EIGHT MEN IN

Merry Christmas everyone! Now in theaters:

The Boys in the Boat--The 1936 Berlin Olympics was a highly satisfying episode for the good guys. Most famously, when Der Fuehrer said his was the Master Race, Jesse Owens heiled (phfft!) heiled (phfft!) right in Der Fuehrer's face. It wasn't enough to prevent the war that was coming, but it was a great foreshadowing of who would prevail.

Yet alongside that glorious debunking of supposed Aryan racial superiority, right under the noses of its promulgators, was another splendid underdog story. Briefly played by Jyuddah Jaymes, Owens is a minor figure in this period spectacle about the improbable rise of the University of Washington's eight-man crew to compete for the U.S. in those same games. It's directed by George Clooney from a script by Mark L. Smith, based on Daniel James Brown's 2013 book.

The story was remarkable before the crew got to Berlin. The UW boys were already upstarts in the sport, long associated with elite, affluent Eastern schools. This crew included working class, Depression-era grunts; the focus here is on Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), who when we first meet him is literally homeless. He lives in a junked car in a Seattle hobo jungle, patching the holes in the soles of his shoes while trying to eke out an engineering degree. He joins the crew for the stipend and the roof over his head.   

"Eight-man crew is the most difficult of all team sports," the coach here pronounces to the aspirants. "The average human body is just not meant for such things." I once had occasion to learn first-hand that my below-average human body wasn't meant for such things. Two of my nieces rowed crew, and back in the '80s I myself had the opportunity to take a one-man shell out onto the Potomac River; my near-helplessness in managing to get the thing to go anywhere gave me a small taste of how much delicate skill the sport requires, even setting aside its physical demands.

The Boys in the Boat gets across hints of this subtle precision; Clooney shows us, for instance, the hiccup-y little wrist-flip that precedes the return stroke. There's a great deal to like about the film, really, starting with what a wonderful, heartening story it tells. It's handsomely produced, with lustrous cinematography by Martin Ruhe, crisp editing by Tanya M. Swerling, another lovely score by Alexander Desplat. And it has rich, sometimes fascinating period detail, like the swanky spectator trains that run along the river banks at the fancier courses.

But as with several of Clooney's earlier directorial efforts, this movie is well-made, well-intentioned, good-hearted and generally enjoyable without being entirely satisfying. And unlike, say, The Monuments Men or The Tender Bar, it doesn't even have vivid star character actors to liven things up.

Joel Edgerton as Coach Al Ulbrickson and Peter Guinness as master boat-maker George Pocock are authoritative presences, but not complex characters. The guys playing the crew aren't, as in the standard sports movie template, a ragtag band of misfits with distinctive oddball personalities; they're just pleasant, good-looking young men. Rantz's coed love interest (Hadley Robinson) tries to generate some playful, mischievous heat, but she's rowing upstream opposite her bland leading man.

Overall, this film has the flavor of a feature length Super Bowl commercial. Like the best of those commercials, it can raise an inspirational tingle. But I don't know that it does much more in two hours than a good Super Bowl commercial can do in sixty seconds.

TRACK STAR

Opening this weekend:

Bullet Train--Brad Pitt plays one of several professional assassins riding the title vehicle on an overnight zip from Tokyo to Kyoto. Dubbed "Ladybug" by his dispatcher (Sandra Bullock), he's a lethal fellow with mad fighting and weapons skills, but he regards himself as a magnet for bad luck, and he's weary of his career and wants more positivity in his life.

This is Pitt in frumpy, glamor-debunking mode, decked out in a bucket hat, drab jacket and sneakers, with horn-rimmed nerd glasses. His manner is pleasant and unassuming; a central joke of the movie is that Ladybug clearly has no wish to hurt anyone. Pitt is very good company here, in the way that only a veteran movie star can be, and as a model for action movie heroes to come I heartily approve.

