NATURAL HORN KILLERS

In the multiplexes this weekend:

Death of a Unicorn--Paul Rudd plays Elliot, a lawyer, who is enroute to the home of his megarich employers, where he's on the verge of a massive promotion. With him is his sullen daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega), perfectly well aware that she's being used as a prop to show what a good family man Elliot is, to help him clinch the deal. They're both still bereaved over the recent death of his wife.

Driving up a mountain road to the remote home, Elliot hits and injures what appears for all the world to be a baby unicorn. Just as the creature is establishing a psychic bond with Ridley when she touches its horn, Elliot bashes it in the skull, meaning to put it out of its misery, and also to get the hell to the meeting for which he's already late.

They carry the body to the palatial home in the back of their rental SUV, but if you guess that their encounter with single-horned magical equines isn't over, you'd be right. The movie takes off from its literal-minded opening into a satire of the wealthy, their bottomless capacity to self-justify, and the similar capacity for toadies like Elliot or the rich family's manservant Griff (the excellent Anthony Carrigan)--to justify enabling them. The employers, you see, are in the pharmaceutical biz, and they--Dad Richard E. Grant, Mom Tea Leoni and cloddish son Will Poulter--soon realize that the creature's horn is a virtual panacea offering a cure for cancer, among other miraculous properties.

Written and directed by Alex Scharfman, Death of a Unicorn is strikingly funny and exciting. It also carries a tinge of sourness, but this is true of most satires. Rudd's obsequious, cowardly character is deeply unlikable for much of the film's length, but this is offset because, of course, Rudd himself is one of the most naturally likable actors on the planet.

In the same way, Scharfman offsets the (justified) bitterness of the satire with monster-movie elements--even some gore--and a dash of New Age mysticism. And he plays fair by the rules of these genres. It's also nice to see unicorns rescued from My Little Pony-style cutesy insipidity, and depicted as badass.

The Penguin Lessons--From horned horses to flightless birds: here's the second movie in less than a year set in South America and based, however loosely, on the real-life friendship between a foundling penguin and a bereaved aging man. Last summer we got My Penguin Friend, with Jean Reno. Despite Reno's undeniable star presence, some gorgeous scenery and the endearing title character, this new effort is a big improvement.

Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, a cynical, lazy, emotionally shut-down English professor at a private school for upscale Argentine boys in Buenos Aires in 1976. On a weekend in Uruguay, he's walking on the beach with a beautiful woman he's met dancing, and they come upon an oil-slicked Magellanic penguin. 

Mostly to impress the woman, Michell takes the poor creature back to his hotel and they clean him up. Things don't work out with the woman, but Michell finds himself stuck with the penguin, smuggling him back into the school and trying to keep him a secret from the strict Headmaster (Jonathan Pryce). Eventually the bird, dubbed "Juan Salvador Gaviota"--the Spanish name of Jonathan Livingston Seagull--becomes a classroom teaching aid and a beloved mascot.

Juan Salvador also triggers a spiritual reawakening in Michell, who connects through him with the family of a cleaning lady at the school. The Junta has just taken over, and people are being "disappeared" off the street in broad daylight; Michell finds himself unable to remain apolitical.

Despite a couple of Monty Python references early on--the Pythons had a long and noble history with penguins--this Brit film isn't a broad comedy. At the beginning we're told that "This story is inspired by real events," whatever that may mean; the script by Jeff Pope is based on a memoir by the real-life Michell. Directed by Peter Cattaneo of The Full Monty--one of the very best poignant Brit comedies--The Penguin Lessons has laughs, but it's also character-driven and melancholy; in the long run it could fairly be called a tearjerker.

It's hard to imagine the movie working as well as it does with anyone but Coogan in the lead. As in the terrific Philomena (2013), he plays an elaborately ironic, acerbic poseur whose reserve is gradually and reluctantly broken down by a guileless fellow being; the penguin serves almost as well as Judi Dench in this role. But Coogan never gets sappy. He lets the marvelous bird melt us, then he dries the movie out again.

EXTRA! (ORDINARY!) READ ALL ABOUT IT...

Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of the delightful Irish horror comedy Extra Ordinary...

...of Greed (not Von Stroheim's masterpiece but a satire starring Steve Coogan)...

