GREENDAY

Happy October everybody! Your Humble Narrator must confess that I am all too vulnerable to seasonal marketing for this, my favorite month. Recently I tried...

...Fanta's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice tie-in pop, Haunted Apple, and also...

...Hostess Limited Edition FrankenCakes, "with SCREAM filling!"

The FrankenCakes tasted, to me, exactly like a regular, tasty cupcake. Perhaps the SCREAM filling would have had more creepy impact if, like the frosting, it was green. As for the pop, at least it commited to the macabre conceit; it had an elusive flavor that I might describe as "very sweet, but moldy." I finished one bottle but I suspect I am unlikely to buy a second.

HAUNT GENERATOR

Opening this weekend:

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice--To the list of Gen X-era movie favorites getting very belated sequels, the sweetly macabre 1988 comedy Beetlejuice may now be added. You may remember the title character (spelled, outside of the title, like the red giant star in Orion) is a manic ghost who specialized in exorcizing the unwelcome living from haunted houses. Like Clive Barker's Candyman, he could be conjured into the world of the quick by speaking his name aloud three consecutive times, after which he would wreak havoc.

It's one of the signature roles of the great Michael Keaton; probably his greatest comedic triumph. The film also featured a breakthrough performance by Winona Ryder as the endearing, self-consciously "goth" heroine Lydia, and was a showcase for the visual and comic style of director Tim Burton. It's unquestionably a classic of '80s popular cinema, and it gave rise to a TV cartoon, video games, comics, a long-running stage show at Universal Studios theme parks, and eventually a Broadway musical that put Representative Lauren Boebert into an uncommonly good mood.

None of which necessarily means, of course, that a sequel was required. But one has been made, directed by Burton, starring Keaton, Ryder, and Catherine O'Hara, and scored by Danny Elfman. It has, in short, the stamp of authenticity, and this many years later it's a bit surprising that the original makers have managed to infuse, if anything, even more craziness into it.

Ryder's Lydia, now widowed, is still able to see ghosts, including the occasional startling glimpse of her old nemesis. She's the host of a paranormal TV show produced by her intolerable boyfriend (Justin Theroux). Relations between Lydia and her teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) are tense, but circumstances bring the two of them and Lydia's stepmother Delia (O'Hara) back to the old house in picturesque small-town Connecticut. Before long, the boundary between our world and the Kafkaesque, DMV-style bureaucratic afterlife has been breached, and the title ghoul is trying to insinuate himself back into the picture.

What ensues, strung along a script by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar from a story by Seth Grahame-Smith, are more of Burton's elaborate yet non-sequitur slapstick set pieces. The gross-out content is slightly higher here than back in 1988, but it works. The original, you'll recall, had a fixation with Harry Belafonte songs from which its most memorable sequences arose; the new movie is likewise enriched by similarly out-of-nowhere musical interests, even more grandly staged. There are sequence here that achieve true, weapons-grade silliness.

Ortega is touching, and there are other effective new additions to the cast, like Willem Dafoe as an afterlife cop--he was a movie cop in this life--with an exposed brain, or Arthur Conti, excellent as a local kid who charms Astrid. Best of all is Monica Belluci, formidable as the enraged ghost of the leader of a "soul-sucking death cult" who has an unhappy history with our titular hero. The scene in which she pulls herself together with the help of a staple gun is a Burton classic.

Keaton, though used somewhat sparingly, slips easily back into his role, tossing off asides in his muttering natter (or nattering mutter?) with the same moldered aplomb, and moving with the same light-footed exuberance, with which he conducted himself three decades ago. Ryder is also perfectly convincing as the middle-aged version of Lydia; tinged with a hint of emotional desperation in her interactions with Astrid.

I know it sounds ridiculous, and maybe I'm just projecting, but I thought that Ryder, O'Hara and even Keaton brought a subdued, rueful undercurrent to their performances, as if stirred-up memories of the first film's events had awakened genuine emotional pain. Don't misunderstand; if it's there, it's done without the slightest heavy-handed intentionality; it may not even have been conscious on the part of the actors. But it deepens both this film and the original.

THE PEOPLE UNDER THE SCARES

In theaters this weekend:

The Blackening--Eight attractive African-American college friends gather at a fancy cabin in the woods for a Juneteenth reunion. After a short stretch of playing spades and drinking over-sugared vodka Kool-Aid, they quickly find themselves at the mercy of a maniac, forced to play a twisted board game called "The Blackening" with their lives as the stakes. The game is focused on black identity; the questions involve black history and culture, and the group is forced to single out a victim on the basis of which of them is "the blackest."

