A CLOWN WITHOUT PITY

Opening this weekend:

It—That short title serves one of Stephen King’s longest and most ambitious horror novels. It’s about a group of pre-teen misfits who take on a fear-eating entity that lives in the sewers beneath Derry, their small town in Maine. This being appears to Its victims in the form of whatever scares them most—movie monsters, manifestations of phobias—but seems to default to the guise of a circus clown.

The novel runs to well over a thousand pages. I read it and loved it when it first came out in 1986, and hadn’t read it since, but the names, and nicknames, of the characters came back to me easily: “Stuttering Bill” Denbrough, the alpha male of the “Loser’s Club”—bereaved and enraged over the loss of his brother George—and Bill’s outcast pals, sensitive obese kid Ben “Haystack” Hanscom, bespectacled wiseass Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier, sickly kid Eddie Kaspbrak, Jewish kid Stan Uris, black kid Mike Hanlon, and the sole girl, Beverly Marsh, who has a (false) bad reputation. And of course, the nightmare clown Itself: Pennywise.

The book was loaded with King’s perennial themes: Childhood loss and mortality and alienation from adults, friendship as its balm, small-town life with its bullies and bigotries and sinister secrets from which a supernatural menace seems almost like a logical extension. The book is loaded, period—King, never one for austerity, seemed in that one to have allowed himself to indulge in every digression and tangent that occurred to him, and to have cut nothing out, in an attempt at a broad-canvas, shaggy-dog magnum opus.

As a result, King’s It is a bit of a mess—exasperatingly dilatory, full of ideas that don’t quite come off, and, because of the build-up given to the title character as the Ultimate Horror, inevitably a little anticlimactic. Even granting all this, however, it’s wonderful, one of his warmest and most engaging tales, and I think this has more to do with its depiction of adolescent camaraderie than with its ghoulish side.

There was a TV miniseries adaptation in 1990 that I remember as fairly well-done. Now comes this feature version which, though it runs over two hours, is still obviously a drastic compression of the story. To begin with, the book was a two-tiered narrative, alternating scenes of the Loser’s Club as kids with their reunion in Derry as adults, 27 years later. The film, directed by the Argentine Andy Muschietti from a script by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman, gives us only the kids’ story, presumably saving the adult side for a sequel.

The cultural references have also been readjusted. With the period pushed forward—the kids’ story now takes place in the ‘80s, when the adult story takes place in the novel—Pennywise no longer appears to his victims in Boomer-era shapes like the Wolf Man or the Creature of the Black Lagoon.

On the downside: Speaking as a confirmed wimp, I must say that I didn’t find this It very scary. There’s a scene or two—especially one involving a slide projector—with some chill factor, but overall the evil clown archetype, which King helped to develop with Pennywise, may have slipped over into cliché. I found Bill Skarsgard, who plays the role, skin-crawlingly repellent from our first glimpse of It—It’s evil bearing is impressive, but I saw no sense of wit or wonder that could draw a child in initially.

This may simply be because the use of the traditional clown by the horror genre over the last few decades has ended the era of Bozo and Clarabell. It may be that Ronald MacDonald is the last iconic old-school clown that can still unambiguously delight children—though the clock may be running for Ronald—and that even the Demon Clown is now overfamiliar.

On the upside: It is still quite entertaining, in the manner of an ‘80s-style youth adventure flick like The Goonies or Stand By Me or The Lost Boys. The young actors here are mostly first-rate, with charm and snappy comic timing, and Muschietti helps them to generate an ensemble hum in their group scenes. It’s oddly disorienting, in this virtual age, to see kids actually doing things in a movie—riding bikes, swimming, exploring—but it’s rather refreshing.

And, times being what they are, I doubt I’ll be the only person unable to resist a political reading of this It: A kid with a disability, a smartass kid, a fat kid, a Jewish kid, a black kid, a kid with health problems and a slut-shamed girl join forces against a clown who gains power from fear, and who grows stronger still when It’s able to divide them. Now more than ever, Losers: Unite Against The Clown!

CLOWN TO THE WIRE

With the new feature version of Stephen King's It opening tomorrow...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...our honoree is the towering "Jojo the Klownzilla..."

