ALLEY WHOOP

Opening this weekend...

Nightmare Alley--"Geek" has now become roughly analogous to "nerd" or "extreme enthusiast." But the term once had horrific connotations; it was carny slang for a sideshow performer who would do ghastly acts--bite the heads off of live chickens, for instance--usually to feed an alcohol or drug habit. The bottom rung of show business (I almost wrote "the bottom rung of humanity" but then I remembered the 45th President and his cronies), this revolting occupation was the jumping-off point for William Lindsay Gresham's classic lower-depths novel Nightmare Alley (1946).

An atmospheric if softened-up movie of it was made in 1947 with Tyrone Power as Stan, the newbie carny who looks at the geek and knows he could never fall to such a degraded level. Bradley Cooper plays Stan in this gorgeously stylized new version from the great Guillermo del Toro, working from an adaptation he co-wrote with Sunset Gun maven Kim Morgan.

Stan, a drifter running away from something awful, makes himself useful as a laborer to a desolate midwestern carny. Soon he's learning the tricks of fortune-telling and mind-reading acts, which here are so talmudical that earning an honest living seems like it would be far easier. He learns how to calm down an angry cop, and how to dispose of a geek who's outlived his usefulness, and where to find a new one. 

And the work brings out Stan's creative side; soon he's designed a spectacular new "electric chair" act for the lovely Molly (Rooney Mara). He's also taught a weird sort of hustler ethic; the veteran fortune-teller Zeena (Toni Collette, magnificent as ever) warns him against doing a "spookshow," that is, actually faking a manifestation of a departed loved one.

This first half, set in the carny amongst its disreputable but mostly warm and likable denizens, is darkly delightful, visually sumptuous and full of terrific, potent acting and pungent dialogue. As with both the novel and the earlier film version, the second half, in which Stan leaves the carny to start a higher-end mentalist scam--and foolishly ignores Zeena's advice--is less engaging. His scenes as the hapless fly in the parlor of a lacquered, satanic psychoanalyst (Cate Blanchett), though entertaining enough, border on camp, and are a little oppressive after the buoyant, motley first act.

Still, this is a rich and absorbing melodrama. Actors seem to thrive in front of del Toro's camera, and alongside the leads and the wondrous Collette, scene-stealers here include Willem Dafoe as the candidly heartless boss, Ron Perlman as an avuncular carny and, perhaps best of all, David Strathairn as Pete, Stan's washed-up, gently rueful mentor. Even in the second half, there's a splendid quick turn by Mary Steenburgen, and Richard Jenkins is scary, and briefly piteous, as the cold-hearted tycoon for whom Stan puts on his spookshow.

Finally, a word should be said for Paul Anderson, as the geek. He plays the part to the hilt, yet without hamming, and with a dreadful glimpse of the human being he was.

SCAM I AM

Opening this weekend at Harkins:

Kajillionare--To call the Dynes small time crooks is to insult small time crooks. The L.A.-based family--paterfamilias Robert (Richard Jenkins), Mom Theresa (Debra Winger) and daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood)--engage in the most pathetic, scrounging grifts imaginable, although Old Dolio tries to bring some parkour-style panache to them. The yields of these scams are, at best, the likes of neckties or gift certificates for a free massage.

The Dynes live in a basement office beneath a factory that produces bubbles; they have to clean up the foamy froth that comes seeping down the walls on a daily basis. This gets them a ridiculously low rent, on which, of course, they are nonetheless badly in arrears. Eventually the trio meets Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), an unflappable, free spirited young woman who more or less invites herself into the operation and throws everything into turmoil.

This is the set-up for this deeply eccentric comedy-drama by writer-director Miranda July. The story meanders, but the acting and left-field dialogue keep it coherent. Jenkins and Winger are so brilliantly, oppressively repulsive that the movie might be unwatchable without the fresh air that Rodriguez riotously provides.

