IT'S A MAMMOTH OCCASION

Man oh man, is Your Humble Narrator homesick today. How I wish I could be back in my beloved hometown of Erie, Pa, at UPMC Park, for the inaugural game of the Erie Moon Mammoths...

...alter-ego of the Erie Seawolves. The team, the AA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, has been (temporarily) rebranded by the great John Oliver and the staff of his HBO series Last Week Tonight. The renaming is after a fossilized mammoth skeleton discovered in 1991 by a scuba diver named George Moon at the bottom of Lake Pleasant, a glacial lake in Venango Township in Erie County.

The bones were taken to my alma mater Gannon University where they were examined by Professor M. Jude Kirkpatrick.

I had Dr. Kirkpatrick for Sociology, a class he seemed to find a chore; his real interests seemed to be archaeology, anthropology and paleontology. Though a fine specimen, the skeleton was apparently deemed too fragile for reconstruction; it was publicly displayed for just one day before being socked away at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg.

Anyway, Erie is set to party hard this weekend, and the game, against the Chesapeake Baysox, is now underway, so I'm being taunted by images from friends who are there:

Well, as I have written here before, I myself was once part of the pregame festivities at a Seawolves game, reading a baseball sonnet back in 2009; you can still watch it on YouTube. So I've composed a new sonnet for the Moon Mammoth; here it is:

MOON MAMMOTH

Frigid fathoms down into the depths

Where bass and sunfish breathe the brineless murk,

And algae straining sunlight intercepts

And dims the realm where grim hellbenders lurk,

Reposing in this glacier-shoveled grave

In layered silt the fleshless bones would lay,

As petrafaction form immortal gave

A trunked behemoth of another day.

Twelve thousand years elapsed, then to the light

A wetsuit-clad invader it exhumed;

A single day it basked in public sight,

Then academically was re-entombed.

But now the mammoth rises once again,

To urge our local Nine on to the win.

GO MOON MAMMOTHS!

THE FAMOUS MR. EDDINGTON

Opening today in theaters:

Eddington--Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross in this one. He's the county sheriff of the titular New Mexico town into which writer-director Ari Aster tries to stuff all the nightmarish national rage and misery of early 2020. It's all there, or a lot of it, anyway--disbelief in COVID, anti-mask anger, George Floyd protests and calls to defund the police, social distancing, rampaging social media, talk radio conspiracy rants, a quasi-religious cult figure, even a Kyle Rittenhouse type.

Joe lives in a rural house with his distant, psychologically fragile wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her mother Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), a 24/7 wingnut conspiracy receiver. He, too, is indignantly resentful of the mask requirement and refuses to wear one, even on the job. A wrangle over the policy in a supermarket leads Joe to impulsively announce his candidacy for mayor.

The incumbent, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), is Joe's rival in town politics, and also personally; he has a history with Louise. Ted is pushing for some sort of new high tech company to locate in Eddington, despite environmental and logistical concerns.

With the exception of his deputy Michael (Micheal Ward) and a tribal cop (William Belleau) from across the county line, Joe is, initially, the most likable of the major characters. But this isn't a high bar. Eddington isn't like Mayberry or Star's Hollow, one of those fictional small towns you might find yourself wishing you could move to. It's full of shifty characters, idiots and creeps. Ted and his allies seem like phonies and business shills. The kids who organize the protests are preposterously self-flagellating. The cult weirdo (Austin Butler) worming his way into Joe's family is repulsive.

By comparison, Joe Cross seems like a decent sort, obtuse and not especially bright but well-intentioned. Phoenix gives him a plaintive, singsong voice and sad eyes, and Aster makes you feel how overwhelmed he is, both by the baffling times he's in and by his own spiritual desperation over the collapse of his libertarian illusions. It may be Phoenix's best performance. 

As the story progresses, however, Joe descends, by disturbingly believable steps, from misguided and angry to monstrous. Aster, who specializes in grueling horror films like Midsommar and Heredity, spares his protagonist here nothing in terms of defeat and humiliation, yet not in a way that allows us the pleasure of schadenfreude. This long film climaxes with a wild, extended, very bloody shootout in the streets of Eddington, as Joe Cross is stalked by a mysterious killer in black. Mysterious to me, at least--is this gunman, who we see arrive by private jet, meant to be an "ANTIFA" operative? An agent-provocateur? A corporate asset? Does Aster intend him realistically? Satirically?

I'm not sure, and in any case, I'm also not sure this frenzied gunfight doesn't drive this amazing movie off the rails a little in its homestretch. Eddington is unforgettable, but it's all too easy for me to imagine viewers who might share Joe's values seeing this persecution of him as a vindication of his despicable actions. Joe Cross is pitiable, but he's no hero.

THE MOLE SHEBANG

Available to stream:

Superman and the Mole Men--The new Superman flick is "too woke," or so I'm hearing, in the opinion of Fox News and other commentators, mostly because of writer-director James Gunn pointing out in an interview that the Man of Steel is an immigrant. Fox host Tomi Lahren pronounced, without seeing the film, that it "went woke and will probably flop!"

She also sneered that "in his comments Gunn conveniently forgot to delineate between IMMIGRANTS and ILLEGALS, but that's par for the course..." [caps her's] This would be a more withering criticism if Lahren hadn't "conveniently forgot" that, um, Clark Kent aka Superman certainly is an illegal, undocumented alien, by any standard.

Other voices from around the MAGA-verse have similarly squawked, I understand. Why am I taking note of these dimwits rising to Gunn's well-dangled bait? Because I shudder to think what howling accusations of wokeness they would direct at the very first Superman feature film, 1951's Superman and the Mole Men. This very low-budget, 58-minute saga, produced for Lippert Pictures, was intended essentially as a pilot for the long-running syndicated TV series The Adventures of Superman (1952-1958) starring George Reeves. In terms of liberal social and civic values, this movie is woke like a grad student on Red Bull.

