CLAW PATROL

It's a big dino-weekend! This week my pal Darryl and I checked out The End of Oak Street, opening today, and made a new friend at the screening...

You can read my Phoenix Magazine review here, along with my review of Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie...

HARD DAY'S NIGHT

Now playing:

One Night Only--Based only on the title and the poster, audiences may not go in expecting dystopian sci-fi. I didn't. But the premise of this romantic comedy is, quite exactly, The Purge, except with sex instead of violence.

Up front we are told that three years before the movie started, "The Mandate" outlawed premarital sex in America except for a single 12-hour period in summer. There's some amusingly interwoven exposition to explain how this is enforced, and some clever background gags in the signage or on TV, but the plausibility or implications of this liebesverbot aren't the point.

The movie is really about our heroine Allie (Monica Barbaro) and our hero Owen (Callum Turner) getting together and realizing they're meant for each other before the time is up. He's a pizza chef; she's a singer who makes her living with embarrassing jingles for pharmaceutical commercials but can't bring herself to deploy her pipes onstage in front an audience.

Dateless on the big day, they wander the lust-saturated streets of New York, crossing and re-crossing each other's paths while chasing after false leads and suffering wacky humiliations. Directed by Will Gluck of Easy A from a script by Travis Braun, One Night Only starts off excellently, with ingenious set-ups and a nice big ensemble of character players--Maya Hawke, Molly Ringwald and Levar Burton, to name only three--along with some surprise cameos.

The movie gets messier and less assured in its overextended third act, as if Gluck and Braun felt obligated to pile on unnecessary complications. By the end, the night feels way too long. But a movie like this fails or succeeds on the degree to which we like the leads and want to see them find each other. Turner and Barbaro's relationship progresses to the next station of fond, amused familiarity each time they meet, so that even when they're presented with glamorous alternatives, it's believable that they would opt for each other.

Turner is winning in his nice guy role; he has a touch of Channing Tatum's sweetness while giving off a sharper sense of intelligence. But One Night Only truly serves as a showcase for Barbaro, the striking young actress who played Joan Baez in No Direction Home. Maintaining her dignity here in a precariously revealing dress, with smiles and quiet chuckles escaping onto her face despite the travails she's facing, she gives us a romantic heroine we can wholeheartedly root for.

SPIN CYCLE

Check out my review of Spider-Man: Brand New Day...

...now in the multiplexes, online at Phoenix Magazine.

HE ONLY HAS EYE FOR YOU

Available on VOD:

The Cyclops (1957)--It's often pointed out that Bert I. Gordon's initials spelled out B.I.G., appropriately because his niche was making movies about people or animals turned amazingly colossal via clumsy rear-projection special effects. Most of these films are terrible; most of them are also entertaining. Christopher Nolan he wasn't, but Gordon did make a film that was a nod to a famous episode in The Odyssey, this 1957 saga of a one-eyed giant.

The beautiful, bob-haired, delicate-boned '50s scream queen Gloria Talbott leads an expedition--consisting of a scientist (James Craig) a pilot (Tom Drake) and a shady speculator (a vigorously hamming Lon Chaney, Jr.) into a remote, radioactive, forbidden valley in Mexico. She's looking for her fiance, who disappeared there a couple of years earlier. The group soon finds it's a canyon of horrors, with giant lizards and other creatures mutated by the uranium in the soil. Then they encounter a bald giant with a disfigured face and one huge, bulging eye. Who might that be?

Made to share a double bill with Daughter of Dr. Jekyll--a Gloria Talbott two-fer!--this movie is slight even by '50s low-budget sci-fi standards, and there's an unsavory tinge to it from the pre-humane animal action. Even so, the title character here, played by Duncan Parkin behind the memorable makeup, and with gratingly persistent groans and snarls supplied by the superb voice actor Paul Frees, has a grotesque pathos. And Homeric action asserts itself: the giant traps the party in a cave with a boulder, and he meets his waterloo from the proverbial poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

WHAT A LONG STRANGE TRIP

Check out my review of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey....

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

BEST RESULTS

Once again I'm proud to have been among the authors of Phoenix Magazine's annual "Best of the Valley" feature...

...now on the stands. Check it out to find hundreds of Valley amenities which we have peremptorily chosen as the best our community has to offer. While you're reading, guess which 13 little mini-masterpieces of prose composition are the work of Your Humble Narrator.

THE LAND OF THE FREE (PASS)

Check out my review of Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

At the screening, I was presented with my own Official Celebrity Sex Pass...

You'll notice that it remains blank; at this writing I still haven't decided which lucky celebrity gets me...

TO FRISBEE OR NOT TO FRISBEE

Not long ago I walked into the Pet Supplies Plus near my house...

...and encountered a young woman sitting at a table laden with prizes and a small wheel of fortune. I was invited to give the wheel a spin. It landed on "TRIVIA QUESTION." The question: What is the life span of a bearded dragon, the endearing Australian lizards popular at pet shops...

Your Humble Narrator prides himself on an above average knowledge, for a layperson, of reptiles. I guessed that in captivity, a properly cared for bearded dragon might hope to live ten years. The young woman said the answer was 8-12 years. Nailed it!

I was therefore invited to choose a prize. I selected a sleek, shiny black plastic frisbee with "PET SUPPLIES PLUS" printed on it in bold green letters. I brought it home, thinking our Stewie...

