THAT'S ONE BIG EFFIN' GIANT...

Opening this weekend: 

The BFG—The title stands for “Big Friendly Giant,” and the title character is just that—a pleasant colossus (Mark Rylance) whose job is delivering pleasant dreams. A young English orphan girl, Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) ends up as his houseguest and friend.

“Big” is a relative term, as it turns out. The BFG’s neighbors in giant land are much bigger than he is, and the monstrous, thuggish brutes (led by Jemaine Clement) routinely bully him. They’re also much less friendly, especially to humans—in the grand tradition of giants, they’re eager to eat Englishmen/women (and presumably any other nationality). The BFG won’t do this—he maintains a vegetarian diet mostly consisting of a revolting-looking produce item called a snozzcumber. He’s also fond of a carbonated beverage with downward-traveling bubbles that induce epic intestinal activity.

Steven Spielberg directed this adaptation of one of Roald Dahl’s strange tales for children. The script is by the great Melissa Mathison, who passed on last year, and to whom the film is dedicated. Mathison wrote the scripts for such kid-movie classics as The Black Stallion (1979) and E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), as well as the underrated 1995 The Indian in the Cupboard. At her best, she was able tap into the subconscious power of such tales. I never thought she got as much credit for, in particular, the success of E.T. as she should have; the best lines in that movie carry an almost Jungian tingle, without the slightest pretension.

Her swansong was another script for Spielberg with, curiously, another initialed title character who befriends a little kid. I wish I could say that the result was another classic, but I think this one falls a little short of their earlier achievement. Visually it has the feel of a throwback, to the sort of fantasy movies made in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

Some of these were by Spielberg himself, in the worst phase of his career—like 1991’s Hook, probably my least favorite Spielberg film—and some of them were by other filmmakers trying to imitate Spielberg and his command of the box office. Like Hook, The BFG is all painterly colors and delicate compositions of the sort that wins Caldecott Medals for book illustrators, and the music, by John Williams of course, has the same soaring, leaping manner that Williams seems able to muster in his sleep.

As for the story, it has the free-wheeling, sometimes slightly sinister absurdity that is the trademark of Dahl’s stories for kids, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The BFG goes in for a degree of kid-pleasing scatology, as well. The Queen of England (Penelope Wilton) samples the BFG’s favorite beverage, for instance, with predictably Chaucerian results.

But somehow the energy just isn’t there with this one. There’s something muted and melancholy to the atmosphere of The BFG that makes it feel heavy and slow and draggy in its first half. Things certainly pick up in the second half, when the more broadly comic stuff kicks in, but even this shift feels vaguely forced—the dream-logic of the goofy narrative doesn’t seem organic.

All that said, there’s a redemptive virtue to The BFG, and that’s Mark Rylance. Endowed via CGI with a long nose and enormous ears below his sloping forehead and swept-back white hair, this great actor, who justly won an Oscar this year for his turn in Bridge of Spies, dries any schmaltz out of the film with his quiet, matter-of-fact line readings. And his young costar Barnhill is impressive, too—she’s a cute kid, but you never see her being cute on purpose. 

The Purge: Election Year—Writer-director James DeMonaco’s Purge movies, of which this is the third, are dystopian chillers set in a not-too-distant future America wherein, once a year for twelve hours, law and order is suspended and all crimes are fair game. The supposed premise is that a wild night of unchecked murder and vandalism will exorcise everybody’s demons and society will be more stable the rest of the year.

This loathsome holiday is explicitly reactionary in origin. DeMonaco seems to think that it’s the natural extension of the hardcore Right’s gun fever and evangelical fervor and class and racial animus, if they ever decided to drop the self-righteous posing. I wish, in light of the current primary season, that I was more confident that he’s wrong about this.

But that doesn’t mean that the movie, set in Our Nation’s Capitol, isn’t exultantly stupid and disgusting. It’s also one of the more disingenuous films I’ve ever seen, inviting our contempt at a social outrage of its own invention, while eliciting bloodthirsty whoops of delight every time one of the “Purgers” gets flattened by the good guys.