The story here unfolds not in Metropolis but in the small town of Silsby, "home of  the world's deepest oil well." Indeed, they've drilled so deep in Silsby that they've encroached upon the underground civilization of the Mole Men. These dome-headed, furry little goobers, who have come to the surface to explore, make whatever they touch glow with phosphoresence (they're played, by the way, by little people including Munchkin veterans Jerry Maren, Billy Curtis and John T. Bambury, and "Philip Morris Bellboy" Johnny Roventini).

Clark Kent (George Reeves) and Lois Lane (Phyllis Coates) arrive in town to do a story for the Daily Planet about the well, only to find the company shutting it down, fearing radioactivity. As word spreads about the Mole Men, the townies quickly start to organize into a mob. Before long, it's clearly a job for Superman. 

While movies don't come much more cinematically bare-bones than Superman and the Mole Men, it's heart-lifting to watch in the context of our current times, because it's clear-eyed about where the real threat in our society lies, when it it comes to aliens and other outsiders: with ourselves. Clark/Superman is sympathetic to the Mole People, and the villains in the story are the reckless, bloodthirsty, xenophobic townspeople, led by a gun-wielding bigmouth played by the great Jeff Corey. It's very easy to picture this guy in a red cap.

The conflict that this movie depicts, however crudely, between seething, reflexive hatred and fear of strangers and openminded welcome of them to our immigrant-made republic seems every bit as ingrained now as it was then, and of course that's depressing. What's cheering, however, is that Superman, at least this vintage of him, has been on the right side of this divide from the start: the side of Truth, Justice and the very best version of The American Way.

SUPER MAX DEAL

Opening in theaters today...

Superman--It's excellent, so a certain poet has told us, to have a giant's strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant. Before James Gunn's Superman has started, the title character (David Corenswet) has pre-emptively interceded to stop the invasion of one country by another, without causalities and in near-certainty that in so doing he has prevented murder and oppression. It's obvious to him that he's done the right thing, but even so, his action strikes some as overbearing, and public opinion of the Man of Steel shifts.

This is all connected, it turns out, to the scheming of Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) to neutralize Superman and consolidate sanctioned power. Superman ends up imprisoned and subjected to torture by kryptonite in an interdimensional "pocket universe" run by Lex. Clark Kent's girlfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and her colleagues at the Daily Planet are on the case, as, with varying degrees of urgency, are Superman's pals in "The Justice Gang."

Best of all, he's got a dog on his side. Krypto, introduced in the comics in 1955, finally gets a proper live action screen treatment here, in a vivid CGI rendering. As in the comics, Gunn depicts the superdog as a sweet-natured and well-intentioned but not always well-behaved creature; he could use a PetSmart obedience class. But he's still a good boy.

Gunn's achievement with this new movie is considerable. The writer-director has managed to make a version that feels original and imaginative, but also authentic; it truly looks and feels like Superman, as much as the George Reeves or Christopher Reeve or Kirk Alyn films or any earlier versions. It's not a perfect movie by a long shot, but it's bold and fun and cheerfully messy; its virtues far outweigh its faults.

Gunn also explores some stimulating ideas here, as if in response to anyone who might wonder if this superficially naive American myth has anything left to teach us. Among these themes is the question--always relevant to interventionist-minded America--of whether omnipotence, even if it was possible and even if it was linked to genuinely good intentions, would inevitably lead to correct action.

It's hard, as it is so often with comic-book and fantasy films these days, not to read contemporary allegorical significance into them. In his spite and resentful envy, Lex seems a lot like our current president; on the other hand, in his calculated efforts to take over our military-industrial power structure, he also seems quite a lot like our current president's biggest donor. As played by Hoult, however, he's more appealing than either of them.

Hoult's performance is one of many in what feels like a truly ensemble cast. Corenswet is one of the few actors to play this role who are at least as charming as Superman as he is in Clark Kent drag. Gunn's attempt to give an explanation as to why nobody sees through Superman's transparent disguise is unnecessary, however; it's just an accepted convention, like a Shakespearean heroine undetectably disguising herself as a boy.

Brosnahan may be the sexiest of all Lois Lanes, or at least since Phyllis Coates back in the first season of the TV show, and she's plucky and loyal and lovable too. Skyler Gisondo makes a fine, competent Jimmy Olsen, Wendell Pierce gets little screen time as Perry White but feels right, and Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Hall are touchingly more rustic than usual as Clark's Smallville parents. On the superhero side, Edi Gathegi is a hoot as a dour, taciturn Mister Terrific; so is Nathan Fillion as a dyspeptic, self-impressed Green Lantern (of the Guy Gardner vintage).

This Superman is overambitious, and more than a little uneven. What I liked least about it was the pocket universe. It gets the movie in over its head, front-loading Lex with too much power. If he can puncture and fracture space and time like this, why should he worry about getting the government's permission for anything?

My distaste for this device goes beyond this point of plausibility, though. If anyone's asking (no one seems to be) I would invite superhero flicks to take a nice long break from dimensional portals, and time/space rifts and alternate universes (except with Dr. Strange, of course; that's his shtick). Also, from crumbling buildings. Enough with the crumbling buildings. It's time to shake off that post-9/11 mentality.

What I liked best about the movie, however, is what it isn't: It isn't "dark." It isn't brooding, or gritty, or cynical. The title character isn't, in the usual sense, cool; Superman uses words like "golly" and "gosh" and Gunn doesn't seem to mean it as camp, or to be more than gently mocking his hero. Even Lois rolls her eyes at Clark's guilelessness here, but he's unperturbed, and so was I, as a viewer. It's taken this genre a long time to work its way around to the idea that being an unabashed, unapologetic good guy is truly punk rock. But it's been worth the trip.

