RE-SEEING RED

Happy Friday everybody!

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, on Phoenix Magazine online, with reviews of Good Boys...

...and Bill Rebane's 1975 The Giant Spider Invasion...

 
...(playing in a "RiffTrax" version at various Harkins multiplexes on Tuesday August 20).

Also opening  this week...

The Angry Birds Movie 2: Red, from 2016's The Angry Birds Movie, isn't quite so angry these days. Still voiced by Jason Sudeikis, the cardinal-like red bird is hailed as a national hero on his island home, populated by flightless avians, for his services in the conflict with the neighboring island populated by green pigs. He enjoys basking in his glory so much that when the pigs send a message requesting a truce, he's terrified that peace will lessen his popularity.

The Angry Birds Movie 2 follows Red as he and his feathered friends team up with the pigs to fight a common menace, huge balls of ice launched from a third island, presided over by an autocratic eagle (voiced by Leslie Jones). Many other characters are woven into the complicated story, voiced by an impressive roster of currently hip comedic talent: among those held over from the first film are Josh Gad as the speedy Chuck, Danny McBride as the explosive Bomb, and Peter Dinklage as Mighty Eagle, who's haunted by some sort of dark secret. Bill Hader is back as Leonard, the leader of the pigs.

New this time is Rachel Bloom as the brainy bird Silver, a love interest for Red. The supporting cast ranges from Awkwafina and Sterling K. Brown to Pete Davidson and Beck Bennett to Eugenio Derbez to Dove Cameron to Tiffany Haddish.

Maybe because it involved a truce and an alliance, I liked Angry Birds 2 much better than I did the original. The first film, derived from a strange and popular 2009 video game that also spawned toys and t-shirts and TV cartoons, was amusing enough at times. But it was rooted in the idea of anger at, and mistrust of, foreigners. I certainly don't think it was consciously intended as reactionary propaganda, but xenophobic fantasy just didn't feel like what our society was in need of in 2016, much less now; we already have plenty of angry birdbrains, and at the moment they seem to be running the show.

Gratifyingly, Angry Birds 2 is about is about learning to work together as a team, including with those you've always regarded as your enemies. It's more generous-hearted, and better yet, it's truly funny, loaded with free-associational blackout gags linked to popular music, imaginative, intricate slapstick action sequences, and pure surreal silliness.

Animated movies for kids, even when they're well-intentioned and generally well-done, can get wearying at times for adults, especially when you see a lot of them, as a parent and/or a movie critic. But Angry Birds 2 made me laugh out loud, quite as lot. It was a pleasant surprise.

If you go, by the way, don't be late; the movie is preceded by an animated short called Hair Love, in which a young African-American father braves the daunting task of helping his daughter fix her hair on an important day. Written and directed by Matthew A. Cherry, it's a flawless five-minute wonder, and it left me in tears. I'll be surprised if it's not an Oscar nominee.

OH, FOR GOD'S SNAKE

Happy Friday everybody!

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, this week reviewing the gripping snake-handling drama Them That Follows...

...as well as Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark...

Also, check out my interview with Mexican movie and TV comedy superstar Eugenio Derbez, currently co-starring in Dora and the Lost City of Gold...

Have a great weekend everybody!

THE SKINNY

Happy Friday everybody! Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, this week reviewing the French thriller 15 Minutes of War (aka L'Intervention)...

...and Skin...

Also, happy August everybody! Check out this month's issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...

...featuring a back-to-school edition of my "Four Corners" column, as well as the annual "Best of the Valley" feature. A couple of those items were also brilliantly composed by Your Humble Narrator; see if you can guess which ones! (No prizes, though.)

Have a great weekend everybody!

GREEN CHEESY

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, this week featuring my reviews of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood...

 ...and of the unsettling German horror film Luz, playing this weekend at Filmbar...

Your Humble Narrator really mooned it up last weekend, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11; The Wife made me a present of this boss new shirt...

...and my film historian pal Richard put on a fantastic lunar-themed movie night, starting with an 1898 Georges Melies short, The Astronomer's Dream, in which a rapacious moon descends and devours the Astronomer's telescope, among other things...

...as well as Excursion to the Moon, Segundo de Chomon's 1908 Pathe rip-off of the Melies Trip to the Moon...

...and 1935's lovely Fleischer cartoon Dancing on the Moon, in which newlyweds of various species take a pleasure cruise to the satellite...

...for just a dollar per couple (a tomcat gets separated from his new bride, alas). He also showed us a silent Hal Roach short, A Moony Mariner, with Billy Dooley pressed into service as an astronaut.

Then for the feature, we got Richard Cunha's hilarious 1958 saga Missile to the Moon (or Invasion de la Luna, as it's called in this Spanish-language lobby card)...

...featuring fabulous moon-maidens, as well as a terrifying giant spider...

...and rather Gumby-like rock men...

Ah, but I didn't stop there. No, on my own last weekend I watched a British double feature; first the likably inane 1969 lunar noir from Hammer, Moon Zero Two...

...and then the 1970 dinosaurs-and-caveman epic When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth...

...which is, after all, also a Moon movie; it's supposedly about the birth of the Moon.

So, here's my last moon-oriented posting (for a while):

Out on Blu-ray this month is Space: 1999, the two-season British TV series from 1975, produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson of Thunderbirds. The premise is that a terrible explosion in the title year has blasted the Moon out of Earth orbit and sent it sailing through space like a futuristic Flying Dutchman. The roughly three hundred inhabitants, led by Martin Landau, Barbara Bain and Barry Morse, encounter strange alien worlds, always hoping they might be able to colonize one, always disappointed.

