ANOTHER LAST CALL

 Here's me, online at Phoenix Magazine, with more FilmBar memories.

LAST CALL

Alas, after more than a decade, FilmBar in Phoenix has announced its closure.

Your Humble Narrator was asked to chat about this sad passing on The Show on KJZZ this morning; you can listen to the segment here.

I'm also proud that my big three-sheet poster for Panther Girl of the Kongo (1955)...

...which I inherited from the late lamented Bill Rocz, was part of the décor at FilmBar for several years. It's currently part of the décor in my garage.

JUDY AND JAMES; YETI AND INGRID

Happy Friday everybody!

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column online at Phoenix Magazine, this week reviewing Judy...

...and the caper comedy Raising Buchanan...

...about a scheme to steal the body of President James Buchanan and hold it for ransom. That tired old plot device again.

Also opening this week:

  
Abominable--Following last year's peculiar Smallfoot, here's another CGI animated feature about Yetis. This one is peculiar, too.

In this Chinese-American co-production, a teenage Chinese city girl finds a fuzzy, sweet-natured Yeti hiding on the roof of her apartment building; he's escaped from a cruel scientific facility. She feeds him steamed pork buns and plays her violin for him, and then, with the help of two friends from the building, tries to smuggle him back to his home in the mountains, with the forces of the nasty collector hot in pursuit. The movie is of a New-Agey-bent; in the course of the odyssey we learn that the creature is tune with the forces of nature, and when he hums the sound causes flowers to blossom and blueberries to grow enormous.

As is almost invariably the case with wide-release animated features of the last few decades, the obligatory elements in Abominable, the stock villains and the stock character motivations, are highly tedious. This template for has been so successful for so long that it's hard to see it going away anytime soon, but it sure makes these films wearisomely repetitive.

That said, the characterizations of the Yeti and the kids are winning, and the Chinese setting is different and colorful. And this is almost certainly the only film to contain the line "Don't body-shame my yak!"

Finally, if you happen to be here in the Phoenix area, you could check out The House That Dripped Blood at 10 p.m. this evening, September 27, at FilmBar. This 1971 British horror anthology, scripted by Robert Bloch and featuring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Jon Pertwee and Denholm Elliot, has long been a fave of mine, largely on the basis of the scene near the end in which supremely sultry and statuesque vampiress Ingrid Pitt levitates and...her high-heeled shoes drop off her feet to the floor. I don't know why, but for some reason that detail remains one of the most deliriously sexy moments in movies for me.

GREEN CHEESY

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, this week featuring my reviews of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood...

 ...and of the unsettling German horror film Luz, playing this weekend at Filmbar...

Your Humble Narrator really mooned it up last weekend, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11; The Wife made me a present of this boss new shirt...

...and my film historian pal Richard put on a fantastic lunar-themed movie night, starting with an 1898 Georges Melies short, The Astronomer's Dream, in which a rapacious moon descends and devours the Astronomer's telescope, among other things...

...as well as Excursion to the Moon, Segundo de Chomon's 1908 Pathe rip-off of the Melies Trip to the Moon...

...and 1935's lovely Fleischer cartoon Dancing on the Moon, in which newlyweds of various species take a pleasure cruise to the satellite...

...for just a dollar per couple (a tomcat gets separated from his new bride, alas). He also showed us a silent Hal Roach short, A Moony Mariner, with Billy Dooley pressed into service as an astronaut.

Then for the feature, we got Richard Cunha's hilarious 1958 saga Missile to the Moon (or Invasion de la Luna, as it's called in this Spanish-language lobby card)...

...featuring fabulous moon-maidens, as well as a terrifying giant spider...

...and rather Gumby-like rock men...

Ah, but I didn't stop there. No, on my own last weekend I watched a British double feature; first the likably inane 1969 lunar noir from Hammer, Moon Zero Two...

...and then the 1970 dinosaurs-and-caveman epic When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth...

...which is, after all, also a Moon movie; it's supposedly about the birth of the Moon.

