UP AGAINST THE WALTER

Check out my list, on Topless Robot, of ten triumphant Tracey Walter credits.

RIP to the seriously adorable Yvonne Craig, passed on at 78. She’s hard to forget as the primly high-kicking Batgirl in the third season of the ‘60s Batman series...
 

 ...but she should also be remembered as the green-skinned, ill-fated Marta, consort of Steve Ihnat’s LOOOORD Garth in the Star Trek episode “Whom Gods Destroy.”

She’s also an example of what Mars needs in Larry Buchanan’s Mars Needs Women. Get in line, Mars.

THE SPY'S THE LIMIT

Opening this weekend:

The Man From U.N.C.L.E.—The feature knockoff of I Spy back in 2002 would have been a lousy movie in any case, but it was the more galling if you had any affection for the original series. The same went for the 1999 version of Wild Wild West, and the 2008 version of Get Smart.

I was at an advantage when it came to the new movie version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., directed by Guy Ritchie, and based on the hit espionage series which ran on NBC from 1964 to 1968. Unlike the aforementioned three shows, I hardly ever watched U.N.C.L.E. as a kid, and therefore had no particular nostalgic investment in it.

The show, you may recall, concerned an international agency (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement) in which spies from either side of the Cold War set aside their differences and cooperated to thwart the evil designs of T.H.R.U.S.H. (Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity). Two such agents were American Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) and Soviet Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum), supervised by dry Brit Mr. Waverly (Leo G. Carroll).

I watched the old show a little in recent weeks in anticipation of the film. It’s on the slovenly and feeble side, but the acting, both of the regulars and the guest stars, was droll and good-natured, and so was some of the writing. If I had been a bigger fan, maybe I would be outraged by Ritchie’s film version. It’s a mixed bag, with style and panache in the directing and designs and acting thrown together with tiresome, even tasteless ideas. But for me, the style and panache won out.

It’s an origin story, about how Napoleon and Illya meet as enemies and are forced to work together to retrieve an atom bomb from some surviving Nazis, and for about the first half of the movie the two of them brawl and bicker. This is tedious, but not as tedious as the chase of all-terrain vehicles in the rain that climaxes the film. And the slightly campy tone taken toward a Nazi torturer feels a little queasy, too.

But Ritchie’s mastery of scrambling and de-scrambling strands of action through omniscient camera moves, split screens, chronology juggling and wild crosscutting give the film a lot of headlong momentum to get us past these missteps. So does a heavy dose of mid-‘60s period flavor from the cars and the fashions on the several beauties in the cast to the punchy, sexy soundtrack.

Probably the biggest upside, though, is the performance of Henry Cavill as Napoleon. Cavill seemed like a cipher to me as Superman, but here he has a grand time imitating the ironically stentorian cadences of Robert Vaughn, and he more or less carries the film.

Armie Hammer manages Illya’s accent well, but the anger issues with which the character is stuck here cheat him out of the chance to show his suave side. Hugh Grant comes into the story late as Waverly, and his line readings are a breath of fresh air, though it’s distressing to think that Grant is now old enough to play a Leo G. Carroll part.

Anachronism watch: The phrases “low tech” and “skill set” are spoken in this movie. Likely, in the mid-‘60s?

Straight Outta Compton—As to the historical accuracy of this chronicle of N.W.A., I’m certainly not hip hop historian enough to have an opinion. I was a fan of several of the guys from the seminal late-‘80s “gangsta rap” ensemble, but mostly on the basis of their movie work. I liked the music a lot, but didn’t think it provided the healthiest set of life influences, and I must say that little in this movie suggests to me that I was wrong about that.

Besides, to a white kid from rural Pennsylvania, it would have somehow felt oddly presumptuous buying those albums, like something I couldn’t pull off. I would have felt like a poseur (if all the white boys had felt that way back then, those guys would have gotten much less wealthy).

