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.

A LONG DARK KNIGHT

Opening this weekend...

The Batman--Time for yet another retelling of the tale of the poor little rich boy, orphaned by criminals, who dresses up as a bat and deploys gadgetry to fight crime. This version, we're assured, is "dark." Not colorful and campy, like the '60s-era TV show; not whimsical, like the Tim Burton series of the '80s and '90s; not epic and Wagnerian, like the more recent series featuring the laryngitic Christian Bale. Strange how durable and flexible this silly myth has proven.

This one is indeed dark, both literally and thematically; dim and shadowy and focused on hidden corruption. Directed by Matt Reeves from a script he wrote with Peter Craig, The Batman is set early in the career of Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) as the Caped Crusader. His costume, gizmos and vehicles seem like works in progress, and his Gotham police ally James Gordon (Jeffery Wright) is a Lieutenant, not yet the Commissioner.

Gordon and The Batman are looking for The Riddler (Paul Dano), who is bumping off prominent members of Gotham's law enforcement community, and whose cryptic messages to our hero suggest that he's trying to drag some of the city's slimy secrets into the light. Gotham underworld figures like Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) and The Penguin (Colin Farrell, buried in makeup) are involved, as is young Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz), who's investigating the disappearance of her girlfriend. The lithe, acrobatic Selina dresses in cat-like gear and has an apartment full of cats; she is, you might say, a cat woman.

There's a lot to like about the movie. Grieg Fraser's cinematography has a dank and gloomy beauty, and seeing The Batman recoil in fear when he comes to the edge of a tall building or miscalculate a descent and clip himself painfully against an overpass is a highly agreeable counter to the parkour-style effortlessness of so many contemporary action heroes.

The actors are strong, too. Pattinson is low-key, but he has the same sallow, Byronic glamour he's shown in other roles, and he's sympathetic, as is Wright, and Andy Serkis as a fretful Alfred. Turturro and Farrell bring a realistic feel to their mobster parts, and Peter Sarsgaard makes his shady D.A. squirmy and weaselly but also pitiable.

The standouts are Dano and Kravitz; Dano's rather squalid take on the Riddler turns truly scary when he starts stretching his words out into deep, indignant bellows. He seems far less like a movie supervillain and more like the pathetic, yet more terrifying, attempts of real-life crazies to emulate a supervillain (as in Aurora, Colorado). Kravitz brings the movie a much-needed breeze of brisk but breathable fresh air. She's the audience surrogate in the film; despite her feats of derring-do she comes across as more sensible and relatable than anyone else.

Against all of these merits, The Batman is too long. It's way too freakin' long. It's nearly three hours of above-average moviemaking of its kind, but three hours is a heavy dose of shadows and fog. The brooding atmosphere suggests that we're in for devastating, morally challenging revelations, but what we get, while coherent, isn't especially surprising. And then, just as we seem to have gotten to the bottom of the case, the movie tacks on a blowed-up-real-good disaster finale that feels jarringly out of tune with the more intimate crime-story flavor of what has gone before.

I thought that superhero pictures were starting to cure themselves of their straining need to pile on climax after climax, seemingly in frantic fear that audiences will feel that they haven't been given enough for their money. The Batman is a step backward in this regard.

It occurred to me that The Batman feels, in atmosphere and pretensions, exactly like what was so sublimely spoofed by 2017's The Lego Batman Movie. It isn't every day that the target of a parody shows up five years after the parody itself.

ORIGINAL KIN

Hope everybody had a great Labor Day weekend; Happy September to all!

Check out this month's issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...for my "Four Corners" column on Valley spots for Caribbean food, and also check out my online reviews of Operation Finale, The Bookshop and a "Big Gay Sing-Along" showing, tomorrow night at FilmBar, of 1986's Little Shop of Horrors...

Now in  theaters:

Kin--It's flown a bit under the radar, but this odd, gritty little tale is not without merit. It's set in the economic wastes of Detroit, where 12-year-old Eli (Myles Truitt) scavenges for scrap metal in the shells of deserted factories. Eli, an adopted African-American, lives with his construction contractor Dad (Dennis Quaid), a morose but morally upright widower.

Eli's ne'er-do-well older brother Jimmy (Jack Reynor) comes home--to a chilly reception--after six years in prison, to quickly realize that both he and his family are in serious trouble with a local gangster (James Franco). Jimmy and Eli end up on the run from the gangster and his goons, and somewhere along the line a stripper (Zoe Kravitz) with a heart of gold is added to their party.

This modest, poignant story, which if not for some violence has almost an Afterschool Special atmosphere, would be compelling simply as a realistic drama/thriller. But the directing team of Jonathan and Josh Baker, working from a script by Daniel Casey (an expansion of the Baker brothers' short film "Bag Man"), layers in a sci-fi twist.

On one of his scavenging excursions, Eli comes upon the aftermath of a battle between some otherworldly warriors--time travelers or aliens or something; it isn't made entirely clear. He picks up a sophisticated weapon that only seems to respond to him, and, as you might guess, this eventually becomes a factor in the story.

I don't mean to mislead anyone about Kin--it's uneven, and sentimental at times. But it has an unpredictability that I enjoyed, and the low-key style of the Bakers recalled, for me, certain commercial directors of the '60s and '70s  like John Avildsen and Jeremy Paul Kagan and Matthew Robbins, whose straightforward, unpretentious style has been insufficiently emulated.

Most of all, Kin worked for me because the actors made me care about the characters. Truitt makes a  fine, sober debut as Eli; you feel sorry for this kid's poor luck in family relations. Reynor, who seems like sort of a poor man's Chris Pratt, is exasperatingly likable as the fun, decent-hearted, well-intentioned, hopelessly foolish Jimmy, who introduces his brother to strip clubs and doing donuts in the parking lot in his truck.

Quaid is convincingly downcast as the desperate dad, and Kravitz is charming as usual, even in this stock role. Most striking, perhaps, is James Franco, truly repellent and scary as the mild-voiced gangster. I've never been able to warm to Franco in ordinary leading man parts, but on the basis of this film and The Disaster Artist, he's a natural as creepy freaks.