Sorry, Baby--Agnes, a young professor, lives alone in a farmhouse in the Massachusetts woods. It could be the setting for an old-school scary movie, but this film is about a more appallingly common sort of horror.

As the movie starts, Agnes (Eva Victor) is welcoming her best friend and former roomie Lydie (Naomie Ackie) for a visit. The two share a blankie on the couch and catch up on their lives, talking with hilarity about the follies of sex. They're having fun, but it's clear that something heavy from the past hangs in the air. Gradually, in chapters that flash back and forward, we learn what it is: Agnes is a survivor of sexual assault.

Written and directed by star Victor, Sorry, Baby is a spectacular debut, restrained and economical yet emotionally intense, poignant yet frequently funny, unpredictable yet believable from beginning to end. Again and again, Victor catches us off guard, using suggestion and distance to get across an outrage, or undercutting misery with quiet but insistent comedy, or with the unexpected restorative grace of a "really good sandwich."

Agnes is a tour de force role, and Victor is devastatingly good, one minute displaying crisp comic timing, another the depths of psychological distress. The supporting cast is mostly for support, but Ackie is a pleasure as usual. Lucas Hedges is serviceable as the neighbor guy that helps Agnes start rebuilding trust, and John Carroll Lynch, reliable as ever, has an excellent scene as the stranger with the sandwich. As a rabidly competitive professional rival to Agnes, Kelly McCormack may seem a little caricatured, but probably less so if you've spent much time around academics.

Victor seems determined not to let the movie be oppressive; to give full measure to the crime that it's depicting but also to the beauty and joy that Agnes takes in life in spite of her trauma and loss. We see her teaching a lit class, and get a hint of her love of and skill at what she does. We see her find a kitten in the street, and how this relationship jolts her soul awake. Somehow all this makes the crime against her more infuriating, not less.

The sequence at the end that explains the title suggests that Agnes may find the hovering, solicitous worry of her friends almost as much of a burden as what's she's suffered. No doubt that's a common feeling for survivors, but I couldn't help it; the movie made me feel the same way her friends do.

Somewhere, perhaps, some other critic may be writing a dissent, feeling a more graphic, less tacit dramatization of sexual abuse is called for. Maybe they're right. But it's hard for me to imagine a movie that generated more understanding of the impact of sexual abuse on a victim. It's one of the best films of the year.

DINO DIRECTION HOME

Now in theaters:

Jurassic World: Rebirth--Dinosaurs, it turns out, are soooo '90s these days. Having been revived by cloning in 1993's Jurassic Park and eventually loosed on the modern world throughout the sequels, they have become public hazards and nuisances. Worse yet--by Hollywood standards--they've lost their commercial appeal; they've become so commonplace that people are bored with them, and museums are packing up their skeletons.

In this latest, a pharmaceutical company nonetheless sees potential in the beasts to create a medicine that will end heart disease. An exec (Rupert Friend), who is far too handsome not to be rotten, hires a team of soldiers of fortune led by Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali, along with a mild-mannered paleontologist (Jonathan Bailey), to travel to an equatorial area where the creatures still thrive. The mission is to collect blood samples from three of the most massive prehistoric reptiles. First up is the marine Mosasaur, then, on a island, the towering sauropod Titanosaurus, and finally the airplane-sized pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus.

This allows for three big showcase scenes, with many side action sequences. A family unwisely cruising through the area on a yacht--Dad, two daughters, and elder daughter's irritating boyfriend--ends up joining the expedition as well. Maybe the best episode in the movie involves this lot encountering a T-Rex who, having just woken up from a rather luxurious nappy-time alongside a river, chases them down the rapids, grabbing at them as if bobbing for apples.

As usual when reviewing a movie in the Jurassic franchise, or indeed any movie with significant dinosaur content, I feel the need to add a disclaimer: I'm a lifelong sucker for dinosaurs. Any movie with prehistoric creatures in it starts at an advantage with me, just as any movie about, say, auto racing starts at a disadvantage with me.

As objectively as possible, though, I can say that the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies consistently offer good summer blockbuster value, with high-end actors and high-end production values--underwritten, no doubt, with lots and lots of blatant product placement--and dialogue that isn't too much of an embarrassment. Most importantly, they get the dinosaurs right, with seamless special effects and imaginative, sometimes crazy set piece sequences.

Directed by Gareth Edwards from a script credited to David Koepp, who has done tidier work, Rebirth may be the corniest of the series to date, and the least plausible-seeming. The finale, which involves a gargantuan mutant horror and other hideous dino-hybrids, feels like something from another movie, and it's slightly off-key. But overall, the movie is still a hearty and entertaining helping of paleo-action.

Be warned, though: your hackles may raise a bit when the younger daughter befriends a cute little baby dinosaur; the series, you realize, has finally knuckled under and had its Ewok moment. But it isn't really much of a drag on the film, any more than the clockwork owl was on the original Clash of the Titans. It has the feel, rightly or not, of a marketable element imposed on the movie from above. The filmmakers seem to spend as little screen time as they can get away with on the creature, and it's easy to ignore. Besides, the kid names the baby "Delores," which somehow is, if nothing else, a really good name for a dinosaur.

PITT STOP

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

F1--This Formula One racing drama stars Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes. Sonny is a former Formula One driver with a troubled past and a gambling problem, now living out of his van and racing in the 24 Hours of Daytona and other events. Javier Bardem plays Sonny's old rival/pal Ruben Cervantes, who shows up with a Quixotic offer: a spot as a driver in his F1 team, in support of his hotshot young driver Joshua Pearce, played by Damson Idris.

