CURRENT EVENTS

Opening today:

The American Southwest--It's hardly breaking news that the American Southwest is full of breathtaking views. But The American Southwest, the generically-titled documentary opening here, is also full of breathtaking views. Written and directed by veteran nature photographer and filmmaker Ben Masters, the movie traces the route of the Colorado River from its source in the Rockies down through the Grand Canyon all the way to its now appallingly dry delta in Mexico.

The overarching point of the film is that humans have, in a very short time, screwed up this great waterway. "From its headwaters to the border, the Colorado is diverted, divided and dammed," says narrator Quannah Chasinghorse, in her measured, lulling tones. "Its water is impounded, evaporated and subjugated." We're also firmly reminded that "The seemingly limitless amount of snow [the source of the river's waters] is actually finite and quantifiable."

It's a compelling, even alarming message, and hopefully a call to arms, but happily The American Southwest isn't a downer to watch, partly because it isn't just gorgeous vistas; it has a lively cast of characters. Along the river's southerly route, Masters, working with partner organizations like American Rivers, Northern Jaguar Project and The Peregrine Fund, gives us passages of truly jaw-dropping wildlife footage.

We see beavers industriously creating their own dams; cuthroat trout struggling upstream to spawn like salmon; a young condor trying to get home after a tentative--and unintentional--early attempt at flight; jaguars marking their mating turfs. Some of these episodes have an amorous flavor: a hilariously frustrated, randy young elk tangling with a wily older rival; a romcom-like courtship between two Mojave rattlesnakes.

My favorite sequence depicted the lives of salmon-flies, swept downstream in their larval stage only to have to fly back upstream as adults to lay their eggs. The scenes of the larva, buffeted around helplessly by river currents beyond their control, may remind some of us of own lives.

Still in the multiplexes:

Caught Stealing--After trying to channel Elvis in 2022, Austin Butler played a beautiful love object with no discernible personality, on purpose, in 2023's The Bikeriders. It's nice to see him playing a guy, just a guy, in his latest, Caught Stealing. He has a nice sympathetic manner as a standard movie hero with a history in this blood-splattered crime yarn directed by Darren Aronofsky from a script by Charlie Huston, adapting his own novel.

Butler plays Hank, an East Village bartender in the late '90s. A functional alcoholic, Hank is haunted by a tragedy which ended his promising baseball career before it started. But he's not a bad sort. He talks by phone to his beloved mom every day as they follow their beloved San Francisco Giants; his sexy girlfriend Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz) is fascinated by him; and he agrees to cat-sit for his punky neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) when Russ tells him he has to go home to London for a family emergency.

This last kindness is what gets him in trouble; he soon finds himself targeted both by gangsters—Russian, Puerto Rican and Hasidic—and by the cops, in the form of an engaging NYPD detective (Regina King). Gruesome misadventures ensue, while Aronofsky evokes the period of mohawks and studded leather jackets and answering machines and pay phones and car cigarette lighters, and Shea Stadium.

The cast is strong, not just Butler, Kravitz, Smith and King but Griffin Dunne as Hank's boss and Liev Schreiber and Vincent D'Onofrio, impressively underplaying the deceptively mensch-y Hasidic triggermen. Even Carol Kane turns up briefly, which is usually enough for a recommendation all by itself.

Caught Stealing is ultimately just standard mayhem from the Robert Rodriguez or Guy Ritchie playbook, and I suppose my investment in it was weakened a little every time a likable character got killed off. Butler kept me rooting for him until the end, however. So did the cat.

DUMBDOG MILLIONAIRE

Opening in Phoenix today; wide on October 6:

Dumb Money--As with 2015's The Big Short, there were plenty of twists and turns in this movie that my finance-challenged brain had to struggle to keep up with. Also like The Big Short, this chronicle of the weird January 2021 boom in GameStop stock is waggish fun. But it's easier to root for the heroes here, because, as least as this movie tells it, they're ordinary people sticking it to rich hedge fund jerks rather than rich hedge fund jerks sticking it to all of us.

