STEVE & JOHN (AND BETTY)

Check out my review, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Stan & Ollie...

...starring the astounding Steve Coogan and the equally astounding John C. Reilly. Also, check out my review of the National Tour of Hello, Dolly!...

...playing through Sunday, January 13 at Gammage Auditorium.

Have a great weekend everybody!

THERE'S AN APE FOR THAT

Opening this week: 

 
Kong: Skull Island—In 1973, just as the U.S. is bugging out of Vietnam, the Military-Industrial Complex mounts a secret but really obnoxiously intrusive expedition, via a swarm of helicopters, to the title island. Within minutes of arriving, the invaders find themselves getting the crap very justifiably beaten out of them by the title resident.

The survivors of the initial attack then squabble and try to regroup, and to survive further attacks by this skyscraper-sized primate as well as other gargantuan abominations. Notable among these are the “skull-crawlers,” a species of voracious reptiles that resemble two-legged monitor lizards with squalid, skull-like heads. The party also encounters human natives, and an American airman stranded there since WWII.

The original 1933 King Kong is my favorite movie, and giant monsters have been cinematic comfort food for me since I was a small child. So when I tell you that it’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun at a movie, I’ll understand if you take it with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, it’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun at a movie, and many people around me at the screening seemed to have the same response.

American popular moviemaking has been on a bit of a roll recently—two weeks ago we had the chiller Get Out, last week brought us Logan, and this week we get this boldly preposterous saga. It would be great if we could count on entertainment at that level every weekend.

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts stages monster action with a true Brobdingnagian grandeur, and he and the special effects folks offer us a Kong who is brooding, irritable and lovable. Part of the pleasure of the movie is that he’s so much more sympathetic than the human visitors that one feels little compunction about wholeheartedly rooting for him.

There’s a tongue-in-cheek nerviness to the script, and the cast is full of character vets that can handle it. The supporting soldiers and researches are forgettable monster fodder, and the nominal hero and heroine, Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson, seem to have been cast for their ability to look great in t-shirts. But John Goodman, as the contractor leading the search, and Samuel L. Jackson as the Army Colonel who goes all Captain Ahab toward Kong, and John C. Reilly as the marooned pilot, ensure that the movie isn’t just an empty spectacle devoid of personality.

Kong: Skull Island is not, I suppose, a movie of particularly mature or wholesome sensibility. But it can’t fairly be called dumb, either—it’s made with skill, wit and imagination, and it has moments that could be called magical. 

 
The Ottoman Lieutenant—Call the title character Ismail, a dashing young Turk in the Ottoman army. He's played by a Dutch actor named Michiel Huisman, previously unfamiliar to me but very appealing. Our heroine, played by the Icelandic actress Hera Hilmar, is Lillie, a high-minded nurse from Philadelphia who goes to work in a clinic in Anatolia in the early days of World War I. She and Ismail fall in love, even though he's a Muslim and she's a Christian, even though the dull doctor at the clinic (Josh Hartnett) also loves her, and even though the Armenian Christians she cares for are in big trouble from the Turks.

This star-crossed interfaith romance tries to be sexy and swoony in the manner of a check-out line romance novel of the old school. The direction is by that excellent journeyman Joseph Ruben, who back in the '80s made three classic thrillers in a row: Dreamscape, The Stepfather and True Believer. The poor fellow hasn't been able to get a script worthy of his abilities since, but that doesn't stop him from bringing the best out of what he has to work with, like efficiently staging some exciting action scenes here, or from capitalizing on the expansive scenery.

Ben Kingsley easily nails his few scenes as another American doctor with whom Lillie bonds, a sick and bereaved man who labors on in spite of despairing doubt that life has any meaning. But crisp direction and a strong supporting turn can only take the movie so far, especially when there may be an unspoken agenda beyond the mild love story.

With its insipid dialogue and nagging, generically epic music, The Ottoman Lieutenant comes off as trite but watchable and harmless enough, on the surface. It would be remiss, however, not to note that the film, a Turkish-backed production, is grotesquely evasive about the Armenian Genocide that started in 1915, in which about a million and a half people perished.

