ALIENATED

Now in theaters:

Jules--Ben Kingsley plays Milton, a widower pushing 80. A mild-mannered guy, he putters around his small Pennsylvania hometown, making inane proposals at city council meetings, tending the flowers in the backyard of his beautiful home, and resisting the efforts of his fretful daughter (Zoë Winters) to make him get a checkup.

Then one day Milton finds that a flying saucer has crash-landed in his backyard, wiping out his azaleas and shattering his birdbath. Soon the craft's silent alien occupant, dubbed Jules, is staying in the house, watching TV and eating apple slices between shifts repairing the saucer.

Initially, Milton doesn't make a secret of any of this. He calls 9-1-1; they think it's a prank. He mentions it to the guy at the supermarket (while buying apples) and it gets back to the daughter, who assumes it's a sign of early onset dementia.

That's the best joke in this wistful, extremely low-key sci-fi comedy--the idea that elderly people are so ignored in our society that an alien visitation could go unnoticed if it happened among seniors. Eventually two ladies (Harriet Sansom Harris and Jane Curtin) from the council meetings learn about and befriend Jules, and advise Milton to secrecy, but there's little urgency to the situation.

Kingsley starts out very deadpan and reserved; it may be that Milton is being careful to hide a cognitive decline. But the performance opens up as the story progresses, and both Jules and the two ladies draw out Milton's perceptive, hospitable warmth.

Harris and Curtin are both lovable as lonely, bored women who know they are, just by virtue of longevity and experience, a resource that's being wasted. Curtin even gets to sing "Free Bird." Under the prosthetics, stuntwoman Jade Quon brings a stoic gravity and woebegone sweetness to the bluish-white, earless, hairless, black-eyed Jules. Standing next to the saucer, wearing an old Spuds Mackenzie t-shirt, this visitor is an absurdly endearing figure.

Director Marc Turtletaub and screenwriter Gavin Steckler seem to have a little trouble figuring out how to end the movie; the last few scenes have a fitful, uncertain quality. But overall, this is a small gem--sort of an E.T. for the other end of the life span.

THERE'S AN APE FOR THAT

Opening this week: 

 
Kong: Skull Island—In 1973, just as the U.S. is bugging out of Vietnam, the Military-Industrial Complex mounts a secret but really obnoxiously intrusive expedition, via a swarm of helicopters, to the title island. Within minutes of arriving, the invaders find themselves getting the crap very justifiably beaten out of them by the title resident.

The survivors of the initial attack then squabble and try to regroup, and to survive further attacks by this skyscraper-sized primate as well as other gargantuan abominations. Notable among these are the “skull-crawlers,” a species of voracious reptiles that resemble two-legged monitor lizards with squalid, skull-like heads. The party also encounters human natives, and an American airman stranded there since WWII.

The original 1933 King Kong is my favorite movie, and giant monsters have been cinematic comfort food for me since I was a small child. So when I tell you that it’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun at a movie, I’ll understand if you take it with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, it’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun at a movie, and many people around me at the screening seemed to have the same response.

American popular moviemaking has been on a bit of a roll recently—two weeks ago we had the chiller Get Out, last week brought us Logan, and this week we get this boldly preposterous saga. It would be great if we could count on entertainment at that level every weekend.

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts stages monster action with a true Brobdingnagian grandeur, and he and the special effects folks offer us a Kong who is brooding, irritable and lovable. Part of the pleasure of the movie is that he’s so much more sympathetic than the human visitors that one feels little compunction about wholeheartedly rooting for him.

There’s a tongue-in-cheek nerviness to the script, and the cast is full of character vets that can handle it. The supporting soldiers and researches are forgettable monster fodder, and the nominal hero and heroine, Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson, seem to have been cast for their ability to look great in t-shirts. But John Goodman, as the contractor leading the search, and Samuel L. Jackson as the Army Colonel who goes all Captain Ahab toward Kong, and John C. Reilly as the marooned pilot, ensure that the movie isn’t just an empty spectacle devoid of personality.

