SHE'S SIMPLY MA-VELOUS

Your Humble Narrator didn't catch up with this one until this weekend...

Ma--Octavia Spencer seems like a game sort. She even came back to reprise her small role from Bad Santa in Bad Santa 2, though she'd won the Oscar for The Help between the two films. It suggests a lack of pretentiousness worthy of a British actor.

Now Spencer stars as the title character in Ma, the latest from the admirable Blumhouse factory. She plays the heck out of Sue Anne, a small-town veterinary nurse who gets confronted with a classic adult moral quandary: teenage kids ask her to buy them alcohol outside a liquor store. She refuses at first, but then, charmed by their pleas and flirtations, she gives in.

She later offers the kids the use of her basement, on the theory that they're safer partying there than outside somewhere. They dub her "Ma" and before long her basement is a popular party spot for the area teens. Her young guests are forbidden, however, from going upstairs. Other disturbing signs arise from this creepy but somehow distressingly plausible social scenario.

Though the product varies in success from movie to movie, I admire the commitment of Blumhouse Productions to provide their young audience with good value on a modest budget. Ma is one of the company's most interesting efforts to date; a horror movie based on character development and queasy inappropriateness rather than shocks. Spencer is emotionally naked here without hamming; using only shifts of expression on her sad-clown face and in her voice, she makes Sue Anne's motivations so painfully obvious that we don't really need the explanatory flashbacks to explain her psychology.

The director is the Mississippian Tate Taylor, who also directed Spencer in The Help.  Working from a script by Scotty Landes, Taylor maintains a good balance between genuine pathos and macabre comedy, and he gets strong performances out of the youngsters, especially Diana Silvers as the good-girl heroine. There are amusing turns by vets like Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans and Missi Pyle, among others.

The violence doesn't really start until the last quarter or so of the movie, but once it does, Ma turns into a wild melodramatic bloodbath. This gory homestretch is entertaining enough, in a twisted sort of way--it even includes a gruesome outrage that Lionel Atwill committed in Murders in the Zoo back in pre-code 1933. This lurid stuff probably lessens the impact of the subtle, uneasy chills that precedes it, but not enough to dismiss the commanding potency of Spencer's performance. Be forewarned, however: Ma isn't a very comforting movie for parents of teenagers.

OIL RICH

A couple of gems open in the Valley this week:

Loving Vincent—The producers stake an unusual claim for this Polish-British animated feature, six years in the making: that it’s the first completely oil-painted movie. Each of its 65,000 frames, we’re told, was meticulously hand-painted by a team of more than 100 artists, working over the previous frame’s image, all in the style of Vincent Van Gogh.

A documentary about the making of this quixotically crazy endeavor would be fascinating. As with Claymation back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, if you let yourself think too long about the labor you’re witnessing, you can start to feel overwhelmed and it can throw you out of the movie.

Happily, the movie itself isn’t just visually breathtaking, it’s also an engrossing little historical drama, well-acted by the Brit voice cast in a naturalistic manner. The story is set in 1891, the year after Van Gogh’s death, and centers on Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), the young man in yellow from the famous portrait. Armand’s postmaster father Joseph, another Van Gogh subject, tasks his son with delivering a final letter from the genius to his brother Theo.

Armand travels from Arles to Paris, and then on to Auvers-sur-Oise, where Vincent died. Initially annoyed by the errand, Armand becomes increasingly fascinated as he delves into the mystery of Vincent’s death.

The directors, Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, working from a script they wrote with Jacek Dehnel, use Armand’s investigations to paint a portrait (if you’ll excuse the expression) of a truly loving Vincent. He’s beset with terrible emotional sufferings, certainly, but he’s sweet-natured and ecstatic in his visionary raptures.

But the thrill in the picture is seeing those immortal images brought to life. In the opening minutes alone, we get the Café Terrace, the Zouave reclining against the wall, Lieutenant Milliet, and so on, gliding easily into each other in service of the narrative.

I suppose there are cultural purists out there who might find using the works of one of the great figures in European art as, essentially, a storyboard, to be a crass, literal-minded stunt. But I was enchanted by this gloriously low-tech labor of love, both for Van Gogh and for the possibilities of the cinema.

Professsor Marston and the Wonder Women—There’s something delicious about the knowledge that the furious accusations of mid-century anti-comics crusaders were, in at least one case, quite right. Wonder Woman, who debuted in 1941 in what would become DC Comics, really was rooted in fantasies of bondage, dominance and Sapphic power.

