COYOTE BEAUTY

Happy Friday everybody! Check out my reviews of Coyote vs. Acme..

...and Ridley Scott's The Dog Stars...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

ROME IF YOU WANT TO

 Check out my review of Ridley Scott's Gladiator II...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

SHORT PEOPLE GOT NOBODY

Opening in theaters today:

Saltburn--The title refers to the enormous, somewhat faded English country mansion in which most of the movie unfolds. But it may also suggest the proverbial pain of salt poured into a wound, as might be caused by the very sight of such a residence and the class system it represents.

Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a slight, nebbishy scholarship student to Oxford, is befriended by a classmate, the blueblood Adonis Felix (Jacob Elordi), who invites him home for the summer to the title pile of bricks in 2007. Felix's family is a fairly gothic bunch--abstracted Dad Sir James (Richard E. Grant), blithe, cordial Mom Lady Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike) and addled wreck of a sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), along with the sneering biracial American cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe). Carey Mulligan is also around as Elsbeth's nutty parasitical friend Pamela, as is Paul Rhys as the imperious butler Duncan.

Rather quickly, Oliver finds himself enmeshed with each of the family members, and drawn into the intrigues and occasional casual decadence of their isolated and mysterious lifestyle. While Oliver initially seems like an honest but in-over-his-head parvenu, like Balzac's Rastingnac or Faulkner's Ben Quick, we gradually see that he has his own wormy, calculating, opportunistic side.

This is the second feature written and directed by Emerald Fennell of 2020's Promising Young Woman. If it's a sophomore slump, that probably says more about the incisive brilliance and focus of Promising Young Woman than it does about any shortfalls of its own. The fury that charged Fennell's first film was direct and uncomplicated. Seemingly wanting to get across something more subtle and nuanced about class, Saltburn flails around a bit and sometimes feels confused, overwrought, overlong, even borderline campy.

But stick with it. It ultimately adds up to a potent piece of moviemaking, and of storytelling. Shot with hallucinatory garishness by the marvelous Linus Sandgren, the movie brings its setting vibrantly to life; there's none of the comforting stodginess of, say, Downton Abbey to it. Better, Fennell's narrative is involving. Even as we sense the influence of everything from The Shining to Risky Business, we're also pulled into investment in a yarn we haven't seen before. And she doesn't let us down; despite the movie's gratuitous thrashing about, in the end the plot snaps together to a satisfying and fairly devastating point.

Fennell also gets uniformly superb performances from her cast. Probably the wittiest and most endearing is Rosamund Pike, but Barry Keoghan, maybe the single best thing about The Banshees of Inisherin, is spectacular here, giving a tour de force turn in a role that is not only wildly mercurial on an emotional and psychological level, but also required physical fearlessness. Saltburn may end up being most remembered for literalizing a common expression for finding somebody extremely attractive, but Keoghan's draining performance makes a splash. 

Napoleon--Returning to France, uninvited, from exile in Elba, the title character is confronted with a regiment of soldiers he used to command. "I missed you," he tells them, seemingly sincerely. Soon he's back in charge.

Apparently there is some historical basis for this scene; Napoleon is said to have had a fond and comradely relationship with his troops, despite his willingness to get them slaughtered. But to the casual viewer of this Ridley Scott epic, the moment may come as a surprise. Nothing in the movie prepares us for it. Played by Joaquin Phoenix, this Napoleon shows little affection or even interest toward anyone or anything apart from himself, and a certain almost adolescent erotic fixation on Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). In between campaigns, he makes rather unromantic attempts to impregnate her, and reacts with sullen outrage when they don't succeed.

Scott's movie, based on a script by David Scarpa, is largely a pageant of carnage. It begins with a graphic depiction of Marie Antoinette's meeting with Madame Guillotine, then shows us Napoleon navigating the deadly mayhem of the Revolution and the First Republic. It then traces him from battle to battle: Toulon, Austerlitz, Moscow and some of his other greatest hits, culminating, of course, against Wellington (Rupert Everett) at You-Know-Where.

This Napoleon isn't boring. It's entirely watchable and well-staged. Scott deploys his forces with the care of a child playing with toy soldiers on his bedroom floor. But it doesn't really hit hard emotionally; something is missing from it. Early on, we see a cannonball splat into the chest of a horse, and the resulting explosion of gore is so obviously computer-generated that, for me at least, it carried little shock (it has this in common with the splatter effects in Thanksgiving, which, exhaustingly enough, I saw the same day). This sort of detached unreality hangs over the movie's horrors, and the same detachment extends to the central character. 