GameStop, a Texas-based video game retailer that had been a mall mainstay since the '80s under one name or another, had been in decline since the rise of online game purchasing. The COVID pandemic seemed like the death knell for the company, and hedge fund short sellers were moving in.

Dumb Money's focus is on Keith Gill (Paul Dano), a small-potatoes analyst and broker from Brockton, Massachusetts. Gill had a day gig at MassMutual but spent his evenings in his basement making funny YouTube videos on investing, and posting on other social platforms that I don't understand. He believed that GameStop stock was undervalued, and his enthusiasm helped to cause an explosion in its price that made the short sellers sweat.

But the "dumb money"--apparently that's what hedge fund folk call individual small investors--was sweating too, of course. The movie, directed by Cruella's Craig Gillespie from a script by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo (based on Ben Mezrich's's book The Antisocial Network), jumps around among a variety of GameStop investors who were riding the wave with Gill, and resisting the temptation to sell as a matter of economic principle, to the horror and bafflement of their families and friends. These include America Ferrera as a struggling Pittsburgh hospital worker and single mom; Talia Ryder and Myha'la Herrold as Texas college students besotted both with the investment and with each other, and Anthony Ramos as a GameStop employee who buys in.

I presume that some or all of these people are fictional "composites" representing the online rabble who collaborated on the short squeeze. They're nicely played and sympathetic. The millionaire and billionaire vultures are based on real players: Seth Rogen as Gabe Plotkin and Nick Offerman as Ken Griffin and Sebastian Shaw as Robinhood's Vlad Tenev and Vincent D'Onofrio, extra-creepy, as Steve Cohen. A scurvier bunch of parasitical cruds you'd have a hard time finding. Shailene Woodley is touching as Keith's supportive wife, Kate Burton and Clancy Brown are believable as his parents, and Pete Davidson is a perfect fit as the idiot brother.

Driven forward by a lot of stately, foul-mouthed hip-hop on the soundtrack and tricked out with split-screens and montages, Dumb Money cruises along absorbingly and, despite copious comedy, with an ambiguous tension--I wanted to see the hedge fund guys squirm, but I was anxious for the everyday people when they didn't sell. They, after all, need the money. The incidental backdrop of COVID adds to the unnerving atmosphere; the masks and empty malls and streets create an almost sci-fi flavor at times. It may be the first pandemic period piece.

Although the GameStop boom had fans as diverse as Elon Musk and AOC, I was never sure, watching this movie, that I wasn't falling for a simplistic interpretation of the events--the little guys banding together to take the big boys, who have rigged the system so only they can win, down a few notches. Is there another side here? I mean, no doubt GameStop was undervalued, but was it really that undervalued? Did this amount to a whimsical, sentiment-based pyramid scheme, even if it was motivated altruistically rather than as a con job?

One of the posters for the film reads "THE TOP 1% THINKS YOU'RE DUMB." No doubt they do, and as far as finance is concerned, in my case they aren't wrong. So if there's another, more negative, legitimately dumb side to this story, I'm not smart enough to see it.

In any case, I'm not prepared to shed a tear for the hedge funds. Despite the hit some of them took, in the end, the well-connected big investors appear to have pulled strings and avoided ruination; the film resigns itself to the game being rigged. But it also suggests that the big boys will think twice before they ignore the dumb money again, and it claims this as a triumph. As the movie presents the story, it's all but impossible not to invest in it--invest emotionally, that is.

EYES WITH QUITE A FACE

Opening in theaters this weekend:

The Eyes of Tammy Faye--One day in 2001, I spent about an hour with Tammy Faye. She was Tammy Faye Messner by that time, not Tammy Faye Bakker. We chowed down together while I interviewed her at the food court at an outdoor swap meet in east Mesa where she was signing her memoir Tammy: Telling It My Way. The copy I bought from her that day is still on my bookshelf; she signed it "God bless you Mark--Love, Tammy Faye."

