GOOD GRIEF MOON

Some February flotsam washes up in theaters this weekend...

Moonfall--In the 1987 classic Moonstruck, sweet Uncle Raymond recalls being awakened, as a young man, by the light of a huge and brilliant Moon outside his window, summoned by the power of love. "I was almost scared," he says, "like it was going to crush the house."

This story is made literal in Moonfall, Roland Emmerich's extravagant new sci-fi disaster epic. But there's more dramatic weight in Uncle Raymond's little monologue than there is in all of Emmerich's picture.

The Moon comes loose from its orbit and starts spiraling toward Earth. A young amateur scientist (John Bradley), regarded as a fringe-y nutjob, knows why: It's not a natural satellite; it's an alien construct and is hollow, and NASA has known it all along and hushed it up. He's finally able to convince a wrongfully disgraced astronaut (Patrick Wilson) and a NASA honcho (Halle Berry) that he's on to something, and the three of them end up on a desperate shuttle mission to confront an alien nanotechnology cloud that looks like a giant space moray, and put the Moon back in its place, marking months and menstrual cycles.

This isn't the first time in pop culture that the Moon has been knocked out of orbit; back in the '70s the Brit TV show Space: 1999 sent the satellite careening away from the Earth, carrying its colonists across the galaxy like an interstellar Flying Dutchman. But preposterous as that show was, it seems like hard sci-fi compared to Moonfall. This U.S.-American co-production is really, really silly. It's silly even by Roland Emmerich standards, even though he keeps recycling ludicrous ideas from his earlier films, like 2012 and Independence Day. And it's queasy at times, too, as with a couple of ass-kissy references to Elon Musk.

That said, the movie doesn't skimp; said to be among the most expensive "independent" movies ever made, it seems to get most of that money onscreen in the form of elaborate special effects and other production values. And I can't say it's boring, either. There's plenty to be said against Emmerich, but letting things drag isn't among them, even though the characters, with the moon bearing down over their heads like a Goodyear blimp, still take the time to fret about their personal problems. Emmerich just makes them fret in motion.

There is one stock figure that Emmerich should maybe consider retiring: The crackpot who knows the truth. Bradley charmingly plays the obsessed moon-watcher here (he owns a cat named "Fuzz Aldrin"). But Emmerich, who made a film a few years ago about how the Earl of Oxford was the true author of Shakespeare's plays, has used variations on the role before, like Woody Harrelson's Art Bell-style radio ranter in 2012 and Randy Quaid's cropdusting UFO abductee in Independence Day, and they've also turned up in movies by other filmmakers, like Brian Tyree Henry's character in last year's Godzilla vs. Kong.  It's an admittedly seductive stereotype, but perhaps this isn't the most auspicious moment to romanticize conspiracy theorists.

The Wolf and the Lion--In the opening of this Canadian-French family picture, we see a mother lion nursing her babies. Then we cut to a hunter loading his rifle. That's about as subtle as the direction of Gilles de Maistre, who wrote the film with his wife Prune de Maistre, gets. We are, at least, spared a graphic view of what follows.

One of the orphaned cubs gets stranded in the forest on a private island in Canada, where he's adopted by a beautiful young musical prodigy who has inherited the gorgeous place from her late grandfather. His adopted brother is a wolf pup, likewise motherless. Their foster mom names the lion "Dreamer" and the wolf, appropriately enough, "Mozart," and they bond.

Eventually the pair are separated; Dreamer to a circus and Mozart to a research facility. But our heroine's efforts to reunite them are tireless. There's some peril that smaller kids might find upsetting, but nothing that rises to the level of those opening shots.

The movie has that polished but unshakably ersatz feel that so many Canadian productions do, and the dialogue sometimes sounds like the product of Google Translate. But hey, you get to see a baby lion and baby wolf tussle and romp and smooch. Maybe that's enough for you; for long stretches of this movie, it was enough for me.

WHAT A RIOT

A bunch of openings this weekend:

Stonewall—The June 1969 riots at the title gay bar in Greenwich Village, credited with goosing the LGBT Liberation Movement into action, are wrapped in a fictitious coming-of-age story. High school senior Danny (Jeremy Irvine), who looks like Troy Donahue’s prettier little brother, flees the Midwest when his dad finds out he’s gay. Landing in New York (he has a scholarship to Columbia), he promptly falls in with the tricking, shoplifting riff raff on Christopher Street.