So, here's my last moon-oriented posting (for a while):

Out on Blu-ray this month is Space: 1999, the two-season British TV series from 1975, produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson of Thunderbirds. The premise is that a terrible explosion in the title year has blasted the Moon out of Earth orbit and sent it sailing through space like a futuristic Flying Dutchman. The roughly three hundred inhabitants, led by Martin Landau, Barbara Bain and Barry Morse, encounter strange alien worlds, always hoping they might be able to colonize one, always disappointed.

Released during lean times for sci-fi geeks—post-Star Trek, pre-Star Wars—Space: 1999 was eagerly anticipated. Revisiting the show now, my memory of it from back then was confirmed: It's dreadful. The production was first-rate, with near-state-of-the-art special effects for the time, cool spaceships and sets and costumes and attractive series regulars. The guest stars were big-name Brits, from Ian McShane to Brian Blessed to Leo McKern to Margaret Leighton to Billie Whitelaw to Roy Dotrice to Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, if you please, to name just a few. But the earnest humorlessness of the atmosphere was oppressive, and to say the pacing was glacial is to insult the promptness of glaciers.

In the second season, a sexy shape-shifting alien played by Catherine Schell was added, as were some attempts at jocular humor, and this obvious play at dumbing-down was somehow just embarrassing. But Space: 1999 did have one splendid feature, albeit in its first season only: The opening title sequence. There would be a blaring fanfare of bombastic music, and then a fast-cut montage of scenes from the episode to follow. If only the shows themselves could have captured some of the excitement of those openings.

MOTHER MAY WE?

Happy Mother's Day to all!

If you still need a place to take Mom for lunch or brunch or dinner, check the May issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...for my "Four Corners" column with some suggestions. From Phoenix Magazine online, you can check out my reviews of the Childsplay production of Schoolhouse Rock Live! at the Herberger, and of Zhang Yimou's remarkable movie Shadow.

TAKING A BAO

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, featuring reviews of the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts program playing this week at FilmBar, including the winner, Pixar's charming Bao...

...as well as of the old-school thriller Bullitt County...

 
...out this week on VOD.

Also, check out my short article on the 55th annual Phoenix Scottish Games...

 ...Saturday, March 2, and Sunday March 3 at Steele Indian School park.

RIP to the magnificent, sexy, hilarious, lovable Katherine Helmond, departed at 89.

Have a great March everybody!

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT?

Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Nadine Labaki's unforgettable Capernaum as well as Don't Come Back From the Moon and Glass, along with a preview of the 3rd annual Chandler International Film Festival. Have a great weekend everybody!

A GRILLE IN EVERY PORT

Happy January everybody! Hope everybody had a great holiday.

Check out the January issue of Phoenix Magazine for my "Four Corners" column on Bar & Grille options around the Valley. Also check out my online column on the remarkable Polish movie Communion, playing at 4 p.m. Saturday at Harkins Shea, the Buster Keaton classic The General, playing Sunday afternoon at FilmBar, and my Top Ten List for 2018.

Here's wishing a Happy 2019 to us all!

NORMAN HOLIDAY

Happy Psycho Day everybody!

That's right, December 11 is the date that appears over the downtown Phoenix skyline at the beginning of the 1960 Hitchcock classic Psycho, one of my all-time favorite movies, before the camera peeks inappropriately into a window to show John Gavin and Janet Leigh sharing an afternoon tryst. The fine folks at FilmBar Phoenix, situated not far at all from the area seen in that opening shot, celebrate the auspicious occasion this evening at 7 p.m. with a showing of the film.

Check out my Phoenix Magazine column noting the event, along with my reviews of Alfonso Cuaron's superb Roma and Swimming With Men, a Britcom starring Rob Brydon.

YETI PERSISTED; JUDGE DREAD; FANCY FOOTWORK

Opening in the Valley this weekend:

Smallfoot--The premise of this animated musical kidflick is that Yeti exist, high in the Himalayas, and that they regard us humans just as we regard them--as legendary. These furry, not-at-all-abominable snow-people have a peaceful culture on a mountaintop above a cloudbank, based on a traditional creation story drawn on flat stones worn by the "Stonekeeper." Questioning this mythology can lead to banishment.

