LONG STRANGE TRIPS

Opening this week:

Doctor Strange—Once he’s fully decked out in the cloak and amulet, with the neatly trimmed goatee, Benedict Cumberbatch really looks and sounds the part of the title character, one of Marvel’s more agreeably metaphysical superheroes. This is an origin story for the “Master of Mystic Arts,” conjured up in 1963 by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee for the pages of Strange Tales.

As in the comics, he’s a brilliant but selfish and arrogant surgeon who loses the use of his hands in a car accident. In desperation, he travels to Nepal to seek out “The Ancient One” (a droll and courteous Tilda Swinton) in hopes of being healed. Instead she recruits him as a new student of sorcery, teaching him to leave his physical body and use his astral form, travel through the “multiverse” and battle evil psychically. Reality-bending adventures across M.C. Escher-ish cityscapes ensue, as Strange and Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor)—a villain in the comics; here sympathetic—take on the sinister Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen), who has purloined a spell from one of the Ancient One’s books.

On the whole, I found this the most enjoyable comic book movie since Ant-Man in 2015, and Guardians of the Galaxy the year before that. Despite the cosmic scope of the material, director Scott Derrickson takes a straightforward and coherent approach to the narrative, which goes pleasingly easy on tired action-movie conventions.

Technically speaking, there’s little physical violence in the film at all. There’s plenty of martial-arts fighting, to be sure, but most of it takes place outside the physical realm, so for once the superhuman feats are justifiable. Better still, as we were leaving the screening, my friend pointed out “No guns,” and he was right—unless I missed it, there isn’t a single gunshot in Doctor Strange, and I didn’t feel cheated by this in the least.

Toward the end, the forces of darkness are unleashed, and buildings start to crumble in Hong Kong. I sighed. Again with the crumbling buildings, like in just about every other big action blockbuster of recent years—blocks literally being busted. But then Strange and his allies do battle with the bad guys while time runs backwards around them, and we get to see the buildings reassemble. This inversion of the sad, frightened post-9/11 subtext of the genre is very refreshing.

Trolls—Like the Smurfs flicks of recent years, this movie doesn’t shy away from its own potential to be annoying. The kitschy, cloying cutesiness of the “Good Luck Trolls” developed in the mid-20^th Century by the Danish toymaker Thomas Dam is built right into this CGI musical from Dreamworks Animation, in the hope that it can be turned to ironic, self-deprecating advantage. For the most part, this works, or at least it worked for me.

The Trolls, who have long shocks of prehensile hair sticking up above their elfin faces, live like perennial glam clubbers. Led by Princess Poppy (voiced by Anna Kendrick), they spend their days singing, dancing and partying, under a philosophy of life as “Cupcakes and Rainbows,” not to mention hourly scheduled hugs.

Twenty years earlier, they narrowly escaped from the “Bergens,” a race of miserable snaggle-toothed ogres who believe they can only attain happiness by eating Trolls. The lone Troll dissenter from constant cheerfulness, the glum Branch (Justin Timberlake), is sure that the Bergens are still a threat, and that Princess Poppy’s blithe insistence on noisy partying increases the danger. He’s proved right, of course, and he and Poppy must team up to rescue a group of captured Trolls in danger of becoming a Bergen banquet.

A variety of allegorical interpretations are possible here, from a straightforward vegetarian reading to an evaluation, at times surprisingly subtle and nuanced, of pessimism versus optimism. But in any event, the movie is a silly good time, with inventive, laugh-out-loud gags and a generous heart.

Also, the music’s pretty good. In part, this is a jukebox musical—Zooey Deschanel, as a lovesick Bergen, gets to sing Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” for instance. But there are some original numbers as well, and a couple of them are sung by Kendrick, in her singular steely yet sweetly plangent belt. Her presence on the soundtrack biases me in favor of Trolls, I admit—not to put too fine a point on it, I could listen to her sing all day. 

Coming Through the Rye—It’s 1969, and Jamie Schwartz (Alex Wolff) has written a stage version of Catcher in the Rye as his senior project at a private school in Pennsylvania. He hasn’t been able to secure permission from J.D. Salinger to produce it, however, so one weekend he and a free-spirited girl (Stefania Owen) head to New Hampshire to seek out the man in person.

This slight coming-of-age yarn is ostensibly based on the real-life experience of writer-director James Steven Sadwith. It’s pleasant, and sometimes poignant, and Wolff and Owen have a sweet chemistry. But there wouldn’t be much to the movie without the brush-with-reclusive-celebrity encounter.

Eventually Jamie manages to get a few minutes with Salinger, sharply played here, in two brief scenes, by the always-commanding Chris Cooper. Brusque and irritable but not unkind, the author endures another kid telling him about the connection he feels with Holden Caulfield. Momentous as this was to him, Sadwith is under no illusions that the episode was at all significant (or even unique) for Salinger, and this modesty gives Coming Through the Rye its rueful charm.

BANKS JOB, INSIDE MAN, WALKING TOUR

Opening in the Valley this weekend:

Saving Mr. Banks—It’s 1961, and P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) doesn’t want to sell the movie rights to her novel Mary Poppins to Walt Disney (Tom Hanks). She’s afraid he’ll vulgarize it with music, animation and sentimentality. This movie, directed by John Lee Hancock, dramatizes how Disney and his cronies succeeded in wearing the prickly, exasperating Travers down, so that they could, indeed, vulgarize her book into a sentimental, partly animated musical.

