PULPY LOVE, PUPPY LOVE

Opening this weekend:

Love Lies Bleeding--It certainly does, along with a fair number of corpses, before this New Mexico noir has run its course. It's 1989--the Berlin Wall is coming down on TV in the background--and our heroine Lou (Kristen Stewart), a lonely employee at a low-rent desert gym, spends her days unclogging toilets and stonewalling FBI agents who would like to talk to her about her estranged arms-dealer dad.

Lou falls hard for Jackie (Katy O'Brian), a beautiful feral bodybuilder who's in training for a competition in Vegas. Jackie moves in with Lou, but as you might guess, all does not go smoothly. Jealousy, domestic violence, gang violence, PEDs and the rage to which they give rise all intrude on this sweet romance and lead to gruesome murder and desperate cover-ups.

Stewart and O'Brian are both believable, and their passion for each other is exhilarating, even as you see the collision course with disaster that they're on. Ed Harris is at his creepiest as Lou's Dad, but Dave Franco wins the award for most odious as J.J., Lou's brother-in-law who abuses her hapless sister Beth (Jena Malone). Anna Baryshnikov is wistful as Daisy, who has the bad luck to have a crush on Lou.

The director is Rose Glass, the Brit behind Saint Maud, working from a script she wrote with Weronika Tofilska. As with Saint Maud, Glass is adept at blending the horrific with the ecstatic and the erotic, and her style, abetted by Ben Fordesman's queasy fluorescent cinematography, shifts comfortably from bleak British nastiness to gritty, lurid '80s-style southwestern nastiness. While the story gets a bit chaotically close to running off the rails in the homestretch, Glass even manages a surreal, magical-realist flourish near the end that feels right.

Arthur the King--This isn't a new version of Malory or T. H. White or Camelot. The title character here is a scruffy third-world street mongrel of such dignified bearing that he's given the royal moniker by his new best friend. Said friend is Mike (Mark Wahlberg), an "adventure racer" who impulsively feeds the dog a meatball during a break in a grueling event in the Dominican Republic, after which the mutt shadows Mike's four-person team as they run, bike, free-climb, zip-line and kayak across hundreds of miles of jungle. He even steers them away from peril.

Directed by Simon Cellan Jones, this is based on the 2017 book Arthur: The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home, by Mikael Lindnord. The script, by Michael Brandt, is fictionalized; Lindnord is a Swede, not an American; he met Arthur in Ecuador, not the Dominican Republic, and Wahlberg's teammates in the movie (Simu Liu, Nathalie Emmanuel, Ali Suliman) are likewise made-up.

More strikingly, the real-life circumstances of Arthur's adoption may have been more ambiguous: an Ecuadoran man later claimed that Arthur, originally named Barbuncho, belonged to him, and that Lindnord had essentially dognapped him. Many hardcore dog lovers, of course, will be unlikely to feel much sympathy for the owner of a "pet" who's at liberty to join a dangerous cross-country race.

In any case, Arthur the King is an unembarrassed and pretty effective hybrid of the venerable band-of-misfits, last-chance-for-glory underdog sports movie with an old-school "I think he's trying to tell us something" dog picture. It's admirably attuned to the plight of strays; there's a hint of reproach, probably unintentional, in the contrast between Arthur's struggles to survive on the streets and Mike's self-imposed travails in his rather bougie, corporate-sponsored sport.

Ultimately, though, the movie is really no less corny than any Rin-Tin-Tin or Lassie flick. But it's well-paced, and if, like me, you're a sucker for dogs there's a good chance you'll enjoy it. Wahlberg is agreeable as the boyishly earnest Mike, but neither he nor any other member of the human cast is a match for Ukai, who plays Arthur, and steals the movie like it was a meatball.

DISASTER RELIEF

Opening here in the Valley this weekend:

The Disaster Artist—If you’ve never seen The Room, you probably should. An attempt at a sort of Strindberg-ish tragic love triangle, the 2003 drama, written and directed by and starring Tommy Wiseau, has come to be celebrated as one of the most memorably bad movies of all time, and not without reason, and there’s a level at which it must be seen to be understood.

I would say that it’s especially important if you plan to see The Disaster Artist, James Franco’s new film about the conception and making of The Room. But I’m not sure that’s the case—the friend with whom I saw The Disaster Artist enjoyed it immensely without having seen The Room.

The jaw-dropping dreadfulness of The Room derives not from ineptitude or economic deprivation (it was professionally produced, with a budget in the millions) but from Wiseau’s seeming lack of understanding of the basics of how human beings normally behave and converse. It was like he fell to earth from another planet where the people have Eastern European accents but no other customs in common with earthlings. My favorite line in the film (it’s not referenced in The Disaster Artist) comes when Wiseau, as the hero, compliments his girlfriend on the surprise party she’s thrown him: “You invited all my friends! Good thinking!”

According to Greg Sestero, the model and aspiring actor who co-starred in The Room, and from whose like-titled memoir The Disaster Artist was adapted, Wiseau was a mysterious figure. His clothing and hairstyle suggested an Anne Rice vampire, and despite his accent and Tarzan-like syntax he claimed he was from New Orleans, and was opaque about everything else from his age to his apparently bottomless wealth. His work in the San Francisco acting class where he and Sestero met was tortured and incoherent, but also uninhibited in a way that Sestoro couldn’t help but admire.

The script, by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, traces Sestero’s strange but mutually supportive friendship with Wiseau which, along with professional frustration, gave rise to The Room. James Franco directs, with skill and comic clarity, but more importantly—way more importantly—he plays Wiseau. Man, does he play Wiseau. He plays the crap out of him.