Said good guys include a Senator (Elizabeth Mitchell, in the specs of a sexy librarian from an ‘80s video) who’s running for President on a vow to abolish the Purge, and her security man (Frank Grillo). These two, stuck on the street after an assassination attempt, are befriended by the owner of a D.C. deli (Mykelti Williamson) and his friends (Joseph Julian Soria and Betty Gabriel) who are trying to defend their store from vengeful Purgers. The whole gang gets swept up into a revolutionary movement against the creepy “New Founding Fathers.”

Ugly and satirically ham-fisted as the movie is, it would be useless for me to deny that I found it a perfectly well-made and exciting Jacobean bloodbath. The dialogue is a little stilted at times, but the actors are easy to sympathize with, the story is tightly constructed, and DeMonaco knows how to use horror shtick—scary masks, cheap shocks—to build an unsavory atmosphere of dread. Election Year—like this election year— may be improbable and revolting, but it isn’t boring.

HUGE DEAL

With The BFG, which stands for Big Friendly Giant, opening tomorrow…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s give the nod to the big not-so friendly giant…

…from the 1970 shocker Equinox. Though that movie, an expansion of a 1967 student film by future multi-Oscar-winning special effects master Dennis Muren, is full of spectacular stop motion effects, this big fellow (Jim Duron) was generated through low-tech forced perspective.

By the way, wouldn’t “The FG” be less redundant?

DON'T BE SO SHALLOW

Opening this weekend:

The Shallows—Few would argue that Jaws—which, it was recently pointed out to me, turns 41 this month—is the greatest shark movie ever made. But one could probably go farther—it may be the only really good shark movie ever made. Its official sequels ranged from weak to laughable, none of its many rip-offs were classics, Deep Blue Sea had the one great scene with Samuel L. Jackson but little else to recommend it, and the Sharknado movies were terrible on purpose.

Now comes The Shallows, sort of a feature-length version of the opening scene of Jaws, if the young woman had been able to fight back. Blake Lively plays Nancy, a lapsed American med student who, as a memorial to her late mother, goes surfing at a secluded beach in Mexico (though the film was actually shot in Australia).

She stays in the water a hair too long, and finds herself alone, injured and trapped on a rock, under siege from a particularly persistent great white shark. Her medical skills come into play, gruelingly, in treating her own injuries, but high tide will submerge her rock, so before long she’ll have to try to make it either to shore or to the buoy nearby.

That’s pretty much the movie, and for most of its length it’s pretty gripping. Director Jaume Collet-Serra and screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski handle the initial buildup deliciously, and manage some clever gimmicks to create the illusion that the story, with its static basic situation, is moving forward.

Best of all, Blake Lively is up to the task of carrying the picture herself. Lively’s supporting role in Ben Affleck’s The Town demonstrated she could act, but here she’s the whole show. She and Oscar Jaenada, as a local guy who gives her a ride, get a nice rapport going in a brief scene near the beginning, but on the whole the rest of the cast are bit players. Much of Lively’s footage here consists of her screaming in terror or groaning in pain, but this doesn’t become tedious, and she finds ways, through the glimpses of personality she’s permitted to offer, to make a portrait of a likable, admirable, believable young woman emerge.

Structurally, The Shallows is almost identical to 2013’s Gravity: A showcase role of a bereaved woman struggling to survive after a disaster. And it has exactly the same key flaw—after a mostly convincing first two-thirds, it lets itself slide into cornball action melodrama in its homestretch. We’re led to believe that Nancy will find some ingenious way to outsmart her fishy foe, but the final clash is like something out of a Schwarzenegger movie. It’s still reasonably entertaining, but a bit of a letdown after such a strong start.

Even if this weren’t the case, though, The Shallows would still fall far short of Jaws for another reason—the shark doesn’t look real. The shark effects here are well above average for the CGI era, but they still have that unmistakable whiff of insubstantial ghostliness, compared to the hardcore presence of the robot shark in Jaws.