...and Disney-Pixar's Onward...

STEVE & JOHN (AND BETTY)

Check out my review, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Stan & Ollie...

...starring the astounding Steve Coogan and the equally astounding John C. Reilly. Also, check out my review of the National Tour of Hello, Dolly!...

...playing through Sunday, January 13 at Gammage Auditorium.

Have a great weekend everybody!

SPAIN THRESHOLD

Opening this week:

The Trip to Spain--Two middle-aged British guys drive up the coast of Spain together. As they pass through breathtaking scenery, staying in exquisite, historically important lodgings and eating glorious-looking meals, they focus far less on these pleasures than on one-upping each with celebrity impressions.

That’s the central joke of The Trip to Spain, as it was the central joke of 2014’s The Trip to Italy and of 2010’s The Trip, all of them derived from a BBC series, and all of them directed by Michael Winterbottom. The premise is that it’s a working tour, that the comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are visiting these restaurants to review them. But the meat of the film is the pair’s nattering, a constant dyad of passive-aggressive digs and competitive movie and TV take-offs, of varying quality.

So while grilled anchovies or shrimp or chorizo or Iranian caviar are placed in front of them, we watch Coogan and Brydon’s fictionalized selves try to outdo each as Roger Moore, or Anthony Hopkins, or Ian McKellan, or John Hurt, or Russell Brand. They do David Bowie perusing Twitter, and they do Mick Jagger as Hamlet. They do some Americans, too—Woody Allen and DeNiro and Brando.

We see them pose in front of roadside dinosaurs, and visit the Alhambra, and, inevitably, we see them in front of windmills, in Don Quixote and Sancho drag. Just as inevitably, they riff on the Spanish Inquisition, treating it as a game show, and quoting the famous Monty Python sketch, although in Brando’s voice.

As in the earlier films, a subtle tension underlies this clowning around, a sense that at some level their competition is a serious attempt at dominance—the world’s most un-macho form of machismo. At one point Brydon manages to get Coogan to crack a smile at one of his shticks, and it’s like he’s scored a TKO.

There’s a wisp of nominal plot about the career fortunes of our heroes, and occasionally Winterbottom shoos another actor or two past the camera, just so we don’t overdose on the stars. He also repeats an effective technique from the previous film: Now and then, while Coogan and Brydon are in the thick of one of their routines, he cuts to the chef and kitchen workers, creating culinary masterpieces for two maniacs paying no more than cursory attention to them. These films are an unusually reproachful form of food porn.

Obviously The Trip to Spain isn’t for everybody, and it’s perhaps a hair overlong, but for anglophilic foodie armchair traveling pop-culture buffs, it’s often riotous. I’d be excited to hear that the pair were planning The Trip to Greece, The Trip to Japan and, for an epic finale, The Trip to America.

Leap!--This animated feature is set in France in the late 1800s--the Eiffel Tower is still under construction, and Lady Liberty is still waiting to be delivered to New York. Our heroine is Felicie (voiced by Elle Fanning), who escapes from a provincial orphanage with her friend Victor (voiced by Nat Wolff). The two head for Paris, where her dream is to become a dancer and his is to become an inventor.

A string of kid-movie cliches ensue, the central one being that old standby Hold Onto Your Dream. Felicie ends up training at the Paris Opera Ballet, where's she's in competition with a nasty rich-girl rival for a role in The Nutcracker. In her corner is a kindly cleaning woman (Carly Rae Jepsen) who walks on a cane but knows dance enough to tutor Felicie, but working against her is the rich girl's mom, a Disney-style wicked stepmother type, and...

I'm getting bored just writing this. The look and settings have some cheeriness and imagination, but dramatically the film is without originality and unusually brazen in its pandering. It's also a spectacular demonstration of the so-called "Uncanny Valley" effect--the premise that human beings, as opposed to cute little animals or trolls or toys, come across creepy when represented in CGI.

A Canadian and French co-production, Leap! was released overseas last year as Ballerina, with a slightly different voice cast. The version we get includes the likes of Mel Brooks, thrown away as an orphanage heavy, and Kate McKinnon, who plays three different characters including the villainess, for whom she seems to be channeling the voice of Susan Sarandon. This, I thought, was the most impressive feat in the movie.

