TRUTHS, DARES, AARDVARKS, PHANTOMS

Opening this weekend:

Truth or Dare--A college senior (Lucy Hale), planning to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity on her last spring break, allows herself to be pressured into going to Mexico with her friends instead. Down there, a stranger (Landon Liboiron) invites them to play a game of truth or dare in the ruins of an old church. When they get back to school, the participants in the game start receiving Truth or Dare challenges through creepy psychic visions, and if they fail to either tell the truth or complete the dare, they gruesomely die.

I’ve seen far worse horror movies than Truth or Dare, also promoted under the title Blumhouse's Truth or Dare. Directed by Jason Wadlow, it’s slick and polished, with an attractive cast playing characters that aren’t as abrasive and obnoxious as they often are in movies like this. It helps that they seem to care about each other. Hale is particularly charming as the earnest good-girl heroine.

But it is, unmistakably, very derivative of other flicks of recent years like Final Destination and It Follows, and I found the ending bungled and unsatisfying. I appreciate the way Blumhouse Productions tries to give its young audience honest value on a modest scale, and this movie is not without merit. But it isn't anywhere near as good as Blumhouse's Get Out, or even as last fall's Happy Death Day.

Aardvark--Josh (Zachary Quinto) is a psychologically troubled guy, haunted by the powerful presence, and absence, of his older brother Craig (Jon Hamm), a famous TV actor. Craig pays Josh's bills, but isn't otherwise in touch with him, except through Josh's occasional apparent delusions, in which a homeless woman or a virile cop seem to him to be his brother, buried in a brilliant new characterization.

The real Craig does show up in the life of Josh's lonely therapist Emily (Jenny Slate), and unethically but perhaps understandably they start an affair. Meanwhile Josh meets an attractive young woman named Hannah (Sheila Vand), but is she another hallucination?

And so on. Aardvark is worth watching. It's perfectly well directed by Brian Shoaf, from his own script, which has perfectly speakable, intriguing, at times touching dialogue. The acting is top shelf. The tiny, exquisite Slate continues to show her range; her prim evasiveness is both funny and moving. Hamm is effortlessly convincing as this veteran celebrity, simultaneously sheepish and confident, quietly disappointed in his life. And Quinto brings dignity and humor to Josh, declining to milk the part for overt pathos.

But I sat there hoping, and doubting, that Shoaf would be able to snap Aardvark's ambiguities together into a dramatically coherent whole, and alas, he missed, at least for me. It was a near miss, maybe; the movie has a number of minor emotional payoffs, but they don't add up to a major emotional payoff.

In case you're wondering, I'm happy to report that the title isn't a cheat: There is an aardvark in Aardvark, played by a handsome creature billed as "Amani the Aardvark." The culmination of the aardvark's strand is, indeed, one of the movie's sweetest moments.

Check out my interview, on Phoenix Magazine online, with my pal, Arizona actress turned mystery novelist Cindy Brown, who signs her book The Phantom of the Oz at the Orpheum Theatre next Tuesday, April 17, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., as a benefit for Friends of the Orpheum Theatre.

BIGLY

It's been a while since an American movie featured a giant white gorilla; probably since 1933's Son of Kong. So...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week our honoree has to be George...

 
...the albino gorilla who gets supersized in Rampage, opening tomorrow.

I missed the screening of this, but I'll probably have to go see it.

VARIETY IS THE SPACE

Saturday night at 10 p.m. only, at FilmBar Phoenix:

Time Masters (Les Maitres du Temps)--This animated 1982 space opera, directed by Rene Laloux from a tale by Stefan Wul, with the collaboration of illustrator Jean "Moebius" Geraud, maybe doesn't quite have the eerie beauty of Laloux's 1973 classic Fantastic Planet. But it has a charm and a sweetly imaginative atmosphere all its own. It concerns the efforts of a band of good-hearted (and terribly chic) space adventurers to rescue a rather irritable little boy stranded on a distant planet. In the course of the rescuers' odyssey, they encounter a planet of winged, faceless ciphers in thrall to a conformist intelligence, well-intentioned telepathic spore creatures, greedy bureaucratic officials and other obstacles, while the boy must contend with tentacled cave dwellers and giant insects. I've seen an English-dubbed version for Brit TV, but the chance to see this one on a screen is a bit of a rarity, and probably shouldn't be passed up.