The great Kerry Condon plays Kate,  the team's technical director, a spirited Irishwoman who's massively unimpressed with Sonny's drawly charm. She and the young hotshot and Sonny clash across the circuit, leaving lots of debris on racetracks around the world.

It's only fair to admit, up front, that racing movies leave me cold. The serious, dramatic ones, like Grand Prix, usually feel overlong and pretentious and humorless; the comic ones, like Speedway with Elvis Presley or Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby with Will Farrell, are better, but tend to inanity.

I realize, of course, that this is all a matter of personal hardwiring; show me a baseball movie, where the stakes are exactly as meaningless, and I'll be on the edge of my seat. Show me a racing movie, and I'm bored and cranky. F1 continues the streak, I'm afraid. More than two and half hours is too long to watch people going in circles.

That said, on its own terms, it's an excellently made picture. I tend to appreciate the director, Joseph Kosinki, because he has an old-school, '80s movie approach, serving up a full credit sequence and pulsing music by Hans Zimmer and rapid-cut montages.

Kosinki is a fine hand at this sort of big-canvas action stuff, having previously helmed Only the Brave and Top Gun: Maverick. His touch is crackling and kinetic, he has an eye for corporate swank, and he's superbly abetted here by the dazzlingly deft editing of Stephen Mirrione, who ought to get an Oscar nomination. The movie is propulsive; for all my eye-rolling distaste, F1 never bored me, at least not when the cars were moving. And that's a lot of the movie.

On the other hand, for all the deft skill and lucid precision of the many racing scenes, the movie doesn't add up dramatically. After the screening I saw, someone told me that they liked how the film showed the degree to which Formula One is a team sport. So it does, but when Sonny acts like a maverick and refuses to follow orders and antagonizes his teammate and ignores his team's strategies, I couldn't tell if the filmmakers wanted me to see him a jerk in need of redemption or a clear-eyed individualist hero cutting through the nonsense.

Pitt has the movie star gift: he's amiable almost, it seems, whether he wants to be or not. F1 takes, you should pardon the expression, a free ride on this, since based on his behavior and not on Pitt's charm, Sonny seems, overall, like a selfish, tactless douchebag. The film's prologue ends with Sonny being asked an existential question; at the end of the film he's asked the same question. He doesn't answer it either time. Neither does the film.

Opening at Harkins Shea:

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore--From her movie debut, in 1986's Children of a Lesser God, Marlee Matlin has been a vibrant presence in movies and TV; captivating, funny, sexy, with a streak of righteous anger balanced by a playful touch of mischief. I'm a fan. But after watching this feature-length American Masters documentary, I realized how little I really knew about her, and how important her story is.

Directed by the actress Shoshannah Stern, it chronicles Matlin's childhood with her loving but unprepared, guilt-ridden parents--she was stricken with deafness at 18 months, after an illness. We get her rebellious, drug-fueled teen years, her abusive relationship with Lesser God leading man William Hurt, her nurturing friendship with Henry Winkler, her prolific movie and TV career, and her sometimes fraught relationship with the deaf community. We learn that she had to pay for her own interpreter when she checked herself into Betty Ford.

I didn't realize the fierceness of Matlin's advocacy; the movie makes the case, for instance, that she's a major reason that closed captioning became standard on TV and videos. Reclined on a couch opposite Stern, who is interviewing, Matlin gives an unassuming account that gets across some sense of the difficulty deaf people have in navigating life, and in accessing information and support, even at this comparatively glamorous level.

A VIEW FROM THE RIDGE

Any play that begins with a figure in black brandishing an inflatable pterodactyl on a stick deserves some credit. A Klingon Hamlet, a Ronin Theatre Company production playing for just one more weekend at Stage Left in Glendale, has many such flourishes of very low-tech theatricality.

As the title indicates, it's a version of Shakespeare's Hamlet performed in Klingon drag. The actors are costumed, and made-up with the ridge-browed foreheads, of Klingons, the warlike aliens from the Star  Trek franchise.

The adaptation, by Keath Hall--who also directed, and plays the title role--and E.C. Darling-Bond (who plays Horatio), boils the play down to its bare essentials and substitutes many words and phrases for Klingon references. The duel is fought with Klingon weapons, for instance, and Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent to Earth rather than to England.

Familiarity with the Klingon language, invented by the linguist Marc Okrand for the Star Trek movies, is not needed to watch the show, however. At the beginning the handy "universal translator" is engaged so that we hear the actors in English, except for the play-within-the-play, which is indeed in Klingon, with a projected translation. Hall and Darling-Bond wisely see to it that the whole thing clocks in at under two hours; they don't let the gag wear out its welcome.

They also don't try--again, probably wisely--for any deeply tragic tone. The flavor is droll and facetious, right down to Hamlet singing snatches of contemporary pop songs, or putting on an "antic disposition" by donning a red clown nose, and wearing it for a fair amount of his stage time.

The skill of the actors varies widely, but everyone is game and committed. At ten, however, the cast is too small; the doubling gets pretty awkward at times. The show could have used at least one more actor, possibly two. Maybe there just weren't enough ridge brows for any more.

C.D. Macauley delivers some true Shakespearean music as The Ghost, The Player King and The Gravedigger; he nicely sings Spock's ballad from the original series episode "Plato's Stepchildren" in the latter role. Kate Haas generates some honest emotion in Ophelia's mad scene. Wes Martin's Claudius is commanding and despicably genial.

The star, however, is Hall. His antic approach to the title role works well with his persona, which comes across like a contemporary comic leading man in the movies, a Vince Vaughn or a Jason Bateman. More than many other Shakespearean plays, the success of Hamlet depends on the likability of the lead, our ability to identify with him, root for him, enjoy his company. Even if it had nothing else going for it, and it does, on that score alone A Klingon Hamlet succeeds.