The heart of the film, however, is Wood's Old Dolio--that wretched name is explained in due course--who has grown up isolated in the world of her pitiful chiseling parents. As a result she's a doleful, affectless blank slate in a track suit, with Rapunzel-length hair like her Mom (presumably to avoid the expense of haircuts). She's never experienced a minute of true love and affection in her life. The stillness and deliberation of Evan Rachel Wood's performance gives Old Dolio the radiant sadness of a silent-movie comic heroine; she's hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time.

The title refers to Robert's life aspiration: He's content to skim and survive, while everybody else, he contemptuously notes, "wants to be a kajillionaire." In its homestretch the movie seems to go completely crazy, yet July is able to turn Robert's grotesque meaning joyously on its head, and the final seconds of the film are beautiful and weirdly inspiring.

Shortcut--Here's how bad an idea taking a shortcut turns out to be in this scare picture: First, the charming Fiat bus piloted by a resolute driver (Terence Anderson) and carrying a quintet of bored British schoolkids gets hijacked at gunpoint by an escaped maniac (David Keyes) whose speciality, reportedly, is eating the tongues of his victims. But soon after, this guy's menace is far overshadowed when the bus is besieged by a fanged, squalling creature like something from Stephen King's remainder table.

Eventually, the kids end up in an abandoned underground network of tunnels, a military base of some sort. They seem pretty relaxed about the whole thing; rather than try with all their might to find their way out and back to civilization as quickly as possible, they split up and dawdle around, making time for squabbles and hints of teen romance. Eventually we get some fairly perfunctory backstory on the monster, and the kids team up in the manner of It for a showdown.

Big chunks of this movie, an Italian production in English directed by Alessio Ligouri, don't make much sense, not even horror-movie sense. But it's atmospheric, there are some scares, the actors are capable and attractive, and at just 80 minutes it doesn't tax our patience too much.

Available today on YouTube:

Public Trust--This documentary is about the efforts, which have gone on for many decades, of corporate raiders to pillage public lands in the United States. Director David Byars follows a variety of activists and journalists, working everywhere from Utah to Minnesota to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, long droolingly coveted by the oil industry. We see the slow, stubborn progress of the Lorax-like activists, their gratifying successes under the last administration, and their appalling setbacks under the current regime.

It's a well-made movie, firm and convincing in the presentation of its evidence. It's also often visually beautiful; it gives you a sense of what's at stake. But it's open to the same criticism as so many polished lefty documentaries: it's preaching to the choir. There's no position this film takes on this issue that I don't agree with, and, specifics aside, none that I wasn't already more or less aware of.

Much as I admired its tireless subjects, the principal effect it had on me was to boil my blood, and maybe raise my blood pressure. I doubt this will be seen by the people who most need to see it, and if it is, most of them will likely dismiss it as fake news. Vote. Vote. Vote.

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.

HOLLAR TREE

Opening this week: 

The Hollars—Even though the small-town middle American family of the title isn’t especially prone to raising their voices, the name somehow fits just the same. They’re an explosive bunch; you get the sense that hollering is what they’re always on the verge of.

John Krasinski plays John Hollar, the son who ran away from home. An aspiring but blocked graphic novelist, he’s been living in New York, working a day job he hates, and reluctant to marry his girlfriend Rebecca (Anna Kendrick) even though she’s in the homestretch of carrying his child. When John learns that his beloved Mom (Margo Martindale) has collapsed and is in the hospital, he hurries home.

Immediately he’s dropped back into the squabbles between his blubberingly emotional, short-fused father (Richard Jenkins) and his divorced, underachieving, angry older brother Ron (Sharlto Copley), whose ex (Ashley Dyke) and two daughters are now living with a maddeningly nice, patient pastor (Josh Groban). Ron, by contrast, is living back at home with the ‘rents, even though Dad has fired him from the family plumbing business, which John also learns is about to go belly-up. Interrupting all of this drama is Mom’s massive brain tumor, for which she’ll quickly need surgery.

If you’re not hearing anything particularly groundbreaking in this synopsis, you’re not wrong. The Hollars, written by Jim Strouse and directed by Krasinki, is fairly standard dysfunctional family comedy-drama, the sort of modest, “character-driven” piece that actors have a hard time resisting.