The movie doesn't exactly deny the event, but it treats it obliquely, in bland passages from Lillie's narration like "the Ottomans took measures to stamp out the Armenian rebels, and the Armenians fought back," or "...some Armenian men were taken from their homes and conscripted to serve in the Ottoman army, while the round-up of Armenian women, children and the elderly had begun..." She never quite spits out what those "measures" were, or what the people were being rounded up for.

It's true that we're shown a small number of Ottoman soldiers massacring some Armenians on a country road. But there's no sense of the scope and sanction of the horror from this scene, the real point of which is that our valiant hero Ismail intercedes on the Armenians' behalf.

To be fair, this probably isn't much more outrageously disingenuous than, say, the classic John Ford epics are toward the real-life genocides of the American West. Still, behind all of The Ottoman Lieutenant's pieties and platitudes and tender longings and noble sacrifices, it's hard to miss a distinct whiff of whitewash.

LOOK BEAK IN ANGER

Opening this week:

The Angry Birds Movie—The Angry Birds franchise began in 2009 as a video game, the object of which was to launch roly-poly little birds from a slingshot at little green pigs. The pigs have stolen their eggs, you see. The game led to more than a dozen spin-off games, and merchandising ranging from toys to clothes to TV cartoons, and now, inevitably, to this animated feature.

Our hero, voiced by Jason Sudeikis, is Red, the scowling, cardinal-like bird you’ve been seeing on kids’ hats and t-shirts the last few years, if you’ve been paying attention. He lives on an island inhabited by oddly flightless avians—it’s the entire Universe, as far as they know. Most of these birds aren’t inordinately angry, so an outburst, early on, lands Red in court, and he’s sent to an anger management class, where he meets other…well, you know.

Then huge ships arrive filled with green pigs. The guileless birds are taken in by their friendly overtures, except for Red, who’s suspicious of them. He turns out to be right, of course. The pigs steal the island’s eggs, and it’s up to Red and his anger management classmates to rouse the ire of the populace, and lead them to the land of the pigs to try to rescue them from the Pig King’s kettle.

The high-ticket voice cast, which includes the likes of Josh Gad, Danny McBride, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, Peter Dinklage and even Sean Penn—amusingly cast as the Angriest of the Birds—more or less ensures that there will be a few laughs. There’s some ingenious visual shtick, too. But overall The Angry Birds Movie is tiring—too many of the gags and situations seem artificially extended, as if the filmmakers knew they didn’t have much story to work with, and were trying to pad for time.

More than this, there’s the whole matter of the theme of anger. Anger is funny. Most comedy is based on some degree of anger. Anger also resonates with children, who feel it intensely but in most cases impotently.

But there’s anger and then there’s anger. There’s legitimate, mature outrage at, say, rudeness or injustice, and then there’s the anger that can arise from annoyance at other people’s cheerfulness, or from changes in our world with which we’re uncomfortable, or simply from daily inconveniences.

We’re all subject to this second sort, of course, and it’s always a good source of comedy. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for wisdom, and I fear that’s how The Angry Birds Movie wants us to see it. I certainly don’t think the film is intentionally reactionary, but I’m also unconvinced that a celebration of anger—resolving itself in war on foreigners—is what our society is most in need of just now. We have plenty of angry birdbrains already. 

 The Lobster—Having been dumped by his wife, David (Colin Farrell) checks into an elegant but cheerless resort hotel for singles. He has forty-five days to find a new partner, and if he fails he’ll be transformed into an animal. This happens often: David shares his room with his dog, who used to be his brother.

David is asked what kind of animal he wants to be if he doesn’t pair off, and he chooses to be a lobster, because of their longevity, and because he loves the sea. The hotel manager congratulates him on his thoughtful choice; the staff’s manner is always one of brisk, patronizing politeness, with contemptuous pity just under the surface.

Compatibility in a relationship is judged by shared impairments—nearsightedness, or a limp, or a tendency to nosebleeds, or sociopathic heartlessness—and people regularly try to feign these limitations to attract a mate. The guest activities include hunts of the neighboring forest, where “Loners”—feral single people—are shot with tranquilizer darts and brought back to undergo their transformations. Bagging a Loner adds days to your stay at the hotel, and thus to your chances of pairing off.

