ALLEY WHOOP

Opening this weekend...

Nightmare Alley--"Geek" has now become roughly analogous to "nerd" or "extreme enthusiast." But the term once had horrific connotations; it was carny slang for a sideshow performer who would do ghastly acts--bite the heads off of live chickens, for instance--usually to feed an alcohol or drug habit. The bottom rung of show business (I almost wrote "the bottom rung of humanity" but then I remembered the 45th President and his cronies), this revolting occupation was the jumping-off point for William Lindsay Gresham's classic lower-depths novel Nightmare Alley (1946).

An atmospheric if softened-up movie of it was made in 1947 with Tyrone Power as Stan, the newbie carny who looks at the geek and knows he could never fall to such a degraded level. Bradley Cooper plays Stan in this gorgeously stylized new version from the great Guillermo del Toro, working from an adaptation he co-wrote with Sunset Gun maven Kim Morgan.

Stan, a drifter running away from something awful, makes himself useful as a laborer to a desolate midwestern carny. Soon he's learning the tricks of fortune-telling and mind-reading acts, which here are so talmudical that earning an honest living seems like it would be far easier. He learns how to calm down an angry cop, and how to dispose of a geek who's outlived his usefulness, and where to find a new one. 

And the work brings out Stan's creative side; soon he's designed a spectacular new "electric chair" act for the lovely Molly (Rooney Mara). He's also taught a weird sort of hustler ethic; the veteran fortune-teller Zeena (Toni Collette, magnificent as ever) warns him against doing a "spookshow," that is, actually faking a manifestation of a departed loved one.

This first half, set in the carny amongst its disreputable but mostly warm and likable denizens, is darkly delightful, visually sumptuous and full of terrific, potent acting and pungent dialogue. As with both the novel and the earlier film version, the second half, in which Stan leaves the carny to start a higher-end mentalist scam--and foolishly ignores Zeena's advice--is less engaging. His scenes as the hapless fly in the parlor of a lacquered, satanic psychoanalyst (Cate Blanchett), though entertaining enough, border on camp, and are a little oppressive after the buoyant, motley first act.

Still, this is a rich and absorbing melodrama. Actors seem to thrive in front of del Toro's camera, and alongside the leads and the wondrous Collette, scene-stealers here include Willem Dafoe as the candidly heartless boss, Ron Perlman as an avuncular carny and, perhaps best of all, David Strathairn as Pete, Stan's washed-up, gently rueful mentor. Even in the second half, there's a splendid quick turn by Mary Steenburgen, and Richard Jenkins is scary, and briefly piteous, as the cold-hearted tycoon for whom Stan puts on his spookshow.

Finally, a word should be said for Paul Anderson, as the geek. He plays the part to the hilt, yet without hamming, and with a dreadful glimpse of the human being he was.

THE CAPER CHASE

Opening this week:

Ocean's Eight--The Ocean this time is Debbie, sister of Danny Ocean. Just paroled, Debbie, played by Sandra Bullock, starts assembling a crew for a modest little heist: The Met Gala in Manhattan.

Cate Blanchett plays some kind of shady bar manager, Mindy Kaling is a jeweler, Sarah Paulson is a fence turned suburban mom, Rihanna is a hacker, the rapper known as Awkwafina plays a hustler and pickpocket, and Helena Bonham Carter plays a dotty Irish fashion designer. An eighth member, neurotic movie star Anne Hathaway, is unwittingly drafted into the crew.

Near the beginning, Debbie tells her pal that she's run through the caper again and again in her head while she was in the joint, working out the bugs, and that she's confident it's foolproof. What director Gary Ross, who wrote the script with Olivia Milch, then unfolds for us is quite possibly the silliest, least-likely-to-go-smoothly criminal plot I've ever seen depicted in a movie. The circumstances required to come together serendipitously would seem optimistic not only in the earlier films in the Ocean series, but in a Gilbert and Sullivan musical.

This may have been intentionally part of the joke by Ross and Milch; in any case it doesn't much hurt the film. Ocean's Eight is about eight beautiful, commanding actresses striding around swanky settings in dazzling outfits, and getting the better of skunky men. It's lavishly yet slickly made, and devoid of any significant emotional or intellectual content. I found it thoroughly undemanding and enjoyable.