In fairness, I should say that I saw Leap! with a large audience of kids, most of whom seemed to watch it reasonably attentively. And afterwards, I saw a few little girls attempting the Grand Jete on their way out of the theatre.

LIVING IN THE PASTA

New this week:

The Trip to Italy—Irritating though the term “postmodern” has become, it’s probably valid to call the British TV comics Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon a postmodern Hope and Crosby. First of all, like Hope and Crosby, they travel together, bantering, flirting with women and obsessively one-upping each other. Secondly, their comedy in no small measure derives from being irritating, from pushing every joke too far.

In 2010’s The Trip, adapted from a TV series, the conceit was that “Steve Coogan,” a glum and dour English comedian played by Steve Coogan, was touring dining establishments in northern England’s Lake District for a series of Observer articles, in company with his insufferably cheery and chatty Welsh friend “Rob Brydon,” played by Rob Brydon.

The point, of course, was not their journey but their conversation along the way, an endless duet of mild aspersions and competitive celebrity impersonations, often quite bad—their badness, combined with their persistence, is part of the joke. It’s the sort of silly chatter that passes the time agreeably between friends on a trip but would generally puzzle and annoy an outsider, but Coogan and Brydon give it a comic tension by showing us the underlying rivalry between the buffoonish fictitious versions of themselves—their prattle is an envy-fueled low-level combat.

Directed, like the first film, by Michael Winterbottom, and gloriously shot by James Clarke, The Trip to Italy takes the same shtick to the land of pasta. The two men cruise, in a Mini Cooper, through incomparably beautiful settings, eating incomparably beautiful food at incomparably beautiful restaurants and staying at incomparably beautiful hotels. All the while, they’re imitating everybody from Michael Caine to Al Pacino to Hugh Grant to Robert DeNiro, and spouting off about the poetic merits of Byron, Shelley and Alanis Morissette with roughly equal passion.

The film can give rise to mixed response. Scene for scene, I found it very funny, often riotous—an extended riff on the comparative incomprehensibility of Christian Bale and Tom Hardy in The Dark Knight Rises was a particular highlight. But in the aggregate, I confess it was a little tiring for me, and I was ready for it to be over by the time it was.

The Trip to Italy is also a curiously reproachful species of food porn. Winterbottom often cuts away from the nattering of his stars to the kitchen staff wherever they are, expertly preparing their exquisite-looking meals. At times it made me want to yell at Coogan and Brydon to shut up and pay attention to their food.

If I Stay—In this screen version of Gayle Forman’s successful 2009 novel, Chloe Grace Moretz plays Mia, an Oregon teenager who finds herself out-of-body after a horrible car crash leaves her in a coma. In this state she scurries around the halls of the hospital, following her stricken family and friends, and tries to decide between waking up or Going to the Light.

A key to this decision, drearily but believably, is her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley), with whom she was on the outs before the accident. Mia’s a cellist, you see, and she’d like to go to Julliard, and Adam’s a rocker whose band has a record deal, and can these two kids from different musical worlds somehow make a long distance relationship work?

This is the real meat of the story, which unfolds in flashback as Mia tries to answer The Clash’s eternal question “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” As a teen love story, it has plausibility, which is to say that its conflicts seem overwhelming to the pair involved, and fairly tedious to onlookers. But the luminously-photographed young Moretz is touching as she lopes along the corridors or gazes down at her unconscious physical self, and her acting is heartfelt. Indeed, Moretz, painfully vulnerable in the overlooked Texas Killing Fields and funny in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, carries this sweet showcase vehicle like a true star.

Some of the other actors have charm, too, especially Mireille Enos, unmemorable in the thankless role of Brad Pitt’s wife in World War Z, but much livelier here as Mia’s cool ex-rocker-chick mom, and Joshua Leonard (of The Blair Witch Project) as her drummer-turned-music-teacher dad. Stacey Keach turns up, too, as Mia’s adoring grandfather; his short speech to his comatose granddaughter was the one moment in the film that jerked a few of my tears. All of them, and pretty much everybody else in the cast, have one job in the movie—to worship Mia—but they manage to maintain their dignity while they do it.

