DYLAN ME SOFTLY WITH HIS SONG

Belated takes on three December releases I've just recently caught up with, prepping for my 2024 Top Ten list: 

Still in theaters:

A Complete Unknown--Directed by the always-reliable James Mangold, this biopic covers Bob Dylan's breakthrough. We see the arrival of the young prodigy (Timothée Chalamet) in the Village, his pilgrimage to a New Jersey hospital to meet the terminally ill Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), attended there by Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who becomes Dylan's mentor and champion, his relationships with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), his rise to stardom, through to his notorious electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

I love Dylan. I saw him perform, sharing the bill with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty, at Rich Stadium in Buffalo, New York in 1986; it's high on the list of the best live shows I've ever been to. And "Like a Rolling Stone," from which this film's title is drawn, may be my favorite song; I've often wondered if it shouldn't be our new national anthem. I'm wondering that especially hard this week.

All that said, I'm not remotely enough of a Dylan worshipper or historian to feel proprietary toward him, or to say how accurate this film is or isn't. All I can say is that I enjoyed it. It's full of good acting, rich period detail and, of course, great music.

Chalamet, for whom I've never previously been able to work up much enthusiasm, gives us a human being as opposed to the bad Dylan impression that any of us can do. Dylan has long been reputed, even by his friends and admirers, to be an asshole--a dazzlingly talented asshole, a funny asshole, an influential asshole, but an asshole nonetheless.

The movie doesn't shirk this; the opinion is stated overtly by a character, and Dylan doesn't disagree. But as with most assholes, he isn't just an asshole, and Chalamet makes it possible not only to accept and admire him, but to like him. Also, he sings for him. And Norton sings for Seeger, and Barbaro sings for Baez, and Boyd Holbrook sings for Johnny Cash, and none of them, to my ear, embarrass themselves.

Despite Chalamet's excellence, Norton's performance as Seeger is the real standout here. Even though by the end Seeger is shoved, fairly or not, almost into the role of antagonist, Norton gets across Seeger's tirelessly disarming, near-saintly sweetness, and beneath it, the depth of his passion for music, and for America.

Now streaming:

Queer--The agonies of not quite fully requited love bleed out of Daniel Craig's old-shoe face in this adaptation of my second-favorite William S. Burroughs book (after Junky), first published in 1985 but written decades earlier. The setting is Mexico City in the '50s, where Craig's "William Lee " is a dissolute expat, drinking too much and engaging in one night stands with local pretty boys.

William is smitten when he gets a load of Allerton (Drew Starkey), a beautiful young American Navy vet. He eventually gets the guy into bed, and later talks him into traveling to Ecuador with him in search of yagé, a hallucinogenic plant he believes will give him telepathic powers (he's already restarted his heroin habit at this point). But Allerton is just along for the ride, literally and emotionally.

Craig is outstanding; the nakedness of his pain is hard to watch at times. And the movie, directed by Luca Guadagnino of Challengers from a script by Justin Kuritzkes, starts off very well. But as it dives deeper into drug-fueled visions (some of them reminded me of those in Ken Russell's 1980 Altered States), it loses dramatic momentum. It's visually arresting, but Guadagnino finds no equivalent to the charge that Burroughs generates in the best riffing passages of his prose.

Also, meaning no moral judgement--I hardly could judge, given my own relationship to junk food--I've never been able to find the glamor that so many filmmakers seem to find in drug addiction. Maybe I would if I understood it first-hand, but if so, I'll pass.

Now streaming, and still playing in the Valley at this writing at Harkins Shea:

A Real Pain--Close friends in their youths, 40-something cousins Dave and Benji have a more complicated relationship now. The quiet, mild-mannered Dave (Jesse Eisenberg) is a successful New York digital ad salesman, while Benji (Kieran Culkin), though cheerful and charismatic, is unemployed, troubled, seemingly directionless, and given to delivering his nervy opinions at distressingly inappropriate times and volumes.

Nonetheless, Dave adores him, and the two travel together from New York to Poland on a legacy left them by their mutually adored grandmother, who survived the Holocaust. They join a "Holocaust tour" led by a non-Jewish Brit (Will Sharpe), starting at Warsaw and working their way toward Lublin, where the cousins will break away to visit the grandmother's home. They smoke weed with each other and interact with the other oddballs on the tour, among them Jennifer Grey as a divorcee and Kurt Egyiawan as a Rwandan who survived the genocide in his country before converting to Judaism.

