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...

WHAT A LONG STRANGE TRIP

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

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

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

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

POP OF THE WORLD, MA!

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

...and Mother Mary...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

SEOUL TRANSFER

Opening this weekend:

Colossal—Manhattanite Gloria (Anne Hathaway) isn't a bad sort, but she's gotten into the habit of drinking and partying and neglecting her boyfriend. When he pretty justifiably gets fed up and dumps her and kicks her out of the apartment, she moves back to her small hometown upstate, gets a job in a bar owned by her old classmate Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), and starts trying, vaguely, to regroup her life.

While this is happening, on the other side of the world, a horned, glowering, Godzilla-sized monster suddenly materializes, seemingly out of nowhere, in downtown Seoul, South Korea. The beast appears every day or so at the same time, behaving sometimes destructively, sometimes just peculiarly, and then vanishes just as inexplicably. The locals are terrified, and the world's sense of reality is shaken, yet back in the upstate New York bar, things settle back into routine soon enough.

How these two story strands very specifically connect, and how it leads to a second titan appearing in the streets of Seoul, is the subject of Nacho Vigalondo's brilliant, off-the-wall exploration of the psychological underpinnings of the giant monster movie. In many films of this sort, the subtext is environmental or social, but here it's rooted in petty personal weaknesses and acrimonies that seem entirely convincing. It's about the micro of human resentfulness, expressed in the macro of rampaging colossi.

This is the most imaginative use of the giant-monster form since the Korean movie The Host, back in 2006. In some ways Colossal also resembles the sort of surrealist-lite comedies that started showing up more than a decade ago, like Being John Malkovich and Cold Souls. But Vigalondo gives it a fairly rigorous internal consistency. About the only lapse in believability that the movie asks us to overlook is the idea that if this was happening, Seoul, or at least that part of Seoul, wouldn't be evacuated, that shops and restaurants would still be open and the streets would still be teeming with people. Otherwise, the movie is—on its own terms, of course—quite logical.

It owes much of its authentic feel to the acting. Sudeikis, always reliable, brings an impressively subtle tension to Oscar, and Tim Blake Nelson and Austin Stowell add warmth as his buddies. At first these guys seem meant only to give us easy-going small town banter, but Vigalondo gradually takes even this side of the material into uncomfortable, unsentimental realms.

The real force in Colossal, however, is Hathaway's funny yet stingingly honest underplaying as the intelligent, sheepish, emotionally bedraggled Gloria. It may be her best performance.

STOMP COLLECTION

Check out my rundown, on the New Times blog, of Korean giant monsters. It's in anticipation of Nacho Vigalondo's fascinatingly weird movie Colossal, opening here tomorrow...

so...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...the nod goes to this titan...

...from that film.

WHAT A RIOT

A bunch of openings this weekend:

Stonewall—The June 1969 riots at the title gay bar in Greenwich Village, credited with goosing the LGBT Liberation Movement into action, are wrapped in a fictitious coming-of-age story. High school senior Danny (Jeremy Irvine), who looks like Troy Donahue’s prettier little brother, flees the Midwest when his dad finds out he’s gay. Landing in New York (he has a scholarship to Columbia), he promptly falls in with the tricking, shoplifting riff raff on Christopher Street.

Danny finds acceptance from this racially and ethnically mixed rabble—especially from the nurturing, flamboyant Puerto Rican hustler Ray (the likable Jonny Beauchamp), who loves him unrequitedly—that he never got at home, but he also learns what it’s like to turn tricks and to get the crap beaten out of him by the cops. He falls for a Mattachine Society activist (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), and Ray suffers, and they’re all in the mix at the mobbed-up club that fateful night in June, a few days after the death of Judy Garland.

Directed by Roland Emmerich, this very old-fashioned movie has taken a lot of shit from LGBT commentators for the whitebread nature of the leading man, and the corniness of his story. Fair enough, maybe, but the script—credited to no less than Jon Robin Baitz, though there are thuddingly self-conscious lines that it’s hard to believe he wrote—is structurally very similar to a low-budget indie effort of the same title from 1995 (I reviewed it for Phoenix New Times), and that movie had the same gushy sentimentalities.

