SUTURE SELF

Check out my reviews of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!...

...and the Disney/Pixar animated feature Hoppers...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

BOT WAIT THERE'S MORE

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Transformers One--The Hasbro toy line debuted in 1984, when I was in college; I knew the Transformers only slightly, through my nephews. As with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or the Power Rangers or Pokemon, I never had a personal sentimental attachment to them.

For the uninitiated: The Transformers are elegant anthropomorphic robots capable of folding themselves up into vehicles: a truck, a car, a tank, a drone. Or, are they sleek vehicles that can unfold themselves into robots? It's all rather Zen, but it was also brilliant toy marketing; not only was it two toys in one, it took kids beyond the childhood power fantasy of having a truck or a tank to being a truck or a tank.

Along with the toys, the franchise has spawned comics, cartoons, novels and several previous feature films, some animated, some live action. I haven't seen them all, but the couple I did were overstuffed and silly, though they also offered some gorgeous imagery.

This new animated feature is an origin story for the two central figures in the Transformer pantheon, Optimus Prime, leader of the good-guy Transformers, and Megatron, leader of the bad-guy Transformers, or Decepticons. It follows the pair, then called Orion Pax and D-16, as young mining robots, without transforming powers, on their home planet of Cybertron.

Pax is forever snooping around old archives, looking for clues to the whereabouts of some McGuffin that will give him and his overworked comrades equality. D-16 resents his oppression at least as much as Pax does, but he's less of a daring, chance-taking sort. Eventually they end up, along with a couple of other allies, on an adventure on the planet's bleak and mercurial surface.  

I couldn't always follow all this, not just because I was unfamiliar with the references but because the movie, directed by Josh Cooley from a script by several hands, is presented in the Michael Bay manner, with scenes so rapidly cut that you sometimes have to take the dialogue's word for what's happening onscreen. That said, it's a great-looking movie, not quite as beautiful as the recent Ultraman: Rising, but close. Along with the strangely passive harlequin faces of the robots, there are lovely planetscapes and herds of cybertronic deer and vehicles that generate their own roadways and tracks before them as they sail along and other magical sci-fi flourishes.

It has a voice cast of stars, too; along with Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry in the leads we also hear from Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Jon Hamm, Steve Buscemi and Laurence Fishburne. And somewhere amidst the fan service, along with a hard-to-miss Christ allegory, the plot probably carries a pretty nuanced and complex parable of radicalization and the manipulation of media.

GOLDEN MEAN

 Opening today:

Mean Girls--"It's a cautionary tale..." So the Greek chorus characters Janis and Damian sing to us at the beginning of this musical remake of the well-loved 2004 teen comedy, pared down from the 2018 Broadway version. This may be the secret of Mean Girls, in each iteration: it really is a moral tale with a cautionary point, and the heroine really does go to the dark side.

As you'll recall, Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) is a smart kid who grew up in campsites in Africa; her mother (Jenna Fischer) is a researcher. When she lands at a suburban American high school for junior year, the divisions in cafeteria clique and caste strike her as similar to those in the animal kingdom. She gets sucked into spending lunches with "The Plastics," a circle of glamorous sycophants led by uber-mean girl Regina George (Renée Rapp). Cady agrees, initially, at the urging of artsy girl Janis (Auli'i Cravalho) and big gay Damian (Jaquel Spivey) to serve as a double agent in a revenge plot against Regina. But gradually, of course, the plastic begins to take over for real. 

Or maybe the secret is just that the film, scripted, like the original, by Tina Fey (freely adapting a book by Rosalind Wiseman), is funny and sweet, but not so sweet that it forgets to be, you know, mean. Or maybe it's that most of the songs, by Nell Benjamin and Jeff Richmond, are delightful, and buoyantly staged by directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez, Jr.

Overall, these actors don't have the vibrancy or distinctive personalities of the original film's cast, but they make up for this with terrific musical performing. Rapp brings such a baleful moan to "Meet the Plastics" that she really is a little scary, and Rice shades herself from guileless to conniving very believably. A few vets are around; Fey and Tim Meadows reprise their roles from the first film, and Busy Phillips and Jon Hamm contribute funny bits. The standouts, however, are Cravalho as Janis and Spivey as Damian, both equipped with gorgeous voices and the ability to act while they're belting.

Fey's generous-hearted--and sensible--take on popularity and self-esteem has provided a solid and unsentimental piece of role modeling for teens (and the teens that endure within most adults) for twenty years now. Maybe this movie will extend it for another twenty.

