KRATT PACK

This...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...is a kratt:

It's a laborer pieced together from odds and ends and junk, then endowed with a soul obtained from the Devil via a bargain (on the level or not) at the crossroads. Apparently kratts figure prominently in Estonian folklore; in any case they figure prominently in Rainer Sarnet's remarkable new film November, from which the still above is taken, and which opens tomorrow at FilmBar.

More about this movie soon.

SIMON DOESN'T SAY

New in the multiplexes this week:

Love, Simon--The title character is an upper-middle-class suburban kid with a loving, supportive family, adoring friends and a bright future. The angst in this teen-angst comedy-drama comes from Simon's self-described "huge-ass secret": he's gay.

Simon (Nick Robinson) exchanges anonymous blog posts with "Blue," another closeted kid at his school, and gradually falls in love with him, as he tries to figure out which of various "suspects" Blue might be. Meanwhile an obnoxious classmate (Logan Miller) stumbles upon Simon's secret and uses it to blackmail our hero into playing matchmaker with Simon's friend Abby (Alexandra Shipp), even though his pal Nick (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) is also in love with her. Simon capitulates, and wacky but painful complications ensue.

If these plot mechanics sound contrived, that's how they came across to me, as well. Those of us who haven't had to face the prospect of such a disclosure ourselves might naively wonder why a well-adjusted, well-protected, principled kid like Simon is so leery of coming out to his family and friends in this day and age. Even allowing for this country's reactionary social ugliness of the last year or two, it seems like such a revelation isn't remotely the earthshaking crisis it would have been even a decade ago, at least in Simon's class and domestic circumstances.

Indeed, the script, by Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker (from a novel by Becky Albertalli), gives Simon some narration addressing his reluctance in amusing terms--his resentment, for instance, that straight kids don't have to come out. But the performance of Nick Robinson makes this gratuitous. Lightly, with no histrionics, Robinson gets across a wary melancholia and tension under the surface of Simon's quiet good nature. He makes us understand what a huge-ass deal it would be to define one's identity in a non-default category, regardless of support system.

Beyond Robinson's excellence, Love, Simon is some fairly typical teen stuff, briskly directed by Greg Berlanti and pleasantly acted by an attractive cast. Jennifer Garner has become quite adept at playing sensible, gently fretful suburban moms, and she's effective again here, while Josh Duhamel is believable as Simon's softie dad. As is so often the case in movies of this sort, the high school staff roles are used as opportunities for goofball character actors, in this case Tony Hale as the anti-cell-phone crusader principal and Natasha Rothwell in a terrific turn as the wound-up director of the school play.

The writing is a bit facile at times, like when Simon assures us that he and his friends do what anybody does, like watching "bad  '90s movies." This seems less a reflection of what kids actually do nowadays than of filmmakers who want to use cultural references from their own youths rather than that of their characters.

But in a sense, the conventional, by-the-numbers aspects of this movie are what make it significant. I'm far from trying to suggest that LGBT people have attained anything resembling full social acceptance, of course. But when I imagine how mainstream American audiences would have reacted thirty, twenty or even ten years ago to a movie that ended with two high-school boys sharing a romantic kiss, as opposed to the routine way it was received by the screening audience with whom I saw this film, it's hard not to feel that a real shift in attitude has occurred. Love, Simon is no big deal, and that's kind of a big deal.

THE FORCE AWAKENS?

This week our President suggested that the U.S. military may soon have a new branch: The "Space Force!" Presumably its duties would include protecting us from threats like...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this "Menace from Uranus" depicted...

...on the cover of this 1967 Lost in Space comic from Gold Key. The adventure's title may provide a clue to the source from whence the President pulls his ideas.

A NEW WRINKLE

Opening this week:

A Wrinkle in Time—14-year-old Storm Reid plays heroine Meg Murray in this first big-screen adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's much-loved novel of 1962. She brings the role a sober, guarded manner that is very touching. Meg's father (Chris Pine), a scientist who was working on a method of instantaneous time/space travel called a "tesseract," disappeared a few years earlier, and Meg's thick glasses and mop of curls can't hide her pain and anger at the loss, or her worry about its implications for her family. They can't hide her intelligence, either.

Young Reid is impressive; unfortunately she's the best thing about the movie. I read and liked the book as a kid, though it wasn't the knockout for me that it was for many readers of my generation. The makers of this version, however, seem to have missed the book's charming originality: It's an epic sci-fi tale told in the prosaic manner of a rural-Connecticut adolescent coming-of-age story, with a strong undercurrent of liberal-ecumenical Christianity (L'Engle was a devout Episcopalian). In its less ambitious way, it prefigures the Harry Potter books, with their inspired blend of high fantasy and school story.

The difference in the approach of director Ava DuVernay and the screenwriters, Jennifer Lee and John Stockwell, shows up nowhere more plainly than in the characterizations of the dotty Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), the quotation-spouting Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) and the lofty Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), who take Meg, her prodigal little brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), and her school friend Calvin (Levi Miller) on an odyssey to distant worlds in search of the missing dad. In the book, the three strange, kindly ladies are venerable old bats.

In the film, they are glitzed-out in costumes and makeup that seem more appropriate to a Mardi Gras parade float, or maybe a Bette Midler back-up singer from the '70s. All three are formidable actresses, of course, and Kaling, in the most enigmatic role, makes good use of her sly, knowing smile. But on the whole, as New Age angels, the trio feels ersatz and unconvincing and simply way too young.

