ELWES & FOREVER

Check out my short column, online at Phoenix Magazine, about "The Princess Bride: An Inconceivable Evening with Cary Elwes"...

...tonight at Mesa Arts Center.

EVERYTHING EVERY TIME ALL IN ONE PLACE

Opening wide in the multiplexes this weekend:

Here--A spot in a living room in an upscale eastern Pennsylvania suburb--that's the title locale of this latest from Robert Zemeckis. It's our static vantage point for, essentially, the whole movie, looking across the room through a picture window that offers a view of the big brick colonial-era house across the street. 

We see the view there before it was a living room--long, long before. As in, we see it during the extinction event that ended the Cretaceous Period, sixty million years ago. We see it as a woodland make-out spot for indigenous lovers (Dannie McCallum and Joel Oulette), and as a burial site. We see it as part of a dirt road leading up to the aforementioned historic manse, which once was occupied by William Franklin (Daniel Betts), estranged Loyalist son of Benjamin (Keith Bartlett).

After the house is built, we get glimpses of the lives of its early 20th-Century inhabitants, like an enthusiastic aviator (Gwilym Lee) whose wife (Michelle Dockery) frets about his flying. They're followed by a whimsical inventor (David Fynn) and his sexy flapper wife (Ophelia Lovibond). This guy is trying to perfect a reclining chair; his working title for it is "Relax-y-Boy." And we see the house's early 21st-Century occupants, an African-American family; Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird are the parents, and Anya Marco-Harris is the beloved housekeeper.

But the movie's main focus is the midcentury family that takes the place over after WWII: Dad (Paul Bettany), a combat veteran and a seething, disappointed functional alcoholic, his sweet, quietly unfulfilled wife (Kelly Reilly), and his oldest son (Tom Hanks), an aspiring artist. The son gets his beautiful girlfriend (Robin Wright) pregnant, so there goes both art school and her college dreams. They move in with the parents, and stay for decades.

So the movie packs in a lot of history (and prehistory), a lot of longings fulfilled and unfulfilled, and cultural references ranging from the Spanish flu to the Spanish Inquistion sketch from Monty Python. But I'll admit that when I realized we were going to be parked in one place for the whole thing--I went in not knowing this--I panicked for a moment.

I needn't have worried. Zemeckis has always been a skillful showman, and while the audacious experiment of Here is by no means an unqualified success, it certainly never bored me. The script, by Eric Roth and Zemeckis, is based on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, and Zemeckis employs comic-book techniques like overlapping inset panels to interweave the various timelines and bounce them off each other thematically. It's an impressive and confident exercise in narrative, and it does carry a cumulative emotional punch.

There are downsides, however. The fixed point of view means that the actors tend to seem a bit far away from us a lot of the time, and when they are brought up into the foreground it somehow feels forced. Zemeckis may have been worried about this distancing too; Alan Silvestri's music, though pretty, is ladled on a bit thicker than it should be, as if to telegraph what we're supposed to be feeling.  

Much more jarringly, though, the people in Here often have an ersatz, CGI "Uncanny Valley" look to them. The leads were taken all the way back to teenaged through some sort of real-time computer tech, and while the results are tolerable, they aren't perfected in realistic terms.

It must be admitted, however, that Hanks and Wright transcend this limitation, especially Hanks. The other actors sometimes feel like cyber-phantoms, but Hanks is so vibrant that he can project his humanity right through the program. And after Apollo 13, Castaway, Captain Phillips and Sully, it's also a relief to see the poor guy stay put.

RUNDOWN

Opening this weekend:

Blade Runner 2049—As the makers of 2001: A Space Odyssey learned, it can be risky to put a specific year into the title of a futuristic sci-fi movie. Ridley Scott’s 1982 favorite Blade Runner, set less than two decades off, in 2019, showed us a Los Angeles in which special cops of the title moniker hunt synthetic humans called “replicants” who have gone rogue. The film’s smoggy, neon-lit vision of the future was scary, but it also had a garish glamour, and accordingly it was done in the style of an old-school film noir—in its original release, it even had hard-boiled narration by Harrison Ford’s title character.

That’s the version I saw back in ’82. I remember enjoying it enormously, but it didn’t become the cultural touchstone for me that it did for so many others. I remembered it less for its plot and more for its details—Joanna Cassidy and the snake, Brion James getting a bullet in the head, William Sanderson’s little guys wandering around the Bradbury Building, Daryl Hannah doing somersaults, Edward James Olmos doing origami. I never saw any of the various director’s cuts and alternative versions that became as complicated as the quarto-versus-folio textual history of a Shakespeare play. I think I may have only seen it the one time, and in any case I hadn’t seen it in decades when I saw this sequel.

This one is set thirty-some years from now, and the glamour is gone. The environment has collapsed, California is a hazy, snowy, defoliated wasteland, and farmers raise grubs for protein. But there are still fugitive replicants, and thus still blade runners. Our title character this time is K (Ryan Gosling)—a spiritual cousin of Kafka’s Josef?—and the twisty, violent mystery he chases unfolds against backgrounds that feel almost like expressionistic stage sets.