Thus the shark in The Shallows never really becomes a character, but formidable as Lively is, she does get upstaged: An injured seagull, marooned on the same rock, keeps regarding Nancy with an unimpressed scowl and an occasional cranky screech. This very real bird is a fine performer, and his vivid individuality demonstrates the limits of CGI.

ELECTRIC BRIDE

Since it’s June, a bridal theme seems in order, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …how about this Bride of Frankenstein doll, I mean action figure, from ReAction Figures that I found recently on a discount table…

Notice that I had to take her “As Is.” You know, for better or worse.

I also like how she seems—not intentionally, I think—to be wearing a pantsuit. Nontraditional chic.

BRIAN'S SONG, & THE PER-FISH-TENCE OF MEMORY

Opening this weekend:

 

De Palma—For all the faults of his movies, even for all the supposed great faults of his character, I’ve always had a soft spot for director Brian De Palma. This isn’t always easy to defend—while the frequent charge that he’s a misogynist can’t, I think, be proven from his movies, the general smarminess and arrested adolescence that many of them give off is hard to deny.

But his filmmaking mastery is even harder to deny. There’s a lot of schlock and silliness on the list of his credits, but there are several enduring classics, too, and I find that scenes from even his worst misfires remain in my memory in a way that plenty of better movies don’t. This is because, of course, he’s a true cinema stylist, lavishing so much craft and obsessive care on even the most absurd or ugly content that it ends up charged with vivid atmosphere.

Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow apparently share this admiration. The documentary they made about him comes across, more than anything, as an act of obsessive fandom. The only talking head is the title character, sitting in front of a gray fireplace. First he talks about his background, a little, and then he talks about his films—every one of them, I think, at least briefly—and the films that influenced him. As he talks, clips and stills are mixed in. That’s pretty much the whole movie.

The austerity of Baumbach and Paltrow’s approach is shrewd, because the material on which they draw is so cinematically rich. The biographical material is fascinating—I certainly didn’t know that De Palma’s father was a famous osteopath, or that the director himself had been a science whiz as a kid—and the straightforward progression through his works gives a bird’s-eye view of his development. The clips offer some intriguing treasures, too, like the unused deus ex machina ending of 1998’s Snake Eyes that’s more interesting than anything that made it into the finished film.

As for his own psychology, the ruefully chuckling De Palma seems candid enough, in a general sort of way. But although he shares some eyebrow-raising autobiographical subtext to Dressed to Kill, overall he seems unwilling to go very deep. Unlike, say, 1994’s Crumb, this movie doesn’t strip its subject naked for us. He’s evasive about his sensibility toward women, for instance, saying only that it “always made sense” to him, in the context of the genre in which he was working. And indeed, adjusting for generational differences in the degree of graphic violence acceptable in a movie, it’s hard to see how Hitchcock, for the most obvious example, is less vulnerable to this charge than De Palma.

In any event, De Palma can lay claim, at least for me, to the highest praise a documentary about a moviemaker can earn. Like last year’s movie version of Hitchcock/Truffaut, it left me with an appetite to re-watch these movies. 

 Finding Dory—Pixar’s 2003 animated ichthyological smash Finding Nemo is one of the most beloved of all kid movies. But I think I enjoyed this sequel focusing on Dory, the cheery titular blue tang with the unreliable short-term memory who helped in the search for the title fish in the first film, even more.

This time Dory, voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, is trying to find her home and parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy), from whom she was separated as a kid, and the worrywart clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) and his little Nemo are helping her. Once again they have to cross the ocean, this time to a marine center on the California coast. And once again they have to depend on the kindness of strangers, notably an octopus named Hank (Ed O’Neill), as well as a whale shark and a beluga. Dory is also amusingly guided by a voice from above—specifically, the voice of Sigourney Weaver.