ZOMBIES AND ALIENS AND DETECTIVES; OH MY!

Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of 28 Years Later...

...and Elio, opening in theaters this weekend...

...as well as my review of Arizona Theatre Company's Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson--Apt. 2B...

...playing through June 29 at Tempe Center for the Arts.

HACK MAN; HACKMAN

Happy Friday the 13th everybody!

Check out my Phoenix Magazine column on Friday the 13th, Part 2, playing this evening at 9:30 p.m. in actual 35mm at Majestic Cinema Tempe 7...

...and also The Birdcage...

...playing on June 17 as next week's "Tuesday Classic" at Harkins Theatres.

SPACE STAGE

Check out my Phoenix Magazine preview of Ronin Theatre Company's A Klingon Hamlet...

...playing, in an abridged form, at Phoenix Fan Fusion at 4:30 p.m. today, June 7, and full-length at Stage Left Productions in Glendale for the last two weekends in June.

Let the record show that Your Humble Narrator has been covering the Klingon-Shakespeare connection since 2002, when I wrote this for the Detroit Metro Times.

Also online at Phoenix Magazine, here's my preview of playwright Ashley Naftule's latest, Selena and Judy Go Dancing...

...opening this weekend at Space 55.

25 IN DOGMA YEARS

Opening this weekend:

Dogma--God really enjoys the occasional game of Skee-ball. That's a sample of the startling theology we learn from Kevin Smith's Dogma. I'm not sure that's official Catholic dogma, but parts of the movie's twisty plot rely on genuine, if pedantically and literally interpreted, church law, like plenary indulgence. Two cast-out angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) are hoping to exploit this doctrine to sneak back into Heaven after centuries of wandering the Earth (Wisconsin, specifically).

A Cardinal (George Carlin), hoping to get more "asses in the pews" is offering the ally-ally-in-free to anyone who comes to his church in New Jersey. The trouble is that if the fallen duo succeed in doing so, it will negate Divine infallibility, which will wipe out all existence.

This, at least, according to a rather irritable Seraphim (Alan Rickman). For some reason he presses Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), a woebegone Illinois woman who works in an abortion clinic, into service to stop this from happening. So Bethany hits the road for Jersey, picking up strange allies and enemies along the way.

I'm not sure I would have guessed that Dogma had a sufficient following to warrant a 25th Anniversary re-release, but it's back in theatres this weekend to celebrate its quarter-century mark, and I'm glad. I've always had a fondness for this messy, irreverent, sometimes offensive yet oddly devotional comedy.

It's a little overlong, and laden with some really dumb gags and gross-out effects. But there's something moving about Smith's grappling with the contradictions of a religion and tradition he clearly loves. And the ruminations and debates he puts in the mouths of his characters seem to me more thoughtful and reflective than those in, say, the Da Vinci Code flicks.

Besides, it's hard to beat Dogma's cast. Along with Affleck, Damon, Carlin and Rickman, the ensemble includes Chris Rock as the 13th Apostle, cut from the Gospels because of his race, Jason Lee as a snide demon commanding a trio of hockey-stick-wielding minions on rollerblades, glorious Salma Hayek as a muse-turned-stripper, and Jason Mewes and Smith himself as the inevitable Jay and Silent Bob, who join the quest to save the universe.

In smaller roles are the likes of Janeane Garofalo, Bud Cort, Alanis Morrisette and even Betty Aberlin (Lady Aberlin from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood) as a nun. Best of all is Fiorentino, deeply likable in essentially the lead role, maybe the richest, most complex part she ever got to play in movies. Somebody ought to coax her out of retirement.

Ballerina--As it happens, I'm one of the handful who had never seen a John Wick movie. Until this week, that is, when I saw Ballerina. Wick, played as always by Keanu Reeves, appears briefly but bloodily in this action melodrama, which I found myself quite able to follow without a heavy remedial course.

The central character this time is Eve (Ana de Armas), orphaned daughter of an assassin. She winds up at a dance company run by the ever-imperious Anjelica Huston; the place is a front for an assassin school. Once grown up, Eve strikes out on her own in search of the people who killed her dad. These turn out to be members of a death cult of professional assassins who live together in a picturesque Alpine village, governed by the diabolical Gabriel Byrne.

The gore-splattered brawls and shoot-outs that ensue are all but non-stop, and the movie, directed by Len Wiseman, is very watchable and well-done for what it is, which is something fairly stupid. The bad guys here reminded me of the similar sect of murder fanatics in the Sylvester Stallone action flick Cobra (1986), and, as there, they feel trumped-up, spun out of whole cloth. They aren't full enough characters to be satisfyingly hateful.

Ana de Armas is a soulful and amusing presence, however, and vets like Huston, Byrne, Ian McShane, Norman Reedus and the late Lance Reddick provide some fun. But there's an artificial quality to this film's thrills that excludes it from the annals of the great revenge pictures.

Also, I had to wonder: What if you had great assassin skills, but two left feet? Would they reject your application to the ballerina school, or would they look the other way, like with college athletes?

CHAN-DO ATTITUDE

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Karate Kid: Legends--The 2010 reboot of 1984's The Karate Kid took a new kid from the U.S. to China to be trained in martials arts by Jackie Chan. This new entry reverses the process; our teenaged hero is reluctantly dragged from Beijing to New York.

Played by Ben Wang, Li Fong is the son of a doctor (Ming-Na Wen) with a family tragedy in his past. When we first see him, he's living, and training in Kung Fu, at the school of his Uncle Han (Jackie Chan). Mom doesn't want him fighting, so she pulls him out of school to live in Manhattan.

