RED ROBIN

Happy Monday! Check out my review of The Death of Robin Hood...

...with Hugh Jackman in the title role, online at Phoenix Magazine.

OH, THE HE-MANITY

Now playing in the multiplexes:

Masters of the Universe--The Mattel toy line which started this franchise was launched in 1982. I was in college at the time, so any nostalgic associations I have with it come from my nephews, both of whom were ardent enthusiasts, of the toys and of the Filmation cartoon series.

 The dolls, that is to say action figures, were sword-and-sorcery fantasy warriors from a realm called Eternia. The signature hero was the blond, brawny swordsman He-Man; his badass friend was Teela, and his stalwart sidekick and mentor was Man-at-Arms. The main villain was the diabolical usurper Skeletor, who had a skull for a face but the same chiseled physique as his enemies (one of my sisters used to say Skeletor was a "double-bagger"). Their clashes and conflicts were played out in various playsets, most notably "Castle Grayskull."

I always imagined the characters were on some higher order of existence than ours, governing the vagaries of good and bad in our Universe. If, say, He-Man and Skeletor were fighting and Skeletor landed a blow, that was a famine or a war somewhere; if He-Man landed a blow, that was a cure for a disease. Something like that.

In any case, there was a 1987 film version, with Dolph Lundgren as He-Man and Frank Langella playing it admirably straight as Skeletor. I remember having a good time at that film with some friends back then, but the new film, opening this weekend, is an improvement.

It stars Nicholas Galitzine as Adam, aka He-Man (the retro term is mocked in the film), who fled Eternia as a runty little boy when Skeletor's hordes invaded Castle Grayskull, and landed in Oklahoma City. Adam had been entrusted with the Sword of Power, which he promptly lost upon arrival in OKC.

Now a grown-up, he's good at his job in HR at some office, so he knows his way around teamwork and respecting the feelings of others. But when he tells his cosmic backstory to, say, a first date, or when he searches the computer in his cubicle for swords, the results are unfortunate.

Before long, boy and sword are reunited, and he and Teela (the appealing Camila Mendes) are back in Eternia hacking it out with Skeletor and his scurvy followers. The good guy allies include the giant greenish feline Cringer/Battle Cat, the “human periscope” Mekaneck and such walking double entendres as Fisto and Ram Man.

Director Travis Knight, working from a script by a gaggle, wisely deflates the grandiose material for laughs, and the cast is only too happy to abet him. Galitzine embraces the silliness, giving us a splendidly manic, machismo-free He-Man.

Idris Elba makes a genial, relaxed Man-at-Arms, and Alison Brie is droll as the half-heartedly wicked Evil-Lyn. Best of all is Jared Leto, lending rich, mellifluous line readings to Skeletor, constantly frustrated by his slow-on-the-take minions, who don't give him proper villainous support when he goes on a cackling jag.

As so often with American fantasy, sci-fi and superhero epics of recent years, it may be hard for many of us not to read political allegory into this goofy, glitzy mash-up of Arthurian legend, Star Wars and Sid and Marty Krofft. The troubled times we're living in seem, at most, only a little less weird and cartoonish than what we see onscreen in Masters of the Universe. And no less needful of heroism.

DAY, DREAM BELIEVER

Check out my review of Spielberg's newest, Disclosure Day...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

SHOW TIME

The great Lauren Gilger, Mark Brodie and the whole gang at The Show...

...on KJZZ made me feel welcome this morning as I babbled on, barely coherently, about this year's batch of summer movies. Great fun!

BITING SATIRE

Check out my Phoenix Magazine review of Arizona Theatre Company's Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors...

...playing at Tempe Center for the Arts through June 7.

BLAME IT ON THE WEATHERMAN

Check out my review of the new WWII drama Pressure...

...online at Phoenix Magazine. Have a great weekend everybody!

STRING THEORY

Playing today at 1 p.m. at the Vail Comedy Festival in Vail, Colorado:

On a String--Our heroine Isabel (Isabel Hagen) finds herself in the title state, and the string is steadily being pulled tighter. She's a professional violist in New York, playing in a quartet and picking up solo gigs at weddings, funerals, proposals, the occasional film score.

Played by Isabel Hagen, who also wrote and directed and who really is a Julliard-trained violist, Isabel lives in a smallish apartment with her oddball musical family--pleasantly inappropriate parents (Dylan Baker and Karen Blood); passive-aggressive pianist brother (Oliver Hagen, the director's real-life brother). Her love life is a disappointing low-level mess, she suffers chronic wrist pain, and she's worried about an upcoming audition for the Philharmonic. She gets a job teaching violin to a little girl, and drifts into an attraction with her married father (Frederick Heller).

