GOV STORY

Opening today:

Ella McCay--Emma Mackey shares initials with the character she plays here. The heroine of this latest from writer-director James L. Brooks is the Lieutenant Governor of an unnamed eastern state. When her boss, the beloved incumbent "Governor Bill" (Albert Brooks) is poached by the President--probably not our current President--for a cabinet post, Ella finds herself swept into the Governor's office, even though she comes across like a nervous college freshman at a job interview.

Narrated by Ella's aide Estelle (Julie Kavner), the movie explores the title character's wacky challenges and less wacky, more serious family dysfunctions, past and present. In flashback, we see her obsessively philandering father (Woody Harrelson) and long-suffering mother (Rebecca Hall) leave her to be parented by her adoring, fretful Aunt Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis). In the present, we see her hustler husband (Jack Lowden) go bonkers over the potential power and perks of Ella's new position.

We see her trying to navigate how to respond to her implication in perhaps the most inoffensive political scandal imaginable. And we see her trying to reconnect with her brilliant but reclusive younger brother (Spike Fearn), who suffers from severe anxiety disorder.

This hectic, haphazardly structured movie rattles along from one strand to another and back in the usual Brooks manner, warm and eccentric and open, with appropriate reserve, to the potential for human growth. I think what Brooks is after here is a sketch of what a genuinely virtuous person in modern American politics might look like; a Ms. Smith Goes to the State Capitol. Ella is a sort of American political Princess Myshkin or Doña Quixote, a hapless knight caught up in a whirlwind despite the most unimpeachable of intentions.

It's a great idea, and I enjoyed Ella McCay, but I'm not sure it hangs together convincingly. In part this has to do with Mackey's youthfulness, and the callow and somewhat ditzy nature of the character. The role requires somebody who can play both teenage and thirtysomething; Mackey is perfectly believable as the first, not so much as the second.

Also, not all of the plot strands pay off. The relationship between Ella and the ever-reliable Curtis as Aunt Helen is fully realized; so is the connection between our heroine and Brooks (Albert), hilariously weary as the pre-emptively compromised Governor Bill, and with Kavner's Estelle, and with Kumail Nanjiani as her stolid, loyal State Trooper bodyguard. But the scenes with Harrelson as the squirrelly Dad come off like a dead end, they don't really offer anything unexpected or add anything much to the story.

It's possible the movie's best, or at least most interesting, episode is one in which the title character doesn't appear. When Ella's troubled brother braves going outside to visit a former girlfriend (Ayo Edebiri) with whom he wants to re-connect, and the two struggle mightily to get around their tics and defenses to communicate the simple truth that they like each other, it feels like the essence of exasperating romcom complications boiled down to a single scene.

MUST BE THE SEASON OF THE SWITCH

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Freakier Friday--Any movie with Jamie Lee Curtis has something going for it right off. Freakier Friday is no exception. Curtis is exuberantly unafraid of looking silly, and this Disney sequel to their 2003 version of the Mary Rodgers novel Freaky Friday gives her plenty of opportunity. Intrepidly mugging and pratfalling in age-inappropriate costumes, Curtis helps the movie, certainly, but not enough to save it.

The 1972 novel, oft-remade for movies and TV since the 1976 version featuring Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster, is one of the many, many stories, possibly starting with F. Anstey's Vice Versa (1882), in which a youth exchanges bodies with an older person. It's a common fantasy for kids, and not uncommon for adults too, even though the ostensible point of such yarns is usually that being any age comes with hassles and stresses that aren't easily seen from other ages.

Back in 2003 Tess (Curtis) and her daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan) accidentally found themselves in each other's bodies. In this version, the grown up Anna has a surf-loving teen daughter of her own, Harper (Julia Butters), as well as a fiancé, Eric (Manny Jacinto) whose fashionista Brit daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons) doesn't get along with Harper.

After an encounter with a wacky palm-reader (Vanessa Bayer, who's pretty funny) all four of them switch places; Tess with Lily and Anna with Harper. In this decidedly freakier situation, the stepsisters-to-be, in their hijacked adult bods, call a truce and try to sabotage Anna and Eric's impending wedding, while Tess and Anna try to navigate teen life.

The movie feels well-intentioned, in the vague, general Disney manner, and the four leads are all appealing. The trouble is that their characters here aren't really distinct enough from each another to keep straight when they switch, and the actors don't make more than a half-hearted effort to recreate each other's accents and mannerisms. Combined with the frenetic, hyper-edited approach of director Nisha Ganatra, it leaves Freakier Friday's twisty complications mostly chaotic and confusing rather than hilarious.

MANSE MACABRE

Opening this weekend:

Haunted Mansion--Bereaved, bitter and a staunch nonbeliever in ghosts: These are perhaps not the optimum character traits for a tour guide of supposedly haunted houses in New Orleans. But before Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) unhappily landed in that job, he was a scientist who invented a camera intended to detect ghostly presences.