There are other strong actors here--Aaron Taylor-Young and Brian Tyree Henry as a team of bickering Brit killers, Hiroyuki Sanada and Andrew Koji as father-and-son assassins, Benito A Martinez Ocasio as a vengeful Mexican hit man, Zazie Beetz as a deadly concessions peddler, Joey King as a schoolgirl type with secrets, all chasing a briefcase McGuffin and trying to avoid the wrath of a shadowy Russian gangster known as "The White Death," not mention a pesky (if rather sweet-faced) boomslang snake on the loose. A few big names turn up in amusing cameos.

Yet all of this creditable work doesn't quite add up to a satisfying movie. Directed by David Leitch from a script by Zak Olkewicz adapted from a Japanese novel by Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train feels like an exercise in nostalgia; it's like one of the innumerable '90s-era knockoffs of Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez or (especially) Guy Ritchie, full of savage yet "ironic" facetious violence and whip pans and cute but bloody flashbacks and characters engaging in detailed discussions of pop culture (Thomas the Tank Engine in this case).

It's well-crafted and perfectly watchable, as long as you aren't too squeamish. But for me, it lacked any real emotional stakes, and the homestretch grows overblown and tediously overextended. Compare it to 2018's underrated Bad Times at the El Royale, another faux-Tarantino throwback that had the same tongue in cheek, but a bit of heart in its chest as well.

Now on Prime  Video:

Thirteen Lives--It's the story of a rescue mission with the number thirteen in the title, and it's directed by Ron Howard. That's a pretty solid recipe for success.

In June of 2018 twelve members of a youth soccer team and their coach went on an outing into a cave in a provincial mountain park in northern Thailand. An unexpected early monsoon hit after they went in, the paths quickly filled up with water, and the boys were trapped, more than two miles into the narrow, twisty passages. The rescue efforts that followed over the next three weeks included participants ranging from Thai Navy Seals to U.S. Military to Brit rescue divers to a Bangkok-based engineer who figured out how to divert rainwater from sinkholes on the mountain, into the agricultural fields below. The movie asserts that more than 5,000 people from 17 countries pitched in.

Howard focuses on the Brits, nicely underplayed played by Colin Farrell, Viggo Mortensen and Tom Bateman, and an Australian diver, played by Joel Edgerton, who was called in because of the specifics of his medical background. Like Howard's best film, Apollo 13, this is a fairly deep dive (sorry about that) into the technical difficulties of the operation, and this attention to detail adds to the suspense rather than dragging on the pace.

The movie's a bit of a harrowing ordeal at times, especially for those of us with a claustrophobic streak, but it's just about impossible not to invest in it emotionally. And while it's inspiring, it may also leave you a little exasperated with our seeming inability to work together for the common good when it's not such an obviously urgent crisis. What a pity it's so hard for us to remember that, in the end, all humankind is one big Thai soccer team, hoping to get out of our respective caves.

TRIAL & TERROR

Opening this weekend:

The Scorch Trials—The screen version of James Dashner’s novel The Maze Runner, released a year ago this month, was about a bunch of teenage boys with no memory, living in an encampment surrounded on all sides by an enormous maze that only opened during daylight hours. At the end they got out, to find they were test subjects of an evil scientist (Patricia Clarkson) in a post-apocalyptic society.

This sequel follows the surviving boys, and one girl, as they escape from yet another sinister complex, only to find themselves in the Scorch, the godforsaken, sandblasted ruin of an American city. As they try to reach a (possibly mythical) resistance, they’re beset by zombies (here called “cranks”) and other menaces, and are pursued all the while by the scientist’s minions.

The first film was fairly routine masochistic young-adult-fiction melodrama, but that mysterious maze gave it a certain fascination, at least until everything was overexplained toward the end. Scorch Trials doesn’t have anything that tantalizing. It’s just a jumble of sci-fi chase movie tropes. Everything seems to have been borrowed from other movies—The Omega Man, Logan’s Run, The Road Warrior, Coma.