The director is Tim Story, who helmed the Ride Along movies. Here he's working with a really well-crafted, intricately funny script by Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins (based on a short by the sketch-comedy group 3Peat) that teases the long and intense love-hate relationship between black audiences and horror movies. It does this less subtly, perhaps, than Jordan Peele's films do, but with a solidly higher ratio of out-loud laughs.

Story generates a fine ensemble buzz with his excellent cast, all of them unknown to me except for SNL veteran Jay Pharoah, and Diedrich Bader as the token "Ranger White." The comedy outweighs the terror here, although the masked, crossbow-wielding killer is a creepy presence. Overall, this movie is the meta-slasher send-up that Scream only thought it was--truly witty, and truly about something.

The Flash--This feature vehicle for the venerable DC superhero has a terrific opening. It involves [spoiler!] a collapsing hospital building, and our harried hero's efforts to corral a maternity ward's worth of newborns plummeting from a window. There's an inventive panache to the multi-tasking gags here that Buster Keaton himself might have appreciated. But the exhilaration of this set piece isn't reflected in what follows.

Launched in 1940 as Jay Garrick with a Mercury-like helmet and rebooted, with the winged cowl, as Barry Allen in the '50s, The Flash can move so fast that he can not only dodge bullets or cross a continent in seconds, he can literally do what Cher only wishes she could do: turn back time. In this story, Barry (a charmingly callow Ezra Miller) decides to go back and prevent the murder of his mother (Maribel Verdú) which of course screws up the space-time continuum. As a result he must team up with a slacker version of himself from a different time-stream to undo the mess he's made, and deal with multiple versions of iconic characters, including Michael Keaton enjoyably returning to the role of a rather Howard Hughes-like Bruce Wayne/Batman.

If all this sounds to you a lot like the "Multiverse" from over at Marvel, I can only tell you that it seemed that way to me too, and not to this movie's benefit. Despite some playful uses, the Multiverse's bottomless stockpile of do-overs and variant replacement characters was already getting on my nerves in the Marvel flicks, and this DC spin on it has the same effect: a dilution of the dramatic stakes.

There's some amusement, I suppose, in the many cameos by various versions of the characters, but it's a dorky, narratively inert amusement, more like a Renaissance masque or pageant than an epic. It feels like fan service, of a particularly OCD kind; like Charles V winding and re-winding his clocks, it's a futile effort to synchronize different versions of pop myths that should simply be enjoyed in their wonderfully irreconcilable diversity.

VEIN MAN

Opening this weekend...

Morbius--Jared Leto certainly has the physique and facial bones to play the title character in this Marvel flick. His performance as the hapless vampiric hematologist is good, too; quiet and haunted yet not oppressive, tinged with grim humor. The movie, however, could use a transfusion of originality platelets.

Michael Morbius, the cadaverous "Living Vampire," was introduced in comics in the early '70s as a nemesis to Spider-Man...

...and eventually headlined Marvel titles of his own. Like Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows, he was a reluctant and tormented blood-drinker. Michael had brought on his condition, which includes superhuman strength and batlike gliding and echolocation ability, through a serum intended to cure the rare blood disease that was killing him. He craved blood but didn't want to hurt anyone, and, as with The Lizard (with whom Morbius notably clashed), Spidey empathized with him and tried not to harm him.

There are other strong performances in the film, directed by Daniel Espinosa from a script by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (the team behind 2014's Dracula Untold). Matt Smith slyly plays Milo, Michael's mega-rich pal and research patron, who suffers from the same disease and soon notices the same side effects from Michael's serum, but feels less guilt over his bloodlust. Adria Arjona has a lovely sober quality as Martine, Michael's partner and romantic interest; her gravity seems to bring out a hint of playfulness in Leto.

I really wanted to like this one; I'm fond of the comic character. And for the first half or so it cruises along enjoyably enough, though there's nothing really new to it, just standard spooky gothic flourishes. The corn is as high as a vampire's eye, too; repeatedly, when they're in bloodsucker mode, both Michael and Milo strike a scary pose and go "RAAAAAH!" like the bully kid in A Christmas Story, and after a while they seem like the performers in a Halloween haunted house.

Then, as the movie progresses, the questionable logic increases. Why, for instance, would a boat on which secret medical experiments were being conducted require a large team of heavily armed mercenaries? Why would Michael want to commandeer a counterfeiting workshop's equipment to adapt into scientific equipment?

In the later scenes, as Michael and Milo battle in the shadowy streets of New York--The Batman has nothing on this movie for gloominess--Morbius descends into an unexciting muddle. It has a truncated, cut-down feel to it, a suspicion supported by the presence of scenes in the trailer that didn't show up in the finished film.