Emmerich’s not a director I would normally go to the wall defending, but there’s a simple energy to his work here, and the cast is lively, with the youngsters abetted by enjoyable turns from vets like Matt Craven, Patrick Garrow and Ron Perlman. Above all, the significance of the event—the startling awareness it gave to the mainstream (not to mention other gay people) that, pushed far enough, that community could fight back like any other downtrodden minority—gives the climax a charge. The movie’s very conventionality is cheering, in a way—it’s shaped to offer the protesters as heroes to a mainstream audience, and who, back in 1969, would have predicted that?

Pawn Sacrifice—Another historical episode, from just three years later: Tobey Maguire plays chess master Bobby Fisher in Edward Zwick’s intriguing chronicle, focusing on his legendary 1972 match in Reykjavik, Iceland, with Russian master Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber). I well remember what an improbably iconic figure Fisher was at that time even in the rural America where I grew up, because he was able to beat the Soviets in a field for which they particularly prided themselves. 

What most of us didn’t know at the time was the degree to which Fisher was not just a little eccentric but a full-blown, tinfoil-on-the-skull paranoid megalomaniac, bristling with ugly vitriol against communists and Jews (though he was Jewish himself) and certain he was being conspired against. He was also deeply sensitive to his environment, finding it hard to play without absolute quiet. The title, perhaps, is meant to suggest that Fisher was the pawn, his obvious mental health needs sacrificed by the U.S. for a Cold War win. 

If the script, by Steven Knight, and Maguire’s performance is to be believed, Fisher’s nuttiness didn’t quite excuse him from also being an insufferably arrogant, exasperating bastard. His chess genius apparently did, however—the people close to him, including his coach, the chess master and Catholic priest William Lombardy (Peter Sarsgaard), seemed capable of forgiving him anything, and going to any lengths to accommodate him.

It’s to Maguire’s credit that, without softening Fisher, he makes him a poignant and haunted and also comic figure as well as an infuriating one. The supporting cast helps too, especially Sarsgaard, Michael Stuhlbarg as the shady, possibly covert-intelligence-connected tournament promoter, and Schrieber. Spassky isn’t a large role, but Schrieber brings it a warm, indolent virility, like a self-possessed old tomcat, yet with the suggestion that he may have his own, less virulent streak of paranoia. 

 A Brilliant Young Mind—Though he’s far less abrasive than Maguire’s Bobby Fisher, the main character of this Brit drama suffers some of the same miseries. Nathan Ellis (Asa Butterfield) is a mathematical genius. He’s also, thanks to some degree of autism but also to a horrifying childhood trauma, a social disconnected misfit, unable to show affection even to his desperately deprived mother (Sally Hawkins).

Under the dryly sardonic tutelage of a teacher (Rafe Spall), himself a “maths” whiz as a kid but now a multiple sclerosis-afflicted pill-popper, Nathan prepares to compete for a spot in the International Mathematics Olympiad. His quest takes him to Taiwan, where a girl from the Chinese team (Jo Yang) takes a shine to him.

The movie, titled X + Y in the UK, is fiction derived from a documentary called Beautiful Young Minds by the same director, Morgan Matthews. For a while it seems like one more variation on the sports movie, sort of a Rocky for people with Asperger’s. And that would be entertaining enough as far as it went, but A Brilliant Young Mind takes a turn in its homestretch that I must admit I wasn’t expecting, and which carries it beyond the simple triumph of the underdog climax toward which it seems to be building to something far more emotionally satisfying. I don’t know how it squares with the clinical realities of this sort of condition, but dramatically it works. 

Sally Hawkins is especially fine in these last minutes, but the whole cast is strong. Spall was my favorite, but Eddie Marsan is also peppery and funny as the UK coach, and Yang is a delight as the unapologetically infatuated love interest. Butterfield (Ender in Ender’s Game) is a touching presence at the center of the movie, and a charismatic one, too—it’s believable that girls might fall for him, not in spite of his strangeness but because of it.

The Intern—This heavy-handed message comedy may do well enough at the box office, but something tells me it won’t get a ton of serious critical sympathy. It’s about as soft-edged and undemanding as movies get, with almost all of the story’s conflict kept on the margins, while the center is filled with platitudes and pleasantries. But I can’t claim I wasn’t engaged by it from start to finish.