The imperturbable, doggedly polite optimism and geniality of DeGeneres is center stage here, and deeply endearing. Her off-the-cuff, throwaway delivery, along with the mild kvetching of Brooks, is central to the movie’s balance. The theme, along with the Pixar/Disney standard of separation from loved ones, is the preciousness and vulnerability of memory, and the light touch of DeGeneres makes this moving, but not exhausting.

To Mesa Arts Center this Sunday, June 19…

 …comes a different iconic American filmmaker of the ‘70s and ‘80s: John Carpenter. The auteur plays a concert of his own music, both from his films and from a couple of recent studio albums. Check out my interview with him, on New Times blogs.

THE FIN CROWD

Finding Dory opens Friday, and in a perhaps unfortunate bit of timing Saturday, June 18 is National Sushi Day. In honor of the latter occasion, Your Humble Narrator devoted the "Four Corners" column in this month's edition of Phoenix Magazine...

…to four Valley sushi joints.

In honor of both occasions…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the nod this week goes to the huge primordial fish…

…that comes up from the depths in 1979’s Up From the Depths. My pal, master thespian James Ward, then a teenager in The Philippines—where the film was actually shot, though it was set in Hawaii—can be glimpsed as a beach extra in this laugh-riot Jaws rip-off.

SHRIEK WEEK

In anticipation of De Palma, the upcoming documentary about the director by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, Phoenix Film Festival is presenting “De Palma Week,” June 13 through June 16 at Scottsdale 101. Three of De Palma’s major works will be screened, one each night at 7 p.m., followed on the final evening by a screening of the documentary. Admission to the first three evenings is just $5; tickets to the De Palma screening are not available for purchase, but must be won; there will be opportunities to do so at the three earlier screenings:

June 13: Carrie—De Palma’s 1976 version of Steven King’s novel, the first movie adaptation of King’s work, was a smash, and probably started the process of turning King into American horror’s household name. For this sad, scary fairy tale of a picked-on, outcast high school girl (Sissy Spacek) with telekinetic powers who raises hell at her senior prom, De Palma uses his characteristic tricks—spilt screens, slow motion, long sinuous tracking shots—to cast a dreamlike spell. Both Spacek and Piper Laurie as Carrie’s religious fanatic mother got Oscar nominations, and the young John Travolta, Nancy Allen and Amy Irving are also in the cast. The final jolt is a classic; I can remember the screams in the theater (including my own) when I saw it the first time.

 

June 14: Scarface—One of the signature American movies of the ‘80s, De Palma’s 1983 gangster saga reset the 1932 classic in Miami, and gave Al Pacino, hamming vigorously, the second most famous role of his career, that of Tony Montana, the Cuban refugee turned killer turned cocaine kingpin. As with so much of De Palma’s work, the film is loaded with bloody violence and carnage, presented in elegant, finely-constructed sequences. The pace bogs down some in the second half—until the wild shootout finale, that is, from which derives Pacino’s now-familiar catchphrase, as he’s about to let loose at his enemies with a comically enormous automatic weapon: “Say hello to my leetle friend!”

The June 15 offering was a “Viewer’s Choice,” between Dressed to Kill and Carlito’s Way. The online voting is completed, and though I like 1993’s Carlito’s Way, another gangster melodrama with Al Pacino, I’m glad the choice is: 

Dressed to Kill—De Palma’s 1980 homage to Hitchcock, this gruesome psychological thriller with Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson and Nancy Allen seems, in some ways, like the quintessential expression of De Palma’s twisted psyche, for better and worse. The sensibility of the movie, which De Palma also scripted, has aged poorly—both the horrifying brutality of the central murder sequence and the implications of the story’s twist ending are unsavory. But as an exercise in technique, it packs at least as much of a punch as it ever did.

Finally, on June 16, the series will conclude with the special screening of Baumbach and Paltrow’s documentary De Palma, which gives the man in question a chance to explain himself.

Go to PhoenixFilmFestival.com for details.