RED ROBIN

Happy Monday! Check out my review of The Death of Robin Hood...

...with Hugh Jackman in the title role, online at Phoenix Magazine.

NEIL AND PREY

A Merry Christmas to all! Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Song Sung Blue...

...and Anaconda...

...now in the multiplexes.

HART, BROKEN

This one’s been out for a couple of weeks, but I just caught up with it:

The Front Runner—It’s hard to say at what audience this movie has been aimed. Younger people may well have no idea who Gary Hart is, and for his supporters back in 1988, the episode that ended his campaign for the Democratic nomination for President may seem painful and embarrassing and best forgotten. Shadenfreude–seeking opponents of Hart or of his party are unlikely to form a very large audience bloc either.

But the movie, directed by Jason Reitman from a script he wrote with Matt Bai and Jay Carson (from Bai’s 2014 book All the Truth Is Out), is a solid, absorbing piece of cinema craft, and shouldn’t be allowed to fall through the cracks of the season. It depicts, arguably, the end of an era in the relationship between the media and politicians and candidates, and the beginning of another.

For those who don’t know or have let it slip their minds: The Kansas-born Hart, an intelligent, handsome, commandingly no-nonsense senator from Colorado, found himself in the title position for the Democratic nomination in 1988. He looked like a cinch to be the candidate and to have a real shot against George H.W. Bush for the presidency.

Hart’s marriage had been troubled in ways that would seem quite routine to most of us today, but which were still a little less publicly acceptable—though probably no less privately common—for a politician thirty years ago, and there were rumors that he was a womanizer. The Miami Herald got wind of Hart’s connection with a young woman named Donna Rice. Partly on the strength of Hart’s defiant challenge to the Washington Post to tail him if they suspected hanky-panky—he assured them they’d be bored—the Herald broke the long journalistic tradition of discretion on such matters and went with the story.

Hart tried to stonewall the media after the story broke, insisting that it was nobody’s business. The rest is…well, you know.

Reitman spins the yarn in a brisk manner, with Altmanesque overheard and overlapping dialogue, and some near-Wellesian camera flourishes that bring order to the chaos of the campaign trail or the newsroom. There’s a large cast of characters, of which we get to know, more than in passing, only a few, but all of which have the feel of authenticity.

The Front Runner gains its integrity, however, from Hugh Jackman, who has the courage to make Hart an unlikable man. Had he played the title character as a martyr, the movie might come across disingenuous; because he plays him as an obtuse, defensive cold fish it becomes possible, paradoxically, to have some sympathy for him. It’s certainly possibly to have sympathy for Hart’s campaign manager Bill Dixon (J.K. Simmons, wry as ever), his wearily illusion-free wife, Lee Hart, superbly played by Vera Farmiga, and for the other women in the story, including Sarah Paxton as Rice.

The movie’s pace and comic edge should make it exhilarating, but there’s a sad, even ominous tone that hangs over The Front Runner, because whether or not Hart deserved what he got, the story marks the beginning of a turn for the worse in American mainstream media. I was living in D.C. at the time of this scandal, and I well remember what people said: They agreed that a candidate’s personal life ought to be private, but that this didn’t excuse Hart’s dishonesty and phony indignation.

Hart might have made an excellent president, and obviously he was hardly the only politician, on ether side of the aisle, with this sort of baggage. He got clobbered, probably, by a combination of his own demeanor and the beginning of a new style of anything-goes reporting, under which by now his story would seem quaint.

SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL

Opening this weekend:

Downsizing–Scientists have figured out how to shrink humans down to five inches tall. The discovery, which has obvious environmental advantages, is promptly commercialized, with people enticed to "downsize" into tiny planned communities where they can now afford a luxurious lifestyle.

Our Midwestern  everyman hero Matt Damon undergoes the irreversible process, regrets it at once, then gradually finds renewed purpose in his new home in New Mexico through his connection with a one-legged Vietnamese cleaning lady (Hong Chau) who was shrunk against her will for her dissident activities back home. He also forms a sort of bond with his neighbor (Christoph Waltz), a grinning Serb hustler who, if he wasn't shady enough already, hangs out with Udo Kier.

This neo-Swiftian satire is perhaps the most ambitious effort yet from the always-interesting Alexander Payne. He takes his time, working out the process and its implications in deadpan detail (although the obvious issues of civil-rights vulnerability for downsized people are not really addressed). This fully-imagined atmosphere extends to the characters. Damon, who wanted to be a doctor, ended up some sort of workplace physical therapist for Omaha Steakhouse–a perfect American intersection of frustrated aspiration, good intentions and barely-conscious consumption.