None of the stars are remotely asked to stretch themselves, and that works to the movie's benefit, too--everybody's low-key and relaxed, and their interplay is droll without any straining. All eight shine for at least a scene or two, but unsurprisingly the standout is the bedraggled but game Helena Bonham Carter. Her theft of the movie is by far the most efficient heist we get to see.

American Animals--This is a far more plausible caper movie than Ocean's Eight. Indeed, it's based on a true story.

Or is it? At the beginning, the legend "THIS IS NOT BASED ON A TRUE STORY" appears, then the words "NOT BASED ON" vanish. As with the disclaimer at the beginning of last year's I, Tonya, it's an ingeniously ambiguous ploy that can be read several ways, but in any case acknowledges the unreliability of "true stories."

The story in question is the 2004 plot by four college-age numbskulls to rob the rare books room in the library at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, after subduing and tying up the librarian. Their targets included an original Audubon folio and a first edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (the title phrase comes from a line in Darwin referencing Kentucky).

Although the books were worth millions, the crime, at least as interpreted here by the British writer-director Bart Layton, doesn't seem to have been principally about money. None of these guys are depicted as destitute; one was rich, another a promising art student. The motive, rather, seems to have been to break loose from the banality and drudgery of their lives as they perceived them, to be more like movie characters. They openly reference The Shawshank Redemption and Reservoir Dogs, and even use Tarantino's "Mr. Green" and "Mr. Pink" alias system (pointlessly, since they all know each other). (Note: after this review posted I was reminded that the same system was earlier used by the robbers in the original Taking of Pelham 123, but I'd guess that these clods were thinking of Reservoir Dogs; I doubt their movie memories went back to 1974.)

The four actors who play the robbers (Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters, Blake Jenner and Jared Abrahamson) were unfamiliar to me. They're all terrific, and are well supported by some vets like Ann Dowd as the hapless librarian and Udo Kier as (of course) a dubious character.

Layton counterpoints his painfully naturalistic dramatization with documentary footage--talking heads of all four of the chastened and contrite real-life conspirators, and others, and even some Brechtian intermingling of them with the actors playing them, something in the manner of the film version of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. It's expert moviemaking, one of the best-crafted films I've seen this year, but it's also emotionally intense: Even though it doesn't involve murder, the plot comes across as truly horrific and vile, from the outrage committed against the librarian to the simple fact that these guys were robbing a library.

And yet, here all four of these middle-class white boys are, long out of prison and carrying on with their lives, probably hoping that the publicity they get from this movie might give them a boost. One of them even pointed a gun at law enforcement officers during his arrest, and somehow didn't get turned into Swiss cheese. American Animals may make you want to take a knee.

Here are belated quick looks at a couple of other movies about formidable women, still in theaters:

Book Club--The title bibliophile's club consists of four affluent L.A. women: widow Diane Keaton, whose kids want her to move to Arizona; rich, perennially single hotel tycoon Jane Fonda; federal judge Candice Bergen, long-divorced and unable to move on; and married but romantically frustrated chef Mary Steenburgen. One month the assigned book (chosen by Fonda) is Fifty Shades of Grey, and it gets all four of them stirred up. Andy Garcia, Craig T. Nelson, Don Johnson, Richard Dreyfuss, Ed Begley Jr. and Wallace Shawn are the various men who enter, or re-enter, the lives of the ladies.

The script of this emeritus chick flick, by director Bill Holderman and Erin Simms, is pretty terrible, with banter and little heartfelt speeches linked together by some embarrassing physical shtick. But this, in itself, is a testament to the skill and charisma of these four magnificent women. Like Ocean's Eight, this movie is redeemed by a bunch of really good actresses--their committed delivery gives even the feeble college-playwrighting-class monologues here a degree of gravitas.

Probably nothing in the film is more mortifying than the idea that these powerful, worldly women would be so shocked and scandalized by the feeble Fifty Shades books. At one point, while reading, Keaton is heard to mutter "Give me a break." There's a solid literary judgement.

RBG--In Book Club, Candice Bergen's federal judge has a bobblehead of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on her desk. The suggestion is that even the Supreme Court Justice's peers might regard her as a heroine.