First of all, said message—that old people are a resource society ought not to squander—is one I find myself agreeing with more heartily every year. Writer-director Nancy Meyers dramatizes this, not very urgently, by sending bored, affluent retired Brooklyn widower Ben (Robert DeNiro) to work as an unpaid intern at an exploding online shopping business founded by Jules (Anne Hathaway). In part because of strained relations with her mother, Jules is uncomfortable with older people, but Ben’s unassuming diligence and discretion quickly break through her defenses, and they bond.

That, I guess, is the second thing I liked about The Intern. Ben isn’t the father Jules always needed; the two bond as friends and colleagues. I think the third and biggest reason I liked The Intern, though, was just because of the chance to see DeNiro in a light, relaxed, funny vein. Though his character is underwritten and preposterously flawless, DeNiro himself is good company here.

Much of Hathaway’s role consists of admiring Ben’s old-school style. Jules, and presumably Meyers speaking through her, seems to regard as the biggest fault of the younger generation of men in this country their failure to wear suits and ties to work, and to carry a hankie with them in case a nearby woman needs a good cry. Strictly from an aesthetic point of view, I entirely agree, but it’s worth remembering the power structure that style symbolized. Whether Jules, or Meyers, would have enjoyed trying to build a career in the suit-and-tie world of Ben’s prime is a point The Intern doesn’t raise.

BEATFLICK

Opening today at Filmbar Phoenix:

Burroughs: The Movie—William S. Burroughs is my favorite of the Beats, though the work of his I like best is his relatively straightforward early stuff, like Junky (1953). The clarity and velocity of his prose at its best is a marvel, although I doubt it’s ever as good on the page as it is when he reads it aloud, in his metallic Midwestern blare.

This documentary, directed by Howard Brookner, opens with Burroughs on a 1981 episode of Saturday Night Live, introduced by Lauren Hutton. He proceeds to read from Naked Lunch and Nova Express, and get solid laughs. The film then gives us a full but not exhausting chronicle of the author’s often harrowing life, much of it narrated by the man himself, dapper, deadpan and unflappably stoic as ever.

Brookner, who died of complications from AIDS in 1989 at the age of 34 (Burroughs outlived him by nearly a decade), started the film as his NYU senior thesis; Tom DiCillo and Jim Jarmusch were on his crew. He filmed Burroughs for 5 years, and captured some remarkably unguarded footage—Burroughs interacting with his talented, ill-fated son Billy, for instance, or with old cronies like Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr. He also got good talking head stuff from such talkers as Terry Southern and Patti Smith and Brion Gysin and even William’s brother Mortimer Burroughs, who put down Naked Lunch halfway through because he disapproved of the language.

The film’s been around since 1983, but Filmbar is showing a remastered version, in connection with the subject’s centennial. For Beat enthusiasts, it’s a must.

Still in theaters:

Interstellar—Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi saga looks, in its first stretch, more like John Steinbeck than Ray Bradbury or Robert Heinlein. Earth of the future has become a dustbowl, wheat has become extinct, billions of humans have died, and farming is understandably the most respected of all professions. Corn is still abundant, but it’s only a matter of time before it goes too, and when it does humankind is done for.

Former NASA pilot Matthew McConaughey has turned farmer, though he doesn’t really like it. But he gets the chance to go back to work for his now-disreputable former employers, flying a spaceship through an inter-dimensional “wormhole” to another galaxy, at the other end of which three planets, each a possible candidate for human colonization, have been discovered.

What ensues is a tale, complex in the Nolan manner, of space travel, time travel, paradoxes, robots, brave new worlds, rationality versus love, survival weighed against worthiness for survival. In other words, it touches on just about every classic theme in sci-fi, none of them all that new since Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer wrote When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide back in the ‘30s.

But Nolan’s treatment of them is absorbing, tense and urgent, and full of hushed, eerie visual beauties that recall such atmospheric ‘60s and ‘70s sci-fi favorites as Kubrick’s 2001, Tarkovsky’s Solaris or Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running, without seeming imitative. At nearly three hours Instellar is, I suppose, a lot of movie, though I can’t think of any point at which I was bored.