This is what happens to our hero Migo (voiced by Channing Tatum) after he encounters a human "smallfoot" and tells his neighbors about it. But he falls in with a secret society of other Yeti who question the literal veracity of the stones, among them Meechee (Zendaya), the daughter of the Stonekeeper (Common). Migo has an adventure below the clouds with a smallfoot named Percy (James Corden), the egocentric, publicity-hungry host of an Animal-Planet-style TV show.

I didn't expect this film do go very far beyond its clever, funny basic idea; I certainly didn't expect it to be a complex satire about skepticism and rational inquiry, and the forces that oppose it. But that's what Smallfoot rather insistently is, even as it fulfills the obligatory demands of the kid movie, complete with slapstick and the occasional flatulence joke.

This conventional stuff is maybe what keeps the movie from being quite the instant classic that it wants to be. There's one terrific rap number, performed by Common, in which the Stonekeeper explains how his orthodoxy arose, and what it does for his society. Otherwise, the songs are pleasant but not really exciting.

Overall, though, Smallfoot is a very pleasant surprise, witty and generous-hearted and expansive. Also, one of the questioning Yeti--voiced by LeBron James--is named "Gwangi," presumably in homage to the allosaurus title character of 1969's The Valley of Gwangi, my childhood favorite movie. So I'd be disposed to like Smallfoot in any case.

The Children Act--Here's another story about the negotiations between reason and faith. But this Brit drama, adapted from an Ian McEwan novel, is a little less lighthearted than Smallfoot.

Emma Thompson plays Fiona, a justice in London. Fiona is routinely charged with making godlike moral rulings on, say, whether a hospital can separate conjoined twins, at the expense of one twin's life and against the wishes of the parents. Her neglected professor husband (Stanley Tucci) announces his plan to have an affair, then leaves her.

While she's in the midst of this turmoil, she's assigned the case of a seventeen-year-old boy, Adam (Fionn Whitehead), who's dying of leukemia and refuses to accept a potentially lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with the Jehovah's Witness faith in which he's been raised. Against her usual practice, Fiona decides to visit the boy in hospital, apparently to decide about the depth and seriousness of his commitment to refusing the treatment.

She finds Adam to be an ecstatic, flamboyantly self-dramatizing fellow, and the two bond at once, in part because of a shared passion for music. But it proves difficult to retreat back to her perch of legal abstraction after her short trip to the world of real humans that her decisions effect. Her connection with Adam continues after her ruling, in unexpected but painfully plausible ways.

Those of us who worship at the altar of Emma Thompson will get a potent dose of her brilliance here. It would be unfair to say that this is in spite of the material rather than because of it, but I think it's partially true, too. Although the quality and intelligence of the production is undeniable, there's something uneasily reductive about the story's approach to its central characters. The persistent suggestion is that Fiona is haunted by her failure to reproduce, and that this is what leaves her emotionally unequipped to deal with the intensity of Adam's, or indeed of her husband's, feelings for her. This feels too thin and pat for the woman that Thompson shows us.

Richard Eyre's direction is tightly proficient, the dialogue is crisp and swift--the script is by McEwan--and the supporting players are all spot-on, especially Whitehead (the everyman soldier protagonist from Dunkirk). But the movie is built around Thompson's performance; it's one of those vehicles where a poised and self-controlled central character is set on a collision course with an Oscar-clip meltdown. Thompson's trademark arch, ironic tones that modulate into a mildly beseeching singsong at the ends of sentences bespeak a self-deprecating reserve that's ripe to be punctured, and Thompson delivers as usual, pushing her performance even past this movie's limits.

Playing Sunday afternoon only at FilmBar is La Chana, the documentary on the famed Spanish flamenco dancer. Check out my review online at Phoenix Magazine.

ORIGINAL KIN

Hope everybody had a great Labor Day weekend; Happy September to all!

Check out this month's issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...for my "Four Corners" column on Valley spots for Caribbean food, and also check out my online reviews of Operation Finale, The Bookshop and a "Big Gay Sing-Along" showing, tomorrow night at FilmBar, of 1986's Little Shop of Horrors...