The most disappointing of these is the paucity of Michael Keaton, as Adrian Toomes aka The Vulture; he's shown in the trailer and I figured that if nothing else worked in the movie, Keaton would at least goose a little life into it. But [spoiler alert!] he only appears very briefly at the very end, and adds almost nothing to the picture (unless I nodded off when he said it, even the line he speaks in the trailer was cut). In the sequel, if there is a sequel, I certainly hope Keaton gets a much bigger role.

SPIDER-KID

Opening this weekend:

Spider-Man: Homecoming--The latest Marvel feature depicts the "Web-Head" still in high school in Queens. Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Tom Holland) has taken part in one quick adventure with The Avengers, which we saw in last year's Captain America: Civil Wars, and now has an "internship" with Stark Industries.

Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) clearly sees that Peter is a good kid with superhero potential, but also that he's impetuous, impulsive, reckless, in short, a teenager. He hasn't yet internalized the lesson that with great power comes...well, you know.

So Stark gives Peter a high-tech, interactive Spidey suit to replace the homemade costume he's been wearing, but encourages him to remain a "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" for the time being, rather than a full-fledged Avenger. Peter makes a pest of himself to Stark and his employees, but he also stumbles across a genuinely world-threatening criminal enterprise right in his own back yard, involving the sale of alien technology. Plus, there's the matter of his schoolwork, and the Academic Decathlon team, and the girl he has a crush on.

What ensues is a lively, fast-moving hybrid of superhero action saga and teenage angst comedy. The two tones don't always gel perfectly, but this slight unevenness only adds to the film's loose, free-swinging feel. After several years of curmudgeonly grumbling about turgid, apocalyptic, buildings-crumbling-to-rubble superhero flicks, I'm glad to admit that I've wholeheartedly enjoyed the last three big releases in that line: Dr. Strange, DC's Wonder Woman, and this one.

Director Jon Watts, working from a script by a gaggle including Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, serves up some memorable grand-scale set-pieces, among them one at the Washington Monument and one on the Staten Island Ferry, that feel epic without losing a sense of playful, colorful wit. And the cast is good company.

Holland hits the right note as Peter, callow and heartfelt but light-footed. Downey has played a beleaguered, glamorous father figure already, opposite Anton Yelchin in  2007's Charlie Bartlett; he did it beautifully then, and he does it beautifully here. Zendaya only gets a little to do as Peter's socially conscious classmate, but she's set up nicely for future films. And Marisa Tomei is charmingly showcased as Aunt May, re-conceived as a sexy young "cool" Aunt.

But the real reason that even somebody who wasn't particularly a fan of this sort of thing might consider Spider-Man: Homecoming is Michael Keaton. Returning to comic book movies 28 years after Batman, he brings real bite and originality to the role of Adrian Toomes aka The Vulture, a startlingly no-nonsense, blue-collar mastermind who seems almost sheepish about the trappings of supervilliany. 

Keaton plays the role quietly, with no zany, over-the-top antics, but with a clear-eyed intelligence and directness that makes his menace unusually authoritative. When he levels a threat, he isn't gloating or grandstanding; he honestly wants Spider-Man to back off, but you never doubt that it's a final warning. He makes pragmatism and sanity scary.

THE HAMBURGLAR

Opening this weekend:

The Founder—Near the beginning of this chronicle history of the McDonald’s empire, we get a look at the hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California that started the chain. It’s 1954, and a long line of customers are waiting for a burger, fries and a Coke. We’re seeing it through the eyes of Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), the underachieving Midwestern milk-shake machine salesman who’s visited hundreds of dreary drive-ins, diners and dives and knows he’s stumbled on to something big here.

Some might see this scene as the thrilling origin of a great American success story. Others might see it as the chilling start of a sci-fi horror film, like the moment that the zombies or the alien pods start to spread soulless conformity—Invasion of the Franchise People.

It’s both, of course. For better and worse, this is no minor episode in the history of America, or indeed of the developed world—as a friend of mine noted recently, it’s unlikely that most of us have ever met anybody who has never in their life eaten at McDonald’s. The makers of The Founder know this, and they go about their business with breezy speed and humor but, quite rightly, without irony.

Kroc, a hustler who’s never found quite the right hustle, talks his way into a job franchising the chain on behalf of the brothers Maurice “Mac” McDonald (John Carroll Lynch) and Dick McDonald (Nick Offerman), New Hampshire natives who had gone west in search of fortune. According to The Founder, the genial, conciliatory Mac and the quiet, wary purist Dick were just trying to run a good quality, profitable burger joint, but with the system he had designed—limited menu, choreographically precise preparation, ridiculously rapid service—Dick had essentially invented fast food.