He promptly meets a friendly girl, Mia (Sadie Stanley), at the local pizza shop; he also meets her bullying jerk of an ex-boyfriend (Aramis Knight), who happens to be a local martial arts champ. Mia's ex-boxer dad Victor (Joshua Jackson) is in debt to a loan shark who runs the jerk boyfriend's school.

The various villains, goals and obstacles thus hurriedly shoved into place, the stage is set for a big showdown between Li and the jerk at a citywide elimination tournament. Before that, of course, comes extended sequences in which he's trained not only in Kung Fu by his Uncle Han, but in "Miyagi Karate" by Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), the title character from the '84 film, still carrying on Miyagi's legacy in California. (The movie comes up with some belated backstory claiming an ancient link between the Japanese Miyagi and the Chinese Han.)

Directed by Jonathan Entwistle from a script by Rob Lieber, this is pretty basic stuff, dramatically speaking. But the young leads have a sweet rapport, and the fan service of connecting the the old film series with the reboot is warmly received; Macchio's first appearance got a round of applause from the audience with whom I saw the film.

Most importantly, the movie features Jackie Chan, one of the great movie stars of all time, in a relaxed emeritus role. We don't get to see much of him in action here; but he seems to enjoy working in friendly rivalry opposite Macchio. And there's a scene in which Li takes on some thugs in an alley in which young Wang seems to be channeling Chan's desperate, hanging-on-by-a-thread comic style. I had to wonder if Chan had a hand in the choreography.

THERE AIN'T NO CURE FOR THE SUMMERTIME CRUISE

Opening this weekend:

Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning--It's pointless to complain that the action sequences in this movie are preposterous. They are, of course, but if they weren't, the audience would presumably feel cheated. It's what this franchise is about--wildly exaggerating the stamina, adroitness and durability of which humans are capable.

Or, rather, of which one particular, superior human is capable: Tom Cruise, as hero Ethan Hunt. Toward the end, Ethan crawls around outside the cockpits of two different biplanes--changing planes in mid-flight!--to grapple with the bad guy (Esai Morales). It's one of the more spectacular airplane stunt sequences since the finale of 1977's Capricorn One, but it makes the Marvel movies seem like gritty realism by comparison.

Mind you, by this time we've already seen Ethan enter a wrecked Russian sub at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean to retrieve some gizmo; he needs it stop a rogue AI program from launching a nuclear holocaust, so no pressure. He then rises to the surface without a wetsuit.

And it isn't just his physical prowess, of which, at 62, Cruise can be justly proud. Ethan is also morally superior. Canoodling with his leading lady (Hayley Atwell) in the decompression chamber after his arctic dip, he asks what human could be trusted with the power to control the world's nuclear arsenals, and the wide-eyed, worshipful woman unhesitatingly suggests that he's just the right guy. Ethan demurs, all modesty.

It's been a while since a star has treated himself to quite this shameless a Stations of the Cross tour. The opening credits announce this eighth film in the series as "A TOM CRUISE PRODUCTION," and the producer certainly shows reverence for his leading man.

But as usual when he plays one of his hyperconfident man of action roles--he can be excellent when he plays desperate, out of his depth pipsqueaks, as in Rain Man or A Few Good Men--at some level I can't take Cruise seriously, despite his obvious great capabilities. He's youthful in the wrong sense onscreen; other stars, say, Henry Fonda or James Stewart, had a boyishness which they never lost, even as they added the gravitas of maturity. But try as he might, Cruise always comes across like a kid dressed up in his dad's clothes.

To be fair, this movie and its predecessors aren't really any sillier than most episodes of Bruce Geller's Murphy's-Law-defying TV series (CBS; 1966-1973). But that show played it cool and laconic, with long, dialogue-free sequences of sneaky spy mischief, sustained by quiet, tense, repetitive musical cues and almost no backstory. The movies are loaded with heaving psychodrama and bombastic music and extended fight and chase scenes, often featuring Cruise doing his adorable little stiff-armed, wind-up-toy run, right up the middle of a conveniently empty road.

It's certainly fair to complain that Final Reckoning, which clocks in just a little shy of three hours, is way too long and drawn out. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie from a script he wrote with Erik Jendresen, the movie is exceedingly well-made on a scene-by-scene basis. But cumulatively, it's too much, and with its heavy, Gotterdammerung atmosphere and plot elements that recall movies like Fail Safe and War Games, it's a little lacking in humor, too.

There is excellent acting here. Angela Bassett brings a moving authority to the role of an intelligent, decent, responsible President of the United States. The French actress Pom Klementieff is amusing as an assassin turned ally; Katy O'Brian from Love Lies Bleeding makes an impression as a Navy diver, and vets like Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Janet McTeer, Rolf Saxon and Nick Offerman, among others, are always welcome.

But the audience is probably most grateful of all to Simon Pegg, who works hard to lighten things up. And Lucy Tulugarjuk, even though her lines are in an Inuit language, connects with the audience pretty much every time they cut to her.

One last snarky shot at a fellow sexagenarian who is possibly holding up better than I am: For all the care lavished on the film in general and the star in particular, Cruise's hair somehow got away from the filmmakers here. It's long, and it seems limp and spiritless; at times it gives him almost a Shemp Howard look. When he's struggling to hang on to the airplane and his face and hair are rippling in the wind, it offers the only other significant laughs in Final Reckoning, albeit likely not on purpose.

THE MINOR THINGS

 A couple of weeks ago, the admirable John Oliver devoted a segment of his HBO show Last Week Tonight to the wonderful weirdness that is Minor League Baseball.

Alas, I can't find a YouTube link to the full segment, but it's hilarious and worth watching if you can (Season 12; Episode 10). It comes at the end of a horrifying, blood-boiling main segment about the current deportation crisis, and it's a heart-lifting cool breeze of American decency by contrast.