Now in  theaters:

Kin--It's flown a bit under the radar, but this odd, gritty little tale is not without merit. It's set in the economic wastes of Detroit, where 12-year-old Eli (Myles Truitt) scavenges for scrap metal in the shells of deserted factories. Eli, an adopted African-American, lives with his construction contractor Dad (Dennis Quaid), a morose but morally upright widower.

Eli's ne'er-do-well older brother Jimmy (Jack Reynor) comes home--to a chilly reception--after six years in prison, to quickly realize that both he and his family are in serious trouble with a local gangster (James Franco). Jimmy and Eli end up on the run from the gangster and his goons, and somewhere along the line a stripper (Zoe Kravitz) with a heart of gold is added to their party.

This modest, poignant story, which if not for some violence has almost an Afterschool Special atmosphere, would be compelling simply as a realistic drama/thriller. But the directing team of Jonathan and Josh Baker, working from a script by Daniel Casey (an expansion of the Baker brothers' short film "Bag Man"), layers in a sci-fi twist.

On one of his scavenging excursions, Eli comes upon the aftermath of a battle between some otherworldly warriors--time travelers or aliens or something; it isn't made entirely clear. He picks up a sophisticated weapon that only seems to respond to him, and, as you might guess, this eventually becomes a factor in the story.

I don't mean to mislead anyone about Kin--it's uneven, and sentimental at times. But it has an unpredictability that I enjoyed, and the low-key style of the Bakers recalled, for me, certain commercial directors of the '60s and '70s  like John Avildsen and Jeremy Paul Kagan and Matthew Robbins, whose straightforward, unpretentious style has been insufficiently emulated.

Most of all, Kin worked for me because the actors made me care about the characters. Truitt makes a  fine, sober debut as Eli; you feel sorry for this kid's poor luck in family relations. Reynor, who seems like sort of a poor man's Chris Pratt, is exasperatingly likable as the fun, decent-hearted, well-intentioned, hopelessly foolish Jimmy, who introduces his brother to strip clubs and doing donuts in the parking lot in his truck.

Quaid is convincingly downcast as the desperate dad, and Kravitz is charming as usual, even in this stock role. Most striking, perhaps, is James Franco, truly repellent and scary as the mild-voiced gangster. I've never been able to warm to Franco in ordinary leading man parts, but on the basis of this film and The Disaster Artist, he's a natural as creepy freaks.

GOOD GRADE

Check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and The Equalizer 2, as well as a revival showing Sunday, at FilmBar, of George Romero's Season of the Witch.

Also opening this weekend...

Eighth Grade--The heroine of writer-director Bo Burnham's comedy-drama is Kayla (Elsie Fisher), a 13-year-old, trying to navigate the last few days of the title grade. She takes a very proactive approach, posting online videos offering social advice despite her own awkwardness, the obvious intended beneficiary of her optimistic wisdom being herself.

She gets invited to a popular girl's birthday party, mainly because the girl's mom is interested in Kayla's single dad (Josh Hamilton). She struggles with a crush on a boy in her class, and assures him of her excellence at giving blowjobs. She participates in a deeply creepy live-shooter drill at school. She shadows a cool friendly older girl at the high school she'll be attending next year. And in a scene that will be excruciatingly familiar to many parents, she endures the clumsy attempts of her adoring dad to get her to put down her phone at the dinner table and engage with him.

These episodes seem to drift into Kayla's life at random, and most of them just drift back out, with no particular dramatic payoff for good or ill. Burnham uses loose ends to emphasize the odd limbo of the middle school years; things pop up that look like they're going to be earth-shakingly important, only to disappear just as quickly, and now and then something that seems inconsequential proves significant after all.

Burnham and the superb, subtle young Fisher refuse to sentimentalize Kayla, but they also insist that we experience the story from her viewpoint. Even when she's the butt of the joke, we may laugh, but we feel her pain, and ultimately she's among the most lovable of teen-movie protagonists. Eighth Grade is low-key, but it packs a cumulative emotional punch. Burnham's disciplined naturalistic touch and sympathetic wit make it funny, poignant, even universal.