Going in, I thought the movie might be at a disadvantage with me. First of all, while I was amazed, fascinated and convulsed by The Room when I saw it, I’ve never felt any strong inclination to see it again. It didn’t become the bad-movie favorite for me that it did for many others (The Disaster Artist opens with talking heads of some famous fans). I laughed hard at it, it’s almost impossible not to, but I didn’t feel altogether good about my laughter. Beneath Wiseau’s incompetence you can sense real pain, and also a streak of misogyny, that can make the movie a little poignant, and a little unsavory.

Secondly, I’ve never been able to work up much enthusiasm for James Franco. He’s been in a number of good movies and I found him effective in some of them, often when his character wasn’t particularly likable to begin with. But he takes the role of Wiseau to a different level, or perhaps it takes him to a different level. It’s one of those cases of a character seeming to take over and possess an actor.

It’s a superb impersonation, but it goes beyond that—Franco’s Wiseau is mesmerizing and scary and hilarious and sad and maddening and lovable in a way that the real Wiseau, onscreen in The Room, is not. Of course, much of the comedy in The Disaster Artist derives from other people’s baffled reaction to Wiseau’s antics, and chief among these reactors is Dave Franco (brother of James), who’s excellent as Sestero, with his perplexed yet touchingly protective manner toward Wiseau. The cast also includes such notables as Zac Efron, Megan Mullally, Sharon Stone, Melanie Griffith, Jacki Weaver and Seth Rogen, mostly in smaller turns.

On the whole, The Disaster Artist is a triumph, small and improbable but definite. Like Tim Burton’s 1994 Ed Wood, it’s the story an artist of passion and vision but no talent, told by artists with passion and vision and plenty of talent.

HOW DARE THEY

Opening this week:

Nerve—Emma Roberts is Vee, a straight-laced Staten Island high schooler who becomes a “Player” in the illicit online game of the title. Play involves taking, and video-recording, outrageous, often extremely dangerous dares, in return for money and views by “Watchers.” Vee thinks she'll take one dare as a lark and to prove to her friends (and to herself) that she's not so square. But then she meets Ian (Dave Franco), a motorcycle-riding Player, and the ante, both in money and peril, keeps getting upped, and before long she's riding through Manhattan on the back of his bike while he's blindfolded, or crossing a ladder extended between two buildings.

Early on, we're invited to share Vee's fun and exhilaration at her first few relatively harmless dares. As the story progresses, it grows more sinister and suspenseful. At least until its rather improbably epic finale, Nerve, directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman from a script by Jessica Sharzer (based on Jeanne Ryan's novel) is well-paced and engagingly acted—it has the potential to be a minor teen-flick classic.

But there's a worrying side to this. While they usually aren't on this scale, idiotic dares among teenagers are a very real thing. I hope that the target audience here doesn't ignore its cautionary side in favor of the glamorized risky behavior. The idea of attempting to act out this movie in real life could get on any parent's last...well, you know.

Life, Animated—The life in question in this documentary is that of Owen Suskind, the younger son of Wall Street Journal writer Ron Suskind. Owen stopped speaking when he was three years old, was diagnosed with autism, and seemed only to be pacified by watching Disney animated films. Gradually his family realized that his movie watching wasn't mindless self-stimulation; he used the characters and conflicts to make sense of his own life, and this enabled him to re-engage with the world.

Directed by Roger Ross Williams from Ron Suskind's like-titled book, the movie is initially heartbreaking, then thrilling. We soon see that what Owen does is only a slightly more extreme version of what many of us do with, say, Shakespeare, or Marvel Comics, or Star Trek—use them as an allegorical shorthand for our own life challenges.

Owen has a fine screen presence, with hints of an ironic sensibility, as in his offhand use of effusive adjectives. But he also has a straightforward lucidity, especially in the face of sadness, that's highly admirable. And he has the soul of a storyteller himself—his own hero narrative, about a boy protecting the Disney sidekicks from a mind-clouding villain called Fuzzbutch, is stirringly rendered in this movie by the French animation company Mac Guff.

Owen's adoring parents and older brother also make a deeply touching impression. And a word should be said for Ron Suskind's performing skills—when he recounts imitating Iago, the nasty little parrot from Aladdin, as the first time he used a Disney character to connect with his son, he does a pretty respectable Gilbert Gottfried.

Phantom Boy—While we're on the subject of French animation: This French-Belgian co-production by Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli (the guys who made 2010's A Cat in Paris), is a gem. Set in New York, it follows title character Leo, a gravely ill boy who has learned to leave his own body and zip around the Manhattan skyline.

In this manner Leo helps a hospital-bound young police detective and a Lois Lane-ish reporter outfox The Face, a super-villain so called because his mug resembles a Picasso portrait (he's voiced here by Vincent D'Onofrio; the voice cast of the English version also includes Fred Armisen and Jared Padalecki). The movie's best comedy arises from The Face's attempts at high villainous flourishes, undermined by his doltish henchmen and his hapless dog Rufus.

The story elements have the familiar flavor of old-school cartoons and European kids' adventure books or comics, but they're wittily recombined here—Tintin meets Casper—and the two-dimensional drawing of the characters, with their simplified, dot-and-dash facial features, is effective. Better still is the rain-on-the-sidewalk atmosphere of the settings. There's a light touch to this movie, an un-fussy feel that it's not oppressively overproduced. It's refreshing.