That’s about as much of the story as I feel comfortable describing, however. After the screening I attended, a studio rep read us a lengthy list of “requests” from the filmmakers about what we mustn’t reveal, even going so far as to suggest wording to us—they seemed to want to bioengineer replicant movie reviews.

I will say that while the script, by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, shows influences ranging from Soylent Green to Logan’s Run to Cherry 2000 to Children of Men to Her to, just maybe, Kurosawa’s Ikiru, it’s ingenious and intriguing, and that director Denis Villeneuve, abetted by the great cinematographer Roger Deakins, gives the film a superb look. Villeneuve also gets strong performances, from Gosling, from Harrison Ford as Deckard, the now-reclusive hero of the first film, from Robin Wright as K’s boss, from Sylvia Hoeks as a relentless corporate operative stalking the same quarry as K, from Jared Leto as her satanic boss, and from the beguiling Ana de Armas as K’s roomie. There are startlingly erotic passages, and terrific touches of verisimilitude, like when Gosling stares in fascination at a dog, presumably a rarity in that world.

On the downside: As he showed in last year’s impressive Arrival, Villeneuve is great at generating a brooding sci-fi atmosphere. He does the same for Blade Runner 2049, but the result, this time, is that the movie is glacially paced. It feels almost an hour longer than it needs to be, and even the action and fight scenes, though often shockingly violent, feel oddly lacking in urgency. And the movie’s environmental bleakness, though marvelously realized on a visual level, also grows a bit oppressive over nearly three hours. I just wish that forecasts like this didn’t seem so plausible these days.

 

My Little Pony: The Movie—Not a whit less bizarre and immersively imagined than the Blade Runner flicks is this new animated feature realization of the Hasbro toy line from the early '80s. It centers on the relentlessly cheery equine inhabitants, mostly distaff, of Equestria, some of whom are winged, some of whom are horned, all of whom are colored like Jelly Bellies.

The story involves an incursion into the city of Ponyville by Tempest (well voiced by Emily Blunt), a sinister magical pony with a jagged stump where her unicorn horn should be. She and her minions are trying to corral four top Pony Princesses in order to steal their magic on behalf of the demonic Storm King (Liev Schreiber), in return for a restored horn.

Tempest imprisons three of the princesses, but the fourth, Princess Twilight Sparkle (Tara Strong), eludes capture. She and her friends, which include a manically upbeat pony, a fashion-and-design-obsessed pony, a Reba McIntire-ish "cowgirl" pony and a diminutive dragon, set out in search of help, with only the mysterious clue “hippo” to guide them. In the course of their quest they encounter everything from airship-borne pirates (Zoe Saldana among them) to a sly, dandified feline hustler (Taye Diggs).

For followers of the franchise, which I'm told include not just children but many adult fans, this movie may hit it out of the park, but I found it a trifle flat. The plot seems boilerplate, and with the exception of a witty line here and there so does the dialogue. The theme is the value of friendship, which is preferable, at least, to the believe-in-your-dream platitude that's usually shoved at us as the moral of this sort of movie. But the songs in which this ideal is extolled are insipid recitatives without a memorable melody in the bunch.

Well, I take that back. "Rainbow," the song that Sia co-wrote and sings at the finale, is quite pretty.  And the pony character through which she sings it has a mane that hangs down over her face. Nice touch.

I AM WHAT I AMAZON

Opening this week:

Wonder Woman—DC's pioneering superheroine finally takes the lead in a feature film with this lavish origin story, set in the World War I era. The title character, Diana by name, has grown from a feisty little girl into the impressive adult form of Gal Gadot on the secret, hidden island of the Amazons, under the watchful eye of her Mom Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen). Against Hippolyta's wishes, she's secretly trained as a warrior by her aunt, Antiobe (Robin Wright, sporting an accent to vaguely match Nielsen's and Gadot's).

One day Diana rescues daredevil American spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), who happens upon the island while escaping from the Germans. She's appalled when she learns of the ubiquity of war in the outside world, and she's convinced it's the malicious work of Ares the war god. She decides, again over Mom's objections, to let Trevor take her to the Front in Europe, where she plans to identify Ares, kick the crap out of him, and end war on Earth once and for all. She's not ambitious or anything.

With Trevor, she travels first to London and then, with a ragtag group of ethnically mixed sidekicks, to Belgium, and learns that shutting down war isn't as simple as it ought to be. She also runs afoul of various villains, among them a scarred chemist known as Doctor Poison (Elena Anaya, masked much as she was in Almodovar's superb The Skin I Live In).