Freud's Last Session--The "session" in question is fictional, or at best nervily speculative--a meeting of the titular psychoanalytic pioneer with the Christian apologist C. S. Lewis. It's September of 1939; England has just declared war on Hitler's Germany, and Freud, who has fled Austria for England with his obsessively devoted daughter Anna, is in the agonizing homestretch of terminal mouth cancer. Irked by Lewis' parody of him in The Pilgrim's Regress (1933), Freud has invited the young Oxford don to his house in London for a civil but contentious chat.

Freud is played by Anthony Hopkins; Lewis is played by Matthew Goode. The direction is by Matthew Brown from a script he co-wrote with the American playwright Mark St. Germain, based on St. Germain's play (which I saw well-produced by Arizona Theatre Company in 2013). The play is a two-hander, but this handsomely-produced movie expands on it with scenes involving Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) and her partner Dorothy Burlingham (Jodi Balfour), flashbacks to Freud's childhood traumas and to Lewis' PTSD from the trenches in the earlier war, his eyebrow-raising cohabitation with Janie Moore (Orla Brady), etc.

But the juice in the film is still in the theatrical sparring between the two leads, especially Hopkins as the chuckling, cheerfully furious Freud. He's as lovably cantankerous here as he was as Pope Benedict in 2019's The Two Popes. For his part, Goode is smart enough not to make Lewis saintly or jolly; he gives him an edge of defensive aloofness alongside a deep decency.

It's hard to say which, if either, of the two men's viewpoints St. Germain and Brown are most in symapthy with. Many of us are likely to feel ourselves somewhere between Freud's staunch and bitter rationalism and Lewis' somehow rather half-hearted pose of orthodoxy. But the point of the film seems to be that what underlies both is, at least partly, existential terror, of a sort to which intelligent, intensely imaginative people like these two are particularly subject. Neither strict nonbelief nor strict belief seems to offer much deliverance.

PROJECT RUNWAY

Opening today:

Top Gun: Maverick--When the original Top Gun was released in 1986, I quickly came to regard it as an embodiment of everything that was wrong with American pop culture, and maybe of American culture in general. Setting aside whatever annoyance we can assign to it for turning Tom Cruise into a superstar, Top Gun's mindless, swaggering triumphalism and fetishizing of empty recklessness struck me as a symptom, maybe even a partial cause, of a generational toxicity from which we're still suffering.

Three and a half decades later, on the occasion of this very belated sequel, I'm not sure I see any rational basis for revising the opinion of my pompous 24-year-old self, or of attributing a healthier mentality to the new film. But I will say this: Top Gun: Maverick is much more enjoyable than the original.

The '86 film has become one of the seminal movie texts of our time, but in case there are a few fortunate souls who remain benighted: It's the story of Navy fighter pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Cruise) and his time at the Fighter Weapons School at Miramar near San Diego, known as TOPGUN. Maverick--all the pilots have cute nicknames--is a brilliant flyer but is given to ignoring authority and making his own rules.

In the new film, Maverick is still a Captain after all these years because he's just too darn rebellious to advance. He's still ruffling the feathers of authority figures (huffily played by the likes of Ed Harris and Jon Hamm). He gets called back to the TOPGUN school at the insistence of its commander, his old rival Ice (Val Kilmer, who has one touching scene).

Maverick's job this time is to instruct a batch of young officers with cute nicknames--except for one simply called Bob (the endearing Lewis Pullman)--in preparation for a secret bombing run against a uranium-enrichment facility in a judiciously unidentified hostile country. Among his pupils is Rooster (Miles Teller), son of Maverick's beloved co-pilot Goose (Anthony Edwards), killed during the first film. Rooster bears Maverick a longstanding grudge. There's a bit of love interest, too; Maverick re-meets barkeep Penny (Jennifer Connelly); his previous leading lady Kelly McGillis, though briefly glimpsed in a flashback, goes unmentioned.

Now, let me be clear: Top Gun: Maverick is every bit as insipid and predictable as Top Gun the first, and Tom Cruise seems like just as much a pipsqueak. Cruise can be good, even very good, when he's playing manic and out-of-his-depth, as in Rain Man, A Few Good Men, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia, but when he's in hypercompetent man-of-action mode I've never been able to take him seriously. Even at nearly 60, he still comes across like a boy dressed up in his dad's clothes.