We see the strange episodes of her life, some funny, some poignant, some creepy, almost all of them awkward and tinged with frustration. Violists, I am told, are a traditional butt of musician's jokes, as in: "Q: What's the difference between a violist and a coffin?  A: With a coffin, the dead person is on the inside" or "Q: What does the viola section have in common with the Beatles? A: Neither have played together since 1969."

This movie seems to be a dramatization of this hapless state of simply being a violist. The focus is on Hagen's performance; her onscreen version of herself is patient and emotionally open, with a charming, inviting smile and manner. But she's stretched thin--Isabel is a serious, exquisitely-trained artist knocked around by her cloutless station within the classical music world.

This modest, surefooted gem has some of the flavor of minor-key indie comedies of the '80s and '90s, and the performances, both acting and musical, are impressive. It played last month at Phoenix Film Festival, and if you happen to be at the Vail Comedy Festival today, as in Saturday, May 23, you can catch it at 1 p.m. Hopefully it will go on to find a wider audience.

WHAT A PIECE OF WORK IS A MANDALORIAN

Happy Friday! Check out my review of Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu...

...now in theaters, online at Phoenix Magazine.

SISTER ACT

Happy Friday to everybody! Check out my review of the revenge yarn Is God Is...

...now in theaters, online at Phoenix Magazine.

BARACK-NID

Time for another edition of my infrequently recurring feature "Weird-Ass Old Comics." This time, we're looking at...

...The Amazing Spider-Man, issue #583, from March of 2009. This is a much more latter-day vintage of comic than I would normally collect; obviously it was the presence of President (then President-Elect) Barack Obama, sharing the cover with Spidey, that made me pick it up. But I had never gotten around to reading it.

Last week Obama was the guest of Stephen Colbert in a prerecorded interview from the Obama Presidential Center, slated to open on June 19th in Chicago. The comic was shown on display at the Center--Colbert teased Obama about having been featured on a Spider-Man cover before Obama was (issue #573, November of 2008)--so I dug out my copy and read it.

Obama doesn't appear in the comic's main story, a sweet feature about Peter Parker's long-suffering office pal Betty Brant. Betty is weary of Petey's tendency to stand her up or be late, little knowing that he's off battling villains while she's waiting.

According to an editorial note, the brief "Bonus Back-Up Feature" about Obama, scripted by Zach Wells and drawn by Todd Nauck, was a last-minute add after the Marvel folks learned from an interview in The Telegraph that Obama was a fan of the webslinger. In the Colbert interview, Obama mentioned his superheroes of choice as a kid were Spider-Man and Batman, which made me swell with pride; same two for me.

In the short saga "Spidey Meets the President!" Petey, in D.C. to photograph the inauguration, switches into Spider-Man to prevent The Chameleon from impersonating Obama and becoming President 44. When Obama realizes that, his Secret Service detail notwithstanding, Spidey is the right man for the job and gives him the green light to take action, Spidey delivers the tale's best line: "Ya hear that Chameleon? The President-Elect here just appointed me...SECRETARY OF SHUTTIN' YOU UP!"

It was poignant to see the Obama interview last week, even though I'm not a 44 fanboy. I've always liked him, but he was never anywhere near as boldly progressive as I wanted him to be, or as I think he could have been, especially if he had acted decisively early on. I'm not at all sure Biden, doddering but clear-eyed and out of  f*cks, wasn't more decisive. Even so I think that, graded on the curve of what he accomplished versus what he was up against, Obama was likely the best American President of my lifetime.

But when you see a man of Obama's poise and grace and reflective intelligence and plain decency in contrast to what we have now, it's both terrifying and mortifying. If The Chameleon had successfully impersonated Obama's successor, we might well be better off.

CAGE, FIGHTING

Check out my review of Mortal Kombat II...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

Here's my review of The Devil Wears Prada 2...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

PROCESSED HAM

In the multiplexes this weekend:

Animal Farm--Seen in a political and historical vacuum, this new movie is a strange but enjoyable enough animated feature for kids. But it's nearly impossible for many of us to see it in a vacuum.

The film is an adaptation of George Orwell's 1945 allegorical fable set on a farm in which the animals have run off the oppressive humans and set up a new society based on such rules as "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL." What follows, of course, is the slide into selfishness, corruption and classism that seems to inevitably follow even the most high-minded of revolutions.