For those who may not remember: Tammy Faye was a star of evangelical TV in the 60s, '70s and '80s. Growing up poor in International Falls, Minnesota, she married aspiring preacher Jim Bakker, who she met at Bible college and who believed that God wanted us--especially him--to be prosperous. They had a traveling Christian puppet show with which they broke into TV through Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network (Jim was the original host of The 700 Club). Then they struck out on their own, founding the enormously lucrative PTL Satellite Network and other ventures such as the theme park Heritage USA. She was the life of the party on their show, and they lived in conspicuous and kitschy luxury funded by viewer donations.

Financial improprieties and sex scandals deflated the PTL enterprise in the late '80s; Jim Bakker went to federal prison for years. Tammy Faye divorced him, remarried to developer Roe Messner, and then, well, she had lunch with me. Did I mention that?

By the time I met her, Tammy Faye was on a roll thanks, in part, to a feature documentary of 2000 by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato called The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Probably initiated to mock its subject, this film helped her rehabilitate her image into a lovable media personality and pop-culture icon, particularly for the gay community; sort of an honorary drag queen. Now the same title has been given to a dramatized version of the story, directed by Michael Showalter from a script by Bailey and Barbato, and starring Jessica Chastain in the title role.

Based on my single brief meeting, I have to say that Chastain disappears into the part; this is the woman I met back in 2001. To what extent either that interview or this performance represents the whole person can be known only to those who knew her better than either Chastain or I did--Tammy Faye passed on, from cancer, in 2007 at the age of 65. But as far as her public persona, Chastain nails it. She also gives us notes of the humor, the bold vivacity, the restlessness, the impatience, the lack of wifely subservience that made her a handful in the evangelical world of the time, and, more striking still, a sense of genuine spiritual exaltation that alienated her from the thievery and sanctimony. Chastain will probably get award buzz, and it won't be undeserved.

Andrew Garfield plays Jim Bakker, and his excellence would be easy to overlook; there's poignancy in his dim, queasy realizations of his carefully self-justified avarice, and his guilty resentment of his wife's popularity. Cherry Jones is terrific as Tammy Faye's hard-assed, no-nonsense mother, who smells trouble the first time Jim comes into the house. Frederic Lehne makes his presence felt as her more easygoing and affectionate stepfather, and in the smallish role of Jerry Falwell, Vincent D'Onofrio has fun imitating the way the preacher would clamp his lips down on terminal consonants: "JiMM."

Aside from the superb acting and the flawless period flavor, this Eyes of Tammy Faye is pretty good; not quite great. Bailey and Barbato simplify and streamline Tammy Faye's life, and maybe whitewash it a bit, too. At one point, as things are falling apart, Jim screams at Tammy that he did what he did to satisfy her greed, but while she's clearly shown enjoying the glitz, we don't really see her ask him for anything other than conjugal relations (which he neglects). It's unclear whether the movie's position is that she was greedy, or that he used her as an excuse for his own rapacity. The movie also gets a little shapeless in its final act; Bailey, Barbato and Showalter can't seem to quite figure out how to wrap it up, though Chastain is powerful in her closing scene.

Those who don't remember Tammy Faye on TV may well think that these performances are caricatures, as many thought about the Coen Brothers' masterpiece Fargo, another movie with a dauntless, cheerful Minnesotan heroine. But those who watched The PTL Club back then, or even those from an equivalent religious or cultural or even geographical background, will realize that this isn't an exaggeration at all.

BULLETS AND BABIES, DELIVERED

Opening this weekend:

The Magnificent Seven—In Rose Creek, some years after the Civil War, poor farmers hire a gunslinging warrant officer to defend them against the mining kingpin who’s trying to run them off. The gunslinger scrapes together six comrades, and they try to prepare the town for the attack of the mining man’s goons.