Downsizing is full of brilliant touches like that. But I'm not sure it amounts to much more than the sum of those brilliant touches, and of some fine performances, especially by Damon, Hong Chau and the ever-freaky Waltz.

The movie dawdles a bit, and Payne can't quite seem to bring it the emotional payoff he's trying for. Even so, this one of the more fascinating and substantial movies I've seen all year. I'll confess, however, that I'm too much of a philistine, and was too much a fan of Dr. Cyclops and Attack of the Puppet People and The Incredible Shrinking Man not to hope that a tarantula or a Gila monster might invade Damon's subdivision and liven things up.

The Greatest Showman –Understatement is strained by referring to this musical as “loosely based” on the life of P.T. Barnum. But then, Barnum wasn’t big on understatement, and it’s likely that nobody would appreciate this portrait of the founder of American pop culture more than Barnum himself.

Hugh Jackman plays the celebrated mid-19^th century purveyor of anomalies, human and otherwise, genuine and “humbug,” the promoter of the first American tour of “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, and the eventual co-founder of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus (and thus, as someone pointed out to me recently, of about a century and a half of unnecessary animal suffering). He’s characterized here not as an exploiter both of disadvantaged people and of unseemly public curiosity, but as a raffish yet open-hearted champion of misfits.

This may not be entirely unfair. Barnum was, for instance, a fairly ardent abolitionist, and a (carefully self-promoting) philanthropist, a capable and progressive mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and an early benefactor of Tufts University. His highly entertaining 1869 memoir Struggles and Triumphs (which the filmmakers could have ransacked for far more colorful episodes than they have), for all its self-congratulation expertly passed off as modesty, nonetheless suggests a decent, well-meaning fellow.

Still, you have to check your sense of period context at the door to accept this movie’s vision of Barnum, or of his time. Screenwriters Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon try to give texture by showing him fold to social pressure here and there, but still, under his influence in this movie, even interracial romance can flourish—between Barnum’s junior partner Zac Efron and lovely aerialist Zendaya—and the human oddities find an empowering community under his roof and stand up to the bigots.

If you can tune yourself into this rosy view, it's very possible to enjoy the film. Jackman is a seamlessly proficient song-and-dance man here. The tunes, by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul of La La Land, could be a bit more varied, but director Michael Gracey and choreographer Ashley Wallen, both young Australians, bring ingenuity and verve to the staging, as in an imaginative duet between Jackman and Efron involving shot glasses.

Michelle Williams doesn't have to do much more than look serenely beautiful as Mrs. B, but the two Barnum daughters seem, creepily, not to age; when Barnum returns from a trip and says "You got so big" to one of them he seems to be trying to convince himself. Rebecca Ferguson has a regal presence as Jenny Lind, but the real standout in the cast is Broadway vet Keala Settle as Lettie Lutz the Bearded Lady, who lets it rip vocally in the movie's one really rousing and memorable song, "This Is Us," a proud anthem to letting your freak flag fly.

I, Tonya–Based on "irony free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly," this docudrama retells the 1994 scandal from the world of big-time figure skating. In case you're lucky enough to have forgotten: The U.S. champ Harding's moronic main squeeze Gillooly and some even more imbecilic associates conspired to wack the skating champ's biggest American rival, Nancy Kerrigan, in the leg to ensure Harding victory at the Lillehammer Olympics. It didn't work out.

Harding may or may not have known, or known much, about the plot (she eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge to avoid jail time), but in any case her career was destroyed. The movie efficiently places this squalid, embarrassing story in the context of Harding's abusive white-trash background with her crazed, furious mother LaVona Golden, played by Allison Janney with her usual crisp acerbity. It also gets at some of the class-based ugliness in the skating world. Through it all, that opening disclaimer conveniently excuses the filmmakers from having to pass judgment on the characters.

Directed by Craig Gillespie from a script by Steven Rogers, it's a watchable, well-acted picture overall, but it contains a classic performance. Margot Robbie somehow makes Tonya Harding both a comic and a tragic figure, all the while never milking the audience for pity. Her face in the mirror in the film’s wordless emotional climax is devastating—it reminded me, no kidding, of Falconetti’s facial close-ups in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc.

Pitch Perfect 3 –The Barden Bellas, now out of college and down on their luck, reunite for a USO tour, and have wacky adventures across southern Europe. They’re competing with other acts on the tour, including an all-women rock band called “Evermoist,” to land a spot opening for DJ Khaled (who amusingly plays himself), and of course there’s some undemanding romance and even a bit of facetious action-movie peril.