Danny finds acceptance from this racially and ethnically mixed rabble—especially from the nurturing, flamboyant Puerto Rican hustler Ray (the likable Jonny Beauchamp), who loves him unrequitedly—that he never got at home, but he also learns what it’s like to turn tricks and to get the crap beaten out of him by the cops. He falls for a Mattachine Society activist (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), and Ray suffers, and they’re all in the mix at the mobbed-up club that fateful night in June, a few days after the death of Judy Garland.

Directed by Roland Emmerich, this very old-fashioned movie has taken a lot of shit from LGBT commentators for the whitebread nature of the leading man, and the corniness of his story. Fair enough, maybe, but the script—credited to no less than Jon Robin Baitz, though there are thuddingly self-conscious lines that it’s hard to believe he wrote—is structurally very similar to a low-budget indie effort of the same title from 1995 (I reviewed it for Phoenix New Times), and that movie had the same gushy sentimentalities.

Emmerich’s not a director I would normally go to the wall defending, but there’s a simple energy to his work here, and the cast is lively, with the youngsters abetted by enjoyable turns from vets like Matt Craven, Patrick Garrow and Ron Perlman. Above all, the significance of the event—the startling awareness it gave to the mainstream (not to mention other gay people) that, pushed far enough, that community could fight back like any other downtrodden minority—gives the climax a charge. The movie’s very conventionality is cheering, in a way—it’s shaped to offer the protesters as heroes to a mainstream audience, and who, back in 1969, would have predicted that?

Pawn Sacrifice—Another historical episode, from just three years later: Tobey Maguire plays chess master Bobby Fisher in Edward Zwick’s intriguing chronicle, focusing on his legendary 1972 match in Reykjavik, Iceland, with Russian master Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber). I well remember what an improbably iconic figure Fisher was at that time even in the rural America where I grew up, because he was able to beat the Soviets in a field for which they particularly prided themselves. 

What most of us didn’t know at the time was the degree to which Fisher was not just a little eccentric but a full-blown, tinfoil-on-the-skull paranoid megalomaniac, bristling with ugly vitriol against communists and Jews (though he was Jewish himself) and certain he was being conspired against. He was also deeply sensitive to his environment, finding it hard to play without absolute quiet. The title, perhaps, is meant to suggest that Fisher was the pawn, his obvious mental health needs sacrificed by the U.S. for a Cold War win. 

If the script, by Steven Knight, and Maguire’s performance is to be believed, Fisher’s nuttiness didn’t quite excuse him from also being an insufferably arrogant, exasperating bastard. His chess genius apparently did, however—the people close to him, including his coach, the chess master and Catholic priest William Lombardy (Peter Sarsgaard), seemed capable of forgiving him anything, and going to any lengths to accommodate him.

It’s to Maguire’s credit that, without softening Fisher, he makes him a poignant and haunted and also comic figure as well as an infuriating one. The supporting cast helps too, especially Sarsgaard, Michael Stuhlbarg as the shady, possibly covert-intelligence-connected tournament promoter, and Schrieber. Spassky isn’t a large role, but Schrieber brings it a warm, indolent virility, like a self-possessed old tomcat, yet with the suggestion that he may have his own, less virulent streak of paranoia. 

 A Brilliant Young Mind—Though he’s far less abrasive than Maguire’s Bobby Fisher, the main character of this Brit drama suffers some of the same miseries. Nathan Ellis (Asa Butterfield) is a mathematical genius. He’s also, thanks to some degree of autism but also to a horrifying childhood trauma, a social disconnected misfit, unable to show affection even to his desperately deprived mother (Sally Hawkins).

Under the dryly sardonic tutelage of a teacher (Rafe Spall), himself a “maths” whiz as a kid but now a multiple sclerosis-afflicted pill-popper, Nathan prepares to compete for a spot in the International Mathematics Olympiad. His quest takes him to Taiwan, where a girl from the Chinese team (Jo Yang) takes a shine to him.

The movie, titled X + Y in the UK, is fiction derived from a documentary called Beautiful Young Minds by the same director, Morgan Matthews. For a while it seems like one more variation on the sports movie, sort of a Rocky for people with Asperger’s. And that would be entertaining enough as far as it went, but A Brilliant Young Mind takes a turn in its homestretch that I must admit I wasn’t expecting, and which carries it beyond the simple triumph of the underdog climax toward which it seems to be building to something far more emotionally satisfying. I don’t know how it squares with the clinical realities of this sort of condition, but dramatically it works. 