While Phoenix holds our attention with his movie star charisma, it's as if he's working in a vacuum. Except here and there in his scenes with Kirby's drolly unflappable Josephine, Phoenix seems to be anomic, walled off from the other characters by his own narcissistic self-regard. Maybe that's deliberate; maybe Scott is trying to dramatize the Napoleon of Walter de la Mare's unforgettable poem:

What is the world, O soldiers?

It is I.

I, this incessant snow,

This northern sky.

Soldiers, this solitude

Through which we go

Is I.

In any case, the movie has a point to make about the appetite for an autocratic "strongman" leader that seems to inevitably arise in reaction to the messiness of democratic movements. It's a theme which would, admittedly, seem to have a slight smidge of relevance to our current times. It should be noted that, warmongering megalomaniac though he was, Napoleon was also a tremendously intelligent and curious person, which puts him in a very different category than our most notable current would-be Emperor.

FORECASTING DIRECTOR

As prestige movie season approaches, Your Humble Narrator had the chance to chat about Oscar-bait movies with Lauren Gilger for this morning's edition of The Show on KJZZ...

You can listen to the interview here.

FASHION VICTIMS

 One more for 2021; still in theaters...

House of Gucci--Lady Gaga plays Patrizia Gucci in Ridley Scott's dramatization of the family turbulence leading up to the 1995 shooting of her husband Maurizio. She's deliciously ripe and amiable in the first half of the story, depicting how she and Maurizio (Adam Driver) met in Milan in the late '70s, how he was willing to renounce his fortune over the disapproval of his father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) for the marriage, and how Maurizio eventually did join the family business, helped to revive the venerable but declining brand, and engaged in internal intrigues with his Uncle Aldo (Al Pacino) and cousin Paolo (Jared Leto).

Gaga is also believable and sad, if inevitably less fun, in the second half, when Maurizio drifts away from her. She grows desperate, and, under the influence of a psychic (Salma Hayek), dangerous.

The leading lady is strong; whether that makes House of Gucci's 158 minutes worth sitting through is another matter. Scott's usual panache seemed to desert him here. The pacing is flat, and the effect is of a competent, expensive but unexciting TV movie.

Still, there's undeniable camp value in watching this star-studded cast spew their dialogue at each other, in English but with radio-comedy Italian accents. Driver makes some effort to underplay, and comes across respectably. Pacino hams away enjoyably, and Irons, who's starting to resemble the late-vintage Boris Karloff, manages some impressively suave nastiness.

The shocker is Leto, who turns the hapless Paolo's lines into aggrieved sing-song arias. It feels like he was trying to see how far he could go before Scott asked him to tone it down. Apparently that didn't happen.

BOO, RIDLEY

Opening this weekend:

Alien: Covenant—Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien was a space Gothic, a sort of Ten Little Indians with a parasitic alien replacing the mystery killer and a dank industrial spaceship replacing the creepy old mansion. There was nothing very new about the plot, but the film’s combination of gory, lowbrow shocks with Scott’s impeccably-crafted direction and the top-notch production values was a major leap forward in making the horror genre critically respectable.

Those of us who saw it in a theater back then aren’t likely to forget the experience. A junior in high school, I saw it with a group of friends, and during the celebrated scene when the baby alien popped out of poor John Hurt’s chest, the young woman next to me repeatedly pounded my right leg with her fist, leaving me with a bruise. Then the little alien let out a little squawk and scampered off, and we all howled with laughter, hysterical but also delighted.

We’d all seen gorier, grosser scenes in other horror movies before. But I don’t think we’d ever seen a scene like this made with the full force of state-of-the-art special effects and high-end designs by H. R. Giger and an award-worthy cast with the likes of Hurt and Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton and so on. It felt like a game-changer.

Then came James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens, more adventure picture than horror movie, and two more sequels, and then two films pitting the Aliens against the extraterrestrial trophy hunters from the Predator movies. In short, the svelte, fanged title characters have proven as durable a movie monster as the Wolf Man or The Mummy.

Then, in 2012, came a prequel to Alien, called Prometheus and directed by Ridley Scott. And this week we get this sequel to Prometheus, likewise directed by Scott. About the most that I can say for it is that it increases my admiration of the original.

The setting is a huge spaceship called the Covenant, headed, like the ship in last year’s Passengers, to a distant colony planet with a cargo of suspended colonists and fetuses. The small crew is woken from their decades-long snooze to deal with a flight emergency, after which they notice a much closer, much more promisingly Earthlike planet, so they make a detour to investigate.

