WHAT A PIECE OF WORK IS A MANDALORIAN

Happy Friday! Check out my review of Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu...

...now in theaters, online at Phoenix Magazine.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE; THE MOODY BLUES

Opening today:

The Housemaid--Desperate for a job, Millie, played by Sydney Sweeney, applies as a maid to a rich young housewife and Mom, Nina, living in a spacious Long Island manse. At first Nina (Amanda Seyfried) is impossibly nice, friendly and welcoming, but within a day of starting the gig, it's clear she's given to scary acting out. Her hubby Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) is both hunkalicious and solicitously apologetic for his wife's behavior, while their daughter Cece  (Indiana Elle) is aloof, to say the least. There's a creepy groundskeeper (Michele Morrone) skulking around as well, glaring at Millie but not speaking.

Also, the door to Millie's snug little A-frame garret bedroom locks from the outside, not from the inside.

All of this would be more than enough for most people to see that they should get the hell out while the getting is good on day one. But director Paul Feig and screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshire, adapting the smash 2022 novel by Frieda McFadden, give Millie understandable reasons to stay in her place. Both Nina's outbursts and the attraction between Millie and Andrew escalate.

This feels something like a contemporary spin on the "hag horror" classics of the '60s, like Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and also of later domestic thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Single White Female. Feig tightens the tension skillfully and then, in the last third or so of the film, executes a pretty good twist.

It's probably a hair longer than it needs to be, and it's hard to say how much scrutiny the plot logic could bear. But it's a polished production, the three leads are improbably pretty, and the rip-snorting gothic comeuppances of the homestretch are satisfying. I understand it's hard to get good help these days, but on balance, this Housemaid gets a good letter of reference.

Then again, before I start complaining that The Housemaid is too long, maybe I should consider it in comparison to...

Avatar: Fire and Ash--On the long list of James Cameron's strengths as a filmmaker, knowing when to quit is notably absent. Toward the end of Cameron's 1994 True Lies, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis kiss while a mushroom cloud erupts in the distance behind them. Most directors would grasp that this meant the movie was over; Cameron insisted on one last grapple on a harrier jet. He's like a little kid who wants to keep playing army when it's time to go home for dinner.

This trait--and I'm clearly in the minority for considering it a weakness--reaches an apex in this third Avatar epic, Avatar: Fire and Ash, which runs to well over three hours, well over an hour longer than Citizen Kane. It's the next clash between exploitative colonizing humans and the Na'vi, the tall, tailed, blue, holistic, new-agey inhabitants of the lush, idyllic distant world Pandora. I'd say it was the climactic clash, but apparently two more sequels are planned.

As someone who liked but didn't love the first Avatar, back in 2009, and also as one who tends to get grumpier the longer a movie runs over two hours, I must admit I wasn't the ideal target audience for this. So perhaps it carries extra weight when I say that I found it...well, too long, certainly, but still a compelling sci-fi spectacle, loaded with grand scenes that recall sources as venerable as the New and Old Testaments.

The dialogue isn't poetry ("Dude, they're fighting!") but the dialogue isn't the point; the shimmering, immersive visuals and mythic yarnspinning are what the movie is for. In the last hour or so I was fully invested; I wanted to see the good guys win and the bad guys lose.

Among many others, Sam Worthington, Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver--particularly good as a starry-eyed young Na'vi--lend their voices and motion-capture presences to the movie; Giovanni Ribisi, Jemaine Clement and Edie Falco are amusing among the humans. But easily the most striking performance is by Oona Chaplin as Varang, a hissing warrior Na'vi who sides with the earthlings against our heroes. She's fierce and seductive.

The Na'vi always remind me of blue-skinned Anne Coulters; nevertheless they have a certain glamour and sexiness. My favorite Na've trait was their ears; I love how they move expressively when they speak, or even change expression. If there was an Oscar for best ears, Fire and Ash would be a shoo-in.

IT IS ROCKET SCIENCE

Opening today:

Hidden Figures—We tend to think of NASA as part of the “New Frontier” and “Camelot” and the general unembarrassed optimistic idealism we associate, accurately or not, with the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. So it’s a slight jolt to realize that the space program, at least in its early days (then NACA, or the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics), was segregated.

It was, of course, decades before there were female or nonwhite astronauts, but in at least one facility, the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, the segregation was overt. A pool of female African-American “computers”—the term was applied to humans who performed complicated mathematical functions in those days—was relegated to a separate building and separate restrooms on the Langley campus until at least 1958.

This drama focuses on Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), who, among many other career achievements, calculated flight trajectories for John Glenn’s first orbital Mercury mission in 1962. It also depicts Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), the de facto supervisor of the department, and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae), who became an aerospace engineer.

The director, St. Vincent’s Theodore Melfi, working from a script he wrote with Allison Schroeder (based, in turn, on Margot Lee Shetterley’s nonfiction book) seems to have compressed and conflated the chronology of events here for dramatic convenience, but he gets across the essentials of this remarkable story, another in the seemingly bottomless supply of belatedly-told instances of American achievement by women and minorities, in the face of outrageous intolerance. The style is standard inspirational uplift, and the characterizations aren’t deep, but the cast—the three leads and also Kevin Costner as the Langley big boss—are vibrant enough to fill in the blanks.

The bright primary-color cinematography and the midcentury period detail are parts of what make this cinematically inconsequential movie so pleasant. Another part, I confess, is the glamour of the lead actresses—I know we’re supposed to be celebrating their intellectual and social triumphs, but as they scurry around in their pencil skirts and glasses, they also show a lot of nerd chic.

A Monster Calls—English adolescent Conor (Lewis MacDougall) lives in a lovely old country house with his adored, cancer-afflicted young mother (Felicity Jones). One night, after he and his mom have watched King Kong together, Conor receives a visit at his bedroom window from a monster; an enormous anthropomorphic tree, something like the green man of myth, who speaks in the rumbling tones of Liam Neeson.

Over the course of the film, The Monster tells Conor three odd stories of elusive meaning, something like Sufi parables, insisting that when he is done with his three, Conor must tell him a fourth story. Eventually he tells The Monster his story and, as with the end of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, his own agonized, guilty secret is revealed.

This film, directed by J.A. Bayona, is based on the much-honored 2011 children’s novel by Patrick Ness, which was based, in turn, on an idea and some notes by the late writer Siobhan Dowd. It’s a poignant, handsomely-made piece of work, with beautiful animated sequences (illustrating The Monster’s stories) and fine acting, not only by MacDougall and Jones but by Toby Kebbell as Conor’s absentee dad and Sigourney Weaver as his stern, terrified grandmother. It’s also nice to see Geraldine Chaplin, in a small but effective role as an authority figure at Conor’s school.

Above all, it has a memorable presence in the great creaking, rustling, uprooted Monster. The special effects depicting him are lovely, and it’s nice to hear that urgently authoritative Neeson voice used for something other than threatening bad guys in lurid action movies.

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.”

TO BUST THOU SHALT RETURN

Happy National Ghostbusters Day!

No, really…at least Sony says it is. There’s a new Blu-ray edition, and they’re re-releasing the film throughout the country for a week, because—get ready for this…

…Ghostbusters is thirty years old this year.

Yes, you heard right. Ghostbusters is thirty. Freaking. Years Old.

So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week the nod goes to one of the oddest giant monsters of the movies, The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters’ climactic scenes, here seen visiting The Today Show on the occasion of Al Roker’s birthday...

He seems cheerful—perhaps somebody followed Bill Murray’s conciliatory strategy with regard to him: “He’s a sailor, he’s in New York; we get this guy laid we won’t have any trouble..."

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.