A LONG STRANGE TRYPTOPHAN

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

Check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Creed II...

...and the Milestone Films Blu-Ray release of the exquisite 1926 animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed...

...as well as a preview of the "No Festival Required" showing of the Rural Route Film Festival Touring Shorts at Scottsdale Center for the Arts.

Eat hearty!

ROY AND HAL AND MARK AND ROSE

Whenever I think of the greatest live performances I've been lucky enough to see, along with Stacey Keach as Richard III at the Folger Theatre and Penn & Teller at Ford's Theatre, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins at the 9:30 Club, all in Washington, D.C. and Tito Puente at the Celebrity here in Phoenix, I also think of Roy Clark, playing Ernesto Lecuona's magnificent "Malageuna" at the Sundome in Sun City. RIP to the funny and unpretentious but virtuoso Clark, who passed on this week at 85.

RIP also to the Canadian classical stage actor Douglas Rain, immortal in the movies as the voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, passed on at 90.

Opening this weekend:

Pete and Ellie, childless “houseflippers” in their forties, decide to foster, and then adopt, three kids all at once, a teenage girl and her two young siblings. All three come with behavioral and social issues, and this, combined with the naïveté and inexperience of the new parents, leads to trouble, some of it wacky, some of it serious, in the comedy-drama Instant Family.

Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne both do sweet but never maudlin work as Pete and Ellie. They convey an awakening sense of open-hearted mission as they become aware both of the needs of foster kids and of their own desire to parent.

There are capable supporting turns in the film as well, notably by Octavia Spencer and Tig Notaro, who turn a pair of social workers into a low-key comedy team, and by Julie Hagerty and Margo Martindale as the Grandmas, demure and boisterous respectively. Most impressive of all, maybe, is Isabela Moner as the teenage daughter, convincing as a bright, decent-hearted kid who’s also an infuriating problem child.

The director and co-writer is Sean Anders, drawing on his own life for inspiration. Anders’ other credits include the likes of Horrible Bosses 2 and Daddy’s Home and similar broad comedies in the modern vein, and that sensibility finds its way into this movie as well. There are slapstick sequences that feel heavy and contrived, and throw the movie off-balance at times.

But the overall effect of Instant Family is surprisingly moving. What Anders gets right about the experience of coming to parenting later in life, and of parenting a teenager—especially in the terrifying era of social media—feels considerable.

Allowing for the conventions of this sort of mainstream family flick, the degree to which Instant Family doesn’t sugarcoat parenting's challenges is impressive: The language is raw, and so is the guilty candor of Pete and Ellie’s private conversations. So when the movie jerks tears, as it did for me at several points, it jerks them honestly.

I had the opportunity to chat with Anders recently about the experiences that led to this film; check out the interview on Phoenix Magazine online.

Still in theaters:

It’s hard for me to imagine any new version replacing, in my affections, the original 1966 TV version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. That half-hour animated special based on the classic Dr. Seuss children’s book of 1957, directed by the great Chuck Jones and voiced by the great Boris Karloff, was one of the true high points of the holiday season every year of my childhood.

Ron Howard’s laborious live-action feature version of 2000, with Jim Carrey in the title role, certainly didn’t come close to capturing the Seussian magic of the original. Neither does the new animated version, titled simply The Grinch, and featuring the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch. But it has its merits, and it’s better than the Howard/Carrey version.

For the benighted few who may not know, The Grinch is a tall, green-furred recluse who bitterly resents the relentless Christmas festivity of the Whos, elfin citizens of nearby Whoville, and thus decides to steal the town’s presents and decorations, disguised as Santa Claus. It is, of course, a nutty variation on the Scrooge theme, economically unfolded through Dr. Seuss’s inimitable, metrically flawless rhyme.

The new film expands the story in a number of directions, all of them thoroughly gratuitous, for no reason other than to stretch it out to feature length. Most annoyingly, it gives us a psychological backstory for the Grinch’s dislike of Christmas—after the narrator (Pharrell Williams) tells us “please don’t ask why/No one quite knows the reason,” he goes on to explain the banal reason.

He’s no Karloff, but Cumberbatch gives good, snide line readings. Even so, this movie’s Grinch is very watered-down as a villain; his redemption is telegraphed so early and often that it has little impact when it arrives.

This aside, it should be said that the movie has visual wit, and that, as with the TV version, The Grinch’s good-natured dog Max is a very successful character, and that a plus-sized reindeer named Fred is also lovable. It’s a testament to how softened-up this Grinch is that the filmmakers don’t let him be mean to Max.

LAND OF THE LEE

This is the shirt...

...I happened to be wearing today, when I learned that the great Stan Lee had passed on, at 95. It demonstrates, if any demonstration is needed, the impact that Stanley Leiber has had on our culture; it links an unrelated entity, a baseball team, to some of his iconic creations and co-creations, for no other real reason than that people like them.