...might enjoy chasing a frisbee in our back yard as opposed to the customary hard rubber balls. And so he did, but after less than ten minutes with him this was the disc's condition:

Very soon after this, oddly enough, I was given another frisbee. This one was a promotional item for the movie Pressure...

After less than ten minutes in the back yard with Stewie...

...this was its condition:

The main reason this post exists is so everybody knows I nailed the question about the bearded dragons.

LOBO TO ME

On the weekend of Our Nation's 250th anniversary, Your Humble Narrator once again had the honor to introduce this week's edition of Reel West Sundays at Western Spirit: Scottsdale's Museum of the West, and lead the post-movie discussion. The selection was...

Rio Lobo (1970)--In the last film that Howard Hawks directed, John Wayne plays a Union army colonel in charge of moving a shipment of gold at the end of the Civil War. Confederate raiders rob the train, and after the war ends, The Duke goes west to get even with the traitors among his men who betrayed the mission.

This was the third Hawks western starring Wayne in just over a decade, after Rio Bravo in 1959 and El Dorado in 1966, all written or co-written by Leigh Brackett. But the similarities run deeper than that; the three films seem almost like loose remakes of each other. All three feature The Duke and his allies guarding a prisoner in a besieged jailhouse from corrupt forces who would like to free him. There are other devices that pop up almost obsessively--prisoner exchanges, dynamite used as a weapon--and all three feature a crotchety old sidekick and a plucky young sidekick; in Rio Lobo the youngster is the lively Christopher Mitchum as "Tuscarora" and the oldster is Jack Elam, having a high time as Tuscarora's maniacally giggling father.

The glamour comes from Wayne's hunky second lead, the Mexican star Jorge Rivera as the leader of the raiders, and from Jennifer O'Neill, one year away from fame in Summer of '42, who looks every inch the Cover Girl model she was. She rocks her leather pants and feels very 20th Century, as do her female co-stars Susan Dosamantes and Sherry Lansing; they come across more like the women in a Beach Party movie. But however anachronistic, they do follow in the Hawks tradition of self-directing, non-subservient women.

Rio Lobo is the least of this odd trio of films, maybe because the seige part doesn't start until the homestretch of the film. Until then it feels a bit aimlessly structured and rambling. But it's still pretty entertaining; Wayne is at his most likable and the movie is full of terrific, reliable supporting players including, among others, David Huddleston, Mike Henry, Victor French, Robert Donner and even a glimpse of George Plimpton, of all people, among the heavies.

MINION SOUP

Now playing in the multiplexes is Illumination's latest, Minions & Monsters...

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine.

BUFFING IT

A week ago today, at Western Spirit: Scottsdale's Museum of the West, Your Humble Narrator had the honor to introduce the afternoon's movie selection...

The White Buffalo (1977)--Charles Bronson plays Wild Bill Hickok, opposite Chief Broom himself, Will Sampson, as Crazy Horse, in this tall-tale weird western. Both men have been plagued by nightmarish visions of the title ungulate, and have decided to try to hunt it down. Eventually their paths converge, and though they're both staunch racists, a tense alliance forms between them. Based on a highly researched, floridly written novel by Richard Sale, who also wrote the screenplay, this was a rare flop for Bronson, though he brings it the same confident bearing he had in his other western roles.

Directed by J. Lee Thompson, a long way from The Guns of Navarone, the movie is terrible, but entertainingly, sometimes hilariously so, and it has a cast of veterans that's hard to resist: Jack Warden as Hickok's crabby sidekick Charlie Zane, as well as Kim Novak, Clint Walker, Slim Pickens, Ed Lauter, Martin Kove, a young Richard Gilliland, and the venerable Douglas Fowley (Roscoe in Singin' in the Rain) as a train conductor. Stuart Whitman and Cara Williams are ignominiously served in their brief roles, and John Carradine plays an undertaker, because of course he does.

White Buffalo are a very real part of the religious beliefs of many indigenous people in America, usually seen as a positive omen, an auspicious harbinger of peace, prosperity and blessings. It would take someone more knowledgeable than I am about such cultures to say if the treatment in this movie is offensive--or rather, just how offensive it is. The animal, one of the clumsier and less convincing creations of the great Italian creature-maker Carlo Rambaldi of Alien and E.T. fame, is treated here basically as a monster; probably Executive Producer Dino De Laurentiis was thinking of Jaws, less than two years earlier, and hoped the movie could cash in on the killer animal vogue, along with the likes of Grizzly, Orca and Tentacles. Even so, especially in his Moby Dick Waterloo at the finale, you may feel a pang of sympathy for the poor beast.

I also enjoyed moderating the lively post-movie discussion...

The movie was presented as part of Museum of the West's excellent ongoing Reel West Sundays film series, in connection with their exhibit Still in the Saddle: A New History of the Hollywood Western, which runs through December 31 of this year (the 2 p.m. Sunday flicks are free with regular museum admission; $10 just for the movie). Still in the Saddle includes artifacts of The White Buffalo, like a dinky little jacket that the apparently very slight Bronson wore in the film...

Before the event, Chief Curator Andrew Patrick Nelson took me to lunch, along with film historian Richard M. Roberts...

...at The Frybread Lounge, a native-owned cafe in Old Town Scottsdale, where, to prepare myself for the task ahead, I had a bison burger...

..."Rez style," that is, on frybread instead of brioche. A seriously lean and delicious burger; if you're in the neighborhood, I highly recommend.

GIRL, INTERRUPTED

 Check out my review of Supergirl...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

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.