The place initially looks like Paradise, but before long it seems more like Hell: the landing party runs afoul of, well, aliens, who look like pretty close relatives of those from the earlier movies. One supporting player after another is bloodily dispatched. They try to take refuge in the ruins of a city, where Michael Fassbender, as a leftover from Prometheus, tells them to make themselves at home, to the extent they can, “in this dire necropolis.” Love that old-fashioned hospitality.

All this may sound more intriguing than it is. The scare scenes are very gruesome, but they rely heavily on CGI effects, and while they’re unpleasant, they lack the shuddery, visceral punch of the original film’s shocks.

But even this is less problematic than the pace. Alien: Covenant is tediously, ponderously slow, burdened with unnecessary backstory and pretentious rambling dialogue.

The supporting players are mostly generic alien-fodder, but several of the leads manage to come across well despite the leaden tone. Elizabeth Waterston is touching as the bereaved but brave heroine. So is Billy Crudup as the feckless fellow who finds himself unhappily in charge, and Danny McBride lightens the mood a bit as a daring pilot.

Fassbender has a dual role, as David and Walter, earlier and later models of the same lifelike robot, so he spends much of his time playing scenes opposite himself. No actor could ask for a more rapturously infatuated scene partner, but the interminable murmured Miltonic musings that he’s been given are enough to make us long for the gore to start up again.

Also opening here in the Valley this week…

…is Lydia Tenaglia’s foodie documentary Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent, about the California Cuisine master. Check out my review of it on Phoenix Magazine online.

EGGCEPTIONALISM

The new chapter in the Alien saga, Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant, is due in theaters May 19. A poster has been released, so...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week's honoree is...

...whatever is in there, I guess...

MARS NEEDS TATERS

Opening this weekend:

The Martian—As in 1964’s excellent Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Ridley Scott’s latest maroons an American astronaut on the Red Planet and lets him figure out how to stay alive. It’s a pretty faithful adaptation of the 2011 novel by Andy Weir, a self-described space nerd who originally self-published the well-researched “hard sci-fi” tale online.

Much of the book consists of first-person narration by our hero, Mark Watney, who has been lost in a sandstorm and thought dead by his fellow astronauts during an evacuation. Watney logs his initially futile-seeming survival efforts—figuring out how to grow potatoes in lifeless Martian soil, how to reestablish communication with NASA, etc.—for posterity, along with copious whistling-in-the-dark wisecracks. When the book is the monologues of the desperate-yet-snarky Watney it’s a terrific read; later, when Weir shifts the scene to the rescue efforts back on Earth, his touch is less assured.

But The Martian is a real achievement, and first-rate movie source material, and Scott makes it convincing and absorbing. Or, rather, he creates the necessary polished setting for his leading man to make it convincing and absorbing. I heard that Matt Damon was playing the title role before I started Weir’s novel, with the result that I heard Damon’s voice in my head the whole time I was reading Watney’s narrative.

But I think I would have heard something very close to his voice anyway. There are other solid performances in the cast, especially Chiwetel Ejiofor as a NASA honcho, but this is potentially the role of Damon’s career, Jason Bourne notwithstanding. I’m not sure any part he’s played has fit his persona like a spacesuit quite like this boyish, decent-hearted yet smart-ass Tom Swift.

For all Weir’s inventiveness and storytelling flair, his book is so practical-minded that it’s a bit lacking in otherwordly wonder. Scott can help here, bringing an eerie, lonely feel to the Martian landscapes without pushing it. On the downside, he can’t resist embellishing the climactic scenes with unnecessary and hokey derring-do. It’s the movie’s only significant misstep (on its own terms), and it’s forgivable. 

The Martian does have an eccentricity, however: The cultural references are persistently retro even for our time, much less for a story set, presumably, decades from now. The mission Commander (Jessica Chastain) is a geek for ‘70s pop, so Mark is stranded with her collection of disco music and Happy Days reruns for entertainment. This leads to some nostalgic numbers for Boomers on the soundtrack, including one, over the end titles, that in context is particularly funny and apt.

A-LIEN-LIST

In honor of No Festival Required’s screening of the cool documentary Dark Star: H. R. Giger this Saturday…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s acknowledge Giger’s most famous creation, the deadly but elegant title character from Alien...

 based on his 1976 painting Necronom IV...

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.”

DID YOU HEAR THE ONE ABOUT THE POLISH ALIEN?

This week…

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let’s acknowledge the Alien in Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien, not as it appears in the movie but rather as it is expressed in this deeply strange and beautiful Polish movie poster…

A fine selection of other bizarre and wonderful Polish movie posters may be found here; I think my favorite may be the one for, of all things, Weekend at Bernie’s.