CRUELLA TO BE KIND

Opening in theaters this week:

Cruella--The title character is Cruella de Vil, the notorious villainess from Dodie Smith's 1956 novel The One Hundred and One Dalmatians, by way of the 1961 Disney animated movie and its various remakes, sequels and spin-offs. In the original animated classic she's a fur-clad bag-of-bones rich hag with a demonic touring car. She covets the puppies for their black-spotted white coats; they match Cruella's own, weirdly yin-and-yang half-black half-white mop.

Cruella is to One Hundred and One Dalmatians (and the 1996 live-action remake 101 Dalmatians, where she's grandly played by Glenn Close) what the horned sorceress Maleficent was to Disney's Sleeping Beauty: The only truly memorable character. So, as 2014's Maleficent showcased Angelina Jolie, this new origin story offers a deluxe vehicle to Emma Stone.

In this telling, the character starts out simply as Estella; "Cruella" is a teasing nickname for the dark streak in her personality. Cast out of her school, Estella washes up homeless in Regent's Park, then gradually rises through the world of London fashion of the '60s and '70s. She goes to work for the Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson), an imperious designer, while at the same time developing her "Cruella" persona to get up to incognito mischief with her cronies Horace and Jasper (Paul Walter Hauser and Joel Fry, both appealing).

Give Disney its due: This lavish production is terrific to look at, and to listen to, as well; the soundtrack is a feast of gutsy, (mostly) '60s- and '70s-era pop hits. Both of the Emmas are in solid form--Stone with her half-sheepish little grins as she wreaks mayhem; Thompson with her unflappable slow burn--and both are costumed to dementedly chic grandeur. The script, credited to a mob that includes Dana Fox and Aline Brosh McKenna, has ideas and gags that recall everything from The Devil Wears Prada to The Winter's Tale to The Terminator, and is by no means lacking in wit or ingenious twists.

That said, Cruella, directed by the Australian Craig Gillespie of I, Tonya, is badly overlong, full of ideas that don't have sufficient payoff for the drag that they add to the narrative. Beyond that, it is, like Maleficent, like 2015's Pan, like 2014's Dracula Untold, even like 2007's Hannibal Rising and 2019's Joker, one of those sympathy-for-the-devil backstories of an iconic evildoer for whom audiences have developed an affection.

I'm not sure why it is that such revisionist sagas irk me, often at the same time that I'm enjoying them; why they bring out my inner Fox News commentator, judgmentally griping about creeping moral relativism in popular art. After all, villains in real life don't typically spring out of a vacuum. Past experiences do matter, and if a fictional ne'er-do-well inspires a fictional backstory, it's a testament to how vividly drawn the character is.

That said, qualifying and quantifying the menace of characters like Cruella or Maleficent reduces their status as symbolic villains, boiling them down to the sum of the specific trauma and betrayals of their youth. It's an impertinence to the scale of their villainy.

Cruella is a fairly enjoyable spectacle, but, like Maleficent, it shrinks its title character a bit. These filmmakers know some good music, but they should have listened more closely to the lyrics of a lesser pop song: In the wise words of Huey Lewis, sometimes bad is bad.

A Quiet Place Part II--This sequel starts as a prequel; writer-director John Krasinski takes us back before the events of the 2018 horror/sci-fi hit, to the day that Earth was invaded by shrieking aliens. Sightless, these ghastly quadrupeds are extremely sensitive to sound, and come charging in to maul any humans who make the slightest racket.

Krasinski appears only in this brief--but pretty enthralling--prologue, after which the movie picks up right where Part I left off. Intrepid Mom (Emily Blunt), her intrepid-er daughter (Millicent Simmonds) and cautious but brave son (Noah Jupe), as well as an infant requiring oxygen tanks, are forced to look around rural New York for a new quiet place. Eventually the daughter, who is deaf, strikes out on her own in search of a radio signal; somebody plays Bobby Darin singing "Beyond the Sea" every day at the same time.

The first film had a wide-awake intensity and deliberation, but Krasinski seems to have grown as a director with this follow-up. Here he gives us sustained, bravura sequences, like the centerpiece in which he intercuts between three currents of action, and the scenes bounce thematic echoes off of each other. This isn't the sort of movie that Hitchcock cared for, but I bet if Hitchcock watched it, he would admire Krasinski's work.

Like the first film, this one has dubious elements. You may look at the aliens and think: Really? These screeching, squalling horrors, looking like creatures from the Francis Bacon triptych, were advanced enough to master interstellar travel? And having arrived on a new planet, they seem to have nothing better to do but to obsessively wait for one of the natives to drop or bump into something. Admittedly, though, plenty of human behavior would probably seem equally incomprehensible to intelligent alien observers.