Sally Hawkins is especially fine in these last minutes, but the whole cast is strong. Spall was my favorite, but Eddie Marsan is also peppery and funny as the UK coach, and Yang is a delight as the unapologetically infatuated love interest. Butterfield (Ender in Ender’s Game) is a touching presence at the center of the movie, and a charismatic one, too—it’s believable that girls might fall for him, not in spite of his strangeness but because of it.

The Intern—This heavy-handed message comedy may do well enough at the box office, but something tells me it won’t get a ton of serious critical sympathy. It’s about as soft-edged and undemanding as movies get, with almost all of the story’s conflict kept on the margins, while the center is filled with platitudes and pleasantries. But I can’t claim I wasn’t engaged by it from start to finish.

First of all, said message—that old people are a resource society ought not to squander—is one I find myself agreeing with more heartily every year. Writer-director Nancy Meyers dramatizes this, not very urgently, by sending bored, affluent retired Brooklyn widower Ben (Robert DeNiro) to work as an unpaid intern at an exploding online shopping business founded by Jules (Anne Hathaway). In part because of strained relations with her mother, Jules is uncomfortable with older people, but Ben’s unassuming diligence and discretion quickly break through her defenses, and they bond.

That, I guess, is the second thing I liked about The Intern. Ben isn’t the father Jules always needed; the two bond as friends and colleagues. I think the third and biggest reason I liked The Intern, though, was just because of the chance to see DeNiro in a light, relaxed, funny vein. Though his character is underwritten and preposterously flawless, DeNiro himself is good company here.

Much of Hathaway’s role consists of admiring Ben’s old-school style. Jules, and presumably Meyers speaking through her, seems to regard as the biggest fault of the younger generation of men in this country their failure to wear suits and ties to work, and to carry a hankie with them in case a nearby woman needs a good cry. Strictly from an aesthetic point of view, I entirely agree, but it’s worth remembering the power structure that style symbolized. Whether Jules, or Meyers, would have enjoyed trying to build a career in the suit-and-tie world of Ben’s prime is a point The Intern doesn’t raise.

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.

WILL HE AM

Shakespeare is my favorite writer. I’m a Shakespeare buff. My experience of his work is, in a small way, as an actor & a director, & in a bigger way as a reader & an audience member. I’m not a Shakespearean scholar, in any literary or historical sense. The difference between me & most of those who question Shakespeare “The Stratford Man” as the true author of the plays attributed to him is that I know it.

Opening today is Anonymous, Roland Emmerich’s film dramatizing the notion, around since at least the 1920s, that Shakespeare was a front, & that his plays were actually written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. I wasn’t able to get to the screening earlier this week, & anyway I wouldn’t want to clutter up a movie review with a pedantic & partisan rant on this premise. So I thought I’d put the rant here, & review the movie fairly, as a movie, whenever I can get to it.

Though he seems to have been the “candidate” most in vogue for the last few years, Oxford seems like a particularly improbable alternative, even if you somehow doubt that Shakespeare could truly have written those plays. For one thing, Oxford was actually mentioned in contemporary writings, like the Palladis Tamia of Francis Meres, that also mention Shakespeare as a different person. No matter, say the “Oxfordians.” Oxford must have written Shakespeare’s works since he was, after all, an aristocrat, & good-looking & troubled, & because details of his own dramatic life can be made to line up with characters & situations in Shakespeare’s plays.

The idea is that Oxford must have had to hide the fact that he was a playwright because this would somehow have been an improper occupation for an aristocrat. This despite the fact that he was known to be a playwright—his own comedies, now lost, were reportedly good—& that this doesn’t seem to have been a secret, let alone a scandal. This despite the fact that Oxford died in 1604, roughly a decade before new Shakespeare plays stopped appearing. The Oxfordians have explanations for all this & for the rest of the comparative mountain of other evidence that associates the “Stratford” Shakespeare with the plays attributed to him.

I’ve spent a lot of time (way too much, actually) over the last few years reading articles & websites pro & con about this silly controversy, & I genuinely think it’s bullshit. & even though it doesn’t really matter—whoever wrote those plays, they’re magnificent—it still annoys me, because I think it arises, in part, from a peculiar self-loathing class snobbery.

It also partly stems from a misunderstanding of the history of the period, which leads people to believe that Shakespeare couldn’t have picked up enough knowledge to write about court matters, foreign countries, etc., the way he did. This is not unlike thinking that somebody else must have written Stephen King’s books, because after all a bumpkin from rural Maine could never have picked up a vocabulary like that, & could never have understood enough about, say, virology to have written The Stand.