It's one of the great works of 20th-Century fiction, and the love that Andy Serkis, director of this new version, has for his source material feels unmistakable. But there's no way around it; Serkis and screenwriter Nicholas Stoller have turned Orwell's hard, unsentimental vision into just another kiddie flick. They've given it a star-studded cast with the likes of Kieran Culkin, Steve Buscemi, Glenn Close, Laverne Cox, Kathleen Turner, Jim Parsons and Woody Harrelson as the saintly horse Boxer.

They've added a character, a young pig named Lucky (voiced by Gaten Matarazzo of Stranger Things) to serve as the movie's conscience. They've filled the story with contemporary elements like cell phones and drones, and added a long action finale in which Lucky and the kingpin pig Napoleon (Seth Rogen; excellent) face off for the soul of Animal Farm.

Giving happy endings—well, not happy, but less dispiriting—to Orwell adaptations is nothing new. The 1956 version of 1984 offered an alternative ending used in some markets, in which Winston and Julia are shot down protesting Big Brother instead of surrendering to their brainwashing. A harsh but visually beautiful 1954 British animated version of Animal Farm (partly financed by the CIA!) ended with a second revolution by the animals, this time to overthrow the pigs.

So it's almost easier to excuse Serkis for offering a less gloomy and cynical Animal Farm, and certainly for adding flatulence jokes and other lowbrow gags, than for flexing Orwell's masterpiece to the standard template of the commercial animated feature. You can look from this Animal Farm to such rural tales as Barnyard and Ferdinand and Rock-a-Doodle and back again, and already it's impossible to say which is which.

POP OF THE WORLD, MA!

A happy Friday to everybody! Check out my reviews of Michael...

...and Mother Mary...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

THE SUN'LL COME OUT TOMB-MORROW

Now playing:

Lee Cronin's The Mummy--No fewer than four earlier horror movies have been titled The Mummy; this new one comes with a onscreen directorial signature. Cronin is the Irishman who wrote and directed the 2023 Evil Dead Rise. His mummy flick should please fans of that movie, as it's essentially Evil Dead Rise with some Egyptian trappings. For the rest of us, though, it's likely to be a tough slog.

An expat American family--TV reporter Dad (Jack Reynor), medical Mom (Laia Costa) and a daughter and son--live in Cairo. The daughter, Katie, is abducted from the family's garden by a witchy presence. Eight years later, poor Katie not having been found, the family has moved back to Albuquerque, and added a new adorable daughter, as well as the sassy gramma (Veronica Falcon).

When Katie turns up alive back in Egypt, catatonic and desiccated, they bring her home and try to care for her there. Gruesome mayhem ensues. Meanwhile back in Egypt, a police detective (the striking May Calamawy) probes the mystery of what happened to her. As might be expected, it's not pretty. 

Cronin is by no means without talent. He has a fine eye, and he can generate atmosphere. His script is nutty but coherent on its own terms, unlike, for instance, that of the recent undertone. There's nothing really new here--the story seems indebted both to The Exorcist and to John Carpenter's 1987 Prince of Darkness--and many of the plot points, starting with but not limited to the idea that a child in this condition could be cared for at home, are deeply stupid. But that in itself wouldn't be a dealbreaker if the movie weren't so rotten-spirited.

Again, this may just be what the market will currently bear for contemporary horror fans. But, as with Evil Dead Rise--I'm a big fan of the original Raimi Evil Dead flicks--I seem to have lost my stomach for this sort of extreme horror shtick; I can't find the terrorizing and torture of little kids entertaining.

The smug, nervy way the director uses wonderful, comforting elements as a supposed ironic contrast to his shocks also soured me on Lee Cronin's The Mummy. He doesn't seem, for instance, to share the Mel Brooks 2,000 Year Old Man's enthusiasm for nectarines. And Cronin uses maybe the most uplifting of American popular songs, The Band's "The Weight," as the background for a scene of ghastly gore.

Fortunately, "The Weight" is more powerful than any splatter that Cronin can muster. But of all this movie's sins, that may be the hardest to forgive.

FEST RESULTS

Check out my short article, online at Phoenix Magazine, about this year's edition of the Phoenix Film Festival...

...which runs through April 19.

WEDDING THRASHERS

Check out my review of The Drama...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

ALGORITHIM METHOD

Now in the multiplexes:

The AI Doc: or How I Became an Apocaloptimist--Frustratingly for co-director Daniel Roher, the talking heads at the beginning of this documentary can't even really give him a clear explanation of what AI is. Roher, a young filmmaker and artist who won an Oscar for his 2022 documentary Navalny, is anxious about the apocalyptic potential of AI for humanity, particularly in light of the possibility of him bringing children into the world.