I’m not sure if the real-life loved ones of coma patients will all appreciate the story’s seeming implication, repeated several times by an angelic-seeming nurse, that coming out of a coma is always and entirely the choice of the patient. But if you accept the premise, your choice, as an audience member, will probably be to stay in your seat, and not to head for The Light of the Lobby until the end credits. And you probably won’t regret it.

Island of Lemurs: Madagascar—The blank, fixed, wide-eyed faces of lemurs suggest minds perpetually blown, and it’s hard not to find them endearing. This IMAX documentary, which runs well under an hour, offers a pleasant dose of these most ancient yet somehow most alien of primates, and of the paradisal, sadly threatened forests of their country of origin.

It was directed and shot by David Douglas, with narration scripted by Drew Fellner and spoken by Morgan Freeman—all part of the team behind the similar 2011 IMAX flick Born to be Wild. That film focused on two animal orphanages, one in Africa for elephants, one in Borneo for orangutans, both run by formidable middle-aged women. With Island of Lemurs, the filmmakers evidently saw no reason to depart from this structure—their central figure is Dr. Patricia Wright, an American who runs a lemur preserve in Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park, and whose researches in the ‘80s led to the rediscovery of the Greater Bamboo Lemur, thought extinct.

Island of Lemurs is a little diffuse; it might have been a bit more engaging, for children especially, had it focused on a specific lemur or family of lemurs. But it’s full of delights: The big Indri, largest of the lemur species, indulging in their weird and beautiful choral howling, a Bamboo Lemur ripping apart a stalk of its namesake plant with relish, elegant Sifakas romping sideways from tree to tree. And, as in Born to be Wild, the film has unusually good music, including selections by Madagascar band Tarika. In short, it has lemurs, the voice of Morgan Freeman, and “I Will Survive” sung in French. What else could you want, in less than an hour?

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE PHILOMENA?

Philomena Lee was a teenager in rural and very Catholic Ireland when she got pregnant in the early ‘50s. She was turned over to the nuns and, after delivering her son Anthony, she and her fellow unmarried teen mothers were kept in the convent as, essentially, slave labor, while their kids were adopted—sold, essentially—to any Catholic who could come up with the sizable adoption fee. In 1955, Anthony was taken to America, along with another little girl from the convent. Philomena had been made to sign a document renouncing any claim on him.

Philomena later married, had other kids, and had a successful career as a nurse, but needless to say, she never forgot her first child. She tried several times to get information about him from the convent and was denied each time. Eventually a journalist named Martin Sixsmith took an interest in her case, and the two of them travelled to the U.S. where they made startling discoveries about the boy. The result was a book, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Sixsmith also wrote a summary of the story for The Guardian in 2009, with the True Confessions-ish title “The Catholic Church Stole My Child.”).

If this story were an old-school stage melodrama or a TV soap opera, it would seem corny and overwrought, down to its tear-jerking final twist. But Philomena, the movie version, isn’t even a little depressing. The director, Stephen Frears, brilliantly treats this real-life tragedy as an odd couple comedy.

Judi Dench plays the gabby, cheery Philomena, an intelligent but unpretentious woman, unfiltered but so warm that she doesn’t give offense to those she chats up. Her openhearted, un-ironic manner wears a bit on Sixsmith—an educated, sophisticated but oddly unlikable cold fish played by Steve Coogan, who also co-wrote the adaptation of the Sixsmith book.

The bracing, self-deprecating wit of the movie helps us manage our fury at the Church’s crimes against Philomena and her son, and God knows how many other families. Sixsmith isn’t able to contain his; his journalistic objectivity dissolves as he unravels the final mystery about Philomena’s son in the climactic scenes.

Yet Philomena keeps her magnanimity to the end, and Dench leaves us with a sense of awe at the grandness of this woman’s soul, even while she keeps on making us laugh. After seeing her so many times as Queen Victoria and James Bond’s boss and other such dour roles, it’s great to see her in what can only be called a lighter vein.

While it isn’t the most remarkable piece of filmmaking I’ve seen this year—the documentary The Act of Killing currently holds that title, and I doubt it will be unseated—Philomena is, I think, the movie I’ve most enjoyed so far in 2013. As cinema craft it’s conventional but polished, and the leads are sublime. If you’re like me, the critical cliché “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry” applies.