Check out the April issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...for my "Four Corners" column, this time about patio dining.

Also underway this week, and continuning through April 15, are both Phoenix Film Festival and, running concurrently, the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival. Check out Phoenix Magazine online for my interview with IHSFF director Monte Yazzie.

BRAD NEWS

My pal Barry emailed me from Scotland to reprove me for failing to note on this blog the passing of a favorite of ours, actor Bradford Dillman, this past January. "You may have to consider seppuku," wrote Barry.

I had indeed not heard the sad news that Dillman, whose career ranged from O'Neill on Broadway to O'Neill in the movies to one of the Leopold-and-Loeb-ish creeps in Compulsion to supporting roles in a couple of Dirty Harry flicks to the mad scientist in the 1975 shocker Bug to the title character in 1961's Francis of Assisi, had passed on, at 87. But I pointed out to Barry that having to soldier on in a Dillman-less world was a greater punishment for me than seppuku.

I should also note that when I was in my early teens, I once started babbling on about how great Bradford Dillman was in front of my older brother, who mocked me by asking repeatedly if I was talking about Bradford Dillman, Bradford Dillman, Jr., Bradford Dillman III etc ad nauseam. The very name "Bradford Dillman" became a running gag with my brother for years.

Anyway...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...in light of the news, this week's honoree can only be...

...Dillman's werewolf in the 1972 TV-movie classic Moon of the Wolf (based on a genuinely good novel by the neglected Leslie H. Whitten). The movie can, and should, be enjoyed in its entirety here.

TRENCH MOB

In theaters this weekend:

Journey's End--Samuel Johnson famously said that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. That guilty sentiment (which now probably extends to a lot of women as well) negates the intentions of a lot of supposedly "anti-war" movies.

The makers of such movies may even genuinely intend them to be anti-war, but the nature of the western narrative tradition being what it is, what often ends up onscreen is an action-adventure story with some inserted piety about the horrors of war. They may leave young viewers in the audience even more eager to rush off to battle, and older viewers reproaching themselves, Johnson-style, for never having done so.

There are exceptions, though. Probably because World War One is now historically regarded as such a colossally wasteful, sordid mess, that conflict has produced several pretty effective cautionary war dramas. All Quiet on the Western Front, both the novel and Lewis Milestone's 1930 movie, truly seem to get across something of both the terror and the futility of trench warfare in WWI. So, from the other side, does R. C. Sherriff's 1928 English play Journey's End, about desperate, shell-shocked, boozing British officers at the end of their rope in the trenches in France in spring of 1918.

Not long ago I saw the 1930 film version of Journey's End, the feature debut of director James Whale, and was impressed with how potently and poignantly it holds up. Going into this new, but surprisingly faithful, British version, directed by Saul Dibb, I feared that the claustrophobic quality of the original might be sacrificed for a more epic scale, and I'm happy say that this isn't the case. This new Journey's End is "opened out" just enough to keep it from feeling stagey, but not enough to lose its atmosphere of crushing dread.

The focus is on the veteran Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin), a shattered alcoholic barely held together by his older Lieutenant, the avuncular schoolmaster Osborne (Paul Bettany). There's a reason that Stanhope isn't happy to see the eager new Lieutenant, Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), an old school friend who hero-worships him. Also under Stanhope's command are the chuckling, equable Trotter (Stephen Graham), the terrified Hibbert (Tom Sturridge) and the deadpan cook Mason (Toby Jones). This ensemble is terrific top to bottom, with Claflin subtly getting across the same bitter, jittery fury that Colin Clive did as Stanhope back in 1930. Butterfield is touchingly callow, and Bettany is heartbreakingly dignified as the "Uncle" Osborne.

The drama arises from the tensions and clashes, and the kindnesses, between these men. There's little in the way of battlefield action, and what there is lacks romance; it's hectic and frightening, with no sense of accomplishment. The heroism in the film, such as it is, comes from the stoicism with which these men try to face their useless deaths. By the end, you may admire them for their courage, but you're unlikely to reproach yourself for declining to share their fate.