Director Wes Ball, who also helmed The Maze Runner, manages the big action scenes well, and several fine character actors—Giancarlo Esposito, Aidan Gillen, Barry Pepper, Lili Taylor and Alan Tudyk, among others—provide some energy. Most of the kids are attractive but on the uninteresting side, with one big exception: a young actress named Rosa Salazar joins the gang about midpoint, and gives Scorch Trials a much-needed dose of soulfulness.

Black Mass—Jonny Depp plays James “Whitey” Bulger, a notoriously brutal South Boston gang boss of the ‘70s and ‘80s, in Scott Cooper’s somber, violent true-crime drama. Cooper’s focus is on Bulger’s unholy alliance with the FBI, apparently the result of the boyhood hero-worship that one of the agents (Joel Edgerton) had for him.

Depp is convincing and scary but repellent, and you may find yourself wondering why you should care about this charmless monster. Not, of course, that he would be less of a monster if he was more charming, but part of the dynamic of the gangster picture is the transgressive thrill it offers in making gangsters so charming we forget they’re monsters while we’re watching.

We certainly don’t forget it here. But the cast is strong—Benedict Cumberbatch stands out as Whitey’s respectable brother—and the movie packs plenty of punch.

By the way, for the tens of readers out there who are no doubt wondering why there was no Monster-of-the-Week yesterday, the feature is on hiatus. Probably at least until October gets here.

FLIPPING THE BIRD

Birdman has racked up the SAG and Golden Globe nominations this past week. But somehow, big fan of Michael Keaton though I am, that film, remarkable though it is, rubs me the wrong way. Check out my list, on Topless Robot, of some reasons why.

Opening this week:

Top Five—Chris Rock is the best American stand-up comedian currently active, and one of the greatest of all time. He is, beyond doubt, a comedy star. But somehow he’s never been able to make a convincing case that he’s a movie star. Something about the guy’s presence has always seemed to shrink a little, grow weaker, when he’s not on stage by himself, but is surrounded by a bunch of actors in a fiction film.

This has nothing to do with his talent. He’s natural and believable enough onscreen, and in an early supporting role in New Jack City (1991) he showed himself capable of powerful acting. But when he’s at the center of a movie, he suddenly no longer has that electric command of the audience’s attention that he has doing stand-up. His star vehicles, like Bad Company, Down to Earth and I Think I Love My Wife, make a sadly forgettable list.

The bad news about his new film Top Five, which he also wrote and directed, is that it doesn’t entirely end this streak. It isn’t a knockout. The good news is that it’s nonetheless the best he’s done so far, by a good margin, and its best scenes are vibrant, complex and extremely funny.

The film, Rock’s version of Sullivan’s Travels or Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, traces a long day in the life of Andre Allen (Rock), a comedian and the star of a string of idiotic but lucrative “Hammy the Bear” comedies. Andre’s in New York trying to promote his new movie Uprize, a tortured drama about Haitian revolutionary Dutty Boukman, and to attend a bachelor party for his upcoming wedding to a reality-TV diva (Gabrielle Union). He agrees, reluctantly, to be interviewed by a New York Times contributor (Rosario Dawson), a big fan of his stand-up who disapproves of the cheesy commercial turn his career has taken.

Can you guess where this is headed? Well, you’re right, but the plot, such as it is, isn’t the point here. Rock has cunningly structured the film so that Dawson provides an onscreen audience for his riffs on various subjects. There are also terrific freestanding sequences, like a punishingly funny (and dirty) flashback of Andre’s lowest point, or a raucous ensemble scene when he visits his family.

The movie hits some false notes and dawdles on a bit too long, and in any case it comes nowhere near Rock’s strongest stand-up. Even so, at least for fans of this genius, it’s well worth seeing.

Exodus: Gods and Kings—For all his diligence as an actor, Christian Bale—like Rock, I suppose, only more so—sometimes shows a recessive puniness of spirit as movie star. At least for me, he lacks the grandeur to play a superhero.

