PTA MEETING

Opening this weekend:

One Battle After Another--The erotic power of revolutionary violence is the initial theme of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest. Set in a strife-torn, more or less contemporary U.S., it follows the exploits of "The French 75," an SLA-like cadre who liberate immigrant detainees and blow up communication towers and banks and the like.

A French 75 operative known as Perfidia Beverly Hills (the goddessy, imperious Teyana Taylor), finds political mayhem an aphrodisiac; she's desperately turned on whenever her sheepish explosives expert squeeze "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) is about to blow something sky high. Her seditious salaciousness isn't limited to Calhoun, however, but also to her enemy, the reactionary Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn)--there's a loathing sexual tension between them the second they meet, at gunpoint.

Anderson's strange saga, very loosely derived from Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (much like There Will Be Blood was vaguely inspired by Upton Sinclair's Oil!) soon fast-forwards seventeen years. The theme then shifts from uncontrolled libido to domestic complacency. Perfidia is long out of the picture, and Calhoun, now known as "Bob Ferguson," is living incognito and raising the teenaged Willa (Chase Infiniti) in an A-frame in Colorado.

Bob learns that he, and Willa, are again targets of the forces of Lockjaw, who's trying to gain membership in an order of wealthy old white guy racists, the "Christmas Adventurers." The French 75 start getting the band back together to protect Willa, but after years of sitting on the couch smoking weed, Bob finds his revolutionary chops are rusty. Besides, he's forgotten all the passwords.

A wild and blood-soaked cat-and-mouse game ensues across the west. Bob and Willa's allies range from radical nuns to a native tracker to Sergio, a relaxed but capable martial arts sensei and immigrant underground railroad conductor played by a scene-stealing Benicio del Toro. The action is often laugh out loud funny, and though the comedy is grim and splenetic, these characters are weirdly endearing.

Partly this is because DiCaprio, Penn, del Toro and others are about as good here as they've ever been. But it's also because Anderson puts them through standard action movie paces--gunfights, rooftop scrambles, interrogations, and one of the more original, woozily effective car chases in some time--but they execute them like real human beings, fumbling in uncertainty. "Tom Cruuuuuise!" Sergio crows at one point, trying to encourage Bob to some derring-do, and it's a funny yet rueful reminder of the contrast between what we're capable of and what the movies have taught us we should be capable of.

If there are real-life revolutionary groups in the style of The French 75 of any significance currently active in this country, I haven't heard about them. But One Battle After Another still has the ring of emotional truth. It all may seem crazy, but it sure doesn't seem nearly as outrageous and improbable as it would have, say, ten or twelve years ago.  Like Ari Aster's recent Eddington, this is a flailing, angry satirical portrait of where we are emotionally right now. But unlike Eddington, it gives us characters we can root for rather than just pity.

Eleanor the Great--Like last year's Between the Temples, this one is about an elderly woman connecting with a younger person, and preparing for a very belated Bat Mitzvah. June Squibb the Great plays the title character, a sassy 90-something widow who moves in with her daughter (Jessica Hecht) in New York after many years in Florida when her beloved longtime roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) passes on. 

Eleanor accidentally wanders into a Survivors Support Group at the Jewish Community Center, and finds herself telling everyone about her experience during the Holocaust. Nina (Erin Kellyman), a young journalism student who's there observing, understandably latches onto it as a great story, and she and Eleanor quickly bond as friends. The trouble is that the story isn't really Eleanor's; it's Bessie's. Eleanor is from Iowa; she converted to Judaism when she married.

It's clear that Eleanor's impulsive act isn't just angling for attention; she's trying to keep Bessie's story, which she never told anyone else, from fading away. Nina is deeply bereaved over the recent death of her mother, and her father (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a famous TV journalist, has been distant from her since the loss. But he takes an interest in the story, and pretty soon poor Eleanor is in over her head.

This peculiar but painfully plausible comedy-drama marks the directorial debut of Scarlett Johansson. Her work is crisp and proficient, but the script, by Tory Kamen, is unsteady; the attempt to pull everything together toward the end doesn't quite come off. None of this, however, is an impediment to the indomitable Squibb, whose fearless, direct performance transcends any shortcomings in the material, as she did in last year's similarly uneven Thelma. And despite the unsavory tension behind the situation, her scenes with the excellent young Kellyman have a sweet hum.

The intriguing film programs at Scottsdale's Western Spirit Museum probably don't get as much notice as they should. The movies are free with museum admission; $10 for just the movie.

