I DON'T WANT A PICKLE...

Opening this weekend:

The Bikeriders--There are many variations within the genre, but overall, biker movies tend to fall into two broad categories. There are those, exemplified by The Wild One (1953), in which the bike gang is seen from the point of view of mainstream society, and those, like The Wild Angels (1966) or Easy Rider (1969), where mainstream society is seen from the point of view of the bikers.

This new "wheeler" manages to have it both ways. Adapted by writer-director Jeff Nichols from the 1967 book by photojournalist Danny Lyon, the film traces the growth of a fictitious Chicago area club, The Vandals, based on The Outlaws, with whom Lyon embedded off and on throughout the '60s. It's very much an insider's view, focusing less on riding action than on the tempestuous relationship between Johnny (Tom Hardy), the club's founder, and Benny (Austin Butler), his beautiful, stoic, monosyllabic right-hand man. The Vandals begins as a racing and social club--Johnny, a truck-driving family man, is initially inspired by seeing The Wild One on TV--but criminality and ugly violence gradually creep in. 

Wisely, however, Nichols makes a mainstream viewpoint central to the film as well. The story is narrated to Lyon (Mike Faist) by Kathy (Jodie Comer), a respectable young working-class woman who stumbles into a biker bar one night to meet her girlfriend, and is unimpressed, not to mention understandably scared, by what she sees. She's unimpressed, that is, until she gets a look at the angelic Benny at the pool table, and can't keep an infatuated smile off her face. Despite Benny's anomie and recklessness, before long he and Kathy are a couple, and she's in competition with Johnny for Benny's devotion.

The beguiling Jodie Comer's Kathy is the live wire in The Bikeriders. A Brit of course, Comer lays on a Chicago accent as thick as a deep dish pizza as Kathy tells us, in hilariously bemused terms, about both the follies of bike gang life and her own folly in loving the seemingly emotionless, self-destructive Benny. Her sensible, self-deprecating take is pre-emptive to how many of us in the audience may feel, and keeps The Bikeriders from skidding into cornball melodrama.

None of this is to say that the movie's other elements aren't top-notch. It's full of fine performances: Hardy, sporting a sort of buzzy, mild-mannered Brando voice, has a quietly tragic appeal as Johnny. By the nature of his character, Butler is asked to play Benny very close to the vest, but he brings a star presence to the part. Damon Harriman, Boyd Holbrook, Emory Cohen and others are strong in supporting parts, and Norman Reedus drops in as "Funny Sonny," an unnerving representative of a California club. As the frazzled Zipco, who wanted to serve in the Army, Michael Shannon makes his big monologue a knockout.

The Bikeriders is also one of the best-looking movies of the year, stunningly shot in Grant Wood-esque midwestern tones by Adam Stone. Like the biker pictures from the period it depicts, it seems to be made up of images of real people, objects and places, lovingly captured but rock-solid. In our computer-generated era, this is refreshing; for all its brutality, this movie takes the world in a love embrace.

WHO'S WHODUNIT

Happy Black Friday everybody! Hope everyone had a gluttonously wonderful Turkey Day. Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Rian Johnson's Knives Out...

Have a great "Shop Small" weekend everybody!

NEWT ATTITUDE

Also opening here in the Valley this weekend:

The Shape of Water—Sally Hawkins stars in this romantic fantasy from the great Guillermo del Toro. She plays Elisa, a mute foundling orphan with scars on her neck who lives in an apartment over a movie theater in Baltimore in the early ‘60s. She gratifies herself in the bathtub as part of her daily ablutions, then brings food to her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), a lonely gay commercial illustrator, before leaving for her janitorial job in the bowels of a sinister research facility.

It’s at her job that she finds love, in the form of an elegantly segmented and finned Gill-man (Doug Jones). The “Amphibious Man” as the movie designates him, originated in a river in South America, where the natives worshipped him as a god.

He was captured by Strickland (Michael Shannon), a repressed, fanatical government agent who refers to him as “the asset” and wants to vivisect him for whatever Cold War advantages his body might yield. Elisa, Giles, her coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and a shady but sympathetic scientist (Michael Stuhlbarg) work to liberate the Amphibious Man, and along the way Elisa discovers her sexual passion for him.

Del Toro claims that as a child, he wanted to see the Creature of the Black Lagoon get the girl. This movie is the result, and it fulfilled that wish for me, too—I can also remember feeling a pang for the Creature’s romantic optimism. So I’m not the fellow to resist The Shape of Water. Like Peter Jackson’s King Kong, it turns a story of unrequited love into a story of requited love.