But that doesn't much matter here. Two factors combined to pull the stick out of my butt and allow me to enjoy this movie. One is that technical filmmaking has advanced exponentially since 1986, and the flight scenes have greater clarity and flamboyance than the original's. It's useless to try to claim that the last 30 or 40 minutes of this movie isn't exciting. It's propulsive and spellbinding, even as you see every plot point coming at you as plainly as if it was on a radar screen.

The other factor, especially for those of us who were regular moviegoers when the original came out, is simple nostalgia. The director, Joseph Kosinski, really captures the '80s-movie montage-to-montage vibe, starting right at the beginning with brooding synthesizer tones leading into the most irksome (albeit catchy) song of the estimable Kenny Loggins, "Danger Zone," all of it backing up a full opening credit sequence, not just a quick flash of the title. In this way, Top Gun: Maverick can be like that odd and common phenomenon of encountering somebody you disliked back in the day, and feeling an unaccountable surge of affection.

The Bob's Burgers Movie--Bravely facing off against Tom Cruise's fighter squadron this weekend is the story of a family struggling to keep their burger joint going when a huge sinkhole opens in the sidewalk and completely blocks access to their storefront. It's the feature version of an animated Fox TV series.

Bob is Bob Belcher (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin), the depressive dad; his wife Linda (John Roberts) is more upbeat. They live in the apartment above the restaurant with their kids, boy-crazy oldest daughter Tina (Dan Mintz); nebbishy, well-intentioned rock star wannabe middle son Gene (Eugene Mirman) and rabbit-ear-wearing, aspirational youngest Louise (Kristen Schaal). Louise is deeply offended when a girl at school calls her a "baby"; to prove this untrue she descends into the sinkhole.

This leads to a mystery involving everyone from the burger joint's rich landlords to carnies from the nearby amusement park. Other characters enter the story, some performed by name actors: Kevin Kline and Zach Galifianakis as the landlords; Gary Cole as a police detective with an inferiority complex. There are some very peculiar musical numbers, and it all culminates in a suspenseful and action-packed finale. 

This movie is funny even if you've never seen the show. I can attest to this, because I've never seen the show, and I thought this movie was funny. The comedy derives from the Belcher family's flat, affectless manner, contrasted with the convoluted gothic plot and wild action. But there's also a humane warmth to the Belchers that keeps the joke from going sour. If I lived in that town, I'd eat at that place.

TRUTHS, DARES, AARDVARKS, PHANTOMS

Opening this weekend:

Truth or Dare--A college senior (Lucy Hale), planning to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity on her last spring break, allows herself to be pressured into going to Mexico with her friends instead. Down there, a stranger (Landon Liboiron) invites them to play a game of truth or dare in the ruins of an old church. When they get back to school, the participants in the game start receiving Truth or Dare challenges through creepy psychic visions, and if they fail to either tell the truth or complete the dare, they gruesomely die.

I’ve seen far worse horror movies than Truth or Dare, also promoted under the title Blumhouse's Truth or Dare. Directed by Jason Wadlow, it’s slick and polished, with an attractive cast playing characters that aren’t as abrasive and obnoxious as they often are in movies like this. It helps that they seem to care about each other. Hale is particularly charming as the earnest good-girl heroine.

But it is, unmistakably, very derivative of other flicks of recent years like Final Destination and It Follows, and I found the ending bungled and unsatisfying. I appreciate the way Blumhouse Productions tries to give its young audience honest value on a modest scale, and this movie is not without merit. But it isn't anywhere near as good as Blumhouse's Get Out, or even as last fall's Happy Death Day.

Aardvark--Josh (Zachary Quinto) is a psychologically troubled guy, haunted by the powerful presence, and absence, of his older brother Craig (Jon Hamm), a famous TV actor. Craig pays Josh's bills, but isn't otherwise in touch with him, except through Josh's occasional apparent delusions, in which a homeless woman or a virile cop seem to him to be his brother, buried in a brilliant new characterization.

The real Craig does show up in the life of Josh's lonely therapist Emily (Jenny Slate), and unethically but perhaps understandably they start an affair. Meanwhile Josh meets an attractive young woman named Hannah (Sheila Vand), but is she another hallucination?

And so on. Aardvark is worth watching. It's perfectly well directed by Brian Shoaf, from his own script, which has perfectly speakable, intriguing, at times touching dialogue. The acting is top shelf. The tiny, exquisite Slate continues to show her range; her prim evasiveness is both funny and moving. Hamm is effortlessly convincing as this veteran celebrity, simultaneously sheepish and confident, quietly disappointed in his life. And Quinto brings dignity and humor to Josh, declining to milk the part for overt pathos.