The film tells how Kroc turned this concept into a third locus for American communities, alongside the city hall and the church—Keaton gets a ripe speech describing Kroc’s vision of the Golden Arches taking their place alongside the flag and the Cross in towns throughout America. Within a few years, he’s on his way to realizing this, and he’s also at war with Mac and Dick, who are still in control of the brand and slow to approve any of Kroc’s innovations.

The director is John Lee Hancock of The Rookie and The Blind Side, working from a script by Robert D. Siegel, the former Onion writer who scripted The Wrestler. There are lines and moments that hit a sour note in terms of period—the phrase “family friendly” somehow didn’t sound like 1954 to me, for instance. But I liked how conflicted Hancock and Siegel seem about their protagonist, an admirable entrepreneur and a selfish, hubristic S.O.B. at the same time. About midpoint, Kroc, who’s not too happily married, falls in love at first sight with the wife (Linda Cardellini) of a man with whom he’s doing business. The tension between the Norman Rockwell wholesomeness of Hancock’s style and the complex and unsavory sexual and economic subtext makes the scene really uncomfortable—and really interesting.

It’s doubtful that any of this could have anywhere near the same charge without Michael Keaton. He deploys his usual manic star persona, the jumpy guy who turns his bouncing-off-the-walls patter into a constant, disarming self-parody. But here he shades it to a character that’s not altogether likable, and he’s no less vibrant and riveting for that. 

Paterson—The title is the name of the setting—Paterson, New Jersey, home of, among other notables, the great modernist poet William Carlos Williams. It’s also the name of the hero (Adam Driver), who works there as a city bus driver and is also a poet—a contentedly unknown bard, jotting carefully-turned lines in the driver’s seat before his shift starts. As he composes, his verses (actually written by Ron Padgett) appear onscreen.

Jim Jarmusch’s idyll traces a week of this fellow’s pleasant routines—waking up in the mornings next to his gorgeous wife (Golshifteh Farahani), walking their jealous bulldog in the evenings, hanging out in a local bar. He witnesses a bit of minor drama here and there in the course of the week, and responds to it perfectly, and he himself suffers one painful but entirely survivable disaster.

As usual with Jarmusch, the hipster pose and the comic stoicism of the style help the whimsical sentiment to go down more easily. The movie is suspiciously rose-colored in its view of the heartsease of an unknown artist with a working life. Paterson (the guy, not the town) doesn’t require literary fame, because he’s vanity-free, and every other benefit that fame might bring to a person of moderate habits—comfort, stability, a beautiful and adoring lover—he already has.

It seems, in short, a lot like a famous person’s daydream of happy creative anonymity. But it’s such a serene and lovely daydream, and Driver is so sweet, that you’re likely to be drawn in.

When Paterson and his dizzy, cuddly wife go out to the movies, it’s to a revival showing of the 1932 masterpiece Island of Lost Souls, and as they leave, Paterson notes—very accurately—that his wife resembles the Panther Girl (Kathleen Burke) from that film. Who wouldn’t want some version of this guy’s life?

(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.

BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED DISADVANTAGE OF PERSONA)

“Dear Lady Gaga, thank you for that wonderful tribute.” These are not words I ever expected to hear Julie Andrews saying.

But they seemed heartfelt, and they were deserved: Lady Gaga’s broadly-played imitation of Andrews, in a Sound of Music medley, was one of the few high points of a generally slow, unappealing Oscar show. Other high points included some good acceptance speeches, especially by Pawel Pawlikowski, the Polish director of Ida, who managed to be funny and even, in an unpretentious way, a bit reflective.

The low point, for me, was Neil Patrick Harris making a joke at the expense of the dress worn by one of the two ladies who had just won a Best Short Subject Documentary Oscar for Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press One. As a friend of mine pointed out, it’s one thing to mock a train wreck worn by some actress who’s a red carpet veteran, quite another to pick on the questionable fashion choice of a “civilian.” Besides, the lady in question had just been talking, seconds before, about losing her son to suicide. Harris may not have been listening, but the effect was ugly in any case.

As for the winners and losers, the big disappointment for me was Michael Keaton not winning. I didn’t much care for Birdman, but I love Keaton’s work, including in that film, so much that I really wanted him to win anyway, as I wonder if he’ll have ever this juicy a lead role again. My wife, by comparison to me the expert Oscar handicapper in our house, was also rooting for Keaton but predicted that Eddie Redmayne would win for The Theory of Everything, as his role as the young Stephen Hawking ticked off too many Oscar-bait boxes: Physical challenge, real-life figure, Brit. One theory floated on some of the talk shows is that Keaton may have been perceived as “just playing himself” in Birdman, as opposed to Redmayne’s transformation.