TRUE WESTWOOD

Check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Lorna Tucker's documentary about Vivienne Westwood, punk-era fashion legend, Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist...

...playing this weekend at FilmBar, and Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation...

...playing everywhere.

FAREWELLISON

Happy July everybody!

Check out the July issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...

...for my "Four Corners" column on the "wrap" in Valley cuisine. Also check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of the films Boundaries and Izzy Gets the F* Out of Town, and my attempt, in these times that demand a patriotism in opposition to our beloved country's Administration, at a patriotic July 4th playlist.

June ended on a sad note: RIP to the irreplaceable Harlan Ellison, passed on last Thursday at 84. I spent the weekend In Memoriam for him. Thursday night I watched his wonderful, dreamlike Outer Limits episode "Demon With a Glass Hand," starring Robert Culp, and also turned up a June 1958 issue of Super-Science Fiction...

 
...with an early Ellison story called "No Planet is Safe" that I had never read.

On Friday night, my pal Richard showed us a 1964 episode of Burke's Law written by Ellison, in which his self-consciously florid, allusion-studded dialogue was spouted by guest stars like Joan Blondell, Nina Foch and Betty Hutton. Yet for guest star Buster Keaton he ingeniously crafted a silent-comedy bit. Then Saturday I took down my copy of Strange Wine, and sipped from it for the rest of the weekend.

THANK GOD IT'S, WELL, YOU KNOW...

Check out my online column at Phoenix Magazine, featuring movie choices this weekend, including the Iraq war drama The Yellow Birds with Alden Ehrenreich, 50th anniversary showings of 2001: A Space Odyssey at Harkins Tempe Marketplace and the Monkees movie Head at FilmBar, and...

...a "No Festival Required" showing of the documentary Lives Well Lived Sunday afternoon at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. No problem staying out of the sun for the next few days...

HEAD TRIP

This year marks the 50th anniversary of 1968's Head, the sole, commercially ill-conceived feature film effort from The Monkees, directed by Bob Rafelson from a script he co-wrote with Jack Nicholson. It's one of my pal Dave's favorite movies. FilmBar is showing the bizarre blend of movie parody sketches, psychedelic surrealism, heartfelt but awkward protest and good music this Saturday at 10 p.m., so...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week's honoree is the Giant Victor Mature from that film...

VARIETY IS THE SPACE

Saturday night at 10 p.m. only, at FilmBar Phoenix:

Time Masters (Les Maitres du Temps)--This animated 1982 space opera, directed by Rene Laloux from a tale by Stefan Wul, with the collaboration of illustrator Jean "Moebius" Geraud, maybe doesn't quite have the eerie beauty of Laloux's 1973 classic Fantastic Planet. But it has a charm and a sweetly imaginative atmosphere all its own. It concerns the efforts of a band of good-hearted (and terribly chic) space adventurers to rescue a rather irritable little boy stranded on a distant planet. In the course of the rescuers' odyssey, they encounter a planet of winged, faceless ciphers in thrall to a conformist intelligence, well-intentioned telepathic spore creatures, greedy bureaucratic officials and other obstacles, while the boy must contend with tentacled cave dwellers and giant insects. I've seen an English-dubbed version for Brit TV, but the chance to see this one on a screen is a bit of a rarity, and probably shouldn't be passed up.

Check out the April issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...for my "Four Corners" column, this time about patio dining.

Also underway this week, and continuning through April 15, are both Phoenix Film Festival and, running concurrently, the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival. Check out Phoenix Magazine online for my interview with IHSFF director Monte Yazzie.

KRATT PACK

This...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...is a kratt:

It's a laborer pieced together from odds and ends and junk, then endowed with a soul obtained from the Devil via a bargain (on the level or not) at the crossroads. Apparently kratts figure prominently in Estonian folklore; in any case they figure prominently in Rainer Sarnet's remarkable new film November, from which the still above is taken, and which opens tomorrow at FilmBar.