Written and directed by Eisenberg, this modest movie is genuinely original--very funny, very poignant, very believable, painfully uncomfortable to watch at times but ultimately a gem. Culkin is terrific, but  Eisenberg is no less so in his less showy role; his love and worry for his cousin, and his protective mortification at his behavior, make up the pain at the dramatic core of A Real Pain.

You can also check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Nickel Boys and the Universal/Blumhouse "reboot" Wolf Man.

DIAL, THOUGH YOUR HEART IS ACHING

Opening this weekend:

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny--The first sound we hear is the ticking of a clock. Thus the fifth and valedictory entry in the series about Harrison Ford's globetrotting, whip-cracking archaeologist establishes Time, and its persistent shadow, Mortality, as the theme.

The movie starts with a lengthy and rather splendid act set in France in 1944, with Ford made young via some impressive CGI alchemy. Indy and a brilliant sidekick (Toby Jones) are snooping around a mountain stronghold, trying to filch back some artifacts from the plunder of retreating Nazis, among them a coldly businesslike SS Colonel (Thomas Kretschman) and a reptilian physicist (Mads Mikkelsen) who identifies the title gadget, a clockwork contraption built by Archimedes himself that supposedly can be used for time travel.

From here we fast forward to New York in the late '60s, where Indy is a grumpy and bereaved old man on the verge of retirement from teaching, separated from his beloved Marion, annoyed by the Beatles blasting from the hippie pad neighboring his cluttered apartment. His goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who he affectionately refers to as "Wombat," pulls him into one more adventure, chasing the Dial from Tangiers to the floor of the Mediterranean to Sicily. The unrepentant Nazi prof, who went on to help NASA get to the moon, is looking for the Dial too, with his murderous goons.

The first Indy flick, 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, is a favorite of mine; tight and witty and curiously modest, it genuinely felt like a Republic serial of the '40s, maybe directed by William Witney. It was also built around a terrific Jewish joke, with its Nazis arrogantly supposing they could co-opt cosmic Jewish power unscathed. The lavish, overstuffed sequels were enjoyable enough, but all of them fell far short, for me, of that snappy, surefooted original.

Dial of Destiny falls short of the original too, but even so it may be the best of the sequels. It's the first that Steven Spielberg didn't direct; the duties here went to the always proficient James Mangold, who was also among the many screenwriters. And for the first half--the 1944 scenes, and the stuff in '60s-era New York, with Indy on the run against the backdrop of war protestors and astronaut ticker-tape parades--it's sensational.

The trouble is that, like so many contemporary blockbusters, it's outrageously overlong, at least thirty or forty minutes longer than it really needs to be. As MacGuffins go, the Dial doesn't have the same stirring imaginative power and poetry as the Ark, and its implications get the narrative in a little over its head in the later acts. For a story that starts with urgent ticking, the movie manages time very poorly.

Still, there's a lot to like here. Ford is wonderfully on point. He seems to have grown into the curmudgeonly manner that's always been part of his persona, but he's also emotionally present to a surprising degree, truly connecting with the other characters. Mikkelsen is a top-notch, quietly megalomaniacal villain, and Toby Jones, Antonio Banderas and John Rhys-Davies could all have warranted more screen time as Indy's allies, as could Shaunette Renée Wilson as an exasperated U.S. intelligence agent. Ethann Isidore is likable as Helena's street urchin pal.

Maybe best of all is Waller-Bridge's Helena--headlong, fearless, smiling, eyes full of self-delighted mischief. She even shows a hint or two of lewdness, welcome in this largely asexual series. It would be okay with me if they gave her more movies.

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken--At the very least, one must admit that this is a take on teen angst we haven't seen before. Ruby and her family are Krakens, the fearsome tentacled sea creatures of Nordic lore, but they're passing themselves off as humans; Ruby's Mom has a good career as a realtor in a seaside town. Ruby is under orders never to get wet in the ocean, lest her giant Kraken-ness be revealed to her classmates. This means she's forbidden to go to prom, as it's being held on a boat.

Soon enough Ruby (voiced by Lana Condor) learns that her Mom (Toni Collette) and her Grandma (Jane Fonda) are giant Kraken as well, and their backstory includes a feud with the mermaids. Indeed, the story is sort of The Little Mermaid in reverse, with many of the same psychological and sexual subtexts at work. And like an earlier DreamWorks Animation effort, Shrek, the snarky shots at Disney are amusing, in an inside-baseball way.

This movie has a glitzy, primary-color sensibility, like a fever dream after bingeing on My Little Pony and Powerpuff Girls and eating too much cioppino. And it feels about that ephemeral. But it's a sweet-natured fish tale, and undeniably original.

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.

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.