In other words, this is another of those Kafka-lite pop absurdist comedies, sort of a European spin on the likes of Being John Malkovich or Cold Souls. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek known for Dogtooth, from a script he co-wrote with Efthymis Filippou, the film is seamlessly imagined and entirely coherent on its own strange terms.

The pace is a little slow, and it seems to slow down even more in the second half. Other than that, the movie really can’t be faulted in terms of execution. The cast, which includes John C. Reilly, Rachel Weisz, Lea Seydoux, Olivia Colman and the excellent Ben Whishaw, maintain admirably straight faces, and Farrell, remaining quietly shellshocked throughout, makes you care about his plight.

It might even be fair to call The Lobster brilliant, but for all its whimsicality, it isn’t much fun. The atmosphere is dark and desperate, and many scenes are horrifically violent—those sensitive to violence toward animals are particularly warned to leave this one alone.

The premise seems to have arisen from a genuine, vitriolic bitterness toward the societal pressure to pair off, and the implication that those who can’t, or don’t want to, are regarded as subhuman. This avoids coming off as a hipster pose because Lanthimos pointedly shows us that life in the woods among the Loners is no less oppressive—romance and sex are forbidden there, and severely punished.

So The Lobster isn’t sentimental. It fully acknowledges that there’s a price to going it alone, or two-by-two, and that the price can be high either way. It also implies that our motivations, either way, are generally selfish. It’s possible to be both cynical enough to respect this viewpoint and romantic enough to be unable to fully agree with it. In any case, this Lobster, though admirable in many ways, brought me less pleasure than one served with butter and lemon.

FOR IT'S ROOT, ROOT, ROOT FOR THE CUBBIES

Opening in the Valley this weekend:

Bears—For parents, Bears may be the most suspenseful movie of the year. The Disneynature documentary follows a mother grizzly bear and her two cubs as they come out of hibernation and cross a vast expanse of the Katmai National Park in southern Alaska, heading for the salmon runs. Mom must not only keep her babies alive, but gorge herself on the fish sufficiently that her milk doesn’t run out in the middle of next winter’s snooze.

Like 2012’s Chimpanzee, this film has the feel of an old-school Disney nature movie, with folksy, jocular narration. In Chimpanzee this was provided by Tim Allen; in Bears it’s John C. Reilly, who mentions, near the beginning, that almost half of all bears don’t survive cubhood. And herein, of course, lies the parental suspense.

I watched this movie with my kid next to me. I was pretty sure that Disney wouldn’t have released it if neither cub had survived, but I was on the edge of my seat because I thought it was just possible, especially after the 50/50 chance noted in the narration, that they’d let kids and their folks tough it out through the loss of one. Don’t read any farther if you don’t want to know what happens.

OK, now I presume that I’m only writing to cowardly parents who want to keep their kids comfortably sheltered from the grim realities of life. Nice to be among kindred spirits. And to you I say: Bears is safe. It’s touch and go at times—the male cub keeps landing in peril—but at least for this season, cubs and Mom all make it.

It’s hard to know to what extent this footage had to be finessed in the editing to build a narrative. But, as with Chimpanzee, no amount of Disney corniness can obscure how astonishing are the scenes that the directors, Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey, and their crew have captured here. Grizzlies snagging fish in mid-leap, male bears roaring and grappling, predators stalking, cubs romping—these are iconic nature-film tropes, and it’s possible that they’ve never been done better than in Bears, all to the accompaniment of a stirring score by George Fenton.

Be forewarned, however: The movie may leave you with a craving for salmon. On the other hand, it may put you off salmon for good.

Joe—Nicolas Cage plays the title character in this adaptation of Mississippi author Larry Brown’s 1991 novel. A Joe of the working-class variety, he spends his days leading a timber crew in the miserable and probably toxic work of killing junk trees by chopping into them with a poison-squirting hatchet.

