TRACK STAR

Opening this weekend:

Bullet Train--Brad Pitt plays one of several professional assassins riding the title vehicle on an overnight zip from Tokyo to Kyoto. Dubbed "Ladybug" by his dispatcher (Sandra Bullock), he's a lethal fellow with mad fighting and weapons skills, but he regards himself as a magnet for bad luck, and he's weary of his career and wants more positivity in his life.

This is Pitt in frumpy, glamor-debunking mode, decked out in a bucket hat, drab jacket and sneakers, with horn-rimmed nerd glasses. His manner is pleasant and unassuming; a central joke of the movie is that Ladybug clearly has no wish to hurt anyone. Pitt is very good company here, in the way that only a veteran movie star can be, and as a model for action movie heroes to come I heartily approve.

There are other strong actors here--Aaron Taylor-Young and Brian Tyree Henry as a team of bickering Brit killers, Hiroyuki Sanada and Andrew Koji as father-and-son assassins, Benito A Martinez Ocasio as a vengeful Mexican hit man, Zazie Beetz as a deadly concessions peddler, Joey King as a schoolgirl type with secrets, all chasing a briefcase McGuffin and trying to avoid the wrath of a shadowy Russian gangster known as "The White Death," not mention a pesky (if rather sweet-faced) boomslang snake on the loose. A few big names turn up in amusing cameos.

Yet all of this creditable work doesn't quite add up to a satisfying movie. Directed by David Leitch from a script by Zak Olkewicz adapted from a Japanese novel by Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train feels like an exercise in nostalgia; it's like one of the innumerable '90s-era knockoffs of Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez or (especially) Guy Ritchie, full of savage yet "ironic" facetious violence and whip pans and cute but bloody flashbacks and characters engaging in detailed discussions of pop culture (Thomas the Tank Engine in this case).

It's well-crafted and perfectly watchable, as long as you aren't too squeamish. But for me, it lacked any real emotional stakes, and the homestretch grows overblown and tediously overextended. Compare it to 2018's underrated Bad Times at the El Royale, another faux-Tarantino throwback that had the same tongue in cheek, but a bit of heart in its chest as well.

Now on Prime  Video:

Thirteen Lives--It's the story of a rescue mission with the number thirteen in the title, and it's directed by Ron Howard. That's a pretty solid recipe for success.

In June of 2018 twelve members of a youth soccer team and their coach went on an outing into a cave in a provincial mountain park in northern Thailand. An unexpected early monsoon hit after they went in, the paths quickly filled up with water, and the boys were trapped, more than two miles into the narrow, twisty passages. The rescue efforts that followed over the next three weeks included participants ranging from Thai Navy Seals to U.S. Military to Brit rescue divers to a Bangkok-based engineer who figured out how to divert rainwater from sinkholes on the mountain, into the agricultural fields below. The movie asserts that more than 5,000 people from 17 countries pitched in.

Howard focuses on the Brits, nicely underplayed played by Colin Farrell, Viggo Mortensen and Tom Bateman, and an Australian diver, played by Joel Edgerton, who was called in because of the specifics of his medical background. Like Howard's best film, Apollo 13, this is a fairly deep dive (sorry about that) into the technical difficulties of the operation, and this attention to detail adds to the suspense rather than dragging on the pace.

The movie's a bit of a harrowing ordeal at times, especially for those of us with a claustrophobic streak, but it's just about impossible not to invest in it emotionally. And while it's inspiring, it may also leave you a little exasperated with our seeming inability to work together for the common good when it's not such an obviously urgent crisis. What a pity it's so hard for us to remember that, in the end, all humankind is one big Thai soccer team, hoping to get out of our respective caves.

TENOR MERCIES

Happy Friday everybody! Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, reviewing Ron Howard's Pavarotti...

...as well as the drama Katie Says Goodbye...

Happy Father's Day next weekend. Check out my "Four Corners" column, also online at Phoenix Magazine, with some suggestions that Dad might enjoy.

FLYING SOLO

Opening this week:

Solo: A Star Wars Story--Fair warning: I'll try to keep what follows free of significant "spoilers," but if you want to go in with no foreknowledge whatsoever, stop reading now.