His initial round of interviews doesn't offer him much to relieve the anxiety; more than one sage suggests that the human race could be extinct within a decade. Even if they don't go that far, they note the loss of both white-collar and blue-collar jobs without any plan to accommodate the unemployed, and the potential for massive, ubiquitous, society-wide surveillance. They also note AI's environmental impact, through the staggering amounts of power these systems require.

Apparently Roher's worries about all this weren't sufficient to encourage marital precautions, because in the course of the film he learns that his beautiful wife is pregnant with their first child. Soon he's getting pep talks to pull him out of his virtual despondency--more talking heads, mostly CEOs with dollar signs in their eyes this time, acknowledge that AI will certainly create turbulence. But they also insist that it has the potential to bring about a technocratic utopia, a world without disease, hunger or want.

The danger in both scenarios is that they sound so absurdly like old school sci-fi that they could breed either Chicken Little terror or complacency. This sprightly, rapid-cut, graphically engaging movie, co-directed by Charlie Tyrell, tries to find a tolerable way to navigate a middle course. The result is a shrug: it could go either way, or a thousand other ways we can't predict, so you might as well have your kid and hope for the best.

This is sensible but of course insufficient, so Roher and Tyrell offer suggestions for what to do in response to this crisis, which even AI's staunchest defenders seem to agree is a crisis. One of the talking heads calls himself an "apocaloptimist"--Roher pounces eagerly on the term--that is, aware of the dangers of AI but also of its possibilities, and prepared to take positive actions.

Most of these seem to involve demanding government regulation, and under normal circumstances that would be the obvious way to start. But...this government? Isn't there somebody else we can lobby, at least for the time being?

I've been repulsed by AI from the first I heard of it, partly for selfish reasons. It hits home for sorry little freelancers like me; the people who pay pittances for little scraps of writing are drooling at the prospect of having a machine write them for free. It also revolts me, perhaps even more so, as a reader. I read to get into the heads of other human beings; I don't want to read a bunch of crap spewed by a computer.

So far, most of the AI-generated text, and music and visual art, that I've seen (and known I was seeing) has been gratifyingly awful. But they're working hard to get it better, and that's no comfort, because I wouldn't want to read AI-generated prose even if it was good. Maybe even especially if it was good.

In any case, the concerns suggested by Roher and Tyrell's movie go quite a ways beyond a few hack writers losing work; they're talking about the survival of the human race. It begs the question: if we can create these systems to begin with, isn't there a way, not to mention a moral imperative, to program them to not harm or oppress us?

Here too, I automatically revert to foundational sci-fi; couldn't they be programmed with some version of Asimov's Three Laws, or with the programming that shut down Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet if he was ordered to hurt a human? Or at least with that little key that left HAL singing "Daisy" in 2001?

If it's not seen as practicable to put basic safety measures like this in place, I would guess that there's one reason: it would inhibit the technology's potential to make money. Even the future of humanity can't compete with profitability. That's why my own apocaloptimism, at this point, remains cautious.

MARC-ALOPOLIS

Check out my review of Sofia Coppola's Marc by Sofia, her documentary portait of her friend, fashion designer Marc Jacobs...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

This morning The Wife and I betook ourselves to 59th Avenue and Bell Road, to participate in yet another "No Kings" demonstration. Some images:

A really large crowd; pretty great signs. Thumbs-ups and peace signs vastly outnumbered middle fingers and thumbs-downs from passing vehicles. BUT...some brave hero slung a handful of ice at The Wife from a car. Most of it spattered ineffectually off her sign. She shook it off at once with the remark "I'm on the right side." But I said that now she can honestly say she's been targeted by ICE.

ROCK OUT

 Late posting this link, but check out my review of Project Hail Mary...

...on the PHiX at Phoenix Magazine.

PODCAST SYSTEM

Check out my review of the new chiller undertone (lower case on purpose)...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

SUTURE SELF

Check out my reviews of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!...

...and the Disney/Pixar animated feature Hoppers...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

SCREAMING SERVICE

Check out my short review of Baz Luhrmann's EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

The weekend's other big theatrical release, Scream 7...

...was not screened for critics before release, at least not in the Phoenix area. Make of that what you will. In lieu of a review, therefore, here are seven great movie screams [spoilers throughout!]:

I'm aware, of course, that any or all of these screams may have been partially or entirely the work of a clever sound designer; the first two listed below certainly are. But that's the magic of the movies, right? The point is, they're effective.