This variation—it’s only a remake in its broadest outlines—of the 1960 guy-movie classic from John Sturges (itself a reworking of Kurosawa’s 1954 Seven Samurai) has an entirely ersatz atmosphere. It feels like something staged daily for tourists at Old Tucson Studios, except that, like Lawrence Kasdan’s 1984 Silverado, it’s full of big-name actors.

Scene after scene (almost every scene, really) recalls some earlier western. A surprising number, starting from the opening town meeting in the church, bring to mind Blazing Saddles—there’s even a “beans scene,” though it lacks audible flatulence. There are nods to Kurosawa, too, notably a major borrow from Throne of Blood.

None of which is to say that this Magnificent Seven isn’t entertaining from beginning to end. Director Antoine Fuqua evokes the tidy, almost abstracted flavor of the genre at its most allegorically suggestive, and he gets terrific performances from his stars. 

Denzel Washington plays the gunslinger, roughly the equivalent of the Yul Brynner role in the earlier film. Chris Pratt is the wisecracking cardsharp, Ethan Hawke is a desiccated, war-shattered Southern gentleman, Byung-hun Lee is his knife-slinging traveling companion. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo plays a Mexican fugitive, Vincent D’Onofrio is a shaggy tracker, and Martin Sensmeier rounds out the Seven as an outcast Comanche.

Washington is poised and commanding, an authoritative axis around which the other six revolve. It would be easy to miss how quietly skilled he is, because his costars are so flashy—Pratt a likable wiseacre, Hawke shaky and soul-wounded, Garcia-Rulfo bright-eyed and vulpine, Peter Sarsgaard a study in twitchy mannerism as the creepy miner boss.

Lee and Sensmeier are less developed, but both of them are physically impressive. The only truly original characterization, however, is D’Onofrio, his voice croaky from disuse, his manner oddly guileless.

If I had a quibble with the movie—on its own corny terms—it’s that I was disappointed that Washington’s character had an old score to settle with the villain. Part of what was touching about the 1960 version is that Brynner and his cronies came to care about the locals, without the need for any backstory.

Storks—Last weekend we had Bridget Jones belatedly expecting a baby; this weekend we have a saga of the avians traditionally in charge of delivering it. Like Arthur Christmas a few years back, this is another animated film that derives its comedy from literalizing a folklore motif—probably, in this case, a cover story to avoid telling kids where babies come from.

The birds have a history in Warner Brothers animation. In the Looney Tunes of the ‘40s and ‘50s, the stork (voiced by Mel Blanc) was a depicted as a bleary-eyed, hiccupping drunk, presumably having been unable to decline offers of cheer from delighted new parents, and the result was mis-delivered babies.

In the new film, from Warner Animation Group, the birds have shifted their delivery operations away from babies to consumer items, a la Amazon.com. The movie follows the quest of an up-and-coming stork, Junior (voiced by Andy Samberg) and Tulip (Katie Crowne), a human who grew up among the storks when she went undelivered to her family, to deliver a baby unintentionally produced at the request of a boy who wants a little brother. It’s a surreptitious delivery, as Junior knows that word of the screw-up would endanger the promotion he’s been promised by the corporate honcho stork (Kelsey Grammer).

Even though the story obeys, through Tulip, the standard animated kidflick trope of the misfit struggling to fit in, the adventures which ensue are quite off-the-wall and hard to summarize. Probably the funniest element of the film is the wolf pack—the Alpha and Beta are hilariously voiced by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele—able to organize itself into bridges and boats even more ambitious structures. As she flees, Tulip notes that she never saw this behavior in the nature shows.

Storks is so stuffed with peculiar ideas that some of them inevitably misfire. There’s a sense of equating babies with consumer products and procreation with acquisition that feels a little unsavory, even though it’s probably unintentional. But overall this is one of the more unpredictable and funnier animated features in awhile.

There’s a Lego short subject before the movie, by the way, a martial arts spoof called The Master in which the title character (voiced by Jackie Chan) clashes with a chicken. It’s good for a chuckle.