For those still reading: This one, set years before the events of the original 1977 Star Wars, is an origin story for dashing pilot Han Solo, played back then by Harrison Ford, and arguably the best-loved character in the franchise. When we meet Han, played here by young Alden Ehrenreich, he's a runaway who has fallen into a Dickensian life of street crime on a dreary industrial planet, in servitude to a sort of giant tomato worm (with beautiful diction).

He escapes, albeit at a painful price, and we're shown his first meetings with Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and his beloved spaceship the Millennium Falcon. Han and Chewie fall in with a gang of space bandits including Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton and a little multi-armed dude voiced by Jon Favreau, who are working for odious crime boss Paul Bettany and his beautiful consigliere Emilia Clarke. The gang, along with Lando and a revolutionary-minded robot (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) end up on another crazy, daring exploit.

As an audience member, I may be in an unusually fortunate position where Star Wars is concerned. I've always liked Star Wars, liked it a lot, really, but it was never the gold standard of entertainment for me. Probably because I came to it as a teenager rather than as a child, I never had the emotional investment in the franchise that so many in the generation after me did (and that I have in, say, Star Trek), so I can take pleasure in the movies on their own merits, and if something feels a little off to me, it doesn't seem like a desecration.

Within that context, I found Solo very authentic, and enjoyed it thoroughly. The credited director is Ron Howard, who reportedly took over late in the shoot, after the directing team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were fired (they're credited as executive producers). Whoever's work predominates in the finished product, it has that inimitable Star Wars feel, with one possible exception: It's a bit dark, in the literal sense, especially early on. To emphasize the grittiness of Han's background, the initial planets we visit are on the gray, overcast, or even downright murky side. While this is appropriate enough to the story, the loss of some of the color and visual vibrancy we expect from a Star Wars movie mutes the effect a bit.

That's about as much of a criticism as I can muster. Solo is a rambling, rollicking space opera, with all the chases and dogfights and shoot-outs and monsters and double-crosses and noble sacrifices one could wish for, supported by a truly engaging cast.

Ehrenreich, who jumped off the screen a couple of years ago as the cowboy star in the Coen Bros. comedy Hail, Caesar!, is even better here as the cocksure but likable Han. He has a no-kidding movie star's face, and dare I say it, I thought he came across here as less aloof, more openhearted than the young Harrison Ford did in the original film (Ford grew much warmer as an actor as he matured). Ehrenreich and Suotamo, the Finnish basketball player who takes over the role of Chewbacca from Peter Mayhew, generate an easy and touching rapport from their first scene together.

Glover channels the suavity of Billy Dee Williams as Lando, and adds a welcome touch of comic vanity and youthful overconfidence. Clarke has the English hothouse-flower charm that seems to recur so often among the leading ladies in the series in recent years, Bettany's bad guy has an unctuousness that's very easy to hate, and the brash line readings of Waller-Bridge are amusing. Best of all among the supporting cast, though, is Harrelson as the wearily cynical leader of the bandits: In the midst of all this Buck Rogers silliness, he manages to create a complex character.

Part of the credit for this must go to the dialogue, by the father-and-son team of Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan, with its touches of humane anti-authoritarian idealism, little riffs on loyalty and selflessness that pop up here and there as if smuggled in. If the movie was made in the '50s, you wouldn't surprised to learn that the script was the work of some blacklisted writer, toiling behind a front.

Always at the Carlyle--George Clooney, Wes Anderson, Anthony Bourdain, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Goldblum, Tommy Lee Jones, Paul Shaffer, Condoleezza Rice, Fran Leibowitz, Lenny Kravitz, Bill Murray: These are just some of the famous people who gush to the camera in this documentary about the tastefully swanky Deco hotel at 76th Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan. What's striking is how the Carlyle's staff, the maids and waiters and bell captains and elevator operators, and maybe especially the august yet sportive concierge Dwight Owsley, don't really come across as any less glamorous than the stars they serve.

These staffers are asked, from behind the camera, to share juicy stories of what they may have witnessed working at the hotel, opened in 1930 and the haunt of movie stars and rock stars and presidents, of Princess Di and JFK and Jackie O and Jack Nicholson and Michael Jackson and Woody Allen and Warren Beatty and famed resident Elaine Stritch. Again and again they refuse to gossip, citing the place's long-held tradition of discretion. Director Matthew Miele turns their tight lips into a running gag, but the result is that we don't get any really juicy stories in the length of the movie.

