ASSAULT OF THE EARTH

 Happy Friday everybody! Check out my review of Onslaught...

...online on Phoenix Magazine.

GOV STORY

Opening today:

Ella McCay--Emma Mackey shares initials with the character she plays here. The heroine of this latest from writer-director James L. Brooks is the Lieutenant Governor of an unnamed eastern state. When her boss, the beloved incumbent "Governor Bill" (Albert Brooks) is poached by the President--probably not our current President--for a cabinet post, Ella finds herself swept into the Governor's office, even though she comes across like a nervous college freshman at a job interview.

Narrated by Ella's aide Estelle (Julie Kavner), the movie explores the title character's wacky challenges and less wacky, more serious family dysfunctions, past and present. In flashback, we see her obsessively philandering father (Woody Harrelson) and long-suffering mother (Rebecca Hall) leave her to be parented by her adoring, fretful Aunt Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis). In the present, we see her hustler husband (Jack Lowden) go bonkers over the potential power and perks of Ella's new position.

We see her trying to navigate how to respond to her implication in perhaps the most inoffensive political scandal imaginable. And we see her trying to reconnect with her brilliant but reclusive younger brother (Spike Fearn), who suffers from severe anxiety disorder.

This hectic, haphazardly structured movie rattles along from one strand to another and back in the usual Brooks manner, warm and eccentric and open, with appropriate reserve, to the potential for human growth. I think what Brooks is after here is a sketch of what a genuinely virtuous person in modern American politics might look like; a Ms. Smith Goes to the State Capitol. Ella is a sort of American political Princess Myshkin or Doña Quixote, a hapless knight caught up in a whirlwind despite the most unimpeachable of intentions.

It's a great idea, and I enjoyed Ella McCay, but I'm not sure it hangs together convincingly. In part this has to do with Mackey's youthfulness, and the callow and somewhat ditzy nature of the character. The role requires somebody who can play both teenage and thirtysomething; Mackey is perfectly believable as the first, not so much as the second.

Also, not all of the plot strands pay off. The relationship between Ella and the ever-reliable Curtis as Aunt Helen is fully realized; so is the connection between our heroine and Brooks (Albert), hilariously weary as the pre-emptively compromised Governor Bill, and with Kavner's Estelle, and with Kumail Nanjiani as her stolid, loyal State Trooper bodyguard. But the scenes with Harrelson as the squirrelly Dad come off like a dead end, they don't really offer anything unexpected or add anything much to the story.

It's possible the movie's best, or at least most interesting, episode is one in which the title character doesn't appear. When Ella's troubled brother braves going outside to visit a former girlfriend (Ayo Edebiri) with whom he wants to re-connect, and the two struggle mightily to get around their tics and defenses to communicate the simple truth that they like each other, it feels like the essence of exasperating romcom complications boiled down to a single scene.

CORE VALUES

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire--2021's Godzilla vs. Kong began with Bobby Vinton's "Over the Mountain, Across the Sea" on the soundtrack, as Kong showered in a waterfall to start his day. This new saga starts with Jim Reeves singing "Welcome to My World" as the super simian lopes through his new home at the center of the earth. Things aren't so bucolic for the big ape; he's plagued with dental pain, harassed by hideous creatures and, assuming he's the last of his kind, he's lonely.

Meanwhile, up on the Earth's surface, Godzilla is keeping busy. He vanquishes a spidery Lovecraftian nightmare in the streets of Rome and then, rather adorably, he curls up to get some shuteye in the Colosseum like it's a cat-bed.

In other words, this is the second American kaiju flick in a row that declines to take itself too seriously. Is it as good as last year's startlingly sober Japanese national rumination Godzilla Minus One? Not remotely. Is it even as good as Godzilla vs. Kong? Probably not. But it's still plenty of fun.

Kong plumbs an unexplored region of the Hollow Earth where he meets an endearing mini-Kong and others of his own kind. They're enslaved by Skar King, a vicious ape dictator, and his brutal goons. Kong understandably feels the need to act.

Along for the ride are a few humans, including Rebecca Hall, returning as the Kong-ologist from the previous film, Kaylee Hottle as her beautiful, pained-looking adopted daughter, the last known Skull Islander, Brian Tyree Henry as the conspiracy-minded podcaster and Dan Stevens as a cocksure kaiju veterinarian. But the focus is less on humans here than even in the earlier films in the series.