Released during lean times for sci-fi geeks—post-Star Trek, pre-Star Wars—Space: 1999 was eagerly anticipated. Revisiting the show now, my memory of it from back then was confirmed: It's dreadful. The production was first-rate, with near-state-of-the-art special effects for the time, cool spaceships and sets and costumes and attractive series regulars. The guest stars were big-name Brits, from Ian McShane to Brian Blessed to Leo McKern to Margaret Leighton to Billie Whitelaw to Roy Dotrice to Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, if you please, to name just a few. But the earnest humorlessness of the atmosphere was oppressive, and to say the pacing was glacial is to insult the promptness of glaciers.

In the second season, a sexy shape-shifting alien played by Catherine Schell was added, as were some attempts at jocular humor, and this obvious play at dumbing-down was somehow just embarrassing. But Space: 1999 did have one splendid feature, albeit in its first season only: The opening title sequence. There would be a blaring fanfare of bombastic music, and then a fast-cut montage of scenes from the episode to follow. If only the shows themselves could have captured some of the excitement of those openings.

VERNE NOTICE

The weekend of July 20 marks the 50^th anniversary of the moon landing. I decided to celebrate by writing, directing and acting in a one-hour radio play, Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (drawing on both Verne's 1865 FTETTM and its 1870 sequel Round the Moon). It's scheduled to air at 7 p.m. (Phoenix time) Saturday, July 20, and again at 2 p.m. Wednesday, July 24, on Sun Sounds of Arizona; you can listen in at sunsounds.org.

Check out my Phoenix Magazine online article about the production.

Here I am in great-director mode during the recording:

 And here's a better angle on me:

 

This was a passion project for me. I was seven years old that week in 1969 when the Eagle, the lunar module of Apollo 11, touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, and I remember it, and the weeks and months leading up to it, with a vividness matched by only a few of my other early childhood memories.

I remember the gathering of relatives at our rural house, and one of my cousins saying, quite gratuitously, “There’s his foot comin’ down,” as we watched Neil Armstrong, in fuzzy black-and-white, take his legendary one small step. Looking back, it seems like a corny, Norman Rockwell scene, but I also remember going outside shortly thereafter, into the cool, clear Pennsylvania night, and looking up at the moon, as if I’d see the guys waving down at me from above.

One of my sisters, however, has these memories beat; she remembers watching the landing at the Newport Folk Festival, on a TV placed on the stage where both the audience and the performers could keep an eye on it!

The feverish excitement that arose during the early years of the Apollo program turned countless people into space geeks, and I was certainly one of the most insufferable of them, wearying teachers, family members and even friends my own age with space chatter to the exclusion of almost everything else (now I'm doing it again, at the age of  57!). As it happened, the mother of one of my brothers-in-law worked for a NASA contractor in D.C., so she had a connection; shortly after the safe return of the astronauts she somehow arranged for me to be sent an Apollo 11 press kit, complete with glossy prints of the iconic photos taken by Armstrong on that first lunar excursion. I still have them.

Several years ago I had my moon pics appraised when Antiques Roadshow came to the Valley, and was told that they’re fairly common, having been sent to thousands of schoolteachers at the time, and only worth about $20 as a collector’s item. You can well imagine, however, that in second grade I felt like I had been entrusted with high-level government documents, and they made me the undisputed King of Show-and-Tell.

Anyway, Happy Moon Landing Day tomorrow everybody, and may the spirit of America one day soon be devoted again to doing things "In Peace, For All Mankind."

Oh, by the way, check out my review, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Lulu Wang's The Farewell, starring Awkwafina...

...one of the better movies I've seen so far this year.

MISS HIT; LOVE LETTERS; TORN TURNS

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, on Phoenix Magazine online, featuring reviews of the sweet indie Miss Arizona...

...and of  Nick Broomfield's Leonard Cohen documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love...

RIP to the magnificent Rip Torn, somehow both chameleon and virile star persona, passed on at 88. Out of everything from King of Kings to You're a Big Boy Now to The Cincinnati Kid to The Man Who Fell to Earth to Cross Creek to City Heat and much more, some of Torn's most memorable performances are, for me, in otherwise misfired movies: His blustery senator in The Seduction of Joe Tynan ("I'm readin' from my pad..."); his loathsome, macho psychotic kidnapper in 1982's A Stranger is Watching; his good-naturedly full-of-it old salt in the lightweight 1985 John Candy comedy Summer Rental; his corrupt yet curiously likable Texan villain in 1987's Nadine.

My favorite Torn character of all, though, was Bob Diamond, the ebullient defender of Albert Brooks in the afterlife in 1991's Defending Your Life. Of his absence during one of the hero's hearings, Bob later apologetically explains that he was "trapped near the inner circle of fault." I hope that's not true for Torn now, and I hope I have somebody like Bob defending me.

I never met Rip Torn, alas, but I did once briefly meet Walter B. Russell Jr., the Korean War hero and Georgia State Representative that Torn played in 1959's Pork Chop Hill. That should count for something.

FOUR DIAGONAL CORNERS

Hope everybody had a great 4th of July weekend. The three-game sweep of the Colorado Rockies by the Arizona Diamondbacks this past weekend put me a good mood, baseball-wise.

In that same midsummer spirit, check out my "Four Corners" column, in the July issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...this month exploring the culinary options at four corners of Chase Field.