Well, Alan Cumming gives an account of how he obtained a nude photo of himself and two other people for an album cover in the entrance of the Carlyle in the middle of the night. And we're told that Our Current President visited the hotel, and was heard to say "This place is a joke." That's about as indiscreet as things get.

Still, this is a well-made, sometimes amusing hour and a half, with some wonderful music (we hear both Bobby Short and Eartha Kitt perform). But it was hard for me to escape the sense that what I was watching was less a movie than a commercial for very rich people. A frequent (non-celebrity) guest tries to tell us that the appeal of the Carlyle, with room rates running in the tens of thousands of dollars, "has nothing to do with money." Rather, she says, it's "the human touch" it provides. Bourdain tries a similarly disingenuous line, noting that the place could probably be even more profitable if the management abandoned its old-school attention to luxurious detail.

Against this is Jon Hamm, who offers a few respectful remarks about the place in a strangely uneasy manner, then snorts when asked if he's ever stayed there. "You could pay for somebody's school for a year," he says. At that moment he became, for me, the hero of the movie.

THE INFERNO CROWD

Opening this weekend:

Inferno—A darkly visionary geneticist has developed a virus to wipe out half of the world’s population, thus solving, or at least postponing, the overpopulation crisis. “Symbologist” Robert Langdon scampers around Florence in the company of a pretty young English doctor, trying to find where the bug is stashed. Agents of the World Health Organization and of a super-secret and lethal security firm chase them from landmark to landmark, led by clues encoded in Botticelli’s illustration of Dante’s version of Hell.

This is the third movie directed by Ron Howard and featuring Tom Hanks as Langdon, based on the fourth of Dan Brown’s syntax-challenged Langdon novels. The first film, 2006’s The Da Vinci Code, was on the limp side; the second, 2009’s Angels & Demons, was feverishly entertaining.

Happily, Inferno takes after its immediate predecessor. Screenwriter David Koepp, who wrote the adaptation, brings a bit more bite and wit to the dialogue than Brown is able to muster, and Howard keeps the action flying from one James-Bond-worthy exotic locale to another, pretty close to non-stop. The cast is full of attractive sorts like Felicity Jones, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, Ben Foster and, perhaps most memorably, Ana Ularu as a chic and scary motorcycle-borne assassin.

Best of all is Hanks, who as in Angels & Demons spends his footage belting out exposition on the fly, like a tour guide way behind schedule. Giving him temporary amnesia and a bleeding head wound just adds to the fun.

These are silly stories, to be sure, steeped in the thudding, reductive literalism and reticular paranoia of Brown’s response to Renaissance masterpieces. But it’s hard—for me, anyway—to resist a movie hero who’s a pedantic middle-aged know-it-all.

Christine—The title refers not to Stephen King’s demonic Plymouth Fury, but to Christine Chubbuck, a Sarasota, Florida news reporter who made a grim kind of TV history when she shot herself on the air in July of 1974. In her final statement, she said her action was “…in keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts…” The incident has long been thought to be part of Paddy Chayefsky’s inspiration for Network.

If a movie on this subject sounds like a bummer to you, you aren’t wrong. Directed by Antonio Campos from a script by Craig Shilowich, Christine is bitterly sad, often heartbreaking. It’s not a movie I’d be likely to watch again, but I’m glad I saw it once, because it’s also superbly done—measured, rich in convincing period detail, compassionate, free of tawdriness.

The key to its success is the talented, underutilized Rebecca Hall, who makes an award-worthy tour de force of the title role. With her long, stricken face, and speaking in the sort of flat Midwestern honk that Brits love to give Americans, she creates a portrait of a highly intelligent and decent-hearted person excruciatingly shut out from enjoying the common pleasures of life.

It seems almost certain that Chubbuck suffered from chronic mental (and physical) illnesses, along with ongoing romantic and sexual frustration and other personal disappointments. Given the understanding of such afflictions at the time, a happy outcome for her was probably a long shot. But her chosen field was no help, and it’s this that makes Christine trenchant rather than gratuitous.

Are many leisure activities more unsavory than watching local TV news? The sensationalism of the stories, and the deliberately dumbed-down insipidity and editorial timidity with which they’re presented, are queasy enough to watch; the effect of working in that world on a person of serious sensibility who wanted to do worthwhile journalism—and who was still vain and ambitious enough to want success—is awful to contemplate.