Be forewarned though: despite a cast that includes Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, Topher Grace, Wes Bentley, Ellen Burstyn and the terrific David Gyasi, this movie's a very heavy dose of Matthew McConaughey—he’s onscreen a lot, and his singsong Texas drawl is heard a lot. If, like me, you’re OK with that, Interstellar may be for you. If not, it’ll be one long space odyssey indeed.

CAPETOWN

Just as it was difficult to discuss 2008’s The Dark Knight out of the shadow of the heartbreaking loss of Heath Ledger, so it’s likely to be difficult, for a while at least, to discuss The Dark Knight Rises out of the context of the horror at the multiplex in Colorado. As it happened, I was unable to attend the screening of the film before it opened, so unlike many of my fellow critics, I saw it—Sunday morning, in a theater maybe one-third full—with the Aurora shootings in my head.

But in terms of the movie, all the tragedy proves is how much easier it is to be a supervillain than a superhero. The real world squeezes the “super” part out of super-villainy, however—it’s terrifying when somebody tries to realize that sort of large-scale, comic-book-style mayhem, but in the end it’s also sordid and pathetic and wretched. It isn’t grand or epic.

And, except to express sympathy to the victims and their loved ones, it probably isn’t worthy of even as many words as I’ve already given it. So let’s turn to a far less important subject—the movie itself.

I wish I could report that the new Batman flick by Christopher Nolan, from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan, is a masterpiece, but I can’t. As with the earlier film, it’s a severely uneven mixed bag, polished and handsome but preposterously overlong, confusing, glutted with enough ideas for three or four movies but way too many for one. Like many, many big Hollywood blockbusters of the last couple of decades, it’s fascinating, even thrilling in fits and starts, but wearying in the aggregate.

Batman hasn’t been seen since the end of Dark Knight. Wayne Industries is in the red, and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), ravaged both physically and spiritually by the tragic events of the last movie, is going through a Howard Hughes-ish recluse phase. Alfred (Michael Caine) keeps pestering Bruce like a Jewish mother to get out and find a nice girl, even if it’s the second-story gal Catwoman (Anne Hathaway), who’s managed to filch a string of pearls belonging to Bruce’s mother.

The principal dastardly duties here fall to a certain Bane, played by the very good Brit actor Tom Hardy, here wasted behind a mask. Bane is like a mash-up of post-Boomer pop villainy, with elements of Darth Vader, The Predator, Hannibal Lecter and especially The Lord Humungus from The Road Warrior—he speaks in the same mushy rumble. But I can’t say I found him as scary as any of the above.

Bane is up to something with a huge crew of henchmen in the sewers of Gotham. Eventually he cuts the city off from the outside world and holds its inhabitants hostage for weeks with a nuclear bomb, while imprisoning Bruce in a hellhole prison overseas.

So there are explosions and chases and fistfights and shootouts and abductions and flashbacks and escapes, between and during which the actors spout pages and pages of exposition, much of it hard to follow even when it’s comprehensible, which for me was maybe about half the time. Things aren’t much easier on a thematic level—politically, the movie flails incoherently, coming across one minute like an Occupy rant and the next like Wall Street propaganda. Scene after scene is propulsive and exciting in itself, but often I was unsure what had happened, or what I should want to happen.

What redeems The Dark Knight Rises is what redeems most overworked movies, if anything does—the acting. Bale is better, or at least less annoying, than he was in the last film, though he’s still using that stupid raspy growl when he has the cape and mask on. Between him and Hardy, much of the dialogue sounds like it’s coming through blown stereo speakers.

There’s no performance on the level of Ledger’s in the previous film, but Caine, Morgan Freeman and Gary Oldman each get a few minutes to show what they’re capable of without breaking a sweat. Hathaway is certainly not repellent in her Catwoman get-up, but Marion Cotillard casts an even stronger seductive spell as a rival love interest for Bruce.

But it’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as an intrepid young Gotham cop, who develops more of a relationship with the audience than anybody else in The Dark Knight Rises. If there’s another film in the series, there’s reason to believe he’ll figure prominently, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

RIP to Al Franken’s laid-back early writing and performing partner Tom Davis, passed on too young at 59.