Thompson is superb, as usual, as the impossible woman, but Hanks steals the picture with a delightful—and probably appallingly whitewashed—portrayal of the drawling, relentlessly genial Disney. With its terrific acting and its loving period detail—we get not only early-‘60s Hollywood but also flashbacks to early-20th-Century Australia, as we learn the author’s sad backstory—this is a highly enjoyable movie. It’s also, being a Disney picture, a rather unbecoming piece of company propaganda: Its message is that once you sign your soul over to Uncle Walt, your life will become a wonderful world of color. Vulgarization is salvation.

Inside Llewyn Davis—The latest from the Coen Brothers is also set against a backdrop of early-‘60s show business, albeit a very different one than that of Saving Mr. Banks—this time it’s the folkie scene in New York. Llewyn, stunningly played by Oscar Isaac, is a performer in the Village clubs. He sings and plays traditional-style folk songs beautifully, but he’s a chronic screw-up, basically homeless, sleeping on other people’s couches after gigs, impregnating women—including, possibly, the wife (Carey Mulligan) of his best friend (Justin Timberlake)—and even losing his benefactor’s cat on the streets. His blundering odyssey from New York to Chicago and back is infuriating to watch—it’s as if the Coens are deliberately trying to see how annoyed they can make us with a protagonist and still keep rooting for him. I almost began to wonder if they were trying to make people hate folk music (more than most do already).

But I, at least, did keep rooting for Llewyn (except in his encounters with animals), and while it’s far from the Coen’s best work, the movie, with its weird humor and unpredictable twists, has stuck in my head since I’ve seen it.

Walking With Dinosaurs 3-D—This feature was made using the same techniques as the popular BBC series aired in the US on the Discovery Channel: majestic live settings (Alaska and New Zealand) into which computer-generated, more or less scientifically-accurate dinosaurs are added, creating the sense of a live nature documentary about the extinct beasts. Unlike the documentaries, however, this movie adds corny voice-over dialogue to turn the story into a kids-friendly adventure. The coming-of-age plot follows a young Pachyrhinosaurus, called Patchi, who has a distinguishing (and occasionally musical) hole in his frill, through his perilous, predator-filled migrations, his conflict with his brother Scowler, his love for a pretty she-dino called Juniper, and his eventual rise through the herd hierarchy.

Justin Long provides the voice of Patchi, and the narration and commentary is provided by John Leguizamo as the bird that rides on his back. The blend of kidflick dramatics with the occasional harshness of the paleontological accuracy creates an odd effect, but the movie is great to look at—even some of the 3D effects are worthwhile—and the young audiences seem to respond to it.

CURVE APPEAL

Having thrown a curve himself last month at the Republican National Convention—your own politics will probably determine whether or not you think he threw it for a strike—Clint Eastwood stays in the stands in Trouble with the Curve. But this time, the stands are where the action is. Both the speech and the movie make the same point, however—that Clint isn’t a kid anymore.

Clint plays Gus Lobel, a scout for the Atlanta Braves, veteran of decades of sitting in the stands with a notebook at high school games. Never exactly a ray of sunshine, Gus has been turned by old age into a snarling coot. His anger is understandable—it’s hard to pee in the mornings, and he needs a magnifying glass to read the paper. He can’t use a computer or any of the new statistical methods for evaluating players. But his real problem, professionally speaking, is the macular degeneration that’s placed a blurry horizontal band across the middle of his vision—right through his view of the strike zone.

A longtime widower, Gus has an emotionally distant relationship with his daughter Mickey (Amy Adams), an overachieving lawyer. An odious young whippersnapper (Matthew Lillard) in the Braves front office wants the GM (Robert Patrick) to get rid of Gus, whose contract is nearly up anyway, so Mickey risks losing a partnership at her firm to join Gus in rural North Carolina, and be his eyes as he scouts a slugging prospect.

While she’s there, Mickey—she’s named for her father’s favorite player—meets a former pitcher (Justin Timberlake) trying to carve out a post-playing niche for himself in baseball after washing out early. Guess what happens between them.

Except for an odd bit of backstory involving a horse, there’s really nothing unpredictable in Trouble with the Curve, either dramatically or visually—the plot’s resolution has, almost, a fairy-tale inevitability. The director is Eastwood’s longtime producer and assistant director Robert Lorenz, making his feature debut, but the style is very much the same as Eastwood’s—straightforward, unadorned narrative, unfolded at a leisurely pace. The dialogue, by Randy Brown, is likewise functional.

The good news is that the picture is still enjoyable and relaxing, thanks to the acting. Eastwood’s Do Not Go Gentle act seems effortless. His timing and his iconic, narrow-eyed expression make his spitting anger funny, and he has a convincing rapport with Adams and Timberlake, and especially with John Goodman, excellent as his boss and defender.

The supporting cast is full of old pros—Ed Lauter, Bob Gunton, Jack Gilpin, George Wyner, Raymond Anthony Thomas and even Chelcie Ross, who’s become a sort of sports-movie good luck charm, having appeared in Major League, Hoosiers and Rudy. These guys reinforce the movie’s point that while getting old is a drag, it doesn’t necessarily make you useless.

I must warn you, from here on I’m going to unload all the baseball metaphors I want. So: unlike the elegant, quietly intriguing Moneyball, released around this time last year, Trouble with the Curve isn’t a grand slam, or even a homer. Eastwood and company play small ball; they methodically get on, get over, get home. And at the end of nine, Clint puts another one in his lengthy win column.