What I can say is that the movie, directed by F. Gary Gray, is juicy entertainment, full of terrific acting and music and laughs and heart. It follows the familiar show-biz-legend movie template—an insanely meteoric rise from rough origins, exhilarating success, too much too soon, conflicts and feuds and tragedy and reconciliation. It plays out against the backdrop of L.A. in the turbulent '80s/‘90s, with its constant threat of violence and terror, both from gangs and from the goonish occupying force of the CRASH-era LAPD.

Ice Cube and Dr. Dre were among the producers of Straight Outta Compton, and Gray directed the former in Friday and the latter in Set It Off, so it may not be surprising that these two—played by O’Shea Jackson, Jr. (Ice Cube’s real-life son, or possibly clone) and Corey Hawkins, are presented as the best artists. But the emotional center of the film is a little-known actor named Jason Mitchell as Eric “Eazy-E” Wright, the weed-dealing hustler who launched Ruthless Records, and, even though he was strained and unmusical, managed to make his mark as a performer as well. Mitchell has a touchingly pensive quality as Eazy-E; it’s not hard to believe it when he bonds with Ruthless manager Jerry Heller (the target of Ice Cube’s notorious anti-Semitic swipe in “No Vaseline”), played here by Paul Giamatti. They’re both fretters.

Nobody in the movie comes across as perfect, nor does anybody—except, maybe, for the baleful Suge Knight (R. Marcus Taylor)—come across like a villain. Everybody seems, rather, like they’re in over their heads, blindsided by the intensity and breadth of the reaction to their music and the fame and fortune it brought. The title, after all, is Straight Outta Compton, not Gradually Outta Compton.

PIPER GLORY

While the WWE has never been an interest of mine, I always liked “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, the wrestler turned action movie star who passed on last week at 61. Last week’s Monster-of-the-Week was in honor of the late lovely Coleen Gray, which meant postponing a Piper MOTW.

So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week the nod goes to this denizen of Frogtown…

…in Hell Comes to Frogtown, the 1988 epic in which Piper starred—indeed, played the title role of potent, frog-fighting wasteland warrior Sam Hell.

R.I.P. STAN

RIP to my friend and Phoenix Film Critics Society colleague Stan Robinson, passed on yesterday at 68.

Stan had become a film reviewer for AZ Weekly after he retired from a long career on the production side of movies and TV; he worked, in various capacities, on movies ranging from Passenger 57 to Van Sant’s To Die For to Psycho IV: The Beginning.

But he was at least as much a movie fan as a movie maker—he was one of the happiest and most devoted screening rats I’ve ever known, never missing anything if he could help it. He struggled with poor health and other challenges over the last few years, always with an inspirationally upbeat attitude. He was a really sweet guy, and we’ll miss him.

O RICKI, WHAT A PITY

Opening this weekend: 

 
Ricki and the Flash—Meryl Streep has been a favorite of mine since, if memory serves, the second movie I ever reviewed, The Seduction of Joe Tynan back in 1979. If I recall, I referred to her as a “brilliant newcomer”; a nervy line from a seventeen-year-old, but I wasn’t wrong. Much as I loved her work back in those accent du jour days, however, I love her even more now—she's lightened up, and loosened up, and her performances are genuinely fun.

I also love Jonathan Demme, and I’ve missed him. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s he turned out a bunch of sophisticated yet unpretentious, entirely accessible classics and near-classics, like Something Wild, Married to the Mob, Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, but he hasn’t made anything anywhere near that level in years.

And I have a high regard for Diablo Cody, who crafted the snappy but heartfelt dialogue for Juno back in 2007. For that matter, I love Kevin Kline.

Which is why it pains me to report that the collaboration of all of the above, Ricki and the Flash, despite plenty of good work, is a miss, and not even a near-miss.

Streep plays Ricki, who abandoned her upper-middle-class Indiana family decades earlier to follow her rock star dreams in California. She had one failed album, and now she and The Flash serve as the house cover band at a bar in Tarzana, where they often outnumber their fans. Her lead guitarist (Rick Springfield, who looks agreeably a bit Kris Kristofferson-ish with middle age) is also her main squeeze, though she holds him at arm’s length emotionally.