I was a devoted reader of Marvel Comics as a kid, especially Spider-Man, The Hulk,  Iron Man and Dr. Strange, but from around my junior high years on I was simply a fan of Lee. His 1974 Origins of Marvel Comics was an endlessly reread tome for me in those days (I still have it on my shelf), and I loved it at least as much for Lee's autobiographical passages, written in his self-consciously jaunty and persistently alliterative style, as for the comic reproductions.

Like Alfred Hitchcock, Stan Lee was a canny pioneer of personal branding, of turning himself into the ringmaster, the impresario at the center of his world. Like Balzac, he created a Comedie humaine, though maybe in Lee's case it should be called a Comedie superhumaine, full of indelible, mythic figures at least a little bit familiar to almost everybody, even people who've never picked up a comic book in their lives. And he made his heroes, and his villains, subject to human foibles and vulnerabilities; for Stan Lee, no matter what your superpower, being human was your Kryptonite.

Even though he did it in print, there can be no question that Stan Lee was one of 20th-Century America's great showmen, and he invariably gave good value. His brash, brightly-colored, wise-assed but good-natured sensibility chased away a lot of the tedious and dreary side of youth and adolescence. And having claimed the pages of his comics as a soapbox, he used it to rail against racism and preach other good values. He had great power, and he used it with great responsibility.

RIP sir, and, of course: Excelsior.

CALLAS BEHAVIOR

Check out my "Friday Flicks" reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of  Tom Volf's documentary Maria by Callas: In Her Own Words...

 
...The Girl in the Spider's Web and the Robert the Bruce chronicle history Outlaw King. Also, check out my article on the General Patton Memorial Museum in Chiriaco Summit, California, which I recently visited...

...and which re-opens on Veteran's Day, Sunday, November 11, after a major renovation and expansion. It's a pretty cool place.

Happy Veteran's Day weekend everybody!

HAPPY TURKEY MONTH!

Happy November everybody! Check out my "Four Corners" column in the November issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...this month concentrated into the four corners of The Churchill, the new downtown Phoenix hipster destination.

Also, Happy Friday. Check out my "Friday Flicks" column on Phoenix Magazine online, with my review of Viper Club...

...and previews of Scottsdale International Film Festival and of the Netflix premiere of the Orson Welles movie The Other Side of the Wind.

Also, RIP to a favorite character actor, James Karen, passed on at 94. Karen was fondly remembered as Uneeda Medical Supply's genial, ill-fated Frank in 1985's Return of the Living Dead and as the developer who "didn't move the bodies" in Poltergeist. But he appeared in movies ranging from All the President's Men, Capricorn One, The Gathering, The China Syndrome, Jagged Edge and Wall Street and television roles on The Jeffersons (as a KKK member saved by George Jefferson's CPR) and Eight Is Enough and The Golden Girls and the swansong of Little House on the Prairie, as the evil railroad man who wipes Walnut Grove off the map. He had several Broadway credits including Cactus Flower, worked with Buster Keaton in Beckett's Film, was the heroic leading man in Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, and starred in countless Pathmark supermarket commercials. Despite his frequent villainous parts, he was highly endearing.

THE FALL CLASSIC

Happy Halloween everybody! My favorite holiday.

Check out The Wife's costume...

Pumpkin Pi, get it?

Here's my costume...

No clever pun with this one; I'm just calling it "Sharky McSharkboy."

Also, Happy Dia de los Muertos. Here's a pic, by The Kid, of the little Day of the Dead dude now riding on my dashboard...

...a kind gift from my pal Joe Moore.

Here's a couple of catch-up reviews:

It's been a few years--since 2015's heavy-handed but enjoyable Black Sea, unless I'm forgetting something--since we've gotten a big-budget submarine adventure picture. But Hunter Killer, now in theaters, gives us an amusing tour of some of the genre's favorite elements--nerve-wracking cat-and-mouse between underwater vessels, threading the ship through narrow canyons, stony-faced rival Captains who respect each other, an Executive Officer questioning orders, decisions effecting the fate of the world made in the cold depths of the sea. Coolest detail: The standing officers leaning back in unison as the ship dives.

The term "hunter killer" refers to a class of submarine used to attack other subs; the one we follow here is the U.S.S. Arkansas, commanded by non-Academy, up-from-the-working-class Captain Gerard Butler. He's asked to navigate his way through a heavily mined inlet to pick up a Navy SEAL team that has rescued the deposed Russian President (who seems decidedly NOT based on the current real-life holder of that office) from the rogue Defense Minister who wants to start a war with the U.S. Along the way the Arkansas picks up the Captain (Michael Nyqvist) of a sunken Russian sub, who must decide whether or not to help the Yanks navigate their way in.

All of these thrills are excitingly if conventionally handled. But where director Donovan Marsh and screenwriters Arnie Schmidt and Jamie Moss really show their ingenuity is how they avoid the dramatic as well as the literal claustrophobia of the submarine genre. We aren't stuck in the tin can underwater with Butler and his crew for the whole running time; there's a dry-land side to the movie as well.