7. The Wilhelm Scream--Originally created for a scene of Sheb Wooley being attacked by an alligator in the 1951 Florida-set period adventure Distant Drums, this scream earned its moniker when it was looped, rather unconvincingly, as the scream of a "Private Wilhelm" in the 1953 western The Charge at Feather River. The shriek of shock and dismay has been used dozens if not hundreds of times thereafter, in movies ranging from the original Star Wars to Toy Story. It's particularly effective with characters falling from high places.

6. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)--Like the Wilhelm Scream, this one is also studio-generated, but unlike the Wilhelm Scream, it's not even of human origin. It's the screech of revulsion let out by a soulless pod person when they recognize, and point out to their pod brethren, an unsnatched human. Legendary sound designer Ben Burtt, a popularizer of the Wilhelm Scream, created the effect for Philip Kaufman's classic '70s-era remake of the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, using the squeal of a pig. It chillingly distills the sense of being identified, and publicly denounced, for being out of sync with the masses.

5. Them!--Few who have seen the 1954 sci-fi masterpiece by Gordon Douglas about giant ants are likely to forget the moment: The catatonic little girl (Sandy Descher) found wandering in the New Mexico desert gets her memory jogged by a whiff of formic acid, and lets out a cry of horror followed by repeated screams of "Them! Them! Them!"

4. The Godfather (1972)--The scream to which I'm referring in this one comes when John Marley gets Marlon Brando's famous offer he can't refuse, waking up to the severed head of his beloved horse in bed with him. It was Marley's iconic moment onscreen; his wails somehow get across not only terror but a palpable despair, at the evil with which he's confronted, and his powerlessness against it.

3. Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)--When Bette Davis sees a grinning, dripping Joseph Cotten risen from the swamp, bedecked with mud and Spanish moss, her strangled, barking screams really do sound like somebody at long last taking grateful leave of their sanity.

2. Psycho (1960)--In the shower scene of Hitchcock's 1960 classic, Janet Leigh begins the family tradition which her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis would carry on in 1978's Halloween and other films: a full-throated, full-screen scream of the highest order. But...

...I would argue the scream that Vera Miles lets out near the end of the same movie, when she at last meets Mrs. Bates face to face, is at least as good. Both are greatly abetted, of course, by the musical shrieks of Bernard Hermann's strings.

1. King Kong (1933)--Can there really be any question of first place? The very name "Fay Wray" evokes the gold standard in "scream." Not only did Wray scream the best, she probably screamed the most, from her first meeting with the title simian to his Waterloo atop the Empire State Building.

Of course I realize that this is very far from a definitive list; these are just seven that occurred to me. What obvious candidates have I forgotten? Feel free to scream at me.

PLAY IT YET AGAIN

Check out my short column, online at Phoenix Magazine, on Casablanca...

...one of my all-time favorites, which is showing tonight at 6:45 p.m. at the Majestic Chandler, as part of their "Curated Cinema" series.

DAYS OF OUR WIVES

Phoenix-area folks looking for some counterprogramming to the Super Bowl and/or the Olympics might consider Southwest Shakespeare Company's The Merry Wives of Windsor...

...this afternoon at Mesa Arts Center; it plays there through February 22. Your Humble Narrator has the honor to share the stage, in the small role of Falstaff's drunken sidekick Bardolph, with a very talented cast. Directed by Keath Hall--of last year's Klingon Hamlet--the production places the farce in an Arizona trailer park in the 1990s, a setting to which it quite readily adapts.

Also on the subject of Shakespeare: In case you missed it, check out the great Ian McKellen on Stephen Colbert's show last week, performing a magnificent speech apparently by Shakespeare from the play Sir Thomas More, unproduced in Shakespeare's time and first performed by McKellen in the mid-1960s. It's More, then "shrieve" (sheriff), shaming an anti-immigrant mob in London, and it's as witheringly appropriate to our time as it ever was.

Back in 1995, I got to interview a pre-Gandalf McKellen (by phone) for Phoenix New Times in connection with Richard Loncraine's pre-WWII-era Richard III movie, in which he played the title role. I asked him about Sir Thomas More and his status as the only living actor to create a new Shakespearean lead. There was a long pause on the line, and then he said, "Can you have seen it?"

No, Sir Ian, I'm just a nerd.

But to hear this beautiful piece of writing blisteringly performed by this absolute freaking master, on national television no less, is a privilege.