Kong: Skull Island is not, I suppose, a movie of particularly mature or wholesome sensibility. But it can’t fairly be called dumb, either—it’s made with skill, wit and imagination, and it has moments that could be called magical. 

 
The Ottoman Lieutenant—Call the title character Ismail, a dashing young Turk in the Ottoman army. He's played by a Dutch actor named Michiel Huisman, previously unfamiliar to me but very appealing. Our heroine, played by the Icelandic actress Hera Hilmar, is Lillie, a high-minded nurse from Philadelphia who goes to work in a clinic in Anatolia in the early days of World War I. She and Ismail fall in love, even though he's a Muslim and she's a Christian, even though the dull doctor at the clinic (Josh Hartnett) also loves her, and even though the Armenian Christians she cares for are in big trouble from the Turks.

This star-crossed interfaith romance tries to be sexy and swoony in the manner of a check-out line romance novel of the old school. The direction is by that excellent journeyman Joseph Ruben, who back in the '80s made three classic thrillers in a row: Dreamscape, The Stepfather and True Believer. The poor fellow hasn't been able to get a script worthy of his abilities since, but that doesn't stop him from bringing the best out of what he has to work with, like efficiently staging some exciting action scenes here, or from capitalizing on the expansive scenery.

Ben Kingsley easily nails his few scenes as another American doctor with whom Lillie bonds, a sick and bereaved man who labors on in spite of despairing doubt that life has any meaning. But crisp direction and a strong supporting turn can only take the movie so far, especially when there may be an unspoken agenda beyond the mild love story.

With its insipid dialogue and nagging, generically epic music, The Ottoman Lieutenant comes off as trite but watchable and harmless enough, on the surface. It would be remiss, however, not to note that the film, a Turkish-backed production, is grotesquely evasive about the Armenian Genocide that started in 1915, in which about a million and a half people perished.

The movie doesn't exactly deny the event, but it treats it obliquely, in bland passages from Lillie's narration like "the Ottomans took measures to stamp out the Armenian rebels, and the Armenians fought back," or "...some Armenian men were taken from their homes and conscripted to serve in the Ottoman army, while the round-up of Armenian women, children and the elderly had begun..." She never quite spits out what those "measures" were, or what the people were being rounded up for.

It's true that we're shown a small number of Ottoman soldiers massacring some Armenians on a country road. But there's no sense of the scope and sanction of the horror from this scene, the real point of which is that our valiant hero Ismail intercedes on the Armenians' behalf.

To be fair, this probably isn't much more outrageously disingenuous than, say, the classic John Ford epics are toward the real-life genocides of the American West. Still, behind all of The Ottoman Lieutenant's pieties and platitudes and tender longings and noble sacrifices, it's hard to miss a distinct whiff of whitewash.

TIGERS & BEARS, OH MY!

Opening this weekend:

The Jungle Book—Disney’s 1967 version of The Jungle Book is probably my favorite of that studio’s animated features. This is partly sentimentality—it’s the first movie to which I can remember being taken, when I was four or five years old. But it’s also looser, lighter, funnier and far richer in personality than a lot of Disney fare, with vibrant primary colors, wonderful voice acting and a couple of catchy big band numbers.

It was hard to imagine that this same charm could be captured in live action. There was a live-action attempt in the 1940s, made by the Korda Brothers and starring Sabu. Heavily narrated, it used live animal footage, but also had a much more human-oriented story.

But Disney’s new version of Kipling’s tales of Mowgli the wolf-raised “Man-Cub,” featuring a live actor as Mowgli and CGI as his animal co-stars, takes a different approach from either earlier version, and finds some unexpected grit and emotional range. Directed by Jon Favreau from a script by Justin Marks, the film uses bits of Kipling’s language and gets across some of his near-peerless storytelling panache. Bits of his icky colonialist presumption inevitably creep in here and there, too, though to my mind this film wasn’t nearly as bad on this score as The Lion King.