Throughout the film we hear the great national stories of the time—the aftermath of Watergate, Ford pardoning Nixon, etc—as a backdrop to Chubbuck’s lurid or fluffy stories at the beginning of the “If it bleeds, it leads” era in local TV coverage. Her struggle to keep her dignity in an undignified industry—ending in utter failure, as she herself became part of the bloody spectacle—makes Christine tragic.

The Pickle Recipe—On a lighter note...

Joey (Jon Dore), a Detroit wedding and bar/bat mitzvah entertainer badly down on his luck, is enlisted by his shady uncle (David Paymer) to filch the fiercely guarded secret recipe for the incomparable pickles made by his Grandma (Lynn Cohen). Joey agrees, goes to work as a lowly "assistant busboy" in Grandma's deli, and gradually bonds with the diverse staff, all the while coming up with wacky schemes to get his hands on the precious recipe.

This comedy, directed by Michael Manasseri from a script by Sheldon Cohn and Gary Wolfson, bogs down in overcomplication and heavy-handed sentiment at times, especially toward the end. But the performances are strong, and there's a pleasant energy to the affair, driven along by rousing klezmer on the soundtrack. Dore is agreeable in the lead, and it's great to see the veteran Cohen, remembered from Sex in the City and as a judge on many episodes of Law and Order, get a juicy showcase role all to herself as the loving but cantankerous Grandma.

You might want to have some good kosher dills ready in the fridge for when you get home from this one.

WHALE TALE, HOLY GRAIL, HITCHCOCK HAIL

Opening this weekend:

In the Heart of the Sea—In 1820, the Nantucket whaler Essex was attacked by a sperm whale in the Pacific, thousands of miles west of South America. It sank, and the crew went through hell and resorted to extreme measures to stay alive. Ron Howard has tried to turn Nathaniel Philbrick’s acclaimed 2000 account of this awful trip, one of the inspirations for Moby-Dick, into a psychologically and spiritually fraught adventure in its own right.

As usual with Howard, it’s a well-made movie with many rousing scenes. The whale effects are mostly very good and convincing, and the actors do solid, respectable work. But the movie doesn’t come off, overall.

Chris Hemsworth plays Chase, the first mate, at Melvillian odds with the haughty novice Captain, Pollard (Benjamin Walker, nicely restrained in a thankless role). The product of a venerable whaling family, Pollard resents the effortless seamanship of Chase, the son of a “landsman.”

This conflict becomes moot when a huge, patchy-white sperm whale decides to go Zidane on the hull of the Essex. I must confess that I enjoyed the leviathan’s vengeance more than anything else in ITHOTS. I felt good for the beast, much the way one might feel good for Charles Bronson in a Death Wish movie.

I found it hard to sympathize with whalers, not because they weren’t courageous and skillful but because I brought a 21^st-Century sense of their enterprise as an environmental atrocity into the movie with me. I realize that this response is pious hindsight, and that our age doesn’t have any real right to feel superior about how we light our cities, that indeed in the grand scheme of things it’s probably a far greater blight on the planet than hunting a few sea mammals to the brink of extinction. It may come down to Orwell’s observation in “Shooting an Elephant”: “Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.”

But whatever the reason, it interfered with my enjoyment of ITHOTS. I think Howard and screenwriter Charles Leavitt anticipated it too. They’ve toned down the horror wrought by the Essex crew, omitting, for instance, their ecologically disastrous visit to the Galapagos, and giving Chase’s final encounter with the whale an ambiguity that falls flat as drama. Melville turned this story into an astonishing, exasperating myth, an allegory that transcends and almost reproaches the very idea of allegory. But ITHOTS is just one more story about The One That Got Away.

Opening this weekend at Harkins Valley Art in Tempe:

Don Verdean—Sam Rockwell plays the title character, an evangelical archaeologist who claims to have unearthed such relics as the shears used to cut Samson’s hair. Bankrolled by a preacher (Danny McBride) anxious over his dwindling flock, Don travels to Israel in search of the skull of Goliath. Under pressure from his patron, and abetted by his unscrupulous local digger Boaz (Jermaine Clement), Don, who sincerely wants to save souls, gradually succumbs to the temptation to fake this discovery. Of course, things only get wackier and worse from there, as Don and Boaz eventually agree to provide a buyer with the “Holy Grail of Biblical artifacts,” which is, of course, the Holy Grail.