This documentary explains why Justice Ginsburg's current status as a cultural icon, on t-shirts and mugs and Saturday Night Live, isn't and shouldn't be just a fad. Those who, like me, were unfamiliar with her career as a lawyer will learn that even if she hadn't been named to the Court, she would still have a place in its history, having argued before it repeatedly, and mostly successfully, for gender equality when it was still an exclusive boy's club.

Directed by Betsy West and Julie Cohen, RBG is, as cinema, little more than a news special, though a deft, absorbing and graphically clever one. We're given a tour of her life, from her Brooklyn childhood to her college years all the way through to her improbable but seemingly heartfelt close friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia. The talking heads here range from Orrin Hatch to Bill Clinton, though some of the most intriguing interviews are the subjects of Ginsburg's cases, the real-world human faces for which she fought her abstract appellate battles.

Most of intriguing of all, however, is RBG herself, reserved and unpretentious, unmistakably partisan and passionate yet collegial. At a time when high-profile civility seems rare in American discourse, she comes across as a humbling example to us all.

NORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR

Opening:

Thor: Ragnarok--Superhero movies have been on a roll lately. For the first decade or so of this century, my reviews of Marvel and DC films have amounted to a lot of grumbling that they were heavy, they were overlong, they were sometimes jocular but lacked true humor, and above all that they were repetitively caught up in a post-9/11 fixation with urban destruction, buildings crumbling to rubble. In short, I didn't find them fun.

And then I did. In the last few years, superhero movies suddenly lightened up. Ant-Man, Dr. Strange, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man: Homecoming and (if you count them) the Guardians of the Galaxy flicks were all fine entertainments, and even the more standard, turgid entries like Captain America: Civil War and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Avengers: Age of Ultron had scenes or performances that zapped some life and looseness into them.

This trend reaches its zenith with the latest Marvel release, Thor: Ragnarok. Those who demand seriousness from their superhero flicks may disapprove, as this movie is played more or less entirely for laughs. But it kept me smiling from beginning to end. It's like an antidote to the preceding Thor flick, 2013's chilly Thor: The Dark World. This movie's world is pretty bright.

Chris Hemsworth returns, and remains agreeable, as the Marvel version of the Norse deity with the hammer only he can sling. "Ragnarok" is the term for the prophesied End Times in the Norse tradition, the day when the giant Surtur will lead an attack on Asgard. This does come into play in the movie, but the principal villains here are Thor's long-dormant sister Hela (Cate Blanchett) the Goddess of Death, and a character called simply Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum), who presides over gladiatorial games on a chaotic planet.

Blanchett is an elegant Maleficent type, topped with a chic antler headdress and attended by an impressive monster wolf. But it's Goldblum who steals big chunks of the picture, bringing the same halting, diffident delivery to tyrannically ruling a violent world that he does to pitching Apartments.com on TV. He's hilarious.

The director is the witty New Zealander Taika Waititi, working from a script by Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost. Waititi serves up plenty of other cheeky performances from his large cast. Tom Hiddleston is back as the ever-devious, ever-likable Loki, as is Anthony Hopkins as crusty old man Odin, and Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr. Strange, and Mark Ruffalo as the chagrined Bruce Banner/The Hulk, who has gone soft with cheap celebrity on Goldblum's planet. Tessa Thompson, the love interest in Creed, makes a quite adorable Valkyrie here, Waititi himself is riotous, behind motion capture, as a mild-mannered revolutionary rock monster, and his countryman Karl Urban gets a nice turn as Blanchett's rather sheepish toady.

The talented cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe bathes the movie in cheery colors, and Waititi stages one sly, silly set piece after another. The movie clocks in at over two hours, but just slightly. It's a trifle, but it hit the spot, and with the exception, maybe, of Spider-Man: Homecoming earlier this year, it's the first superhero movie in recent memory that I could imagine wanting to go see again.

HEAD GAMES

Merry Christmas! Quickies on several Christmas Day openings: 

Concussion—Peter Landesman directed this straightforward drama starring Will Smith, who plays Dr. Bennet Omalu. This Nigerian pathologist came to the U.S. starry-eyed about the American Dream, and then learned what happens when you get between Americans and football.