Theoretically, this might make him right for the role of Moses in a movie about the Old Testament prophet, who was, after all, an unimpressive speaker in his own opinion. In practice, however, giving the lead in a nearly three-hour epic to a guy with a brick in his mouth turns out to be inadvisable. Say what you will about Charlton Heston’s monolithic turn in The Ten Commandments, but you caught every furious word. When the old Pharaoh (John Turturro) asks if the Egyptians can beat the Hittites or if the slaves are about to revolt or whatever, Bale’s Moses replies “Fribshm mblim snablub griflb.”

That said, the plagues and miracles are entertainingly staged by director Ridley Scott, and Ramses, played by Joel Edgerton—no champ in the diction department either—has our sympathy when he loses his child on Passover. There’s some ingenious dialogue, too, particularly between Moses and God, here personified as a rather cheeky little boy. The kid has the diction of an RSC actor, by the way. I kept waiting for The Almighty to reply to one of Bale’s mumbles with “I’m sorry, I may be All-Knowing, but I didn’t catch that.”

TO GATSBY OR NOT TO GATSBY

It sounds like a joke: “The Great Gatsby, in 3-D.” What’s next, The Grapes of Wrath in 3-D? The Old Man and the Sea in 3-D? Catcher in the Rye in 3-D? What other high-school English class assignment classics could we watch in dorky dark glasses?

Oddly, though, it sort of works in the case of this Gatsby. The director of this new version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald tale is Baz Luhrmann, and he takes more or less the same approach to it that he did to Romeo & Juliet and Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom—which is to say, a combination of Bollywood and Busby Berkeley on speed. So his lunging, plunging, swooping camera seemed to pack a little extra punch from the 3-D in a way that most recent offerings in the format—the superhero and animated flicks—have not.

Strictly in terms of plot, it’s a pretty faithful retelling of the 1925 novel about the title mystery man (Leonardo DiCaprio) who shows up at the ritzy end of Long Island. But it couldn’t be much farther away in tone from Fitzgerald’s famously balanced, plangent prose. Despite the solemn narration by Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), the style is all wild whip pans and fast cutting and undulating aerial shots that carry us from new money “West Egg” to old money “East Egg” and back, and sometimes all the way in to Manhattan.

Gatsby, a West Egger, throws decadent jazz-and-flapper parties in which he doesn’t usually participate. His neighbor and tenant Nick sees Gatsby gazing longingly at the “green light” across the bay, on the dock of the East Egg estate where Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) lives with her blueblood ape of a husband, Tom (Joel Edgerton). Needless to say, there’s some history there.

I’ve always been fond of this yarn, with its fairy-tale backstory. Like many durable American fables, it’s rooted in seriously adolescent notions, about reinventing yourself and impressing the girl of your dreams with grand gesture, but what gives it its power was that Fitzgerald knew, first-hand, that the fix was in when it came to Gatsby’s dream of making himself acceptable to the old money class—if he’d simply wanted to be rich or famous, he could have managed it easily enough, but he wanted to be One Of Them. That he wanted this for, from his point of view, the most gallant and romantic of reasons mattered not at all.

Once you’ve accepted that this is Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby, not Fitzgerald’s, you’re likely to feel that this is the most successful adaptation of the story. It’s highly uneven—in particular, it runs out of steam toward the end—but it’s more satisfying, overall, than the drab 1949 version, starring Alan Ladd, and much more than the plodding 1974 version starring Robert Redford, and this has at least as much to do with the leading man as it does with Luhrmann.

Neither Redford nor Ladd was the real problem with their respective productions; both did their level best with the part. But neither of them captured the subtly frantic, terrified side of Gatsby’s psychology like DiCaprio does. This makes it possible, as it usually isn’t, to find some pity for Daisy, to see how even life with the cloddish, philandering Tom might offer her more breathing space than Gatsby’s obsessive devotion.