Setting this movie during WWI, rather than having Wonder Woman battling the Nazis as she was originally created to do (the character debuted in the comics in 1941), initially seemed wrong to me, and there were moments where the dialogue and other details seemed off, period-wise. I'd guess that, among other reasons, the filmmakers wanted Diana to enter civilization at an even less emancipated time for her gender; they wanted her to encounter corsets and petticoats. They may also have wanted less familiar, less easily loath-able bad guys than the Nazis, so as to spread around the blame for warmongering more equitably among all humankind.

In any case, as the movie progressed my resistance to it quickly wore off. Wonder Woman isn't quite as slick as last year's Dr. Strange, but it's more touching, and like Dr. Strange, it's a non-facetious superhero flick that it's possible to wholeheartedly enjoy, almost from beginning to end. The movie is colorful and playful, even sunny at times, but better still there's a lack of cynicism to it, an openhearted, unembarrassed sense of decency and heroism that's highly gratifying after years of self-consciously "dark" comic-book sagas.

This tone is reflected in the warmth and emotional directness of Gadot's performance—she has a quick throwaway scene involving an ice cream cone that made me fall in love with her. The lack of coyness between her and Pine's Trevor is likewise refreshing. They don't tediously bicker or one-up each other.

Diana is so preoccupied with her mission that she barely seems to notice how she scandalizes the male authority figures she meets, ignoring their shock at her outspokenness as if it's too unimportant to acknowledge. And when she expresses disbelief at the matter-of-fact acceptance of war, she doesn't seem infantile, because director Patty Jenkins and the writers (Allan Heinberg among other hands) have structured the story so that we see our own civilization from her point of view.

The filmmakers grapple, while staying within a conventional template for this kind of movie, with the persistent limitation of superhero stories: The tendency to reduce all conflicts to a climactic brawl. That they don't prevail—the movie does indeed climax with a brawl, and one that's of questionable relevance to the vexing problem of the human tendency to make war not love—doesn't make the attempt any less honorable. 

Also opening in the Valley this week...

...is the historical drama Churchill, with the great Brian Cox playing the title role. I had the chance to chat with director Jonathan Teplitzky; you can read my interview on the New Times blog.

And Sunday evening at FilmBar Phoenix...

...is a showing of The Quiet Earth, the 1985 sci-fi classic from New Zealand, with an introduction and Q&A by co-writer and co-producer Sam Pillsbury. You can read my short article on this memorable flick on the Phoenix Magazine blog.

COP TO BOTTOM

The movie isn’t much fun, but Woody Harrelson is brilliant in Rampart. He plays Dave Brown, an unraveling Los Angeles cop in 1999, the height of the notorious Rampart Scandal. From the outside, Dave looks like a cocksure archetype of the LAPD at its formidable worst: Crooked, vicious, racist, arrogant, obsessively macho, reflexively self-justifying.

But Harrelson also lets us see how Dave sees himself—as a roguish, vigilante hero—& how his intensity & sexual confidence suck others, women especially, into sharing & enabling this delusion, at least temporarily. His smile is both boyish & predatory, & he speaks with a deliberate, jaunty verbosity, provided in part by James Ellroy, who wrote the script with director Oren Moverman. The movie is a bit like a west coast version of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, with a more specific psychology & social context & minus the Catholic guilt & mysticism. For better & worse, it’s Bad Lieutenant done a la Robert Altman.

Dave Brown feels that his name is too prosaic for a person as remarkable as he thinks he is, but he has a more distinctive nickname: In the department he’s called “Date-Rape,” because he coyly declines to confirm or deny having killed a man known to be a serial date rapist. Early on, we see him bully a (female) rookie & beat up a suspect, then do a full-on Rodney King to a guy who collides with his car & then flees. Later, we’re clearly shown his capacity for murder, not to mention robbery.

He justifies all this brutality with claim that he never hurts any good people. He also uses the familiar line, beloved of racists everywhere, that because he hates everybody he somehow can’t be a racist; he cites his willingness to sleep with black women as further evidence of this.

Some of the most successful scenes in Rampart, however, are concerned not with Dave’s work but with his eyebrow-raising home life. He’s been married, consecutively, to sisters (Cynthia Nixon & Anne Heche), & has one daughter with each, & they all live together, though the exes want him gone so they can get on with their lives. Despite frequent absences for sex with other women, including Robin Wright as a self-loathing lawyer, Dave refuses to move out—his role as paterfamilias is essential to his heroic self-image.

The cast of Rampart is stellar—in addition to the aforementioned, it includes Sigourney Weaver, Ned Beatty, Steve Buscemi, Ice Cube, Ben Foster & Audra McDonald—& they give fine performances, but they have the feel of cameos in a vehicle for Harrelson.

For about half the film’s length, his magnetism keeps it morbidly riveting. But Ellroy & Moverman haven’t shaped the material for a climactic payoff. We’re just expected to stare at the last few loops of this guy’s downward spiral, & it grows very tedious. Even though I felt a certain repulsed pity for Dave, I also began to strenuously wish that someone would put him out of our misery, & his own.