In that segment Oliver's only criticism is that some minor league teams aren't pulling their weight with regard to eccentricity and creativity in their branding, merch and promotional stunts. He offered to put the efforts of his staff to the task for one team, provided that the team agreed in advance to have no input into the rebrand, and to do whatever they come up with. In a follow-up on last Sunday's show, also worth watching, he announced which of the 47 teams that applied--about 40% of the league, he gleefully noted--the LWT group would work to rebrand.

After dismissing several teams for being so strange already that LWT couldn't do better, he finally told us which lucky team they had settled on. Sure enough, it was the Erie Seawolves, the AA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers from my beloved hometown of Erie, PA.

Among the problems which they plan to fix with the rebrand is the fact that the city, though an important port on the Great Lakes, is nowhere near the sea. The name and the mascot, piratical lupine C. Wolf, date to the team's earlier affiliation with my father's beloved Pittsburgh Pirates.

Anyway, I was thrilled by this news because, of course, I've been a Seawolves fan for decades. My family and I go to the games at UPMC Park (formerly Jerry Uht Park) whenever we can get back to Erie in season. I've worn the shirts and hats...

The Kid has canoodled with C. Wolf...

...and other canines at "Bark at the Park" night.

We've been witness to a fireworks show at the park that sounded like a full-scale artillery bombardment...

A Seawolves magnet adorns our fridge...

...and The Kid has accumulated a couple of autographed game balls...

But most memorably, I myself was featured in the pre-game festivities at a Seawolves game. Back in 2005, I wrote a sonnet inspired by a wild, field-flooding rainout I saw at the park. The poem was published in 2008 in the baseball literary journal Elysian Fields Quarterly (sadly since defunct).

On the off chance that you don't have the back issue lying around, here the masterpiece is:

In 2009, through the intercession of my friends Tom Maggio and Lory Varo, I was invited to read it before a game, which I proudly did (you can watch it here)...

I was feeling quite triumphant when I returned to my seat after a round of polite but pleasant applause and, you know, nothing flung at me from the stands. But I found The Wife scowling furiously. A guy down the row from us had yelled "GET A LIFE!" at the conclusion of my reading.

Not bad advice, but after getting a look at the guy...

...I'm not sure I thought he was in a position to offer it.

Anyway, I can't wait to see what Oliver and Company come up with for the Seawolves. Maybe the Erie Kleps (after Eddie Klep, an Erie native and the first white player in the Negro Leagues)? The Erie Pepperoni Balls? The Erie Misery Bay Sox? The Erie Blue Pike? The Erie Lampreys? The Erie Hellbenders? The Erie Pizza Bombers? 

The Wife, more of a stodgy baseball purist than I am--she's offended, for instance, by the Globetrotters-esque antics of the Savannah Bananas--is uneasy about the rebrand, and she tells me that internet is full of indignation at the prospect. But the whole thing is likely to be very temporary anyway, of course, and should raise the team's and the town's profile nicely, if fleetingly.  

Maybe rename them, after my poetry fan, the Erie Heckling Philistines? Just a thought...

TOWER PLAY

Opening this weekend:

Final Destination: Bloodlines--The format of the Final Destination flicks is that of the slasher movie; the gimmick here is that the killer is an impersonal force: Death Itself. Each movie begins with a spectacular, lovingly presented disaster in which a bunch of young people meet gruesome ends. In the first film (2000) it was a plane crash; later entries featured a highway pile-up, a roller coaster mishap, a raceway catastrophe and a bridge collapse.

In each case these depictions are revealed to be premonitions, which allow the protagonists to avoid their fate, and to prevent several others from suffering it as well. But it turns out that The Grim Reaper is a bit of an OCD completist. The rest of each film consists of Death, or Fate or Destiny or whatever, conspiring to kill these survivors off, in order, through increasingly elaborate chains of events, something like the "accidents" that claimed Damien's enemies in the Omen movies.

This sixth entry opens in the early '60s in an unnamed city that looks a lot like Seattle, in a tower that looks a lot like the Space Needle. After the usual vision, a pretty young woman (Brec Bassinger) averts a fire and disintegration of the tower during its dedication festivities, thus cheating Death not only of herself but of everybody else at the party.

The variation, this time, is that this woman's granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is being haunted in the present day by her grandmother's experience. Stefani gradually realizes that she and all of grandma's descendants and the bloodlines of everyone spared that day are fated to untimely ends. Her Uncle and cousins and Mom and brother are all on the clock, as is she.

Despite its somehow vaguely Calvinist worldview, the series has had a lightly tongue-in-cheek tone from the start, and it's grown more facetious as it's gone on. The death sequences have become gory Rube Goldberg Mousetrap Game-style slapstick set pieces, and the audience hoots at them happily.

The journeyman actors are pleasant company, but not so much that you overinvest in them as real people, and can't giggle at what happens to them. Besides, as with so many recent splatter movies that seem to rely heavily on CGI (Cocaine Bear, Renfield, Thanksgiving, Heart Eyes), the gore effects feel insubstantial and carry little punch, beyond the comic.

There's no denying the inventiveness that directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, working from a script by Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor and Jon Watts, bring of some of these scenes, presented with the heartless glee of an EC horror comic. I certainly can't claim that none of them made me chuckle. But the movie suffers from diminishing returns, and it weighs the silly premise down with too much literalism. It also cheats a little, killing off a character supposedly exempt from the curse, and then lamely explaining it away. 

I suppose I can also admit that there was an irritating element of hardship duty for me in the tower scenes here; I'm not great with heights. A few years ago I visited the Space Needle and, while my daughter cavorted happily on the glass floors, I could just barely stick a toe out over that dizzying drop. Having my phobias justified by this movie was not especially gratifying.