...from the 1988 Chiodo Brothers favorite Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

VOW FACTOR

Opening this week:

I Do...Until I Don't--A noxious British filmmaker (Dolly Wells) shows up in Vero Beach, Florida, to work on a documentary about marriage. The institution, she thinks, is in need of reform. Florida being the divorce capital of the world, or so she says, she starts following three married couples around with her camera, looking for (and trying to engineer) evidence to support her theory that marriage should be a seven-year contract with an option to renew.

Longtime married couples are represented by Harvey (Paul Reiser) and Cybill (Mary Steenburgen), affluent, perennially combative New York expats. Harvey walks around in a leather jacket and helmet even when he isn't riding his motorcycle; Cybill mocks him for it.

Younger specimens are Noah (Ed Helms) and his creatively frustrated wife Alice (Lake Bell). They run his late father's window blind business, which is on the verge of failure, and despite this looming financial disaster are rather halfheartedly trying to get pregnant. Also a target of the documentarian's camera and agenda are Alice's younger sister Fanny (Amber Heard) and her husband Xander (Wyatt Cenac), hippies in a theoretically open marriage.

This is the second feature written and directed by the talented Lake Bell. The actress has kept busy with prolific voice work and supporting parts, and pulled occasional nominal leading lady duty in stuff like No Escape and Million Dollar Arm. But it was with 2013's In a World...,  a screwy, uneven but original comedy about envies and career barriers in the voice-over community, that she showed her behind-the-cameras promise. I Do...Until I Don't, though by no means without strong performances and laughs, suggests, alas, a sophomore slump for Bell.

Neither the critique nor the defense of marriage presented here is anything really new. This wouldn't much matter, if the specific storylines were surprising in some way, but the characterizations, as written, are sitcom-basic--the hippie couple and the comic-villainess filmmaker are particularly weak and stereotypical. And the interweaving of the various plot strands feels awkward and uncertain.

On the upside, there are many passages of bright, funny dialogue, and Bell gets good work out of her cast, down to minor players like Chauntae Pink and Rae Grey as massage parlor workers. Bell's own performance as the sweetly complaisant, melancholy Alice, is the strongest, but Reiser and Steenburgen also develop an impressive comic rapport out of their underwritten scenes that allows us to see the touching, almost reluctant bond beneath their distracted sniping at each other. There's real venom and acid in their bickering, but no real urgency; their marital resentments have a familiarity, a low-key domestic rhythm.

Performances like this allowed me to enjoy I Do...Until I Don't quite a lot, even as I recognized its significant weaknesses and limitations. Bell has ability and vision, and I hope she gets to continue to toll.

TOBE OR NOT TOBE

RIP to the brilliant Tobe Hooper, passed on at 74. Hooper directed 1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, one of the most harrowing of all horror movies. It was one of several films from around those years that helped to launch a new era of hardcore, high-intensity horror that I don't much care for or even entirely approve of, but the ugliness to which it led does not take away in the least from Hooper's cinematic skill, his pitch-black wit, even a certain grotesque poetry that comes through in that classic.

In Hooper's honor...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week let's acknowledge Barlow...

...the Nosferatu-esque vampire played by the ever-cadaverous Reggie Nalder in Hooper's TV-movie adaptation of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot.

SPAIN THRESHOLD

Opening this week:

The Trip to Spain--Two middle-aged British guys drive up the coast of Spain together. As they pass through breathtaking scenery, staying in exquisite, historically important lodgings and eating glorious-looking meals, they focus far less on these pleasures than on one-upping each with celebrity impressions.

That’s the central joke of The Trip to Spain, as it was the central joke of 2014’s The Trip to Italy and of 2010’s The Trip, all of them derived from a BBC series, and all of them directed by Michael Winterbottom. The premise is that it’s a working tour, that the comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are visiting these restaurants to review them. But the meat of the film is the pair’s nattering, a constant dyad of passive-aggressive digs and competitive movie and TV take-offs, of varying quality.