The family has also discovered the achilles heel of the aliens, and while it's satisfying to see them brought low, it also seems a little too easy. It's essentially the same weakness that the aliens had in the Twilight Zone episode "Hocus Pocus and Frisby."

But Krasinski's taut yet passionate direction carries us past such objections while we're watching the movie, as does the acting. Blunt has a heroic, warrior-goddess presence here, like the carving on the prow of a ship. The kids are superb, especially the soulful Simmonds; Cillian Murphy is effective as a frightened, bereaved neighbor who's given up on humankind, and Djimon Hounsou contributes a warm bit in the later acts.

And aside from all of these merits, any movie that holds up Bobby Darin singing "Beyond  the Sea" as a promising sign of civilization shows good sense to me.

HOLLAR TREE

Opening this week: 

The Hollars—Even though the small-town middle American family of the title isn’t especially prone to raising their voices, the name somehow fits just the same. They’re an explosive bunch; you get the sense that hollering is what they’re always on the verge of.

John Krasinski plays John Hollar, the son who ran away from home. An aspiring but blocked graphic novelist, he’s been living in New York, working a day job he hates, and reluctant to marry his girlfriend Rebecca (Anna Kendrick) even though she’s in the homestretch of carrying his child. When John learns that his beloved Mom (Margo Martindale) has collapsed and is in the hospital, he hurries home.

Immediately he’s dropped back into the squabbles between his blubberingly emotional, short-fused father (Richard Jenkins) and his divorced, underachieving, angry older brother Ron (Sharlto Copley), whose ex (Ashley Dyke) and two daughters are now living with a maddeningly nice, patient pastor (Josh Groban). Ron, by contrast, is living back at home with the ‘rents, even though Dad has fired him from the family plumbing business, which John also learns is about to go belly-up. Interrupting all of this drama is Mom’s massive brain tumor, for which she’ll quickly need surgery.

If you’re not hearing anything particularly groundbreaking in this synopsis, you’re not wrong. The Hollars, written by Jim Strouse and directed by Krasinki, is fairly standard dysfunctional family comedy-drama, the sort of modest, “character-driven” piece that actors have a hard time resisting.

Fortunately, the actors who couldn’t resist this script include several of the best now in American movies, and Krasinski managed them briskly. There are scenes that seem heavy-handed and obvious, as when the brothers confer with their mother’s Asian surgeon (Randall Park) and the anxious Ron can’t stop himself from bringing up the man’s race. But most of the interactions between these frightened, pissed-off, loving people ring more or less true, and the actors get all that there is to get out of them, and maybe a bit more.

Vibrant as the whole ensemble is, Krasinski deserves highest marks for giving Margo Martindale a juicy opportunity in a feature film. Long valued as a supporting player, Martindale is showcased here, and has a couple of Oscar-clip-worthy scenes with real punch. But her quiet scenes with the lantern-jawed, sadly smiling Krasinski are even better—John and Mom are the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Hollars, and their conspiratorial, amused alliance is the heart of the movie.

BY DE FAULT

Opening this weekend:

San Andreas—A good disaster movie can be great fun. So, for that matter, can a bad disaster movie. Indeed, the line between a good and a bad disaster movie is tough to define, and depending on your criteria, either adjective can be applied to this California earthquake melodrama. It couldn’t be more preposterous, and it’s fun.

After trashing Hoover Dam as an appetizer, the movie gives us the long-dreaded Big One. The title fault finally splits wide, L.A. buckles like a house of cards, then the crack spreads north toward San Fran. But The Quake hasn’t counted on The Rock: our hero Dwayne Johnson, an L.A.-based rescue-helicopter pilot, heads for the Bay Area with his estranged wife (gorgeous Carla Gugino), because his college-age daughter (Alexandra Daddario) is trapped there.

San Andreas feels like a pure throwback to ‘70s-style mayhem. Starting with Charlton Heston for Johnson, it’s easy to recast every role with a familiar character actor from four decades ago, and even Andrew Lockington’s music sounds like something that John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith might have written back then.

Mostly San Andreas is good for laughs, but it does have a potent demonstration of the power of acting. Paul Giamatti plays a Cal Tech seismologist who looks directly into a TV camera and tells San Franciscans that they must get out right away, and that whiny, strangled, almost apologetic voice of his gives more of a chill than all the apocalyptic special effects the movie has to offer.

The special-effects spectacle isn’t really anything we haven’t seen before, but it’s geographically expansive—we get to see both the Hollywood sign and the Golden Gate Bridge brought low. Thus the movie may have some extra appeal for Tea Partiers and other reflexive Cali-haters.

Oh, and over the end titles we hear a spooky version of “California Dreamin’” performed by Sia. Nice touch.