Many still think of the Renaissance as a period in Merrie Olde England full of Lords & Ladies & Wenches & Squires & Peasants, & nothing very much in between. In truth, even a perfunctory reading of social history about the period shows that this whole system (never as quaint as it’s depicted anyway) was already long in decline. The really dynamic social force in Renaissance Europe was the Middle Class—and therein, I think, lies the heart of the matter.

Maybe the core of the whole authorship controversy, in all its forms, is something I’ve never seen anyone write about: a desire not to let the middle class have Shakespeare. Many people love & admire Shakespeare’s work, but just can’t bring themselves to like Shakespeare. The man who emerges from the existing record is too dull, too disappointingly conservative in his social and political beliefs, too interested in money, too litigious, & just generally too...well, middle class to be responsible for such glories.

If Shakespeare had been born to poverty but worked his way up to reknown, like Bunyan or Dickens, I don’t think it would bug people as much as the idea of a middle class guy from a small town whose Dad was a glovemaker & local politician turning into the greatest writer in English. So you get stuff about how scanty the information about Shakespeare is, but nobody points out how it’s still far less scanty than that of any other playwrights of the time except Ben Jonson & Oxford himself.

You get the line about how there’s no evidence that Shakespeare attended the Grammar School in Stratford, but they don’t point out that no records at all survive for any students there during that time, but that the children of public officials could attend for free, & Shakespeare’s father served as both an alderman & “bailiff” (mayor) in Stratford-on-Avon. Also, the grammar school in Stratford offered a Latin education that would probably have exceeded in rigor that of the average Classical Studies Major at a contemporary American college, & was steeped in the sort of Latin writers (Plutarch, Plautus, Seneca, etc.) that are the clearest influences on Shakespeare’s earlier work.

You get the nonsense about how Shakespeare couldn’t have learned French & Italian when, apart from the fact that knowledge of Latin makes both of those languages less daunting, the same publisher who printed the first editions of Shakespeare’s long poems Venus and Adonis & The Rape of Lucrece, a guy named Richard Field, specialized in publishing language manuals, especially for French & Italian (knowledge of these languages in Shakespeare’s time was as commercially valuable for a Brit as knowledge of Japanese is for a modern American). Field was also a Stratford guy of about Shakespeare’s age, & lived a few houses from him in Stratford-on-Avon as a kid; records show their fathers knew each other, & it’s believed that he & Shakespeare were friends. In other words, there are all sorts of connections between Shakespeare the Stratford “bumpkin” & Shakespeare the writer.

But above all, “anti-Stradtfordians” are never able to give a satisfactory answer to one simple question: why only Shakespeare? If you insist that detailed evidence about Shakespeare’s life is lacking, you may be right, but if that leads you to conclude that he therefore probably didn’t write the stuff that’s attributed to him, then why not apply the same standard to all the other playwrights, Christopher Marlowe very much included, about whom even less (often much less) is known. The obvious answer—and indeed, on some of the websites they flatly admit this—is that the other playwrights aren’t so dull and provinicial.

It’s true, too—Shakespeare’s politics are ass-kissingly in favor of the aristocracy & the status quo. Playwrights at the time, including some of Shakespeare’s pals, tended to be brawlers & radicals & horndogs—Marlowe died in a barfight, Thomas Kyd was jailed & tortured for “atheism and immorality” (&, ignominiously, informed on Marlowe to get out), Jonson & John Marston both got busted for their play Isle of Dogs, Jonson killed two men in duels in his life.

Shakespeare isn’t known to have done any of that sort of thing, though his wife was about three months pregnant when he married her, & there are a few gossipy stories about his womanizing. He was a careful businessman & very willing to participate in lawsuits, & he also was always careful not to piss off the powerful, all of which has made him utterly unsuitable for glamorous literary status now.

Absurdity certainly doesn't mean, of course, that Anonymous might not be a highly enjoyable movie, as was the willfully ridiculous trifle Shakespeare In Love a few years ago. That film also hinged on the gag that The Bard must have turned from his own torrid affairs, picked up his pen, & scribbled them into Romeo & Juliet & Twelfth Night. The difference is that Shakespeare In Love treated this idea as a goofy, borderline-campy romantic fiction, while Anonymous, at least in its marketing, treats the idea as an Oliver Stone-style expose.

Shakespeare’s works are so astoundingly good that it’s understandable, in a sense, that one might find it improbable & mysterious that anyone could have written them. But trying to turn the author from a social-climbing Stratfordian into a financially frustrated blueblood does nothing to solve that mystery.