And not just fantasies, either, but realities. As we’re told in this amusing chronicle, the creator of the character, a Harvard-educated psychology professor named William Moulton Marston (writing under the name Charles Moulton), spun the Amazon by blending traits of the two women with whom he lived—his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and Olive Byrne, a student and assistant who became the third member of their marriage.

It’s likely that the writer-director Angela Robinson (Herbie: Fully Loaded) has heated up the story a bit. But there are true elements that trump fiction, the juiciest being that before his comic-writing days, Marston was one of the developers of the systolic blood pressure test that led to the polygraph—in other words, he invented the Lasso of Truth in reality before he gave it to his heroine. As an adolescent in the ‘70s, watching the Lynda Carter TV version of Wonder Woman, I always found the Lasso of Truth shtick distinctly erotic; now I’d guess that Marston did too.

This movie’s historical accuracy is debatable, and some chapters work better than others, but Robinson has, any case, crafted maybe the wittiest and sweetest cinematic menage a trois in recent memory. Those looking for graphic sex will be disappointed—the threesome scenes, which involve a lot of dressing-up in theatrical costumes, are too tame and discreet for a Cinemax soft-core flick from the ‘90s. But something about their good-natured naïveté makes them sexy.

The charm in Professor Marston and the Wonder Women comes in the deadpan delivery of earnest dialogue by glamorous actors like Luke Evans as Marston and waif-like Bella Heathcote as Olive. There are nice supporting turns by Oliver Platt as early comic peddler Max Gaines and Connie Britton in a peculiarly flirtatious turn as early comic critic Josette Frank. We also see JJ Feild as fetish costumer Charles Guyette, here shown decking out Olive in a get-up very similar to Wonder Woman’s.

But the standout is Rebecca Hall as the brittle, unflappable (well, almost unflappable) Elizabeth. Her readings give a sharp edge even to lines that don’t have one built in, yet she somehow infuses them with a palpable undercurrent of love and emotional directness as well. I hate to resort to it, but indulge me: She’s a wonder.

THREE, TIMES FIVE

Opening today:

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies—The third installment of Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation—and embellishment upon—the Tolkien novel starts off big. The dragon Smaug, voiced by the ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, wreaks havoc on a nearby fishing village and does battle with a valiant local boy (Luke Evans). While I sat there watching this sequence, I thought it was so strong that Jackson would have a hard time topping it, and as it ended I settled in for a long evening of droning exposition and wearying, incomprehensible-to-non-geeks prophesying.

I was wrong. Hobbit Part Two was better than Hobbit Part One, and for my money, Hobbit Part Three is the most exciting of the lot. Title character Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his pals the dwarves have taken occupancy in the dragon’s treasure-filled lair, and dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) is going all Treasure of Sierra Madre with gold-fueled paranoia.

Meanwhile four other legions—the elegant, aloof elves, the ogre-ish Orcs, the humans from the fishing village and more dwarves led by Thorin’s cantankerous brother Dain (the great Billy Connolly) converge outside the lair, each with its own agenda involving Smaug’s hoarded booty. At the heart of this bombast, and comically contrasted with it, is the modest sheepishness and goodwill of Bilbo, scurrying around trying to be honest and do the right thing.

When you get past the brilliance and intricacy of Jackson’s staging, I suppose all these tempestuous fight scenes don’t have anything deeper behind them than pro wrestling. But I liked how almost every positive thing that happens in this finale happens because members of different races reach out to each other.

Now that his Hobbit saga is (presumably!) complete, I really hope that Jackson puts the Tolkien on the shelf, at least for a decade or so, and tries something different. Almost anything different will do—a car chase movie, a bachelor party comedy—as long as it doesn’t involve broadswords and shaggy beards. Middle Earth has been very good to Jackson, but I hope that now this incredibly talented filmmaker will turn his attention, and his camera, back towards regular old Earth.

The Phoenix Film Critics Society, of which I am always proud to note that I'm a founding member, has announced our 2014 Award Winners. As always, some of them reflect my voting—despite my gripes about Birdman, for instance, Michael Keaton had my vote—and others don't, but there are plenty of movies worth seeing on the list. I was particularly pleased to see the powerful and artful Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me take Best Documentary.