This feel extends to the production as a whole. Backed by a bottomless Disney budget, this Wrinkle in Time turns into a typical blockbuster effect spectacle. There are times when this generates some magic, as when Mrs. Whatsit takes the kids on an aerial tour of a paradisiacal planet. But at least as often, the story gets lost or disjointed in all that CGI, and the pace curdles.

The movie has its vivid moments, particularly in the visit to Camazotz, a world of conformity where the inhabitants are in thrall to IT (here called, for some reason, "The IT."), a sinister alien entity. There's a sunlit spookiness to the scene in which our heroes pass through a cul-de-sac of stucco houses, which looks startlingly like a subdivision in west Phoenix, and see children bouncing identical red balls in unison before their midcentury-magazine-cover moms call them inside to eat. Still, there may be something disingenuous about a movie from this particular voracious conglomerate inveighing against social uniformity. After dinner, I bet all those kids sit down to watch the Disney Channel.

The Leisure Seeker—The title refers to a faded ‘70s-era Winnebago in which an elderly married couple decide to take a last road trip, from Wellesley, Massachusetts to Key West, Florida. John (Donald Sutherland), a retired English professor, has Alzheimer’s, but can still pilot the huge vehicle, and Ella (Helen Mirren), a cheerful southern belle, is determined that that they will at long last make the trip to see the house of John's literary hero Hemingway.

So while their kids (Christian McKay and Janel Maloney) sit home and worry, Ella does her best to navigate both the roads and her husband’s ever-shifting mental state. One minute he's holding forth on literature to a waitress, or remembering a former student with perfect clarity, and seconds later he's monosyllabic and primal, like the half-wit handyman Sutherland played in Die! Die! My Darling! back in 1965. Painful, long-held family secrets leak out, and in the movie's one ripe moment of satire, we see John, a lifelong Democrat, wander off and happily join in cheering at a Trump rally.

Directed by Paolo Virzi from a novel by Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker shows some signs of having sat on the shelf for a while; for one thing, Dick Gregory, who died in August of last year, has a small but funny role in it. It's a highly uneven movie, with many heavy-handed episodes and some curious loose ends. But the star power of the leads makes it moving, both in the tragedy, and the grim comedy, of dementia, and in the exhilaration of travel.

HERE COMES THE BRAIN AGAIN

With the film version of A Wrinkle in Time opening tomorrow, I'm reminded of IT, the terrifying alien brain that rules Camazotz, the world of conformity, in the beloved 1962 novel by Madeleine L'Engle.

So...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's acknowledge the huge extraterrestrial brain in Jack Arnold's 1958 movie The Space Children...

...who also exerted telepathic influence on kids. The title kinder (the unnerving little girl from the beginning of Them! among them), who find the big cerebrum hiding in a seaside cave on the California coast, are the offspring of Cold War rocket scientists, and the brain tries to get them to sabotage their parents' anti-Commie efforts. I've long wondered if this underrated, atmospheric, dreamlike little movie, with its chilly, formal visual elegance, might have been an inspiration for L'Engle's IT.

FORWARD MARCH

Check out the March issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...

…for my “Four Corners”column on new and newish Valley joints with four and five star ratings on Yelp.

After last year’s bungling of the Best Picture award, the focus at this year’s Oscar show seemed, understandably, to be on having a disciplined, orderly presentation. And indeed, from a set of metallic crystal that looked like the interior of a giant geode, the 90^th annual honors went reasonably smoothly last Sunday.

During a straightforward but funny opening monologue, the host, Jimmy Kimmel, offered an incentive to keep the show tight: A jet ski was offered as a prize, game-show-style—with Helen Mirren impressively handling the Carol Merrill duties—to whoever gave the briefest acceptance speech. It was one of his funnier gags, compounded later when, needing to up the ante on the prize, he also offered a stay at Lake Havasu.

There was also a becoming focus on history. My favorite aspect of this year's production were the clips that preceded each acting award: quick, dazzling montages of previous winners. It had the effect such sequences do when they're well-done; they made me want to shut off the show and watch those movies.

THUNK PIECE

It was recently pointed out to Your Humble Narrator that tomorrow, March 2, is Dr. Seuss Day, being the great man's birthday. So...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week's honoree is The Glunk...

...title character of "The Glunk That Got Thunk," a story from the 1969 Dr. Seuss collection I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today! The Glunk is conjured up by the Cat in the Hat's daughter with her "Thinker-Upper" when she unwisely departs from using it to think up "friendly little things with smiles and fuzzy fur." Her brother describes him thusly:

"He was greenish
Not too cleanish
And he sort of had bad breath.

'Good gracious!' gasped my sister,
 'I have thunked up quite a meth!'"

The Glunk proceeds to make a long distance call to his beloved mother, and relate to her a long, preposterous recipe for "Glunker stew."

As many of us have painfully learned in recent years, the progressive social values of Dr. Seuss were a lifelong, if ultimately triumphant, work in progress (he created racist advertising art and cartoons in his early years). This particular story, which would seem to imply (probably unconsciously on the author's part) that little girls should stick to imagining "friendly little things," does not represent him at his philosophical best. But it does represent him at his comedic best, and it's hard to resist a monster whose greatest menace is running up the phone bill.