Aloha—In Cameron Crowe’s peculiar new romantic comedy, Bradley Cooper plays Brian, a defense contractor fallen on hard times after being wounded in Afghanistan. Brian gets a minor, foot-back-in-the-door job in Hawaii, facilitating a diplomatic formality with the indigenous people on behalf of a creepy billionaire (Bill Murray) who’s about to launch a satellite with the collaboration of the U.S. Air Force.

The gig throws Brian back in touch with his old girlfriend Tracey (Rachel McAdams), now married to a taciturn pilot (John Krasinski) and raising two kids with him at Hickam Field, but unable to conceal her love for her old flame. It also introduces him to Captain Ng (Emma Stone), his exuberantly forward aide during the proceedings. He’s put off by Ng’s overenthusiastic manner at first, but over time…

Well, you can guess. On the one hand, Aloha is a meet-cute romance set against the paradisiacal backdrop of Hawaii; on another it’s a satire about rich guys buying their way into national (and global) political and military power, and about the vaguely guilt-ridden Faustian flunkies like Brian that help them do it.

We don’t seem intended to take this strand, about Murray and his satellite, very seriously, however. At times the movie feels almost like the contemporary equivalent of an early sixties comedy, with Stone in the Doris Day part and Cooper standing in for James Garner. You expect Arthur Godfrey and Paul Lynde to turn up in the supporting cast.

This movie was at a disadvantage with me from the start—Bradley Cooper’s charm continues to elude me, I’m afraid. He’s been undeniably proficient in several films I’ve seen, and on TV interview shows he comes across like a nice guy, but something about his onscreen manner, some unseemly petulance or neediness, makes me reluctant to see movies in which he stars. His work here is professional, but just about every other member of the cast—like Danny McBride, amusing as a put-upon Colonel, or even Alec Baldwin at his most shamelessly hammy as a splenetic General—has so much more presence that Cooper begins to seem like a dead spot at the movie’s center.

I also resisted Aloha for a long time from a desire not to be played by Cameron Crowe. His cute, preciously hip, knowingly indirect dialogue can work my nerves, and for a while it did here, until…

Well, until it didn’t anymore. By the end of Aloha, despite the silly implausibility of its plot, I had succumbed to it, as I almost always do to Crowe’s films. I wanted to be these people—these attractive, flawed yet decent folks with their charming, flirty, oblique-angled way of conversing.  With the exception of the miserable Vanilla Sky, Aloha may be Crowe’s least successful film, but it won me over in the end.

GOOD WELL HUNTING

A small town in southwestern Pennsylvania is the setting of Promised Land. It’s not exactly flowing with milk and honey—it’s a broke, fading farm community. But it’s sitting on oceans of natural gas, so two corporate agents, Steve (Matt Damon) and Sue (Frances MacDormand) descend on the all-too-eager locals, offering what seems like a fortune in return for drilling rights.

Said rights, in this case, mean hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” extremely deep drilling aided by the injection of chemically-enriched water, in order to release gas from beneath otherwise impenetrable rock. It’s a highly controversial technique, on the one hand suspected of polluting water tables—sometimes resulting in flammable water!—killing crops and livestock, and other environmental blight, but prized on the other hand for its promise of increased freedom from foreign oil.

A local schoolteacher (Hal Holbrook) raises concerns at a town meeting, and Steve and Sue’s deal—and Steve’s big promotion—are endangered. Their headache is increased by Dustin (John Krasinki) an engaging fellow who shows up in town with tales of fracking’s horrors, to which the townies, much to Steve and Sue’s fury, are clearly listening.

Scripted by Damon and Krasinski from a story by Dave Eggers, and directed by Gus Van Sant, Promised Land is a great-looking movie. Rather than focusing on the economic bleakness of the town, the cinematographer, Linus Sandgren, emphasizes the verdant beauty of the Pennsylvania countryside, suggesting what these people stand to lose in return for corporate chump change.

Van Sant’s touch is low-key and, as always, tinged with good-natured comedy, as is the acting, especially in the familiar bickering affection between Steve and Sue. There’s also an agreeable love interest for Damon—and maybe Krasinski as well—in the form of Rosemarie DeWitt as an attractive elementary school teacher, smiling with amusement at what a sitting duck she is for these out-of-town boys.

Also built into the material is a plot twist, and while it’s fairly cunning, I couldn’t decide if it helped or weakened the movie. Something weakens it, in any case—it’s watchable and inoffensive, but somehow it doesn’t deliver. While fracking is certainly made to seem reckless, the movie doesn’t work up that much of a lather about it, and it makes the point that if it isn’t natural gas, it’s going to be oil or coal (the idea of decreased consumption is dismissed). The real point, though, seems to be that the people who do this sort of unsavory work for energy (or tobacco, or pharmaceutical, or whatever) companies aren’t moustache-twirling villains; they’re likable folks trying to get ahead.