This is the latest from Jared Hess of Napoleon Dynamite, again from a script co-written with his wife Jerusha. As with their other post-Napoleon films, Nacho Libre and Gentlemen Broncos, it’s seriously uneven. The Hess touch, so to speak, is all about awkward pauses and fitful, off-kilter bursts of slapstick action, and when it works it’s punishingly funny, and when it doesn’t, it just hangs there on the screen, not working.

The acting is terrific, however. McBride and Will Forte ham it up a bit more than they have to as the rival preachers, but Clement takes the opportunity, as he did in Gentlemen Broncos, to deploy another shamelessly silly accent. Amy Ryan gives us so much subtext as Don’s adoring assistant that she’s almost too touching for the farcical tone.

And as usual, Rockwell is a marvel. His Don hides his poker face behind a thick beard, speaking in a firm, sober drawl—he sounds like George W. Bush mixed with Johnny Cash—and authoritatively puts everyone at ease. In their ridiculous way, Rockwell and Hess offer a plausible, even somewhat affectionate portrait of how a decently-intentioned person could allow himself to be corrupted.

Opening this weekend at Harkins Shea:

Hitchcock/Truffaut—This documentary is both a film version of and a tribute to the famous 1966 book-length interview of Alfred Hitchcock by the young Francois Truffaut. Familiar to just about every film geek of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the tome is credited with helping to change the perception of Hitchcock as a talented craftsman and entertainer to that of an artist.

Thus the movie, directed by Kent Jones, features talking heads ranging from Wes Anderson to Richard Linklater to Kiyoshi Kurosawa to Martin Scorcese, talking not only about how much they love Hitchcock and Truffaut but also about how much they loved the book. We get clips from the movies, and audio clips of the interviews, and a little narration, by Bob Balaban.

So what’s not to like? Nothing; it’s a fine way to spend 80 minutes. But as with the best documentaries about cinema, it’s an appetizer—it leaves you hungry for whole movies.

CLINT TRAP

Check out my list, on Topless Robot, of Clint Howard coolness.

No further inducement than the name “Clint Howard” should be necessary.

VATICAN-DO ATTITUDE

“What a relief, the symbologist is here.”

Thus sneers a haughty Vatican bigshot when he beholds Tom Hanks as the professor hero in Angels & Demons. This was by no means the only time that the film made me laugh out loud, but I think it may have been the only time it did so intentionally.

A sequel to 2006’s The Da Vinci Code, and directed, like that film, by Ron Howard, the movie was a much better time than I expected. The Pope officially steps down tomorrow; if you’d like to mark the occasion with a tale of wild Vatican intrigue, this could be your choice.

Da Vinci Code was well-made but silly and a little slow; Angels & Demons is no less silly but is furiously fast-moving and sometimes surprisingly gruesome. It involves the Catholic Church and the Illuminati and the kidnapping of four Cardinals and a plot to blow up the Vatican right in the middle of a Conclave, using a fragment of anti-matter purloined from the CERN laboratory in Switzerland as the explosive.

Hanks’ symbologist rides to the rescue at the request of the Vatican cops, and follows a string of clues conveniently planted around Rome in Bernini’s sculptures. Hanks takes a deep breath at the beginning and pounds through his movie-star duties here with an award-worthy straight face, belting out exposition on the fly.

Aiding him is a gorgeous CERN physicist, played by Ayelet Zurer, who shows a solid grasp of such other disciplines as pathology and Renaissance art whenever the plot requires—she’s a bit like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. I liked her a lot. Rounding out the cast are Ewan McGregor, as a fresh-faced young priest, Armin Mueller-Stahl as a cold-fish old cardinal, Stellan Skarsgaard as the chief of the Swiss Guard and the very cool-looking Pierfrancesco Favino as the Vatican police inspector.

Crazy and headlong throughout, Angels & Demons chucks any pretence of credibility in its last twenty minutes or so, climaxing in a chaos of helicopter ascensions and explosions and immolations. It’s quite absurd, but Howard kept me happily entertained throughout.

Like Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons is an adaptation, of course, of a best-selling novel by Dan Brown. How faithful it is, I can’t say, because I was completely satisfied, and felt no need to press on, after reading Brown’s stunning first sentence: “Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and knew it was his own.”

Really? He was a physicist? How interesting. I wonder what made him decide to choose physics as a career? I wonder how the lifelong study of the laws of the physical universe molded his outlook on life? Also, why was his flesh burning?