Even more than this, though, for the story to be convincing, Gatsby must have a radiant glamour that transcends acting, or even beauty. In one of the book’s most famous passages, Nick describes Gatsby’s smile:

“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”

When DiCaprio smiles into the camera here, he comes closer to capturing this quality than any previous Gatsby I’ve seen. Maybe it was just the 3-D.

GROWING BOY

In the title The Odd Life of Timothy Green, the word “odd” is a bit of an understatement. Timothy is a little boy who grows, in a matter of hours, out of a vegetable garden after it’s been seeded with the wishes of his parents.

Cindy Green (Jennifer Garner) and her husband Jim (Joel Edgerton) live in the small town of Stanleyville, where Jim works in the failing pencil factory and Cindy gives tours in the pencil museum. As the movie begins they’re devastated by the news that they can’t conceive. That evening, with the help of some wine, they attempt to move on with their lives by collaborating on “making” an idealized kid, scribbling what they think he’d be like on scraps of notepaper and stuffing them into a little wooden box, which they then bury in Cindy’s garden.

From this sweet, poignant session of self-therapy, the movie swings into the truly odd. Later that night there’s a freak rainstorm which seems only to fall on the Green’s home, after which Jim and Cindy find a mud-covered boy (CJ Adams) of about ten, calling himself Timothy and referring to them as Mom and Dad, has slipped into the house. Timothy is fully formed, articulate, affectionate, funny. His only peculiarity—well, his major peculiarity—are the leaves that grow out of his ankles. He also has a tendency, when the sun emerges from behind the clouds, to respond by turning and opening his arms to bask in its rays.

What follows is a string of episodes in which Timothy’s apparently magical presence revitalizes his parents and their families, as well as the town. He makes a connection with a beautiful older girl, Joni (Odeya Rush), who acts as a sort of bike-borne guardian angel. Each time Timothy suffers a loss or has a growth experience, he notices one of his leaves going autumnal and falling off.

In other words, this is one of those self-consciously whimsical fantasies in which vague supernatural forces intercede positively in people’s lives; Field of Dreams, Phenomenon, Mr. Destiny and The Family Man are all examples. On the whole it’s a genre to which I’m resistant, not because I dislike fantasy (I love it) but because this particular sort so often seems tinged with middle-class self-congratulation.

That said, it should be admitted that some films of this kind are better than others—less shameless, less mushy—and that Odd Life is at the high end of the spectrum. The director is Peter Hedges, who wrote the script from a story by producer Ahmet Zappa. One can only guess what Ahmet’s late and still-lamented dad Frank would think of the film, but I’d be lying if I tried to claim that I got through without a misty eye.

It’s prettily produced, and the acting is strong. Jennifer Garner gave an excellent performance—the best of her career, maybe—in Juno as a similarly earnest, yearning wannabe-Mom. She’s very good again, and Edgerton, a ringer for the young Tom Skerritt, is pleasant company. The supporting cast is full of pros like David Morse as Jim’s distant Dad, Rosemarie DeWitt as Cindy’s pushy sister, Lois Smith and the great M. Emmet Walsh as a jolly aunt and uncle, Shoreh Aghdashloo as an adoption authority, and Dianne Wiest, Ron Livingston and James Rebhorn as representatives of the “Crudstaff” clan behind the pencil factory (by the way, not since Eraserhead, also about a strange parenting experience, has a movie been this interested in the composition of pencils).

These performers and others give Odd Life texture and vitality and a sense of the messiness of real life, which is the point of the story: The difference between parenting as theory and as scary, scrambling, humbling reality. Jim and Cindy are allowed to concoct a child out of their own best qualities, and they still find themselves using him as a pawn in their own agendas. At one point Cindy says “We didn’t want him to be perfect…we wanted it to be perfect…” “it” being Timothy’s childhood. She doesn’t seem to realize that this is possibly an even more insanely control-freak goal, and that even if it could be attained, the perfection would theirs, not the kid’s.