an asshole--a dazzlingly talented asshole, a funny asshole, an influential asshole, but an asshole nonetheless.

The movie doesn't shirk this; the opinion is stated overtly by a character, and Dylan doesn't disagree. But as with most assholes, he isn't just an asshole, and Chalamet makes it possible not only to accept and admire him, but to like him. Also, he sings for him. And Norton sings for Seeger, and Barbaro sings for Baez, and Boyd Holbrook sings for Johnny Cash, and none of them, to my ear, embarrass themselves.

Despite Chalamet's excellence, Norton's performance as Seeger is the real standout here. Even though by the end Seeger is shoved, fairly or not, almost into the role of antagonist, Norton gets across Seeger's tirelessly disarming, near-saintly sweetness, and beneath it, the depth of his passion for music, and for America.

Now streaming:

Queer--The agonies of not quite fully requited love bleed out of Daniel Craig's old-shoe face in this adaptation of my second-favorite William S. Burroughs book (after Junky), first published in 1985 but written decades earlier. The setting is Mexico City in the '50s, where Craig's "William Lee " is a dissolute expat, drinking too much and engaging in one night stands with local pretty boys.

William is smitten when he gets a load of Allerton (Drew Starkey), a beautiful young American Navy vet. He eventually gets the guy into bed, and later talks him into traveling to Ecuador with him in search of yagé, a hallucinogenic plant he believes will give him telepathic powers (he's already restarted his heroin habit at this point). But Allerton is just along for the ride, literally and emotionally.

Craig is outstanding; the nakedness of his pain is hard to watch at times. And the movie, directed by Luca Guadagnino of Challengers from a script by Justin Kuritzkes, starts off very well. But as it dives deeper into drug-fueled visions (some of them reminded me of those in Ken Russell's 1980 Altered States), it loses dramatic momentum. It's visually arresting, but Guadagnino finds no equivalent to the charge that Burroughs generates in the best riffing passages of his prose.

Also, meaning no moral judgement--I hardly could judge, given my own relationship to junk food--I've never been able to find the glamor that so many filmmakers seem to find in drug addiction. Maybe I would if I understood it first-hand, but if so, I'll pass.

Now streaming, and still playing in the Valley at this writing at Harkins Shea:

A Real Pain--Close friends in their youths, 40-something cousins Dave and Benji have a more complicated relationship now. The quiet, mild-mannered Dave (Jesse Eisenberg) is a successful New York digital ad salesman, while Benji (Kieran Culkin), though cheerful and charismatic, is unemployed, troubled, seemingly directionless, and given to delivering his nervy opinions at distressingly inappropriate times and volumes.

Nonetheless, Dave adores him, and the two travel together from New York to Poland on a legacy left them by their mutually adored grandmother, who survived the Holocaust. They join a "Holocaust tour" led by a non-Jewish Brit (Will Sharpe), starting at Warsaw and working their way toward Lublin, where the cousins will break away to visit the grandmother's home. They smoke weed with each other and interact with the other oddballs on the tour, among them Jennifer Grey as a divorcee and Kurt Egyiawan as a Rwandan who survived the genocide in his country before converting to Judaism.

Written and directed by Eisenberg, this modest movie is genuinely original--very funny, very poignant, very believable, painfully uncomfortable to watch at times but ultimately a gem. Culkin is terrific, but  Eisenberg is no less so in his less showy role; his love and worry for his cousin, and his protective mortification at his behavior, make up the pain at the dramatic core of A Real Pain.

You can also check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Nickel Boys and the Universal/Blumhouse "reboot" Wolf Man.

YES YOU MAE

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of the 1933 pre-code Mae West comedy I'm No Angel...

...playing at the Orpheum Theatre in Phoenix, as part of that venue's 96th Anniversary, at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, January 4.