INTERNATIONAL SPACE CRUSTACEAN

With the Yorgos Lanthimos film The Lobster opening here in the Valley tomorrow… 

Monster-of-the-Week: ...the choice this week is clear: Gargon, the huge and oddly vertical extraterrestrial lobster-monster…

 

…from the 1959 classic Teenagers from Outer Space.

SHOW ME THE MONEY (MONSTER)

Opening this weekend:

Money Monster—George Clooney plays a buffoonish TV financial pundit in the Jim Cramer mold. Julia Roberts plays the long-suffering director of the silly show he hosts, and Jack O’Connell plays the scruffy disgruntled loser with a gun who takes him hostage on the air, demanding to know what happened to the $60,000 he lost to an investment that the TV guy claimed was safer than his savings account.

The screenwriters, Alan Di Fiore, Jim Kouf and Jamie Linden, aren’t exactly Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, but they do manage to give the dialogue a certain amount of snarky, unpredictable wit, and the director, Jodie Foster, stirs up a lot of whirling frenzy around what is essentially a static situation. So the movie generates a Front Page-like energy that carries us along quite enjoyably, even as the story’s complications grow harder and harder to swallow.

It helps that Clooney, who also co-produced, doesn’t seem to mind looking like a stooge onscreen. We’re asked to believe that, in this crisis situation, the host, director and crew of this show would swing into action as highly competent investigative journalists, swiftly tracking down the secret that led to the loss of the guy’s money. But helping us accept this laughable conceit is the look on Clooney’s face—scared, but also glum and guilty; the look of a man who has known all along, at some level, that he’s just a shill, but is only now confronted with the reality of his irresponsibility.

Roberts gives a maternal authority to her role—she’s as much a nanny as a director—and some of the other actors, notably Christopher Denham, Giancarlo Esposito, Caitrona Balfe, Lenny Venito, Emily Meade, Dennis Boutsikaris and Condola Rashad, bring speed, charm and a surprising amount of comedy to what they’re given. Money Monster is too conventional, too close to superficial, to be a really scary monster—I doubt it could be considered much more subtle in its dissection of matters financial than the shows it's spoofing. But it’s fast and well-made and entertaining, and the cast gives it heart.

A personal note: I was sworn to secrecy until it opened, but my pal Gayle Bass, lovely co-host of Right This Minute, appears briefly in Money Monster, playing the complex role of Gayle Bass, lovely co-host of Right This Minute. So even if there was no other reason to see it…

GUNG HODAG

The May issue of Phoenix Magazine…

 …includes my column showcasing four pizza restaurants. It’s on the stands now, or you can read it here.

One of the pizzerias in question is CheezHeadz, a Peoria joint with a Wisconsin theme which offers a massive cheesesteak sandwich called the Hodag. Cheeseheads will of course recognize that as a reference to…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree, The Hodag, terrifying yet beloved beast of Wisconsin tall tales, described in an 1893 newspaper story as having “the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with spears at the end.” Sounds a bit stegosaurian, no?

Anyway, here…

 …is one of the more spectacular specimens of Hodag, guarding the Rhinelander, WI Chamber of Commerce.

THE MAN OF A THOUSAND CREDITS

Well, hundreds, anyway…

Just this past weekend I was watching one of my all-time favorite movies, 1954’s Them! and I mentioned to The Wife that William Schallert, who has a small part as an ambulance attendant early on, was one of the few members of that great cast who was still alive. Then yesterday we learned that Schallert has passed on, at 93.

Best known for his regular role as Patty’s Dad on The Patty Duke Show—who would’ve thought he’d outlive his TV daughter?—and his recurring role on Dobie Gillis, Schallert was one of the most ubiquitous faces in American movies and TV in the second half of the 20^th Century. He appeared in movies ranging from The Man from Planet X to The Incredible Shrinking Man to Pillow Talk to In the Heat of the Night, and his dizzying list of TV roles includes everything from Twilight Zone to The Andy Griffith Show to The Wild Wild West to Get Smart to Gunsmoke to The Partridge Family to Kung Fu to the disagreeable Federation official in the Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles,” among many, many others.

Schallert, who also served as the President of the Screen Actors Guild from 1979 to 1981, slowed down a little after the ‘90s, but only a little. He was still making fairly regular TV appearances in stuff like My Name is Earl and True Blood and Medium until just a couple of years ago. RIP; his legacy with rerun junkies will not fade anytime soon.

SUPERFEUD

Opening this week: 

Captain America: Civil War—In March it was Batman and Superman that couldn’t get along; now it’s the gang over at Marvel. The U.N. wants the Avengers to agree to regulation. Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) thinks it’s a good idea. Captain America (Chris Evans) doesn’t want anyone telling him what he should and shouldn’t do.

I’ve become a bit of a curmudgeon about the current run of superhero flicks; technically eye-popping though they are, most of them seem overlong and humorless to me. That’s true of Civil War too, but I will say I enjoyed it more than Batman v Superman. About midpoint the quarrel leads Iron Man and his pals into a brawl with Cap and his pals at an airport, and the goofy, semi-slapstick action and the trading of corny quips between adversaries really conjured up the fun of reading an old-school comic. For once, the movie didn’t feel like Wagner without the arias.

The point of contention between Iron Man and Cap is, I suppose, a fair dramatization of a central conflict in the American attitude toward the rule of law, especially international law. But whichever side with which you may sympathize ideologically, there’s little doubt of which leading man wins this Civil War from an acting standpoint—Downey is as manically vibrant as ever, while poor Evans is as pleasantly bland a leading man as you can find in American movies right now.

Also adding some liveliness is Paul Rudd, returning as Ant-Man, Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther, and Tom Holland as another new Spider-Man. Spidey gets a new Aunt May his time, too—Marisa Tomei. Yes, that’s right; since the first Spider-Man flick back in 2002 the role of Aunt May has gone from Rosemary Harris to Sally Field to Marisa freakin’ Tomei. It’s a bit of a jolt to realize that Aunt May is two years younger than I am (and looks at least ten years younger).

MALL-OUT WAR

Mechanical monster time! Check out New Times blogs for my encomium to the ludicrous and highly entertaining 1986 horror movie Chopping Mall… 

 Monster-of-the-Week: …featuring this week’s honoree, the leader of the Killbots…

…the trio of robotic mall cops gone murderously rogue in that movie…

PHIL

RIP to my pal Phil Strassberg, who passed on late last week at the age of 89.

I had the good luck to share many lunches with Phil, who wrote for The New York Daily Mirror in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, and was the film critic for the Arizona Republic in the ‘70s, among many other adventures, and I turned one of our conversations over Chinese food into a profile for New Times back in 2001; check out his eventful life.