Fortunately, the actors who couldn’t resist this script include several of the best now in American movies, and Krasinski managed them briskly. There are scenes that seem heavy-handed and obvious, as when the brothers confer with their mother’s Asian surgeon (Randall Park) and the anxious Ron can’t stop himself from bringing up the man’s race. But most of the interactions between these frightened, pissed-off, loving people ring more or less true, and the actors get all that there is to get out of them, and maybe a bit more.

Vibrant as the whole ensemble is, Krasinski deserves highest marks for giving Margo Martindale a juicy opportunity in a feature film. Long valued as a supporting player, Martindale is showcased here, and has a couple of Oscar-clip-worthy scenes with real punch. But her quiet scenes with the lantern-jawed, sadly smiling Krasinski are even better—John and Mom are the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Hollars, and their conspiratorial, amused alliance is the heart of the movie.

THE LEAK IN REVIEW

Opening this weekend:

The Fifth Estate—The British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, recently impressive as the villain in Star Trek: Into Darkness, does a striking impersonation of Julian Assange in this chronicle of the WikiLeaks saga. Like 2010’s The Social Network, it’s the story of a virtual-world revolutionary, based on a book by a disgruntled former second-banana—Zuckerberg pal Eduardo Saverin in the case of the Facebook movie, and WikiLeaks crony Daniel Domscheit-Berg (sympathetically played by Daniel Bruhl) in the case of The Fifth Estate.

Surprise, surprise, in both the sidekicks are depicted as decent and long-suffering, and the central figures as socially awkward, paranoid, narcissistic ingrates.

The director is Bill Condon of Chicago, and as in that film he shows some ingenuity in creating psychological landscapes, and his illustrations of the real-world impact of Assange’s online activities are cleverly handled as well. But there’s something slack and artificial about the attempts to generate conventional political-thriller suspense from the release of the Afghan War Logs or the Diplomatic Cables. The performances are sharp and witty—Stanley Tucci and Laura Linney have fun as a couple of jaded State Department stooges—and so is much of the dialogue, but somehow the movie doesn’t feel urgent.

Maybe that’s because it’s off-center. I don’t mean to suggest that Assange’s psychology, at least as it relates to the ethics of his leaks, is an unimportant subject. I just don’t think it’s as important as most of what, rightly or wrongly, he leaked.

Most people would probably agree that at least some state secrecy is necessary for a nation’s security; most people would probably even more strongly agree that this shouldn’t be used as a catch-all excuse to cover up brutality or illegality, or even avoid embarrassment. Yet this is clearly much of what WikiLeaks exposed. The focus on Assange’s admittedly questionable character has kept this material from being as widely discussed as it should be, and it’s hard to believe that isn’t at least partly by design.

A.C.O.D.—The title stands for Adult Children of Divorce, and the central character, Carter (Adam Scott), is a prime specimen of such. His younger brother (Clark Duke) is getting married, and it falls to Carter to negotiate the brief truce between his long-divorced, still-enraged parents (Richard Jenkins and Catherine O’Hara) necessary for the occasion. None of the wackiness which ensues is especially revelatory—the direction, by Stu Zicherman, and the script, by Zicherman and Ben Karlin, are on about the level of an above-average sitcom.

But the great O’Hara and the great Jenkins bring this material to life without breaking a sweat. The supporting players, including Jane Lynch, very funny as an opportunistic therapist, Ken Howard, Amy Poehler, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Jessica Alba, are all proficient. Scott, from Parks and Recreation, is agreeable as the straight man at the center of it all.

The climactic attempt to resolve the various family conflicts with a single stroke of the plot is on the clumsy side, but then, at the very end, Jenkins is given a simple, poignant monologue. He hits it out of the park, of course, and for aficionados of fine acting the movie would be worth seeing just for this.

Now in theatres:

Machete Kills—The title here is, at least, truth in advertising. Scary-looking, likable Danny Trejo returns to his role from the 2010 action parody, a Federale-turned-avenger who slaughters both Cartel goons south of the border and nativist goons north of it. Director Robert Rodriguez, with the help of a cast which includes everybody from Sofia Vergara to Mel Gibson to Lady Gaga to Charlie Sheen, here billed (accurately) as “Carlos Estevez,” as the President of the United States, makes this one even more cartoonishly gory and raunchy than the original, and for my money, more enjoyable (for adults, that is). We’re told at the end that the character will return in Machete Kills Again…In Space. I, for one, hope so.