While doing autopsies for the Allegheny County Coroner’s office in Pittsburgh, including one for down-and-out Steelers center Mike Webster, Omalu came to the conclusion that it might not be healthy for men to spend their careers bashing their heads into each other—he referred to the results of this as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. The NFL found his theory shocking and controversial.

After a while, it struck me that the film’s somber, brooding tone was less about the horror that befalls CTE victims and their families, and more about American angst over anything that challenges, complicates or interferes with the love of football. The best line, delivered by Albert Brooks, refers to the place the NFL has taken in America: “They own a day of the week,” he says. “The same one The Church used to own.”

Carol—The latest from Todd Haynes is this impeccable adaptation of the 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt. As in Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett is a rich lady in trouble. Carol is an affluent, elegant New Jersey housewife and mother, in the process of divorcing her husband. She’s out shopping when she meets Therese (Rooney Mara), an aspiring Manhattan photographer, working in a department store. The two are immediately riveted by each other, and as they get acquainted, eventually taking a road trip together, their relationship grows from yearning infatuation to a genuine bond. It need hardly be said that all does not go smoothly for them.

This is sort of a companion piece to Haynes’ Far From Heaven, his lush, Douglas Sirk-ish ‘50s soap opera in which Dennis Quaid struggled against his sexuality as if he’d been diagnosed with low blood sugar or anemia. But because the lead characters in Carol aren’t trying to overcome their identities, it’s probably a more enjoyable movie. It’s also probably better made—the period detail is rich but not fussy, and the acting bristles, both erotically and emotionally.

Blanchett is daringly mannered, both in her look and her delivery—at first she seems lacquered and campy, almost a little gothic. But as the movie progresses her grand style starts to blend perfectly with Mara’s touchingly unaffected, natural directness. Very simply, the two of them seem lucky to have found each other.

Daddy’s Home—Will Farrell is the square, trying-too-hard stepdad, and Mark Wahlberg is the cool absentee Dad with the motorcycle and the treehouse-building skills. They stupidly one-up each other for the love of Linda Cardellini and her rather unlikable kids, and the result is self-consciously “transgressive” slapstick of the kids-in-wheelchairs-getting-knocked-over style in vogue since The Hangover.

It’s fairly terrible, though I suppose it gets a smidge better in the homestretch when Farrell and Wahlberg aren’t competing anymore. My only other comment is: I can no longer see Mark Wahlberg without being reminded of Andy Samberg’s Saturday Night Live impression of him.

SLATE SHOW

Opening this weekend:

Obvious Child—It might be called the anti-Juno. It’s another romcom where the cute quirky young woman finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy, but this time she unhesitatingly decides she wants an abortion, and is upset that she has to wait two weeks, for medical reasons, to get it—on Valentine’s Day, no less.

Said young woman is Donna, played by Jenny Slate, a tiny Saturday Night Live veteran with a pretty, anxiously optimistic face. Donna is a small-potatoes stand-up comic who, sad and very drunk, has an unprotected one-night stand with a nice goyish type (Jake Lacy) and soon realizes she’s in a jam. When they meet again sober, they find they like each other, and would maybe like to be parents someday, but Donna is sure she’s not ready yet.

With reproductive rights under legislative attack in many parts of the country it’s probably well to put a human face on this predicament, and Slate’s sweet face is a good choice. She carries the movie nicely—a friend of mine predicts that this is her star turn before a long career of playing wisecracking roommates and cubicle neighbors—and she gets capable support from the small cast, which includes Richard Kind and Polly Draper as her parents and Gaby Hoffmann as her wisecracking roommate.

Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, the movie is slight, watchable and somehow not quite satisfying. But it’s honest and believable.

How To Train Your Dragon 2—This sequel to the 2010 animated charmer, adapted from the books by Cressida Cowell, continues the adventure of young human hero Hiccup and his dragon Toothless, who taught the Viking culture of Berk to be dragon trainers instead of dragon-slayers. Now the dragon-loving colony is threatened by a growling warlord who enslaves dragons through his mastery of a gargantuan “Alpha” monster who compels obedience in others of its species.

The appeal of this movie—and it’s extremely appealing—lies in the characterizations, both of the humans and of the dragons, who have endearingly canine personalities. The story takes a sad turn about two-thirds in, but while it’s upsetting, the loss makes sense in the context of a robust adventure story.