This is the broadest, silliest and easily the weakest of the three flicks about the a cappella ensemble. But it’s nonetheless pleasant to sit through its brief running time. The young actresses, led by Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson, are still adorable and funny, and there’s some enjoyable music, although the film could have done with an extra number or two at the expense of some dumb slapstick.

The first Pitch Perfect was charming, and has proven surprisingly re-watchable in TV reruns. The sequels are increasingly laborious, but they both retained enough of the original’s merits to be fun. Judging from PP3, I don’t think this is further sustainable—it’s time to sing a fond aca-adieu to the series.

EXIT CLAWS

Opening this week: 

Logan— The Marvel superhero Wolverine, a Canadian mutant with regenerative powers verging on invincibility and long, claw-like blades he can distend from his knuckles, has been around in the comics since the ‘70s. He’s been played in the movies by Hugh Jackman since 2000, and this latest, which goes by his walking-around name of Logan, is said to be Jackman’s last.

This one finds Logan, haggard and careworn, working anonymously as a chauffer in a U.S./Mexico border town and supporting the dementia-afflicted Professor X (Patrick Stewart). The two men become guardians of Laura (Dafne Keen), a little girl with mutant powers remarkably similar to Logan’s, right down to the claws and the tendency to use them. Soon they’re all on the run from corporate forces led by a drawlingly evil security chief (Boyd Holbrook) and a mad scientist (Richard E. Grant).

The director is James Mangold, who previously helmed The Wolverine in 2013, and whose earlier movies include the 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma and 1997’s High Noon-ish police drama Cop Land. His work often shows the influence of the classic westerns—the underdog facing powerful enemies with moral rectitude on his side. With Logan, Mangold overtly indentifies his hero with the title character in Shane, but he also infuses a strong, even heavy-handed streak of religious allegory into the story—this is Shane meets The Last Temptation of Christ. With extendable claws.

Mangold creates an atmosphere of dusty, ochre-toned defeat, and the actors match it. Jackman may never have done better work onscreen than this portrait of grudging, exhausted compassion, and Stewart’s enfeebled warmth is touching. Both have a rapport with silent, spooky Dafne Keen. Among the supporting cast, both Stephen Merchant as Caliban, a sort of mutant-bloodhound who has become Professor X’s caregiver, and Elizabeth Rodriguez as a desperate nurse add to the movie’s tragic flavor.

As with the other Wolverine flicks, I greatly enjoyed this gritty, gripping, melancholy chase picture, even though I was never a devotee of these comics. Be forewarned, though: With severed limbs and heads and bloody shootings and impaled henchmen from beginning to end, Logan is probably the most gory superhero movie I’ve ever seen (though I missed last year’s notorious Deadpool).

Despite this splatter, I was prepared to appreciate any superhero flick that didn’t climax with a bunch of skyscrapers collapsing into rubble, not to mention any movie that closes with Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around,” in its entirety, under the end credits. With superhero flicks, one should never assume anything is final, but if this truly is Jackman’s farewell to the role, then Cash gives him the perfect swansong.

BOY POWER, GIRL POWER

Opening this weekend:

Pan—A friend of mine disapproves of origin stories for iconic characters almost on principal—he thinks it cheapens the symbolic power of such figures to give them too specific a background. So Pan, a prequel to Peter Pan that focuses on his early friendship with the young Hook, is the sort of thing that would seriously get on this guy's nerves. But I enjoyed this cheeky, imaginative spectacle much more than I thought I would. It's certainly a huge improvement over 1991's Hook, probably my least favorite Steven Spielberg movie.

Peter (Levi Miller) is here a foundling at a home for orphans in London run by swinishly corrupt nuns. He's spirited off by an airborne pirate ship during the Blitz—neat trick, since J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan was first produced in 1904—and taken to Neverland, where he is forced to work mining pixie-dust for the despotic Blackbeard the Pirate (Hugh Jackman) along with throngs of other boys of every sort and from every time-period. Peter bonds with a slightly older fellow prisoner, Hook (Garrett Hedlund), and they escape into the forests. Blackbeard, noting Peter's nascent ability to fly, fears he's the fulfillment of a prophecy about the pirate's downfall, and pursues.

Other familiar characters from the saga, including Princess Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara), Smee (the excellent Adeel Akhtar) and even Tinkerbell are woven into the story, and the whole thing comes to a head in a battle between Hook's and Blackbeard's ships, excitingly staged by director Joe Wright. Hedlund is no more than serviceable as Hook, but the knockout among the cast is Jackman, in possibly the most febrile performance he's given onscreen. His Blackbeard, who has a disturbing intensity in the way he relates to his young slaves, is repellent yet fascinating and not without pathos.