As preposterous as Godzilla x Kong is, it's also genuinely and freewheelingly imaginative. Director Adam Wingard and his gaggle of co-screenwriters give us scenes of Kong sauntering among the Pyramids, or Mothra over Rio, or Godzilla taking a belly-flop dive from the summit of Gibraltar, that seem to owe more to cheerful whimsy than to logical plotting.

Still, without too much straining, one could even tease out an allegorical political subtext here. It's not hard to guess who the mangy, patchy, orange-furred King Skar might symbolize, but the source of his tyrannical power has a parallel, too. Skar maintains his rule because he holds in bondage a huge, spiky, frosty-pale monster with freezy breath. This behemoth started to remind me of a certain currently subjugated Grand Old Party.

There was also something I liked about this movie's ending: It has one. It doesn't have twenty. When the dramatic arc has been satisfied, Godzilla x Kong doesn't keep piling on extra codas, as if panicky it hasn't given us enough. It wraps things up in under two hours and gets out while the getting is good. Let it serve as an example to future big franchise movies.

BEAST PICTURE

Opening in theaters and on HBO Max...

Godzilla vs. Kong--The colossal ape of the title, plodding groggily toward a morning shower under a waterfall, scratches his butt. On the soundtrack is Bobby Vinton singing "Over the Mountain, Across the Sea." This was the point, barely a minute in, that I was pretty sure this movie was going to be fun. I wasn't disappointed.

I was indeed disappointed by the 2014 Yank version of Godzilla, but the 2017 Kong: Skull Island and the 2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters were both big improvements. This clash of the titans, their first movie meeting since the 1962 Japanese King Kong vs. Godzilla, may be the best of the latter-day lot. It's certainly the silliest, which works to its benefit.

After years of peaceful coexistence, the gargantuan reptile of the title is turned from heroic protector of humankind back into a menace, for purposes of the main event; he attacks a shadowy corporate facility in Pensacola, Florida. A conspiracy-minded podcast host (Brian Tyree Henry), a teenager (Millie Bobby Brown) and her best friend (Julian Dennison) investigate the sinister reasons behind the incident.

Meanwhile, those same corporate interests have Kong transported--in chains, by ship, just like back in 1933--from Skull Island to Antarctica in hopes that he'll lead them into the Hollow Earth. Traveling with him are a Hollow Earth expert (Alexander Skarsgard), a "Kong Whisperer" scientist (Rebecca Hall) and her adopted native daughter (Kaylie Hottle), who communicates by sign language. The two strands converge, via an actual hole to the center of the Earth, in Hong Kong, where the title monsters plus one other kaiju icon scrap in the streets.

As you can tell from this synopsis, director Adam Wingard and his screenwriters certainly don't let utter preposterousness get in the way of telling this tall tale; they loot sources from Verne and Burroughs to pro wrestling. When Kong socks Godzilla in the jaw for the first time, it reminded me of Alex Karras punching the horse in Blazing Saddles. This pop pilferage has the feel, at times, of kids improvising a make-believe monster game in their back yard.

Yet there are moments, like the scenes involving Kong negotiating the gravity deep underground, that have a near-poetic wonder. And the monsters, especially the soulful, fed-up Kong, are truly vivid characters, engaging our sympathies more than any of the human actors.

Absent profound, meaningful filmmaking and drama--and maybe, sometimes, in preference to it--this is what I want my summer blockbusters to be: fast, funny, unpretentious, with dash of heart. It clocks in at under two hours, but it didn't leave me feeling cheated.

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.

THE INFERNO CROWD

Opening this weekend:

Inferno—A darkly visionary geneticist has developed a virus to wipe out half of the world’s population, thus solving, or at least postponing, the overpopulation crisis. “Symbologist” Robert Langdon scampers around Florence in the company of a pretty young English doctor, trying to find where the bug is stashed. Agents of the World Health Organization and of a super-secret and lethal security firm chase them from landmark to landmark, led by clues encoded in Botticelli’s illustration of Dante’s version of Hell.