So while grilled anchovies or shrimp or chorizo or Iranian caviar are placed in front of them, we watch Coogan and Brydon’s fictionalized selves try to outdo each as Roger Moore, or Anthony Hopkins, or Ian McKellan, or John Hurt, or Russell Brand. They do David Bowie perusing Twitter, and they do Mick Jagger as Hamlet. They do some Americans, too—Woody Allen and DeNiro and Brando.

We see them pose in front of roadside dinosaurs, and visit the Alhambra, and, inevitably, we see them in front of windmills, in Don Quixote and Sancho drag. Just as inevitably, they riff on the Spanish Inquisition, treating it as a game show, and quoting the famous Monty Python sketch, although in Brando’s voice.

As in the earlier films, a subtle tension underlies this clowning around, a sense that at some level their competition is a serious attempt at dominance—the world’s most un-macho form of machismo. At one point Brydon manages to get Coogan to crack a smile at one of his shticks, and it’s like he’s scored a TKO.

There’s a wisp of nominal plot about the career fortunes of our heroes, and occasionally Winterbottom shoos another actor or two past the camera, just so we don’t overdose on the stars. He also repeats an effective technique from the previous film: Now and then, while Coogan and Brydon are in the thick of one of their routines, he cuts to the chef and kitchen workers, creating culinary masterpieces for two maniacs paying no more than cursory attention to them. These films are an unusually reproachful form of food porn.

Obviously The Trip to Spain isn’t for everybody, and it’s perhaps a hair overlong, but for anglophilic foodie armchair traveling pop-culture buffs, it’s often riotous. I’d be excited to hear that the pair were planning The Trip to Greece, The Trip to Japan and, for an epic finale, The Trip to America.

Leap!--This animated feature is set in France in the late 1800s--the Eiffel Tower is still under construction, and Lady Liberty is still waiting to be delivered to New York. Our heroine is Felicie (voiced by Elle Fanning), who escapes from a provincial orphanage with her friend Victor (voiced by Nat Wolff). The two head for Paris, where her dream is to become a dancer and his is to become an inventor.

A string of kid-movie cliches ensue, the central one being that old standby Hold Onto Your Dream. Felicie ends up training at the Paris Opera Ballet, where's she's in competition with a nasty rich-girl rival for a role in The Nutcracker. In her corner is a kindly cleaning woman (Carly Rae Jepsen) who walks on a cane but knows dance enough to tutor Felicie, but working against her is the rich girl's mom, a Disney-style wicked stepmother type, and...

I'm getting bored just writing this. The look and settings have some cheeriness and imagination, but dramatically the film is without originality and unusually brazen in its pandering. It's also a spectacular demonstration of the so-called "Uncanny Valley" effect--the premise that human beings, as opposed to cute little animals or trolls or toys, come across creepy when represented in CGI.

A Canadian and French co-production, Leap! was released overseas last year as Ballerina, with a slightly different voice cast. The version we get includes the likes of Mel Brooks, thrown away as an orphanage heavy, and Kate McKinnon, who plays three different characters including the villainess, for whom she seems to be channeling the voice of Susan Sarandon. This, I thought, was the most impressive feat in the movie.

In fairness, I should say that I saw Leap! with a large audience of kids, most of whom seemed to watch it reasonably attentively. And afterwards, I saw a few little girls attempting the Grand Jete on their way out of the theatre.

LEWIS CHANGE

Saturday night the "No Festival Required" film series features The Rural Route Film Festival Touring Program...

...a collection of striking shorts, both animated and live-action, from the New York-based fest. Check out my review, on Phoenix Magazine online.

RIP to Dick Gregory, passed on at 84, and to actor Jay Thomas, departed at 69.

And of course, RIP to the great Jerry Lewis, passed on at 91. My Mom always found Lewis' comic persona infantile and annoying, and his public persona preening and obnoxious. I can't say she was wrong on either score; the trouble, for me as a kid, was that I loved him anyway. I always felt sheepish watching his movies because of Mom's disapproval, but privately I thought they were hilarious. I remember once being home alone when The Patsy came on TV, and, unburdened by the need to inhibit my reaction, I was left prostrate with laughter by the pre-credit scene alone.

In the mid-'90s, I was lucky enough to see Lewis perform live, in a touring production of Damn Yankees that had been reshaped into a star vehicle for him. He was superb--even if his style wasn't your cup of tea, his charisma and old-school showbiz chops were stunning.