BEST PICTURE

Birdman

TOP TEN FILMS OF 2014 (in alphabetical order)

A Most Violent Year
Birdman
Boyhood
Gone Girl
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Guardians of the Galaxy
The Imitation Game
The Lego Movie
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash

BEST DIRECTOR

Richard Linklater, Boyhood

BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE

Michael Keaton, Birdman

BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE

Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl

BEST ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

J. K. Simmons, Whiplash

BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game

BEST ENSEMBLE ACTING

Birdman

BEST SCREENPLAY WRITTEN DIRECTLY FOR THE SCREEN

The Grand Budapest Hotel

BEST SCREENPLAY ADAPTED FROM MATERIAL IN ANOTHER MEDIUM

Gone Girl

BEST LIVE ACTION FAMILY FILM (Rated G or PG)

Into the Woods

THE OVERLOOKED FILM OF THE YEAR

Edge of Tomorrow

BEST ANIMATED FILM

The Lego Movie

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Ida

BEST DOCUMENTARY

Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

"Everything is Awesome," The Lego Movie

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Birdman

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Birdman

BEST FILM EDITING

Birdman

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

The Grand Budapest Hotel

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

The Grand Budapest Hotel

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Intersellar

BEST STUNTS

Edge of Tomorrow

BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE ON CAMERA

Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl

BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE BEHIND THE CAMERA

Dan Gilroy, Nightcrawler

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A YOUTH IN A LEAD OR SUPPORTING ROLE: MALE

Jaeden Lieberer, St. Vincent

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A YOUTH IN A LEAD OR SUPPORTING ROLE: FEMALE

Lilla Crawford, Into the Woods

BATMAN BEGINS

New this week:

Dracula Untold—It’s hard to believe that there are any versions of the Dracula myth that remain untold. There have been earlier origin stories—the slightly underrated Dracula 2000 offered a particularly audacious and amusing one, for instance. But this may just be the first Dracula movie to suggest that the Count embraced vampirism in a spirit of noble self-sacrifice.

Set in the 1400s, Dracula Untold depicts Vlad Dracula, played by the pleasantly studly Welshman Luke Evans, as a gallant warrior-prince who loves his waiflike wife (Sarah Gadon) and his stouthearted son (Art Parkinson). Sure, he used to be called “Vlad the Impaler” for his treatment of his enemies, but now he just wants to protect his beloved Transylvania from the Ottoman Turks, by whom he was enslaved as a Janissary when he was a boy. He’s a reformed impaler, you see.

When the Turks show up at his castle, in the middle of Easter dinner no less, demanding, along with their usual monetary tribute, a new legion of boy slaves including Vlad’s own son, the Prince takes to a mountain cave where he once had an encounter with an ancient, desiccated vampire (Charles Dance). This old fiend gives him vampiric powers sufficient to bedevil the Turks, and if he can refrain from slaking his thirst for blood for three days, he’ll become human again, no harm no foul.

Everything goes smoothly. Vlad, family and country live happily ever after.

Just kidding. All manner of melodrama ensues. It’s about as historically convincing as a Ren Faire, but then, unlike life probably was in actual medieval times, Ren Faires can be fun.

So, despite a few missteps, is Dracula Untold. Some of its flourishes are grandly over-the-top—Dracula doesn’t just turn into a bat here, but a whole swarm of bats—and all are unembarrassed. At one point a groveling character says “Yes, Master”; at another a character flings back his head and howls “Nooooo!” These clichés are executed with no apparent irony, and the audience snickers a little. But we keep on watching.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day—If you’ve seen Steve Carell’s encounter with the very fake-looking kangaroo in the TV ads, it’s understandable if you’re dreading taking your kids to this movie. Not to worry, Disney’s adaptation of Judith Viorst’s 1972 children’s book favorite is nothing special, but it’s a lot better than its own marketing makes it look.

Alexander, the third of four kids, undergoes various humiliations and social catastrophes on his 12th birthday, and so do his older siblings and parents. Jennifer Garner and Steve Carell are funny as his impatient working Mom and his unemployed, doggedly optimistic Dad. Ed Oxenbould has an everykid naturalness as Alexander, Dylan Minnette is his confident older brother, and Kerris Dorsey, wonderful as Brad Pitt’s daughter in Moneyball, is his theatrical older sister. I liked how they didn’t mindlessly bicker; without pushy sentimentality, the ensemble manages to suggest a loving family.

Plenty of the gags in Alexander don’t work, but plenty do, and director Miguel Arteta sets a relaxed pace and tone that allows the charm of the actors to get across. And the Disney-ish atmosphere isn’t too oppressive—this is, at any rate, the first Disney movie I can recall with an overt penis joke.

The lesson that Alexander arrives at, of course, is that any day among loved ones in which nobody ends up at the morgue or in the hospital or in jail is a wonderful, beautiful, not bad, very good day. You can’t start teaching that soon enough.