He’s a shaky alcoholic and a brawler, with enemies and a stint in prison in his past, but we’re also meant to see that Joe is a hard-working, honest man, liked and respected by those who know him. He gives a job to a homeless teenager (Tye Sheridan) who squats in a nearby abandoned house with his family. Wreck though Joe is, he quickly proves a vastly better father figure to this kid than his actual father, a tyrannical, dangerously abusive drunk played by Gary Poulter, a homeless guy in real life who died in the streets of Austin, Texas, still homeless, shortly after Joe wrapped.

Directed by David Gordon Green, Joe is a southern-fried lower depths melodrama in the vein of Sling Blade and Mud. It’s more ferociously violent than either of those films—be forewarned, it includes animal violence—but it has the same agreeable streak of sentimentality, and it has terrific performances, especially by the bleak-eyed Cage. After many tours of movie star duty at the center of big-budget idiocies, you can almost feel Cage’s pleasure in creating a character again.

Happy Easter, Passover, etc. everybody. Check out my Topless Robot list, in honor of the redoubtable Easter Bunny, of badass pop-culture bunnies.

WRECKONING

When your name is Wreck-It Ralph and you no longer want to wreck things—well, what you got there is an existential drama.

The title character in Disney’s computer-animated feature is a burly thug in bibs, with two huge fists which he uses, spitefully, to inflict damage on a building. His counterpart is an insufferably chipper handyman who scampers around tapping Ralph’s wreckage with a hammer, thus repairing it. All of this happens within the confines of a video game in the ‘80s arcade style, a la Pac-man or Super Mario Bros.

The chirpy handyman is the game’s titular hero, Fix-It Felix Jr., and Ralph is the designated Bad Guy—a successful game ends with him getting thrown off the building’s roof. Ralph’s been going through this for decades, and he’s sick of it. He’s had to start attending a Bad Guy’s support group, where another heavy tells him “You are Bad Guy, but this does not mean you are bad guy.”

Ralph can’t take this to heart, however. He’s determined to try his hand at being a good guy, so he leaves his game and goes seeking glory in other, more modern games in the arcade—first Hero’s Duty, a grim and violent milieu in which armored space soldiers led by a fearsome Amazon battle giant invading bugs, and later Sugar Rush, a racing game through a land in which everything is made of sweet stuff. In the latter he meets Vanellope, a wisecracking urchin who’s been told she’s a “glitch” in the system.

While all this is going on, the characters back at Fix-It Felix Jr. are suddenly aware that they can’t function without him. The game soon has an Out Of Order sign on it, and with no antagonist, the very dated machine is in serious danger of being replaced. Felix, who after all is the sort of person who always tries to fix everything, heads off in search of his old nemesis.

The premise of Wreck-It Ralph is thus similar to that of Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, but its application to the world of old-school video games is more complex and ingeniously worked-out. To those who grew up in that world, I’d guess the movie might even mean more than it did to me. I played a game of Pac-man every now and then in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but I was never very good at it, and I didn’t hang out in arcades too often. Many people at the screening of Wreck-It Ralph that I saw were laughing at references that were lost on me.

Yet even without this nostalgic element, the movie works beautifully. Taking off from the odd notion of Ralph’s discontent, the plot gradually expands to nearly epic scope, with elements from all the games converging in the exciting race finale in Sugar Rush. What surprised me even more than the seamlessness of the storytelling, however, was the depth of its emotion. The gradual bond between Ralph and Vanellope is unexpectedly touching.

The voice actors have a lot to do with this. The ever-reliable John C. Reilly brings his voice’s singular combination of overripe thickness and underlying heart to Ralph. Sarah Silverman doesn’t have to take many steps to infantilize herself, endearingly, as the chattering, unflappable Vanellope. Jack McBrayer and Jane Lynch use their usual personas to fine effect as, respectively, Fix-It Felix and Sgt. Calhoun from Hero’s Duty.

Wreck-It Ralph’s release, between the summer and holiday blockbuster seasons, suggests that Disney might be unsure about its prospects. But I have a feeling it could be a hit—the crowd with whom I saw it really responded to it. I was about to say it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen this year, when I realized that at least three of my top-ten contenders for 2012 are animated kidflicks. It’s a great time for the genre.