There are scenes, as when the boys or the pirates sing snatches of songs from different time periods, when Pan has an almost Bollywood feel, and I began to wish it had just taken the leap and been an all-out jukebox musical. It seems safe to say, anyway, that this is the first version of Peter Pan that quotes Nirvana and The Ramones.

He Named Me Malala—The most moving scenes in this documentary portrait of Malala Yousafzai are those which show her simply being a kid—ragging on her brothers, or mooning over online pictures of cricket stars or Roger Federer. When you consider that Yousafzai, now 18, was writing a blog for the BBC when she was eleven about her life under the Taliban in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, that she was shot in the head and nearly killed in 2012 by the Taliban for her educational activism on behalf of girls, and that she became the youngest person ever awarded a Nobel Prize in 2014, there’s something heartbreaking, humbling and uplifting about seeing her act like a sweet giggly teenager.

Deftly directed by Davis Guggenheim of An Inconvenient Truth, He Named Me Malala mixes this sort of footage with interviews and elegant animation sequences to tell Malala’s story, and she’s just about irresistibly likable. But as the title implies, the movie is also a portrait of her father, Ziauddin, a schoolmaster. He gave her the name after the heroine of an Afghan folktale, a young woman who rallied the Afghans fighting the Brits and was shot for her trouble. From a certain angle, in light of what happened to his daughter, the title could almost be seen as a reproach.

In interviews Ziauddin is quiet and unassuming, with a noticeable stammer, but when we see footage of his speeches back in Pakistan in favor of a leftist, secular government and a nonviolent Islam, he’s a fiery, passionate, confident orator. What the movie gradually makes clear is how much Malala takes after her father in this way, as opposed to her reserved, homesick mother (the family now lives in England). In one of the animated flashbacks, we learn that Malala’s Mom left school while still a girl, exchanging her schoolbooks for candy.

Malala, by contrast, describes crawling through the halls and classrooms of the school her father ran while still in infancy. “School was my home,” she says bluntly, and what comes across in her is a willingness to defend that home like a patriot.

Opening this weekend at Harkins Shea:

The Final Girls—Here’s an odd gem: a mixture of Friday the 13^th with Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. The teenage heroine, Max (Taissa Farmiga), reluctantly agrees to attend a screening of Camp Bloodbath, an ‘80s slasher movie in which her late mother (Malin Akerman) appeared before Max was born. A fire breaks out at the screening, and Max and her friends flee the theater straight through the screen, and straight into the movie.

They find themselves stranded in the summer camp with Camp Bloodbath’s characters, the usual lunkheads and sexpots that make up the body count of such films, including the sweet-faced “quiet girl with the clipboard” played by Max’s Mom. They’re all stalked by the masked, Jason-esque Billy Murphy, the victim of a prank gone bad in the camp’s past. But the 21^st-century girls are having none of it—they try to rally the ‘80s characters to fight back against Billy.

This sort of whimsy either works for you or it doesn’t, and The Final Girls, directed Todd Strauss-Schulson from a script by M. A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller, worked for me. The feminist ideas underlying the film, while laudable, aren’t anything all that new; Halloween: H20: Twenty Years Later explored them back in 1998. But The Final Girls shows a lot of wit in the collisions of the characters with movie conventions like flashbacks and titles, and the cast, which also includes Adam DeVine, Alia Shawkat, Nina Dobrev and the always-funny Thomas Middleditch, sell the conceit with spirit and energy.

What really makes the movie work, however, is the touching story of the heroine reconnecting with a phantom version of her mother. Akerman has specialized for a while in playing cuties with more substance and integrity than they initially show. She’s enormously endearing here, and she and Farmiga have a lovely rapport. In the climactic scenes, their bonding somehow turns “Bette Davis Eyes,” on the soundtrack, into an anthem of female empowerment.

INTERNATIONAL CLAW

“To die! To be really dead! That must be glorious!”

This was the opinion of Count Dracula, as played by Bela Lugosi, and there have been plenty of other characters who have warned us that immortality—physical immortality, at any rate—is no picnic.

The latest is the title character of The Wolverine, the Marvel mutant superhero, armed with a metal skeleton and retractable metal claws, as well as the ability to quickly regenerate when wounded. Thus Wolverine, aka Logan, has been alive and in fighting trim since the most recent days when his bushy mutton chops wouldn’t make him look ridiculous—the 19th Century, in other words.