But I sat there hoping, and doubting, that Shoaf would be able to snap Aardvark's ambiguities together into a dramatically coherent whole, and alas, he missed, at least for me. It was a near miss, maybe; the movie has a number of minor emotional payoffs, but they don't add up to a major emotional payoff.

In case you're wondering, I'm happy to report that the title isn't a cheat: There is an aardvark in Aardvark, played by a handsome creature billed as "Amani the Aardvark." The culmination of the aardvark's strand is, indeed, one of the movie's sweetest moments.

Check out my interview, on Phoenix Magazine online, with my pal, Arizona actress turned mystery novelist Cindy Brown, who signs her book The Phantom of the Oz at the Orpheum Theatre next Tuesday, April 17, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., as a benefit for Friends of the Orpheum Theatre.

(RE)LIVER & MINIONS

Lots of weird science opening this weekend:

Self/less—Ben Kingsley plays Damian, an ultra-rich New Yorker dying of cancer. A shady scientist (Matthew Goode) tells Damian that he can transfer his consciousness into a healthy young body grown in a lab. Damian agrees to this, and finds himself residing in the strapping frame of Ryan Reynolds. Relocated to New Orleans, he starts partying, but inexplicable recurring visions make him suspect that there are things the scientist hasn’t told him.

The ideas here are very familiar in sci-fi; in movies they go back at least as far as the 1936 Boris Karloff thriller The Man Who Changed His Mind, and there are also strong echoes of John Frankenheimer’s 1966 Seconds. But Self/less, directed by Tarsem Singh from a script by David and Alex Pastor, is a reasonably unpredictable and tightly-paced variation on it.

The opening quarter or so of the film is particularly strong, not only for the moral questions it raises but also for the fantasy fulfillment it offers, especially to aging audience members. Wouldn’t it be fun, the movie asks us, to suddenly find yourself several decades younger, healthy, rich, without attachments and looking like Ryan Reynolds?

After this promising set-up, the way the movie plays out is a bit disappointingly routine. Like a lot of popular sci-fi, it raises intriguing questions, then gives us car crashes and gunfights. But within the conventional format to which it aspires, Self/less isn’t merit/less.

Minions—This animated feature is an origin story for the little goobers who debuted in 2010's Despicable Me. Bright-yellow, bib-clad, goggled (sometimes two-eyed and sometimes cyclopean) and shaped like Tic Tacs, they were first seen as the aides to Gru, the super-villain from that excellent film, and as they giggled and chattered at each other in what sounded like some sort of sped-up Esperanto, they pretty much ran off with the movie.

I guess I had vaguely assumed that the Minions were meant to be some cybernetically-engineered creations of Gru's. According to this film, however, they've been around since prehistoric times, and their tendency, we are told by The Narrator (Geoffrey Rush), has always been to serve the most despicable master they can find.

These include, in early sequences, Napoleon Bonaparte, cavemen and a marvelously loutish Tyrannosaurus Rex. The meat of the movie, however, is set in 1968 and has them working for a chic super-villainess called Scarlett Overkill (voiced by Sandra Bullock). Their assignment: Steal the crown of Elizabeth II (Jennifer Saunders). In the course of the very silly, almost free-associational storyline, one of the Minions, Bob, gets crowned King of England.

Minions is an enjoyable film full of visual beauties—the title sequence splendidly evokes William Steig—and many hilarious episodes. It isn't the classic that Despicable Me is, to be sure, probably because the Minions are, as the name implies, born supporting players. Endearing though they are, they don't have the richness or complexity to carry a movie, and Scarlett Overkill and the handful of other characters bounced off of them really don't either. The Minions were designed to be scene-stealers, but you can't steal what already belongs to you.

THE BIGS

Opening this weekend…

Godzilla—There’s a fine melodramatic flourish near the beginning of this second American-made movie about the great beast. It involves Juliette Binoche and Bryan Cranston, and allows them both, but especially Cranston, to let it rip with some old school emoting. It gets the picture off to a promising start.

This doesn’t last, I’m disappointed to say. Though certainly an improvement on the 1998 U.S. version, the new movie plods. Binoche and Cranston are two of the best things it, and one of the movie’s troubles is that there isn’t nearly enough of them onscreen. Nor is there enough of Ken Watanabe, of Sally Hawkins, of David Strathairn, or of Elizabeth Olsen. The focus is on the Navy man hero, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who is passably stalwart but not remotely as interesting as his costars.