One actor makes a vivid impression: Tony Todd, a recurring presence in the franchise, shows up to provide some exposition toward the end, and gets to deliver a lovely little encomium to the preciousness of life as his exit speech. Partly because the actor, who looks thin and gaunt, passed on last November, it gives the movie a more touching moment than it probably deserves. Bloodlines isn't without entertainment value, but I hope that this truly is the final destination for this quarter-century-spanning series. Joke's over.

NOIR IN THE WORLD I'D RATHER BE

Now a quarter-century old, the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs remains my favorite film festival in the country.

Held at the Camelot Theatre on Baristo, it specializes in crime movies, mostly from the '40s and '50s, mostly in black and white. Some of them are classics, familiar from Turner Classic Movies or other channels. But I go to see the obscurities, the oddball, forgotten quickies that rarely turn up on TV even in wee hours.

Here are three I caught this year:

Swell Guy (1946)-- The title role, ironically meant, is a celebrated war correspondent who returns to his wholesome small town. His family and the other townies welcome him as a hero; only his Mom (Mary Nash) drops her smile, and drops stitches from her knitting, when no one is looking, because she knows her son is a thieving, amoral creep. Sonny Tufts plays the great man; his name has long been almost a byword for bad actor, but he carries the movie pretty capably as the hale-fellow-ill-met, and he leads a cast that includes Ann Blyth, nearly as unlikable as she is Mildred Pierce, Ruth Warrick, William Gargan, Thomas Gomez and Millard Mitchell, along with Frank Ferguson and Charles Lane among the uncredited bit players. Directed by Frank Tuttle from a clumsy but sassy script by Richard Brooks (based on a play by Gilbert Emery), this uneven but fascinating yarn was presented in a sparkling new 35mm print; we were told that this showing was its debut before an audience.

Lust for Gold (1949)--This gripping, grimly funny western/noir hybrid is set and was partially shot in the Superstition Mountains here in the Phoenix area. It's about the fabled Lost Dutchman Mine, and stars Glenn Ford as Jacob Walz, the "Dutchman" (actually German) who claimed to have discovered gold in the Superstitions but took the location with him to his grave. The movie presents Walz as a slack-faced, dead-eyed rat-bastard, treacherous and murderous and spiteful but also stupid and gullible. He makes the title character in Swell Guy seem like a genuinely swell guy. Ford's not a favorite of mine, but he's excellent here; like a lot of bland nice-guy actors (Fred MacMurray is another good example) the chance to play a louse brings him to life. The presenter warned us that the movie had not one sympathetic character, and right he was; Ford is way outmatched in cool Machiavellian villainy by his leading lady, the exquisite Ida Lupino. The film is oddly structured, with the period western part set within a modern-day frame story of nearly equal screen time featuring William Prince, Paul Ford and Will Geer. The old west story is resolved by a dues ex machina; the modern story is resolved by a serpens ex machina. The cast includes Gig Young as Lupino's weakling hubby, Edgar Buchanan as Ford's partner, and, among the uncredited players, the likes of Arthur Hunnicutt, Will Wright, Hayden Rorke, Percy Helton and Jay Silverheels, among others. Hard to go wrong.

The film's version of the Lost Dutchman story is probably pure fiction, but that's fair enough, as none of the other versions are any more reliable. Nonetheless, the film opens with the following gobbledegook Certificate of Authenticity from Dan E. Garvey, then the Governor of Arizona, on AZ Governor's Office letterhead no less:

"The picture which you are about to see represents, to the best of our knowledge, the true facts concerning this unusual situation, as substantiated by historical records and legends of the State of Arizona."

Nice to know that it isn't only in today's political climate that legends could be used to substantiate facts.

Unmasked (1950)--This brief programmer from  Republic stars a fleshy, pre-Perry Mason Raymond Burr, indolently slimy as the editor of scandal sheet called The Periscope. He impulsively murders his mistress, then frames her husband (Paul Harvey) for it. This was the least of the three movies I made it to, but Burr puts on a good show, as does Harvey, as does Norman Budd as Burr's squirrely sidekick. And near the end, there's a wild fistfight, just to remind us it's a Republic picture.

Lots of fun, but alas, the relentless march of time is not treating this festival kindly. I've been going, not every May but most, since 2007, and for the first few years many of the screenings were attended by actors from the films; over time I got to see June Lockhart, Marsha Hunt, Ann Rutherford, Richard Anderson (not wearing socks!), Norman Lloyd, Robert Loggia and Ernest Borgnine, among others, including grown-up child actors like Billy Gray and Gordon Gebert.

Now that even these kids are getting a bit long in the tooth, the festival has had to resort to offspring. This year's guests included Errol Flynn's daughter and Joel McCrea's grandson.

FEASTIVAL

As in most Mays since 2007, Your Humble Narrator spent this past weekend in Palm Springs, at the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival...

...now in its 25th year; its late founder and namesake, mystery novelist and Palm Springs City Councilman Lyons, was still presenting when I first went there. Like every year, I got to see a couple of obscure gems at the Camelot Theatre this weekend.

More about these movies later, but first: food! Here is some of the yummy stuff we enjoyed. First, mushroom barley soup at Sherman's Deli...

Then sand dabs in lemon sauce with fettuccine at Sammy G's...

Then Rigatoni Capri at Kalura Trattoria...

Then back to Sherman's for knockwurst and eggs...

Plus cookies from Sherman's, and a date shake, as is traditional in that town. For the sake of both our health and our finances, it's probably just as well that we don't have access to these places year-round.

On a column near Sammy G's, we saw this beautiful local...

Some variety of spiny lizard, I think. My miserable photographic skills do him no justice. He looked pretty worn and battle-scarred, and his tail appeared to be stumped; it clearly wasn't his first rodeo.