The new film is a stand-alone adventure, set in Japan, in which the brooding, world-weary Wolverine, played once again by Hugh Jackman, visits an old acquaintance from his WWII POW days, who offers him a chance at regular physical mortality. The trouble is that however much of a drag immortality may be, it turns out that it comes in really handy when you’re tangling not only with murderous opponents like ninjas and yakuza goons, but also with a venom-spitting snake-woman and a giant metallic suit of samurai armor.

Director James Mangold, working from a script credited to Scott Frank and Mark Bomback, moves the lavish production along, and he makes atmospheric use of the Japanese settings. There’s a funny, ingeniously-worked-out fight on top of a bullet train, for instance, and another memorable sequence where our hero gets riddled with arrows, a bit like Toshiro Mifune at the end of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood.

The Wolverine is given a love interest here, the Yakuza’s beautiful daughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto). But he seems to have a lot more fun with Mariko’s adoptive sister Yukio (Rila Fukushima), who becomes Logan’s self-appointed sword-wielding bodyguard and sidekick. Fukushima’s odd and oddly appealing face is full of puckish life, and Jackman gives the brooding a rest in his scenes with her. For me, she was easily the best thing about the picture.

Jackman manages the title role with the same lithe, effortless physicality he showed in the earlier films in the series. I must confess, though, that the fascination with this character, an associate of both the X-Men and The Avengers, eludes me. It may be a matter of chronology; he first appeared in the mid-70s, around the time that I stopped reading comics religiously. I wasn’t really aware of him until the X-Men movies started coming out.

But there’s no question that the fascination is real: Wolverine has gradually become one of the most beloved of superheroes of all time. A few years ago a friend of mine, then in his twenties, truly tried to get his wife to let him name their son Wolverine. He finally got her to settle for “Logan.” I’m not kidding.

I enjoyed The Wolverine well enough, but if you’re of this guy’s mindset, I’d say it’s a must-see. Then again, if you’re of this guy’s mindset, you’ll probably see it no matter what I say.

FROST HIT

Given his abstract-impressionist’s brush on window glass, you might imagine Jack Frost would be the artsy, snooty sort. But according to Rise of the Guardians, Jack’s a friendly, mischievous boy, eager for acceptance, dismayed that the kids who have him to thank for snow days and sledding fun can’t see him.

Jack, voiced by Chris Pine, is the hero of the computer-animated flick, conflated from William Joyce’s series of children’s books. The title characters are the legendary or allegorical figures who watch over childhood wonder, hopes and dreams. The others include Santa Claus, voiced like a radio-comedy Russian by Alec Baldwin, the Tooth Fairy, a winsome half-woman/half-hummingbird voiced by Isla Fisher, and the tough, Aussie-accented Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), who comes armed with a boomerang, but also has the tendency to leave a blooming flower in his burrow’s wake.

Best of all, maybe, is the Sandman, a roly-poly sort who doesn’t speak, but communicates by shaping his thoughts in sand over his head. They’ve all received their commissions from the omniscient—and thus, of course, highly enigmatic—Man in the Moon, and now it’s Jack Frost’s turn. If he becomes a full-fledged Guardian, then the kids may actually believe in him like they do Santa or the Bunny, and thus be able to catch a glimpse of him.

The menace is Pitch Black, aka the Boogeyman, given a nicely ironic, tut-tutting voice by Jude Law. Pitch is a simply pale figure in a brown robe, attended by a stamping herd of terrifying black horses—nightmares, of course.

Nostalgic for the Dark Ages, the salad days of terror and despair, Pitch looks to make a comeback, and he’s no minor adversary. So the Guardians must put aside their egos and grudges—even the Bunny, who resents Jack for the “Blizzard of ‘68” on Easter Sunday—and unify to defend childhood wonder.

Like last year’s fine Arthur Christmas, among other kid movies, Rise of the Guardians plays with the childhood desire to literalize and reconcile the difficult logistics connected to the duties of these symbolic figures, and does it in funny and imaginative ways. It also features an exciting action finale and many good jokes and some thrilling images, like the Sandman’s good dreams—sand-cast dinosaurs and sting-rays and dolphins—trooping to the rescue down suburban streets. That it’s not the best animated movie of the year testifies not to its weakness but to the genre’s strength these days.

RIP to the excellent Larry Hagman, passed on at 81, and to lovely Deborah Raffin, passed on at 59. More about the redoubtable Hagman, and his contribution to Monster-dom, in the next edition of Monster-of-the-Week.