We follow the Russians, and the exploits of the SEAL team, led by Toby Stephens, that's infiltrating the Russian headquarters. And back at the Pentagon, we get to see the squabbles between the bristling head of the Joint Chiefs (Gary Oldman), a sober-minded Admiral (Common) and a shrewd NSA analyst (Linda Cardellini). We even get a glimpse of the blond, female U.S. President (Caroline Goodall), wistfully reminding us that this film went into production when a different set of political and social assumptions were in place.

Butler is good company once again, and the late Swedish actor Nyqvist, to whom the film is co-dedicated (along with producer John Thompson), brings an effective tinge of the tragic to his Russian counterpart. Those hoping for a good rip-snorting Gary Oldman scenery-chew may be disappointed; he gets less of an opportunity for flamboyant ranting here than in some of his other roles.

In case it isn't clear from my description, Hunter Killer is a very old-school piece of work, in the "guy movie" tradition. If you're the sort who could never resist a Saturday afternoon rerun of The Enemy Below or Ice Station Zebra, this might be the movie for you, and maybe your dad or your grandfather or your uncle might want to come along. Much of the action seems cartoonishly implausible, and it's exactly on that basis that you're likely to enjoy it.

A note on this movie's Russians: In another old-school convention, they speak Russian when it's necessary for the American characters to overhear them, and accented English the rest of the time, so we don't have to read subtitles. But at a key moment, a Russian character expresses his feelings to some of his fellow countrymen by showing them his middle fingers. Does that gesture have the same meaning for Russians that it does for us?

Halloween is here, both the holiday and yet another movie named after it that's too scary for younger children and wimpy adults. But there's also a milder movie alternative for such audiences who still want to get into the spirit: Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween. The subtitle begs the question, though--shouldn't any self-respecting Halloween be haunted?

It's a sequel to Goosebumps, the 2015 comedy-fantasy riff on Scholastic Publishing's massively successful young-adult horror paperback series of the 1990s. The heroes of these tongue-in-cheek tales, cranked out by the dozens by author R. L. Stine, were kids, pitted against ghosts and werewolves and aliens and giant bugs and mummies and pretty much any other standard horror or sci-fi menace you could name, most of them derived from the movies.

The 2015 film turned a bunch of these creatures loose on a small town in Delaware; it also brought Stine onscreen as a character, played by Jack Black as a vain but lovable curmudgeon with an imagination so powerful that his creations can literally leap off the page. It was a trifling film, but well-made and enjoyable, with a little more wit than might have been expected.

Goosebumps 2, directed by Ari Sandel and set in a small town in New York, has a Halloween theme. Two scavenging boys inadvertently unleash the power of an unfinished early Stine tale, Haunted Halloween, and the town's elaborate decorations and treats come to life, from a bucket of Gummi bears to an enormous black-and-purple dragon made of balloons. These creepy creatures are led, once again, by Slappy, the sinister ventriloquist's dummy come to life.

Some of the resulting sequences are visually striking, though again, none are allowed to tip over into serious terror, and the film should be fun for all but the littlest viewers. The young cast, led by Jeremy Ray Taylor and Caleel Harris as the boys and Madison Iseman as Taylor's college-bound older sister, are capable. But most of the laughs are provided by the adults, especially the always-amusing Wendy McLendon-Covey as the indomitable mom, Chris Parnell as the drug store guy turned into Slappy's toadying sidekick, and Ken Jeong as the wacky neighbor who really, really likes Halloween.

One of the best features of the first film was the lively music by the great Danny Elfman. The macabre scherzos here are by the British composer Dominic Lewis, and he channels Elfman so well it's scary.

SHELL OR HIGH WATER

Happy October everybody! My favorite month, back again.

Plenty of opining by Your Humble Narrator, in case you have time on your hands: Check out my reviews of Free Solo and Marvel's Venom, online at Phoenix Magazine...

...as well as my "Four Corners" column on Valley gastropubs, and my short item about the abruptly announced demise and just as sudden revival of Pedro's Mexican in Glendale.

It's always a wacky adventure when my pal Vince Larue visits from Normandy.

Earlier this week we were heading up East Van Buren, along the back forty of the Phoenix Zoo, when we noticed a large object in the road—a turtle. We pulled into the parking lot of the Rolling Hills golf course and crossed two lanes of traffic to get to him. So much traffic went by in that time that I was sure he’d be turtle pizza by the time we reached him, but incredibly he was intact, plodding along calmly, almost to the far side of the road.

There was just a construction site there, however, with no water I could see, and since he was obviously an aquatic species of turtle I thought we’d better try to get him back to the lagoons at the rear of the zoo, from whence I’d guess he escaped; you can often see turtles sunning themselves there. It was tough to find a spot in the fence he could get through, but we finally left him at the bottom of a steep bank, near a muddy pool that led through an abutment under the fence. But not, of course, before getting a few testudine selfies...

 

Could I look any creepier? "Hey lady, y'wanna buy a turtle...?"

Hope he’s OK. It seemed like a better spot than where we found him, anyway.