But if it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, if it all sounds terribly self-consciously whimsical and twee and self-delighted, then I can only tell you that, with as much objectivity as I can muster, it doesn’t come off that way at all to me. Del Toro earns his poetic passages by linking them with robust, gutsy storytelling. If it weren’t for some gore and sexual frankness, it might have made a great children’s movie.

It’s not a subtle film, admittedly; del Toro pushes his motifs, like the color green or the hydrophilic ubiquity of water, very hard. And the characterizations, especially that of Shannon’s furious reactionary g-man, are similarly broad-stroke. But the performances make them real people, and the story takes hold, as a romantic-erotic daydream merged with a period thriller merged with, in the most literal sense, a fish-out-of-water comedy.

Fair warning, though: This movie includes the fairly gruesome death of an animal. In the context of the story it makes perfect sense, and it helps to counteract the movie’s potential sentimentality, but for animal lovers sensitive to such things, this won’t matter at all.

STEEL-GOOD MOVIE

Playing Superman is sometimes seen as a curse for an actor. The career and life of George Reeves were blighted by his association with the role, Kirk Alyn did little else of note, and Brandon Routh, from 2006’s tepid Superman Returns, has hardly become a household name. Even Christopher Reeve, who had many fine credits apart from the tights and cape, is still chiefly remembered as the Krypton Man.

On the other hand, none of these actors had much right to grumble, in my opinion, because…well, because they got to play Superman! They had, at least at that point in their lives, the looks and the physique and the genial charm to play America’s own folk hero, our Hercules/Everyman/Immigrant-Makes-Good hybrid, not to mention the even better role of sly, likably milquetoast Clark Kent.

If you get to do that, anything else you get to do should be regarded as gravy. Besides, if you’re right for Superman there’s a decent chance you won’t be quite right for much else anyway.

That seems to have been the feeling toward the latest victim/favored son—British actor Henry Cavill, of TV’s The Tudors, was reportedly considered and passed over for James Bond, for Edward in the Twilight movies and for a key role in a Harry Potter flick. As Clark Kent/Cal-El in the current Man of Steel, he’s buff of bod and pretty of face, and if he has any personality to speak of, he doesn’t show it.

But the movie has plenty of more vibrant actors to make up for this. Russell Crowe and Ayelet Zurer as Clark’s Kryptonian parents, Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as his Kansan parents, Laurence Fishburne as Perry White, Richard Schiff as a mild-mannered scientist and Christopher Meloni and Harry Lennix as military men all contribute solid turns, and Amy Adams is beguiling as usual as Lois Lane, though in general I object to Lois Lanes that don’t wear big librarian-ish glasses.

The best performance, however, is by Michael Shannon as the villain, the exiled, enraged megalomaniac General Zod. Though Zod is from Krypton, he seems oddly flinty and Midwestern somehow—he might almost be a shady politician from Smallville. Shannon doesn’t have the weird, campy magnetism that Terence Stamp brought to the role in 1980’s Superman II—he’s a repellent figure. But he’s more dramatically substantive. Without overdoing it, he carries a hint of tragedy in his eyes.

This echoes both the merits and the downside of Man of Steel. Unlike most of Superman Returns, the new movie isn’t dull, but it’s on the heavy-handed side. Directed by Zack Snyder from a script by David S. Goyer, it retells, in its first half, Cal-El’s nativity and his escape from the dying planet Krypton, his arrival on Earth and adoption by the Kents, his discovery of his incomparable powers and his early attempts to help humankind. In its second half, it’s basically a loose remake of Superman II, with Zod and comrades, banished from Krypton just before its destruction, invading Earth with an eye to remodeling it in their home planet’s image.

The ensuing clash between Zod’s forces and Superman is a special effects spectacle, no question, with cities crumbling before the might of cool spaceships that look like robber crabs or scarabs. There are superb, imaginative scenes earlier on, also—like the young Clark unable to look at his teacher or classmates without seeing their skeletons and organs. But I found the movie a bit much—too many percussive explosions and collapsing building, too many pummeling fistfights, a little too much sturm und drang.

What Man of Steel lacked, for me, was a fun, playful side. Part of the delight of the Superman myth has always been its unabashed, primary-color cheeriness, but Man of Steel has a chilly, haunted feel.

There are a couple of episodes—one on a oil rig, one on a school bus, and one involving a waitress being harassed—where the title character simply gets to come to people’s rescue, and they’re among the best moments in the picture. Why can’t we have a whole movie of this sort of thing? They’ve already turned Batman into a Dark Knight—would it be so terrible to leave us one uncomplicated, civic-minded Bright Knight?