This is the third movie directed by Ron Howard and featuring Tom Hanks as Langdon, based on the fourth of Dan Brown’s syntax-challenged Langdon novels. The first film, 2006’s The Da Vinci Code, was on the limp side; the second, 2009’s Angels & Demons, was feverishly entertaining.

Happily, Inferno takes after its immediate predecessor. Screenwriter David Koepp, who wrote the adaptation, brings a bit more bite and wit to the dialogue than Brown is able to muster, and Howard keeps the action flying from one James-Bond-worthy exotic locale to another, pretty close to non-stop. The cast is full of attractive sorts like Felicity Jones, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, Ben Foster and, perhaps most memorably, Ana Ularu as a chic and scary motorcycle-borne assassin.

Best of all is Hanks, who as in Angels & Demons spends his footage belting out exposition on the fly, like a tour guide way behind schedule. Giving him temporary amnesia and a bleeding head wound just adds to the fun.

These are silly stories, to be sure, steeped in the thudding, reductive literalism and reticular paranoia of Brown’s response to Renaissance masterpieces. But it’s hard—for me, anyway—to resist a movie hero who’s a pedantic middle-aged know-it-all.

Christine—The title refers not to Stephen King’s demonic Plymouth Fury, but to Christine Chubbuck, a Sarasota, Florida news reporter who made a grim kind of TV history when she shot herself on the air in July of 1974. In her final statement, she said her action was “…in keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts…” The incident has long been thought to be part of Paddy Chayefsky’s inspiration for Network.

If a movie on this subject sounds like a bummer to you, you aren’t wrong. Directed by Antonio Campos from a script by Craig Shilowich, Christine is bitterly sad, often heartbreaking. It’s not a movie I’d be likely to watch again, but I’m glad I saw it once, because it’s also superbly done—measured, rich in convincing period detail, compassionate, free of tawdriness.

The key to its success is the talented, underutilized Rebecca Hall, who makes an award-worthy tour de force of the title role. With her long, stricken face, and speaking in the sort of flat Midwestern honk that Brits love to give Americans, she creates a portrait of a highly intelligent and decent-hearted person excruciatingly shut out from enjoying the common pleasures of life.

It seems almost certain that Chubbuck suffered from chronic mental (and physical) illnesses, along with ongoing romantic and sexual frustration and other personal disappointments. Given the understanding of such afflictions at the time, a happy outcome for her was probably a long shot. But her chosen field was no help, and it’s this that makes Christine trenchant rather than gratuitous.

Are many leisure activities more unsavory than watching local TV news? The sensationalism of the stories, and the deliberately dumbed-down insipidity and editorial timidity with which they’re presented, are queasy enough to watch; the effect of working in that world on a person of serious sensibility who wanted to do worthwhile journalism—and who was still vain and ambitious enough to want success—is awful to contemplate.

Throughout the film we hear the great national stories of the time—the aftermath of Watergate, Ford pardoning Nixon, etc—as a backdrop to Chubbuck’s lurid or fluffy stories at the beginning of the “If it bleeds, it leads” era in local TV coverage. Her struggle to keep her dignity in an undignified industry—ending in utter failure, as she herself became part of the bloody spectacle—makes Christine tragic.

The Pickle Recipe—On a lighter note...

Joey (Jon Dore), a Detroit wedding and bar/bat mitzvah entertainer badly down on his luck, is enlisted by his shady uncle (David Paymer) to filch the fiercely guarded secret recipe for the incomparable pickles made by his Grandma (Lynn Cohen). Joey agrees, goes to work as a lowly "assistant busboy" in Grandma's deli, and gradually bonds with the diverse staff, all the while coming up with wacky schemes to get his hands on the precious recipe.

This comedy, directed by Michael Manasseri from a script by Sheldon Cohn and Gary Wolfson, bogs down in overcomplication and heavy-handed sentiment at times, especially toward the end. But the performances are strong, and there's a pleasant energy to the affair, driven along by rousing klezmer on the soundtrack. Dore is agreeable in the lead, and it's great to see the veteran Cohen, remembered from Sex in the City and as a judge on many episodes of Law and Order, get a juicy showcase role all to herself as the loving but cantankerous Grandma.

You might want to have some good kosher dills ready in the fridge for when you get home from this one.