Her patient, recessive ex (Kline), who long since remarried a supermom (Audra McDonald), has made peace with Ricki, but her three grown kids still resent her, at different levels of bitterness. Ricki gets a call from the ex that their daughter (Mamie Gummer) has been dumped by her husband and is in bad shape. When Ricki gets to Indianapolis, she finds that this was an understatement.

Nothing terribly wrong with any of this, on paper, and there are many sharp, funny passages of dialogue and lively little episodes. Cody has a way of departing from the standard movie-character playbook—Ricki, for instance, is one of those Tea Partiers who turn up at times in fields where you wouldn’t expect them. She makes sour cracks about Obama from the stage, voted twice for George W. Bush, and even has a Gadsden Flag tattooed on her back.

As always with Demme, the settings ring with authenticity and there are terrific touches of atmosphere. But there’s a slackness to the pacing and a sloppiness to the transitions that keep the movie from adding up, somehow, either as drama or as comedy.

Or, I’m afraid, as a jukebox musical, either. Streep is a fine musical talent—she handled the folk numbers in Altman’s Prairie Home Companion and the show tunes in Into the Woods with authority and wit. But the classic rock in Ricki and the Flash just isn’t a good fit for her voice and performing style, and Demme saddles her with several full numbers. I don’t wish to be ungallant, but let’s just say that it’s not terribly surprising that Ricki’s album wasn’t a success.

About the best thing I can say for Ricki and the Flash is that it doesn’t punish us too much. The movie climaxes at a wedding. I knew there were going to be toasts and speeches and awkward encounters, and I tensed up, remembering Demme’s 2008 Rachel Getting Married. But Demme and Cody give us a break—they don’t seem determined to make us miserable. Ricki’s gesture at the wedding is borderline inappropriate yet nonetheless lovely, and it ends the film on a pleasant note. But it’s faint praise when the best feeling a movie gives you is relief at what it didn’t do.

LEECH THERAPY

RIP to the astoundingly beautiful Coleen Gray, best known for noirs like Kubrick’s The Killing and for the western Red River, passed on this week at 92.

In her honor…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the nod this week goes to the title character in 1960’s The Leech Woman…

…played by Gray, as a vain middle-aged American lady who learns a native African secret for restoring her youthful beauty by leeching away the pineal hormones of men.

 

(amazon)

A minor detail: this results in their deaths.

TRIUMPH OF THE WOOL

Opening today:

  

Shaun the Sheep Movie—The hero of this wonderful English stop-motion feature from Aardman Studios may literally be a sheep. But he’s not a sheep in the figurative sense. For better or worse, he isn’t one to conform, to accept his lot unquestioningly, to follow the flock.

Shaun, who debuted in the Wallace & Grommit short A Close Shave and starred in his own 2007 TV series, lives on a farm under the dominion, not quite cruel but not especially tender either, of The Farmer. Inspired by an advertisement on the side of a double-decker bus, Shaun decides he deserves a day off from being herded around the farm, so he stages a daring escape to spend a day in The Big City.

He hasn’t taken into account the effect his holiday may have on others, however. It results in accidents, homelessness and imprisonment for his flock, amnesia for The Farmer, and peril for all from a relentless animal control officer. Wild slapstick chases ensue.

The characters converse, when they do, only in indistinct jabbering and muttering and grousing. Aside from some song lyrics on the soundtrack, the only clearly enunciated word I heard was “hey!” Thus Shaun the Sheep Movie is, essentially, a silent comedy, and its star, Shaun, is a somewhat stoic, Keatonesque hero.

He isn’t a pure stone-face, however. It’s astonishing how much subtlety and nuance and depth of emotion the animators are able to bring out of the faces of these characters—which include not only the sheep and The Farmer but Bitzer, the wary sheepdog, and a large dramatis personae of supporting dogs, pigs, people and other animals. There wasn’t a moment, watching Shaun the Sheep Movie, when it occurred to me that these weren’t real creatures leading real lives somewhere. Indeed, I still refuse to believe they aren’t.