More problematic still...there wasn’t enough of the title character here, for my taste. King Kong obviously excepted, no giant movie monster has as distinctive and oddly lovable a personality as Godzilla. The filmmakers give him quite a buildup here before his entrance, and unlike Roland Emmerich’s ‘98 Yankzilla, this one really does feel like an authentic incarnation of beast, with his blunt muzzle, his nettled expression and his squeaky-hinge roar.

The monster scenes are good—directed with an almost maddening sense of deliberation by Gareth Edwards, they have an uneasy ponderousness, a low-angle sense of peril, that many other films in this genre miss. But only at the end do we get a heavy dose of rampaging creature action, and by that time I was worn out by the banality of the plot and the dialogue. This Godzilla has many strong moments, but to assemble a fine cast around an iconic central presence and then not give any of them enough to do? That’s monstrous.

Million Dollar Arm—American sports agent J. B. Bernstein hits upon an idea to open India to baseball fandom: a reality TV show in which cricket “bowlers” compete to see who can throw fast enough, and accurately enough, that they might be a prospect as an MLB pitcher. Neither of the first year’s winners turns out to be a bowler; one specializes in the javelin. But both end up in Los Angeles, trying out for the Majors.

At least in its broad outlines, it’s a true story, though this sweet Disney movie doubtless makes it a little taller. Bernstein, played by Jon Hamm, is depicted as a desperate, scheming hustler who starts by exploiting the two homesick boys, both of whom come from poor provincial backgrounds, and gradually finds his soul by becoming a surrogate father to them. He’s also a ladies’ man who likes young models, and the boys see that his scrub-wearing, nurturing neighbor (the charming Lake Bell) is the better choice for him.

It isn’t as corny as it sounds. The screenwriter is Thomas McCarthy of The Station Agent and The Visitor, that master of unlikely ad hoc families, and he wrings most of the potential condescension out of the dialogue. Aided by a driving score by A. R. Rahman, the director, Craig Gillespie, keeps things crisp, as do the actors—Suraj Sharma and Madhur Mittal as the arms, Pitobash as an aspiring manager, and Bill Paxton as the earnest pitching coach Tom House. There’s also Alan Arkin as a curmudgeonly scout who keeps his eyes closed throughout the tryouts, because he can judge the speed of a pitch by the sound it makes in the catcher’s mitt.

And then there’s Hamm. He shows a scarily flawless surface in his Mad Men role, but as soon as he steps out of that character he becomes strangely disheveled and nerdy. This isn’t always a bad thing—he used this quality to excellent effect, for instance, in his supporting role in Ben Affleck’s The Town. It works for him in Million Dollar Arm, too—he comes across believably as a nice guy trying hard to be a heartless shark, and happily failing.

Skinless—Playing for one show only, at 11:55 tonight at FilmBar Phoenix, this splatter parody concerns Dr. Peter Peel (Brandon Salkil), a brilliant young oncology researcher working, like many brilliant young oncology researchers, out of his basement. He has a malignancy on his shoulder, so despite countless examples of this proving a poor idea, he skips straight to human trials on a possible skin cancer cure, with himself as the guinea pig. Regret ensues.

Originally known under the (better, if less commercial) title The Ballad of Skinless Pete, this no-budgeter is the work of a young Cleveland-based writer-director named Dustin Wayde Mills. He’s by no means lacking in talent—he writes speakable, lucid dialogue, he obtains serviceable performances from his actors, and he structures the story coherently. It’s outrageously gruesome and deliberately sick, very definitely not for the squeamish, but it’s played with a deadpan wit that keeps it, overall, from seeming mean-spirited.

I just wish that young horror film makers could find a way to tell a gripping tale without reflexively turning to the trope of the young woman tied up, pleading and whimpering for her life. Skinless escapes contemptibility because, like Cronenberg’s The Fly (to which it pays homage) it has a heart. But I can’t say that I enjoyed the unsavory final act.

Still, Mills could quite conceivably make a classic horror film. Unlike the many modern-era movie horrors that are motivated by hatred of women, Skinless Pete, you see, is motivated by unrequited love—like the Phantom of the Opera, like King Kong, like the Creature of the Black Lagoon. I’m not placing Pete in their league, certainly, but neither am I suggesting that Mills could never create a movie monster that was.