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Hope everybody had a great Super Bowl Sunday. Along with a few minutes each of the Puppy and Kitten Bowls, this is what I watched during the big game:

Winchester--This horror yarn wasn't screened in advance for critics, at least not here in the Valley. It's set in the Winchester Mansion in San Jose, in 1906, and stars the great Helen Mirren as a Sarah Winchester, heir to the gun company's fortune.

Enthusiasts of occult lore will know that Mrs. Winchester was a real person, and her massive, rambling house still stands, and is a popular tourist attraction. It's claimed that she was haunted by guilt over the horrific bloodshed the family business had facilitated over the years, and that her constant and seemingly random additions to her home were intended to accommodate the ghosts of these casualties. Hence the place is sometimes hyped as the most haunted house in America.

It's not certain if, or to what extent, this is apocryphal, but the movie is a tall tale.  Mirren makes an imperious entrance and lends a certain understated dignity to the proceedings, dressed throughout in widow's black. But most of the screen time is carried by Jason Clarke, as a washed-up, laudanum-addicted doctor from San Francisco with a tragic past, who has been pressed into service to get the old lady declared mentally incompetent. He's a skeptic, of course, so that he can be shaken up by the rather brazen specters that start appearing to him almost immediately.

The result, directed by the German-born, Australia-raised identical-twin filmmaking team of Michael and Peter Spierig, trades in very old-school, and mostly low-tech, scares. From the opening title on, the film had the feel of a haunted house drive-in shocker of the '70s, like The Legend of Hell House or The House of Seven Corpses, with lingering atmosphere shots of the house's spires and gables and cupolas, and lengthy scenes of characters prowling the halls investigating creepy sounds, telling themselves that their fears are all in their heads. I thought they might find the Cowardly Lion's admission more comforting: "I do believe in spooks, I do I do I do..."

The jolts are conventional, but the Spierigs come up with some crafty variations in the timing. Winchester isn't an especially good movie, but it has a throwback feel I couldn't help but like.

Check out February's issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...for my "Four Corners" column  on brunch joints.

BOY WONDER

Opening today at Harkins Valley Art:

The Better Angels—Shot in ravishing black-and-white, this vision of Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood in Indiana takes its title, of course, from Lincoln’s famous reference to “The Better Angels of Our Nature” in his first inaugural. Writer-director A. J. Edwards seems to be making the case that said Better Angels were Lincoln’s mother and stepmother. The film even begins with an onscreen quote from Abe: “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”

The dreamlike, free-floating narrative depicts both this biological mother, Nancy Lincoln (Brit Marling), who died when he was nine, and his father’s new wife Sarah (Diane Kruger) as paragons who instilled in the frontier boy (Braydon Denney) not only civility but compassion. It’s less generous to Thomas Lincoln (Jason Clarke), Abe’s dour drudge of a dad—his appearances often heralded by the sharp crack of an ax as he splits wood. He’s acknowledged as a decent sort at bottom, but fairly or not it’s implied that Lincoln’s greatness arose in spite rather than because of him.

Edwards worked as an editor on several of Terence Malick’s films, and was credited as “Key Creative Consultant” on Malick’s 2011 The Tree of Life. This isn’t surprising, since The Better Angels—which Malick produced—seems almost like a retelling of The Tree of Life. Not only does Edwards work slavishly in Malick’s elliptical style, but the story is essentially the same—a boy’s memories of saintly maternal influence and of an upright but joyless, emotionally distant father.

Also like The Tree of Life, The Better Angels, with its lingering, quivering attention to the natural world that surrounded these people, will seem hypnotic and powerful to some viewers—like me—and tiresome and exasperating to others. But to no viewers will it seem like a business-as-usual historical film.

HOUSE HUNTED

It’s said that for a few years after the huge success of the original Die Hard, every action movie idea in Hollywood was pitched as “Die Hard in a…” That 1988 film featured bad guys taking over an L.A. office building until their schemes are bedeviled by coincidentally visiting New York cop Bruce Willis, so for a while it was Die Hard in a hockey rink (Sudden Death), Die Hard on a cruise ship (Speed 2: Cruise Control), Die Hard on a Navy ship (Under Siege), Die Hard on Alcatraz (The Rock) and so on. I once heard that this became so reflexive that somebody brought it full circle, and pitched “Die Hard in an office building.”

It’s odd that it’s taken so long to get to Die Hard at the White House, but Hollywood is making up for lost time. Just months after Olympus Has Fallen, we get another action extravaganza about an armed takeover of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down. The new film’s imitation of Die Hard is agreeably brazen. It even features an insufferably snide computer hacker, and Beethoven on the soundtrack (the Fifth Symphony here; in Die Hard it was the Ninth).

This time the attackers are an alliance of reactionaries and racists and militarist paranoiacs who despise the charismatic young black President (Jamie Foxx), who’s on the verge of pulling U.S. troops out of the Middle East. The coincidentally visiting cop this time is Channing Tatum, as a member of the Capitol Police at the White House to interview for a gig with the Secret Service. Also present is his politics-geek daughter (Joey King). The two of them manage to join a tour, and about that time D.C. blows up.

Literally. Director Emmerich, as is his wont, seems determined to outdo, in excess, previous actioners of this sort. In some movies, a fiery explosion in the Capitol dome might be the climax; here it’s the appetizer. Airplanes and helicopters plummet from the skies, motorcade vehicles chase each other across the White House lawn spewing bullets and rockets, a fire is set in the Lincoln Bedroom.

The good news is that we aren’t asked take a minute of it seriously. Aside from the fears and hatreds that motivate the attack, I wouldn’t suggest that there’s a single plausible element to this preposterous movie. The zombie epic World War Z, now in theaters, seems much more convincing. Yet somehow White House Down, unlike some of Emmerich’s other films, has a good-natured tone that makes its absurdity fun and infectious, even though, like so many action blockbusters, it’s probably at least twenty minutes overlong. I laughed and rolled my eyes at its corniness throughout, but I wasn’t bored or irritated.

Partly this is due to Emmerich’s over-the-top approach. But it’s also due to the actors, who either ham it up or keep straight faces as required—James Woods hams it up and Maggie Gyllenhaal keeps her face straight, for instance, as Secret Service officials. Jason Clarke is the most rabid of the gunmen, Michael Murphy and Richard Jenkins are in the line of succession, and Nicolas Wright is amusing as the tour guide.

At heart, though, White House Down is a buddy movie, dependent on the connection between the two stars. Fortunately, their personas blend well. Foxx seems sharp and canny, a quick study, while Tatum, proclaimed the Sexiest Man Alive last year by People magazine, seems sweetly dim as usual. The idea that the fate of the free world is in their hands is simultaneously scary, comforting and funny.