Ready Player One--Human society is run down and slummy, but most people don't care that much because they spend most of their time in virtual reality anyway.

But enough about present-day America. Steven Spielberg's latest, based on a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, takes this state of affairs further, into a bleak and distressingly plausible version of 2045. The teenage hero Wade (Tye Sheridan) resides in a stack of mobile homes in Columbus, Ohio. But he, like most of his neighbors, spends as much time as possible in an immersive online universe called The Oasis, in which people assume the roles of "avatars," many of them based on favorite pop-culture characters ranging from the Mutant Ninja Turtles to Harryhausen's Cyclops, as well as many original creations: Wade's avatar Parzival resembles an anime hero.

The departed creator of the The Oasis, a socially awkward genius named Halliday (Mark Rylance), has left behind a series of "Easter Eggs," three keys that, if found, will make the player the heir to The Oasis. Tye, of course, is determined to find them. It's a bit like The Matrix meets Willy Wonka, with Ben Mendelssohn as an evil corporate Slugworth. There's a dash of The Searchers, too.

Wade/Parzival falls in with various allies, and wild fights and chases ensue, both in The Oasis and the real world. The movie starts slow, and is a bit of a mess; long stretches of it, like a nutty passage set in the Overlook Hotel from Kubrick's The Shining, are absorbing and funny, while other stretches, especially the real-world stuff, recall the heavy-handed, obsequiously crowd-pleasing Spielberg of the later '80s. It's a bit perplexing to see, after the effortless command Spielberg demonstrated a couple of months ago in The Post.

The real fun is in the juxtaposition of pop icons: Where else can we get King Kong and Chucky and The Iron Giant all in the same movie, along with countless characters from video games and cartoons and toy series? Even Mechagodzilla turns up, accompanied by a whisper of Akira Ifukube's unforgettable Godzilla theme.

Ready Player One seems to be an allegorical plea for, on the commercial and political end, net neutrality, and on the personal end, a bit of moderation where online life is concerned. Neither of these positions is particularly radical, but the movie seems to have its middle-of-the-road heart in more or less the right place.

PEEPSHOW

Happy Opening Day everybody!

Also: Happy Easter weekend!

In honor of the holiday...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...here's Peeps Bunny-eating Godzilla:

Let me just state again for the record that, despite the currently fashionable pose of elaborately loathing them, Peeps are the greatest Easter candy yet invented. Godzilla and I can't be wrong.

ESTONIANS, RUSSIANS, CALIFORNIANS, NEW YORKERS...

A busy movie weekend full of interesting stuff here in the Valley:

November--As far as I'm concerned, American filmgoers don't see nearly enough Baltic supernatural period dramas in breathtaking black and white. Happily, this weekend FilmBar does its part to make up this deficit by bringing us, on the first weekend of spring, November, Rainer Sarnet's strange and splendid Estonian gothic.

Adapted from Andrus Kivirahk's novel Rehepapp ehk November (Old Barney aka November), the movie focuses on a community of serfs sometime in the 18th or 19th Century. The atmosphere calls to mind Bergman's medieval nightmares The Virgin Spring and The Seventh Seal, with hints of Dreyer and maybe of Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba, yet it has a weird intensity and heart all its own.

The central plot strand is a sort of gritty fairy tale: peasant beauty and shape-shifting werewolf Liina (Rea Lest) is in unrequited love with lusty young Hans (Jorgen Liik), who in turn is smitten with the somnambulistic young German baroness (Jette Loona Hermanis) living in the handsome estate nearby. Both Liina and Hans are willing to resort to supernatural means to get what they want.

Around this core storyline, however, November weaves subplots and episodes involving witches, ghosts, a hidden treasure, a romantic, poetic snowman, a manic, gibbering Devil at the crossroads, bread with feces in it, and the Plague personified as a goat, a pig and a blonde beauty. Sarnet presents these folklore motifs in such a matter-of-fact manner that they're startlingly believable--a series of dark yet nonchalant miracles. Pagan and Christian forces mix freely; the peasants regard Jesus as just another powerful deity, secretly spitting out the communion wafers the priest gives them to use as bullets when hunting.