When people say this about an actor, what they really mean (though they may not know it) is that he or she always or usually plays the same basic character. That’s certainly true of Keaton, but it was also true of Henry Fonda, John Wayne, James Stewart, Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman—it didn’t stop any of them from winning Oscars.

One last note: I was also sorry that the Glen Campbell song “I’m Not Gonna Miss You,” from Glen Campbell…I’ll Be Me, didn’t win for Best Song—it lost to the admittedly beautiful “Glory” from the ridiculously under-nominated Selma. But at least it was treated to a fine, simple performance on the show by Tim McGraw, and hopefully it will call more attention to this powerful documentary about the Alzheimer’s-afflicted country great. Please don’t skip this movie on the (understandable) fear that it will be a depressing bummer. It’s sad, of course, but also uplifting.

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

FLIPPING THE BIRD

Birdman has racked up the SAG and Golden Globe nominations this past week. But somehow, big fan of Michael Keaton though I am, that film, remarkable though it is, rubs me the wrong way. Check out my list, on Topless Robot, of some reasons why.

Opening this week:

Top Five—Chris Rock is the best American stand-up comedian currently active, and one of the greatest of all time. He is, beyond doubt, a comedy star. But somehow he’s never been able to make a convincing case that he’s a movie star. Something about the guy’s presence has always seemed to shrink a little, grow weaker, when he’s not on stage by himself, but is surrounded by a bunch of actors in a fiction film.

This has nothing to do with his talent. He’s natural and believable enough onscreen, and in an early supporting role in New Jack City (1991) he showed himself capable of powerful acting. But when he’s at the center of a movie, he suddenly no longer has that electric command of the audience’s attention that he has doing stand-up. His star vehicles, like Bad Company, Down to Earth and I Think I Love My Wife, make a sadly forgettable list.

The bad news about his new film Top Five, which he also wrote and directed, is that it doesn’t entirely end this streak. It isn’t a knockout. The good news is that it’s nonetheless the best he’s done so far, by a good margin, and its best scenes are vibrant, complex and extremely funny.

The film, Rock’s version of Sullivan’s Travels or Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, traces a long day in the life of Andre Allen (Rock), a comedian and the star of a string of idiotic but lucrative “Hammy the Bear” comedies. Andre’s in New York trying to promote his new movie Uprize, a tortured drama about Haitian revolutionary Dutty Boukman, and to attend a bachelor party for his upcoming wedding to a reality-TV diva (Gabrielle Union). He agrees, reluctantly, to be interviewed by a New York Times contributor (Rosario Dawson), a big fan of his stand-up who disapproves of the cheesy commercial turn his career has taken.

Can you guess where this is headed? Well, you’re right, but the plot, such as it is, isn’t the point here. Rock has cunningly structured the film so that Dawson provides an onscreen audience for his riffs on various subjects. There are also terrific freestanding sequences, like a punishingly funny (and dirty) flashback of Andre’s lowest point, or a raucous ensemble scene when he visits his family.

The movie hits some false notes and dawdles on a bit too long, and in any case it comes nowhere near Rock’s strongest stand-up. Even so, at least for fans of this genius, it’s well worth seeing.

Exodus: Gods and Kings—For all his diligence as an actor, Christian Bale—like Rock, I suppose, only more so—sometimes shows a recessive puniness of spirit as movie star. At least for me, he lacks the grandeur to play a superhero.

Theoretically, this might make him right for the role of Moses in a movie about the Old Testament prophet, who was, after all, an unimpressive speaker in his own opinion. In practice, however, giving the lead in a nearly three-hour epic to a guy with a brick in his mouth turns out to be inadvisable. Say what you will about Charlton Heston’s monolithic turn in The Ten Commandments, but you caught every furious word. When the old Pharaoh (John Turturro) asks if the Egyptians can beat the Hittites or if the slaves are about to revolt or whatever, Bale’s Moses replies “Fribshm mblim snablub griflb.”

That said, the plagues and miracles are entertainingly staged by director Ridley Scott, and Ramses, played by Joel Edgerton—no champ in the diction department either—has our sympathy when he loses his child on Passover. There’s some ingenious dialogue, too, particularly between Moses and God, here personified as a rather cheeky little boy. The kid has the diction of an RSC actor, by the way. I kept waiting for The Almighty to reply to one of Bale’s mumbles with “I’m sorry, I may be All-Knowing, but I didn’t catch that.”