As before, young Mowgli (Neel Sethi) is menaced by the scarred tiger Shere Khan (voiced by Idris Elba), who bears him a grudge. It’s decided that the black panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) will return Mowgli to the “Man Village,” and episodic adventures ensue. He’s befriended by the leisure-loving bear Baloo (Bill Murray) and threatened by the python Kaa (Scarlett Johansson) and the primate King Louis (Christopher Walken), here presented much like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, before he and Shere Khan have their big confrontation.

It’s an odd hybrid, with the Brit actors declaiming high drama alongside Murray’s Chicago-accented shtick, but mostly it works. Lupita Nyong’o, voicing Mowgli’s lupine mother, brought tears to my eyes with her avowals of love for him. It should be noted that there are a few funny but retroactively wistful lines spoken by the late Garry Shandling, as the porcupine.

There are also a few missteps, the most glaring, for me, being the decision to allow Murray and Walken to perform their character’s songs from the 1967 film. Both are great performers in their own right, but musically Murray is no Phil Harris and Walken is no Louis Prima, and they seem to know it—their numbers feel halfhearted, almost sheepish.

Parents of smaller kids—and anyone sensitive to animal suffering—should be aware that the film is violent at times, especially by current kid-movie standards, and that a couple of characters are killed in the course of the story. As the saying goes, it’s a jungle out there.

(RE)LIVER & MINIONS

Lots of weird science opening this weekend:

Self/less—Ben Kingsley plays Damian, an ultra-rich New Yorker dying of cancer. A shady scientist (Matthew Goode) tells Damian that he can transfer his consciousness into a healthy young body grown in a lab. Damian agrees to this, and finds himself residing in the strapping frame of Ryan Reynolds. Relocated to New Orleans, he starts partying, but inexplicable recurring visions make him suspect that there are things the scientist hasn’t told him.

The ideas here are very familiar in sci-fi; in movies they go back at least as far as the 1936 Boris Karloff thriller The Man Who Changed His Mind, and there are also strong echoes of John Frankenheimer’s 1966 Seconds. But Self/less, directed by Tarsem Singh from a script by David and Alex Pastor, is a reasonably unpredictable and tightly-paced variation on it.

The opening quarter or so of the film is particularly strong, not only for the moral questions it raises but also for the fantasy fulfillment it offers, especially to aging audience members. Wouldn’t it be fun, the movie asks us, to suddenly find yourself several decades younger, healthy, rich, without attachments and looking like Ryan Reynolds?

After this promising set-up, the way the movie plays out is a bit disappointingly routine. Like a lot of popular sci-fi, it raises intriguing questions, then gives us car crashes and gunfights. But within the conventional format to which it aspires, Self/less isn’t merit/less.

Minions—This animated feature is an origin story for the little goobers who debuted in 2010's Despicable Me. Bright-yellow, bib-clad, goggled (sometimes two-eyed and sometimes cyclopean) and shaped like Tic Tacs, they were first seen as the aides to Gru, the super-villain from that excellent film, and as they giggled and chattered at each other in what sounded like some sort of sped-up Esperanto, they pretty much ran off with the movie.

I guess I had vaguely assumed that the Minions were meant to be some cybernetically-engineered creations of Gru's. According to this film, however, they've been around since prehistoric times, and their tendency, we are told by The Narrator (Geoffrey Rush), has always been to serve the most despicable master they can find.

These include, in early sequences, Napoleon Bonaparte, cavemen and a marvelously loutish Tyrannosaurus Rex. The meat of the movie, however, is set in 1968 and has them working for a chic super-villainess called Scarlett Overkill (voiced by Sandra Bullock). Their assignment: Steal the crown of Elizabeth II (Jennifer Saunders). In the course of the very silly, almost free-associational storyline, one of the Minions, Bob, gets crowned King of England.

Minions is an enjoyable film full of visual beauties—the title sequence splendidly evokes William Steig—and many hilarious episodes. It isn't the classic that Despicable Me is, to be sure, probably because the Minions are, as the name implies, born supporting players. Endearing though they are, they don't have the richness or complexity to carry a movie, and Scarlett Overkill and the handful of other characters bounced off of them really don't either. The Minions were designed to be scene-stealers, but you can't steal what already belongs to you.