Anyone who found this surprising would have to be naïve—and if they drive a gasoline-powered car, or buy a fast-food hamburger, or for that matter type a movie review on a computer plugged into an electrical socket, they’d have to be hypocritical, as well. Still, there’s a difference, even if it’s only a slight difference, between using pernicious or questionable technology because it’s most of what’s viably available and actually participating in perpetuating that status quo.

Steve and Sue are pleasant, even endearing, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing what they’re doing, and Damon, Krasinski and Van Sant can’t seem to find a way to confront this dramatically without turning Promised Land sanctimonious. So they don’t quite confront it. They just let the gas leak out of the movie, with a mild, unconvincing sigh.

THE GOSPEL OF FLUKE

Last week, in The Grey, humans lost in the Alaskan wilderness were turned into wolf chow. This week, in Big Miracle, humans struggle to save three whales trapped under the Alaskan ice. If you got all your information from the movies, you might conclude that humans were the put-upon species in the Alaskan ecosystem.

Veterans of the late ‘80s may recall that Big Miracle is based on a true story, at least in its broad outlines. In October of 1988, news media began to fret about a trio of California gray whales at Point Barrow, Alaska, one a juvenile, who had waited too long to begin migrating south & were separated from open water by several miles of ice; they had only a small hole through which they could surface to breathe.

Various groups pooled their resources to cut a path to safety for the enormous mammals, & the heightened media coverage broadened & intensified the effort. It was a highly improbable coalition—Reagan administration officials, oil company officials, the Alaska National Guard, the Soviet Navy, local Eskimos, and Greenpeace, among others. It’s almost unthinkable that equivalent groups would set aside their differences in today’s climate, for anything, let alone a mission this quixotic.

Directed by Ken Kwapis from a script by Jack Amiel & Michael Begler, Big Miracle shapes the material something in the manner of, say, a broad-canvas Preston Sturges comedy, with lots of eccentric types bouncing off each other. The central character is an Anchorage-based TV reporter (John Krasinski) who longs to make the big time but is stuck sending human-interest dispatches from Barrow. His ex-girlfriend (Drew Barrymore) is the frazzled Greenpeace operative, & Kristen Bell is the cute reporter from LA who shows up to distract him.

The cast is high-powered—it includes Ted Danson as the oil company honcho, Dermot Mulroney as the National Guard pilot, Vinessa Shaw as the White House rep, Tim Blake Nelson as a cetologist, & Rob Riggle & James LeGros as stereotypical Minnesotans who ride to the rescue. Kathy Baker, Stephen Root & John Michael Higgins also contribute amusing bits.

I liked Big Miracle a good deal more than I expected to. It’s unabashedly a sentimental family film, with warmhearted performances, but it isn’t dumb, & it neither soft-soaps the sad side of the material nor milks it for pathos. In short, it doesn’t pander. Kwapis & the screenwriters fully embrace the whale-sized irony at the heart of the story: That everybody was there for the free PR.

This was obvious in the case of the Reagan & oil industry folks, who were trying to soften appalling environmental records, but it was just as true of Greenpeace, who acknowledged that the plight of the whales, though heartbreaking, was natural; humans weren’t to blame. Even the Eskimos, who were sanctioned whale-hunters, were hoping to improve their image to outsiders.

The movie is by no stretch a satire, however. What keeps it from cynicism is the suggestion that whatever their motives, when these people looked down the long-jawed faces of the whales, with their sweet, somehow pessimistic frowns, all that mattered was setting them free.

This leads, however, to another irony of human psychology upon which the film touches only briefly—Barrymore’s character summarizes it in a TV interview. Of course humans are more likely to feel compassion for animals that we find cute or beautiful, but I think that large animals fall into this category as well.

I was once walking with my then-boss along a wide tract of desert in North Phoenix—long since paved over—& he spotted the nest of a large bird, a hawk or other raptor, at the top of a tall tree. The area was due to be cleared for construction, & my boss seemed really upset at the probable fate of the nest’s residents. He anxiously asked me if I thought that the birds would be moved.

I felt so bad for him that I almost made up some fake agency in charge of relocating large birds, but instead I pointed out that most trees have small birds’ nests, & no trouble is taken about moving them. This didn’t seem to bother him especially.

This incident came back to me after I saw Big Miracle, which from its title on suggests that when it comes to interspecies empathy, size does matter.

RIP to Angelo Dundee, passed on at 90, & to Soul Train producer/host Don Cornelius, passed on at 75, alas apparently by his own hand. Obviously & inevitably, as always in parting we wish him love, peace & soul…