A couple of RIPs: First, to the fine character actor Ed Lauter, passed on at 74—I just watched him the other night in Hitchcock’s Family Plot, but he was in dozens of movies and TV shows ranging from the original Longest Yard to The Artist.

RIP also to the great Stanley Kauffman, longtime movie critic at The New Republic, passed on at 97. Though I often—maybe even usually—disagreed with his cranky conservative judgments, Kauffman’s impeccable style and wit always made him a terrific read. At the age of 18—years before I discovered Pauline Kael—I was given Kauffman’s 1980 review collection Before My Eyes by a bookstore-owning family friend as a high school graduation present. It was endlessly rereading this book that made me want to get serious about being a film reviewer.

HOUSE HUNTED

It’s said that for a few years after the huge success of the original Die Hard, every action movie idea in Hollywood was pitched as “Die Hard in a…” That 1988 film featured bad guys taking over an L.A. office building until their schemes are bedeviled by coincidentally visiting New York cop Bruce Willis, so for a while it was Die Hard in a hockey rink (Sudden Death), Die Hard on a cruise ship (Speed 2: Cruise Control), Die Hard on a Navy ship (Under Siege), Die Hard on Alcatraz (The Rock) and so on. I once heard that this became so reflexive that somebody brought it full circle, and pitched “Die Hard in an office building.”

It’s odd that it’s taken so long to get to Die Hard at the White House, but Hollywood is making up for lost time. Just months after Olympus Has Fallen, we get another action extravaganza about an armed takeover of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down. The new film’s imitation of Die Hard is agreeably brazen. It even features an insufferably snide computer hacker, and Beethoven on the soundtrack (the Fifth Symphony here; in Die Hard it was the Ninth).

This time the attackers are an alliance of reactionaries and racists and militarist paranoiacs who despise the charismatic young black President (Jamie Foxx), who’s on the verge of pulling U.S. troops out of the Middle East. The coincidentally visiting cop this time is Channing Tatum, as a member of the Capitol Police at the White House to interview for a gig with the Secret Service. Also present is his politics-geek daughter (Joey King). The two of them manage to join a tour, and about that time D.C. blows up.

Literally. Director Emmerich, as is his wont, seems determined to outdo, in excess, previous actioners of this sort. In some movies, a fiery explosion in the Capitol dome might be the climax; here it’s the appetizer. Airplanes and helicopters plummet from the skies, motorcade vehicles chase each other across the White House lawn spewing bullets and rockets, a fire is set in the Lincoln Bedroom.

The good news is that we aren’t asked take a minute of it seriously. Aside from the fears and hatreds that motivate the attack, I wouldn’t suggest that there’s a single plausible element to this preposterous movie. The zombie epic World War Z, now in theaters, seems much more convincing. Yet somehow White House Down, unlike some of Emmerich’s other films, has a good-natured tone that makes its absurdity fun and infectious, even though, like so many action blockbusters, it’s probably at least twenty minutes overlong. I laughed and rolled my eyes at its corniness throughout, but I wasn’t bored or irritated.

Partly this is due to Emmerich’s over-the-top approach. But it’s also due to the actors, who either ham it up or keep straight faces as required—James Woods hams it up and Maggie Gyllenhaal keeps her face straight, for instance, as Secret Service officials. Jason Clarke is the most rabid of the gunmen, Michael Murphy and Richard Jenkins are in the line of succession, and Nicolas Wright is amusing as the tour guide.

At heart, though, White House Down is a buddy movie, dependent on the connection between the two stars. Fortunately, their personas blend well. Foxx seems sharp and canny, a quick study, while Tatum, proclaimed the Sexiest Man Alive last year by People magazine, seems sweetly dim as usual. The idea that the fate of the free world is in their hands is simultaneously scary, comforting and funny.