Thus Ben is drawn into a team of paranormal misfits, along with shady exorcist Father Kent (Owen Wilson), shady medium Harriet (Tiffany Haddish) and Bruce (Danny DeVito), a rumpled history professor, to help a young single mother (Rosario Dawson) and her son (Chase W. Dillon) who have moved into the title Louisiana domicile. The place isn't just a little bit haunted; this mansion is teeming with nearly a thousand unquiet spirits, tyrannically presided over by the "Hatbox Ghost" (Jared Leto).

After my visit in 1972, if you had asked my ten-year-old self which was my favorite ride at Disney World in Florida, I would probably have told you that it was the Nautilus submarine ride from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (long since retired). But the close second place would have gone to The Haunted Mansion, on which this extravagant Disney feature is based. I vividly remember riding past the mirrors and seeing a greenish spectral figure sitting between me and my sister in the car. The movie brought back other flourishes from the ride: the talking busts, the stretching portraits, the dueling ghosts.

There was an earlier film based on the ride in 2003, The Haunted Mansion (the new version's title dispenses with the definite article), starring Eddie Murphy. The current movie, directed by Justin Simien from a script by Katie Dippold, seems better to me than that forgettable effort, but unfortunately only a little better. Simien and Dippold and the actors try for a little depth of feeling along with the comedy, but the film feels poky and unfocused, and doesn't pick up much momentum until the reasonably exciting last twenty minutes or so.

Still, it's a good-hearted movie, with an engaging cast. Stanfield, chillingly haunted in Get Out, makes a sympathetic leading man here. Haddish's hoarse, hammy inflections as the soothsayer are funny, as are DeVito's blunt line readings as the prof; Dawson and young Dillon are pleasant as the hapless householders. As Madame Leota, the disembodied head in the crystal ball, Jamie Lee Curtis proves, if you'll pardon me saying so, spirited.

Mild as this Haunted Mansion is--I can't imagine it being truly scary to any but the littlest moviegoers--I was a bit startled, and amused, by its subtext. When we finally get some backstory on the Hatbox Ghost, there are striking paralells to another power-hungry figure who stubbornly refuses to depart from the contemporary American psyche. It could be that our nation's most perniciously haunted mansion these days is Mar-A-Lago.

KNIFE GOES ON

Now in theaters:

Halloween Kills--Well, it certainly seems to, at the box office, at least. The new installment in the slasher series slaughtered at the multiplexes this weekend, even though it was available to stream for free on video. This suggests that people may still want the communal experience of moviegoing, at least for certain kinds of movies, horror flicks being an obvious example. I find this a cheering thought.

Unfortunately, it's not very good. It's handsomely produced, with a look and a premise and some cast members that link it nostalgically to John Carpenter's 1978 original, and it has some good ideas. But it fumbles almost all of them, and fails to be deeply scary.

Despite being burned alive at the end of the previous sequel (2018) generic masked killer Michael Myers still is not quite dead, and he plods around Haddonfield racking up more victims. Jamie Lee Curtis is back as Laurie, hospitalized with a wound and fretted over by her daughter (Judy Greer) and granddaughter (Andi Matichak). The focus this time, cleverly, is on the characters who were little kids in the '78 movie: Anthony Michael Hall as Tommy, Robert Longstreet as Lonnie, and Kyle Richards, who returns to the role of Lindsey which she played in the original (the fact that the little girl from Halloween is now in her fifties is scarier than anything onscreen). Tommy raises an angry mob of townies to kill Michael, just like the torch-and-pitchfork-bearing gang at the end of Universal's Frankenstein.

I was irked when I saw clips of these scenes in the trailer; this does not strike me as the most auspicious moment in our history to extoll the virtues of mob uprisings. I was pleased that screenwriters Scott Teems, Danny McBride and director David Gordon Green did not, at least, fall into this trap; indeed, mindless mass rage is repudiated by the film, and Michael is described as a personification of fear, and the reckless destruction that can arise from it. The reactionary subtext of Michael's hostilities is also hinted at; his targets this time include a middle-aged gay couple and a middle-aged interracial couple.

Something really interesting could have been done with all this, but the movie is muddled and slow and clumsily structured, and--very much unlike the original--it falls back on gore. Buckets more blood are spilled, but Halloween Kills never comes close to capturing that pervasive sense of archetypical dread that Carpenter's film had.

Certainly I'm a fan of the idea of flinty old Jamie Lee Curtis, past her fear and ready to rise up and kick Michael's ass. The trouble is, they already made that movie, back in 1998. It was called Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, and while it wasn't in the same league as the original, it wasn't a bad picture. It's where the series should have ended, but of course, the prospect of the kind of box office that Halloween Kills is having is the surest way to make a masked killer rise again.

WHO'S WHODUNIT

Happy Black Friday everybody! Hope everyone had a gluttonously wonderful Turkey Day. Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Rian Johnson's Knives Out...

Have a great "Shop Small" weekend everybody!