The current series is Robert Rodriguez: Sinema Sin Fronteras. The next selection by the Texas auteur, the charming Harryhausen-esque fantasy Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams, shows at 2 p.m. this Sunday, September 28. It's followed by Once Upon a Time in Mexico at 6 p.m. Wednesday, October 1; Spy Kids 3: Game Over at 2 p.m. Sunday, October 5; the vampire yarn From Dusk till Dawn at 6 p.m. Wednesday, October 8, and the bloody actioner Machete, starring Danny Trejo, at 6 p.m. Wednesday, October 22.  

The Spy Kids flicks are great for children; the evening Rodriguez movies are decidedly for grown-ups. Go to westernspirit.org for details.

TROUBLE WITH THE CARVE

Opening this week:

Thanksgiving--Slasher movies of the '70s and early '80s were often holiday-themed. Black Christmas, Halloween, My Bloody Valentine, Silent Night, Deadly Night, New Year's Evil and April Fool's Day are all examples, while Friday the 13th and Happy Birthday to Me, though not strictly about holidays, are still tied to special dates and the convenient unity of time they provide. But Thanksgiving was somehow the major holiday the genre seemed to miss.

There actually were a couple of little-remembered attempts--Home Sweet Home in 1981 and Blood Rage in 1987. But neither seemed to count, perhaps because they didn't use the holiday in the title, or perhaps because they didn't sufficiently exploit the gruesome possibilities offered by the day's rituals. Whatever else may be said about it, the newly-made but self-consciously old-school slasher picture Thanksgiving works hard to include every classic Turkey Day trope.

A shoppers' riot and stampede at a store that shouldn't be open on Thanksgiving leads to bedlam and grisly death in a small Massachusetts town. "One Year Later"--as a subtitle traditionally informs us--a figure in the mask and garb of a Pilgrim skulks around exacting vengeance on those deemed responsible for the disaster. Everything eventually converges in a ghastly sit-down dinner.

The film traces its inception back to 2007, when two movies, the Robert Rodriguez shocker Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino's stunt thriller Death Proof, were released as a double feature under the joint title Grindhouse. In and around the two features, the show included several "fake trailers" for fictitious grindhouse-style movies. Two of these have already wagged the dog as the basis for real features, Machete (2010) and Hobo With a Shotgun (2011); Thanksgiving marks the third.

Directed by Eli Roth, the Thanksgiving trailer in Grindhouse captured the nastiest, most low-rent atmosphere of a vintage gore movie, complete with scratched, faded footage, some really sleazo shocks, and the smarmy, glottal tones of the narrator (Roth himself?). You could almost believe it wasn't a put-on.

The new feature, directed by Roth from a script by Jeff Rendell, doesn't try for this level of faux-authenticity. The setting is contemporary, the budget clearly comfortable, and cell phones and social media figure prominently in the plot. But the movie still has a nice old-fashioned pace and structure and flavor, and the nostalgia of this is much of what makes it unsavory fun.

I'll admit that in recent years I've largely lost my stomach for slasher flicks. Moreover, I thought Roth's 2002 debut feature Cabin Fever was an interesting misfire at best, and I took a pass on his 2005 torture flick Hostel. But he strikes an affectionate tone here, and he employs techniques that distance us from compassion for the victims. Most simply and effectively, he makes many of them, especially the early ones, deeply and amusingly unsympathetic.

The cast is livened up by some veterans, like Patrick Dempsey, Rick Hoffman and Gina Gershon, and the "final girl" (Nell Verlaque) has a lovely presence, and unlike so many heroines back in the day, she fights back, resourcefully and successfully. It was also great to see Lynne Griffin, the first victim from 1974's Black Christmas--and the Hamlet figure in the Bob and Doug McKenzie movie Strange Brew--in a bit here.

Most notably, the film keeps it light. As with two other movies from earlier this year, Cocaine Bear and Renfield, Thanksgiving goes in for extreme, over-the-top splatter effects, and they aren't scary, nor do they seem meant to be. They aren't even all that gross. There's no visceral substance to them; the bodies of the victims go to pieces like gingerbread men, and the effect, seemingly deliberate, is cartoonish slapstick. We're about as likely to take their suffering seriously as that of Wile E. Coyote.

Maybe it's how entertainment like this works best: as a sort of anarchic Punch and Judy show, using humans instead of puppets. Like Thanksgiving dinner, it wouldn't be healthy to consume this sort of thing every day, but about once a year, it can hit the spot.

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.