More about this movie soon.

I AM WHAT I AMAZON

Opening this week:

Wonder Woman—DC's pioneering superheroine finally takes the lead in a feature film with this lavish origin story, set in the World War I era. The title character, Diana by name, has grown from a feisty little girl into the impressive adult form of Gal Gadot on the secret, hidden island of the Amazons, under the watchful eye of her Mom Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen). Against Hippolyta's wishes, she's secretly trained as a warrior by her aunt, Antiobe (Robin Wright, sporting an accent to vaguely match Nielsen's and Gadot's).

One day Diana rescues daredevil American spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), who happens upon the island while escaping from the Germans. She's appalled when she learns of the ubiquity of war in the outside world, and she's convinced it's the malicious work of Ares the war god. She decides, again over Mom's objections, to let Trevor take her to the Front in Europe, where she plans to identify Ares, kick the crap out of him, and end war on Earth once and for all. She's not ambitious or anything.

With Trevor, she travels first to London and then, with a ragtag group of ethnically mixed sidekicks, to Belgium, and learns that shutting down war isn't as simple as it ought to be. She also runs afoul of various villains, among them a scarred chemist known as Doctor Poison (Elena Anaya, masked much as she was in Almodovar's superb The Skin I Live In).

Setting this movie during WWI, rather than having Wonder Woman battling the Nazis as she was originally created to do (the character debuted in the comics in 1941), initially seemed wrong to me, and there were moments where the dialogue and other details seemed off, period-wise. I'd guess that, among other reasons, the filmmakers wanted Diana to enter civilization at an even less emancipated time for her gender; they wanted her to encounter corsets and petticoats. They may also have wanted less familiar, less easily loath-able bad guys than the Nazis, so as to spread around the blame for warmongering more equitably among all humankind.

In any case, as the movie progressed my resistance to it quickly wore off. Wonder Woman isn't quite as slick as last year's Dr. Strange, but it's more touching, and like Dr. Strange, it's a non-facetious superhero flick that it's possible to wholeheartedly enjoy, almost from beginning to end. The movie is colorful and playful, even sunny at times, but better still there's a lack of cynicism to it, an openhearted, unembarrassed sense of decency and heroism that's highly gratifying after years of self-consciously "dark" comic-book sagas.

This tone is reflected in the warmth and emotional directness of Gadot's performance—she has a quick throwaway scene involving an ice cream cone that made me fall in love with her. The lack of coyness between her and Pine's Trevor is likewise refreshing. They don't tediously bicker or one-up each other.

Diana is so preoccupied with her mission that she barely seems to notice how she scandalizes the male authority figures she meets, ignoring their shock at her outspokenness as if it's too unimportant to acknowledge. And when she expresses disbelief at the matter-of-fact acceptance of war, she doesn't seem infantile, because director Patty Jenkins and the writers (Allan Heinberg among other hands) have structured the story so that we see our own civilization from her point of view.

The filmmakers grapple, while staying within a conventional template for this kind of movie, with the persistent limitation of superhero stories: The tendency to reduce all conflicts to a climactic brawl. That they don't prevail—the movie does indeed climax with a brawl, and one that's of questionable relevance to the vexing problem of the human tendency to make war not love—doesn't make the attempt any less honorable. 

Also opening in the Valley this week...

...is the historical drama Churchill, with the great Brian Cox playing the title role. I had the chance to chat with director Jonathan Teplitzky; you can read my interview on the New Times blog.

And Sunday evening at FilmBar Phoenix...

...is a showing of The Quiet Earth, the 1985 sci-fi classic from New Zealand, with an introduction and Q&A by co-writer and co-producer Sam Pillsbury. You can read my short article on this memorable flick on the Phoenix Magazine blog.

TAPE FEAR

Check out Phoenix Magazine’s blog for my story on the VHS Swap tomorrow evening at FilmBar, followed by a screening of the amusing ‘80s-style horror flick Beyond the Gates...

With The Lego Batman Movie opening tomorrow…

 Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to Lego Clayface, seen here towering over the back row…

…among that movie’s villains.