HTTYD2 is likely to hold up as one of the best animated films of the year. As far as I’m concerned, in its sunnier way, it’s as visually and thematically extravagant a fantasy as Peter Jackson’s Tolkien movies.

OLD MASTERS AND CUBISM

Opening this weekend:

The Monuments Men—It’s worth remembering that the Nazis weren’t just murderers, they were also thieves, looting and hoarding the art treasures of the countries they occupied. Formed in 1943 to work against this shameless robbery was the Monuments, Fine Art and Archives program, known for short as the Monuments Men, a division of Allied forces made up of artists, restorers, collectors, architects and the like in charge of recovering and returning this incomparable booty.

Out of Robert M. Edsel’s acclaimed nonfiction book on this outfit’s intriguing exploits, George Clooney and cronies have crafted a throwback. The Monuments Men is sort of a benign, high-minded version of the facetious buddy-ensemble military actioners that were popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s, like The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? Like those films, it’s not likely to be regarded as a piece of high cinematic art, and like those films, it’s relaxed and engaging—a guy movie for middle-aged gallery rats. The composer, Alexandre Desplat, even provides a jaunty march theme, a la The Great Escape.

Clooney co-produced and co-wrote the script with his frequent partner Grant Heslov (who has a small role as an army surgeon), and provided the easygoing direction. As an earnest MFAA Lieutenant, Clooney also leads his cast into battle, searching for such prizes as Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna and the Van Eyck Ghent Altarpiece. His followers include Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban and Hugh Bonneville. It may be noted that most of these guys are a trifle long in the tooth for basic training, and Clooney doesn’t hesitate to use gray hair and paunches for their comic value.

But these actors are proven good company, and that’s what they add up to here. Murray and Balaban pair off into a mild comedy team, and Goodman and Dujardin show a pleasing rapport together as well. Damon is particularly good, managing a few sweet, wistful scenes with Cate Blanchett, as his Parisian contact who has secretly tracked the art’s destinations (her character is based on the marvelous real-life Resistance figure Rose Valland), without trying to turn them into feverish drama.

While recognizing its limitations, I enjoyed The Monuments Men a lot. It’s fascinating material, and the cast is tough to beat, and its old-fashioned feel carries, for guys of my age, a nice dose of nostalgia. But I think the real source of its charm may be that it begins as the war is ending—with the Nazis in ignominious retreat, and the shattered ruins of western Europe starting to take a breath. The very fact that the Allies could start worrying about getting art back to its owners was a sign that the good guys were winning.

Because of this, the lackadaisical pace that Clooney sets is almost a benefit. The Monuments Men is no monumental movie, but it’s suffused with a refreshing sense of day breaking after a long and horrible night.

The Lego Movie—Not only did I never have Lego building blocks as a kid, I don’t remember ever playing with them at school or at another kid’s house. Nor did I regard myself as especially deprived by this absence in my toy box. Thus I was an unlikely audience member for The Lego Movie, and thus I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud at a lot of this computer-animated kids' comedy-fantasy, and to walk out of it thinking that I seen something sort of brilliant, even slightly thought-provoking.

In the generic Lego city of Bricksburg, rank-and-file construction worker Emmet, voiced by Chris Pratt, finds himself the object of a prophecy—he’s told he’s “The Special,” the “Master Builder” who can save the (Lego) universe from schemes of the tyrannical President Business (Will Ferrell). The trouble is that Emmet is an enthusiastic conformist who only wants to follow the instructions and fit in.

This leads to a fast-moving and highly complex, but as far as I could tell seamlessly-thought-out, adventure involving everybody from a wizard (Morgan Freeman) to a woman of action (Elizabeth Banks) to a “Unikitty” (unicorn/kitty hybrid) to licensed characters like Batman (Will Arnett, growling amusingly) Superman (Channing Tatum) and the Green Lantern (Jonah Hill) to a villainous Bad Cop with a kindly Good Cop on the other side of his swiveling head (both are voiced by Liam Neeson).

Much good comedy is derived from the limited range of motion possible for rigid Lego figures, and the dialogue is witty too. Yet the movie manages, without so much as a wisp of pretentiousness, to hint at some troubling allegorical resonances about conformity and creativity in human society. The whole thing, if you’ll excuse my saying so, snaps together nicely.