In his honor...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...the nod goes to this grotesque horror...

...into which Lewis, as Professor Kelp, briefly changes in The Nutty Professor, his 1963 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, before changing into the true monster, Buddy Love...

WIDOWER & WIDOWMAKERS

Opening in Arizona today:

Menashe—Yiddish movies used to be a thing; more than a hundred of them were made, mostly in Poland or the U.S., in the decades before the Second World War. After that, they became rarities—this indie drama is thought to be the first American feature made mostly in Yiddish since 1975’s drama Hester Street.

The title character is a Hasidic widower in his thirties who works in a grocery store in Brooklyn. He’s a genuinely loving father to his ten-year-old son Rieven, and doesn’t agree with the requirement that the boy go to live with his uncle and aunt until Menashe remarries, because of the belief that a child must not be raised by a single parent. He’s in no hurry to remarry, but he wants his kid back.

The simple story that ensues provides director and co-writer Joshua Z. Weinstein ample opportunity for a peek into a little-understood world. The movie was shot, not quite surreptitiously but with a very low profile, in the Hasidic enclave in Borough Park, Brooklyn, with a cast of non-actors. While this generates a neo-realist, almost verité atmosphere, Menashe transcends cultural anthropology. It’s a character study, brought to life by a gifted first-time star—Menashe Lustig, on whose life the story was loosely based.

Menashe is described as a schlimazel by his own family members, ungenerously but perhaps not inaccurately—he’s a nice fellow, but he’s chronically late, late with the rent, broke, and so forth. He insists on mild rebellion from his culture—not wearing the full Hasidic regalia on the street, for instance—in ways that nettle his family and do him no favors.

As played by Lustig, however, the character is also quietly, unsentimentally, even a little exasperatingly endearing. Lustig gives us a naturalistic portrait of the man’s humor, his guilt, his anger, his mischievousness. At one point Menashe’s disapproving brother-in-law says he’d like to see him become a mensch, but we in the audience see him this way already.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard—Samuel L. Jackson is the Hitman, Darius Kincaid, who specializes in killing rich, powerful scumbags; Ryan Reynolds is the Bodyguard, Michael Bryce, who escorts such scumbags to safety. Michael is recruited to get Darius, his longtime enemy, safely from prison in Manchester, England to The Hague, so that he can testify at the International Court of Justice against a brutal Belarusian dictator (Gary Oldman, who else?).

Apparently the imprisoned tyrant is pretty well-connected, as massive numbers of mercenaries try to kill Darius enroute. Hitman and Bodyguard bicker jocularly through mayhem, slaughter, even torture. Michael is persnickety, orderly, a planner, while Kincaid flies by the seat of his pants.

There's nothing new here, but strictly on its own terms, this cartoonishly overscaled buddy picture, directed by the Australian Patrick Hughes, is perfectly executed. Well, almost perfectly; it has the genre's annoying sentimental streak. And like most big-budget action flicks of the last few decades, it could be trimmed by at least ten minutes without losing anything it needs, but as it clocks in at just under two hours it doesn't quite wear out its welcome.

Yet despite the skill with which it's made, there is an imbalance to The Hitman's Bodyguard, in the unsavory contrast between the cutesy comedy and the shocking violence. When the dictator kills a man's family while he watches, and then minutes later we're back with Reynolds and Jackson and expected to crack up at their bantering, it's really jarring, and it doesn't feel like a deliberate black-comedy effect. It just feels like an adolescent sensibility, willing to use the sufferings of people under such regimes as a summer blockbuster plot point.

The leads keep us diverted from this ugliness, however. Reynolds has never been a favorite of mine, but he 's a good sport here, embracing the role of a prim foil to Jackson. That great actor has rarely gotten the chance to cut loose to quite the degree he does here. He seems to have a blast, singing fatalistic blues lyrics (there's a pretty good one written by Jackson himself, and reprised under the end credits) and cheerfully guffawing at the twists of fate that fling him about. Darius is out of his cell, so despite the carnage around him and the constant peril, anything else is gravy.