Most astounding are the "kratts," monster farmhands with spindly bodies pieced together from household junk or animal skulls, then endowed with souls bargained for with--or, sometimes, cheated out of--that aforementioned Devil. I couldn't decide whether the kratts in this movie were accomplished by CGI, practical puppetry or some combination of the two, but in any case they're jaw-droppingly convincing, the most thrilling special effect I've seen in a movie in years. If you told me the filmmakers employed real kratts, I'd be inclined to believe it.

The Death of Stalin--As a kvetching Kruschev, Steve Buscemi hilariously leads an ensemble that includes Jeffery Tambor as Malenkov, Michael Palin as Molotov, Simon Russell Beale as Beria and Jason Isaacs as Zhukov, as they frantically jockey for power (and survival) in the aftermath of the title passing. Adapting a French comic book, the Scottish director Armando Ianucci offers us a compressed and cartoonish but essentially defensible version of the history, played in the style of a latter-day American TV sitcom (Ianucci is the creator of Veep).

The result is both brilliantly and sometimes disturbingly entertaining. It's also a troubling dramatization of how often sweeping historical shifts are directed not by the clash of lofty ideologies but by opportunism and petty grudges.

By the way, the Russian Ministry of Culture has banned the film, according to The Guardian, on the grounds that it's a "planned provocation" and might be a "western plot to destabilize Russia by causing rifts in society." Riotous as The Death of Stalin is, it doesn't contain a single joke quite as funny as that.

Flower--Erica (Zooey Deutch) is a subrban-L.A. 17-year-old who tempts older men with oral sex so that her friends can get video for purposes of extortion. She's trying to raise money, you see, to bail her dad out of jail. Nice to see a movie about a teenager with some initiative.

When the troubled son (Joey Morgan) of the dorky boyfriend (Tim Hiedecker) of Erica's Mom (Kathryn Hahn) moves into the house, Erica forms an odd but touching bond with him. The two, along with Erica's previous cronies, enter into a plot against a creepy schoolteacher (Adam Scott), and the film, with its bright teen-comedy repartee, takes an increasingly noir turn, as if Gun Crazy had been rewritten by Diablo Cody (the script is by Alex McAulay, Matt Spicer and director Max Winkler).

I couldn't decide, and I still can't, if Flower is a work of transgressive feminism or of adolescent male wishful thinking and sentimentality. I also can't decide if it's morally valid or reprehensible. In either case, however, it's perfectly executed, and Zooey Deutch's Erica is a star-making performance.

Itzhak--Alison Chernick's portrait of the Israeli-American violin great Itzhak Perlman is a pleasure to watch, because the title character seems so happy. He's an intelligent, funny, thoughtful guy, yet his happiness seems uncomplicated and unembarrassed. He's a riveting artist, but this doesn't stop him from being the quintessential cheerful, gabby, affluent Manhattan mensch, watching the Mets and eating Chinese food.

Like Pamela Tom's 2015 Tyrus (about the painter and Disney animation artist Tyrus Wong), this is a theatrical version of an American Masters documentary. As filmmaking it's straightforward, but the subject is so extraordinary, both musically and personally, as to make it a must-see. In archive footage and photos, we see Perlman on The Ed Sullivan Show in the '50s, and performing and socializing with everybody from Zubin Mehta and Pavarotti and Yo-Yo Ma to Sinatra and Johnny Carson. We see him comparing childhood polio stories with Alan Alda. We see him meeting Netanyahu in Jerusalem, and rehearsing with Billy Joel. We get to know his adoring wife Toby, his kids, and his dogs.

Delightful as all of this and more is, it's not what makes Itzhak unforgettable. But throughout the movie, we get to hear that sound: Perlman's technically masterful yet raucous, peerlessly soulful renderings of Mendelssohn and Bruch and Bach and Schubert and Wieniawski and Vivaldi and Strauss, and "Allentown" and "We Didn't Start the Fire," and "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and "The Star-Spangled Banner."

At one point Perlman tells how, just after he and his wife had taken out a loan to buy a house, he learned that his beloved Stradivarius had come up for sale, and his wife told him they'd just have to take out another loan. "We're still paying it!" he exclaims. Money well spent, as far as the rest of us are concerned.