CAUGHT '22

2022 is unlikely, it seems to me, to go down in history as a banner year for popular movies. But even in less auspicious years, there are always some good flicks, and some good or even great scenes or performances in movies that aren't so great overall.

Out of what I saw, here are ten movies that stood out as best for me this past year:

Nope--Jordan Peele's latest is probably the best UFO movie since Close Encounters, though it has a more sinister edge. It's wildly original, funny and creepy sci-fi/horror, yet it also carries the heroic charge of a good western.

Good Night Oppy--This documentary about the Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit has interesting information about the Red Planet, but it's really about the way the NASA nerds anthropomorphized the robots and fretted over them and cheered them on and ultimately grieved over them. In an entirely unpretentious way, the movie hints at the question of where sentience comes from. 

The Duke--This pandemic-delayed release was, I thought, perhaps the most overlooked and delightful movie of the year. Jim Broadbent is splendid as Kempton Bunton, a cab driver, factory worker and anti-television fee protestor who in 1965 confessed to stealing Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London; Helen Mirren is his fed-up wife. The direction, by the late Roger Michell, is warm, graphically lively and period-rich.

Everything Everywhere All At Once--Family drama, immigrant saga, sly comedy, martial arts actioner, Matrix-style sci-fi adventure and more are mashed-up in this freaky yarn from writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert that tries to live up to its title. It's epic, intimate, silly and profound. All at once.

Thirteen Lives--Dramatizing a technically complicated rescue mission in detail, Ron Howard is in his element in this moving account of the rescue of twelve Thai kids and their soccer coach from a flooded cave in 2018. A little tough if you're claustrophobic, but a true feel-good movie.

The Whale--Brendan Fraser gives a luminous, possibly generational performance as Charlie, a morbidly obese English teacher trying to reconnect with his furious estranged daughter. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, the movie is a little heavy and one-note aside from the star, but Fraser's radiance shines through the prosthetics.

Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down--Infuriating because of what Giffords lost when she was shot in 2011; inspirational because of how much she got back, and how courageously she refused to give in to despair. Directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West build the movie around how central music was to Giffords' recovery.

The Fabelmans--In Steven Spielberg's loosely autobiographical coming-of-age yarn, scripted by Tony Kushner, the focus is largely on the parents, beautifully played by Paul Dano and Michelle Williams. The movie isn't a grand slam, but it's fascinating, and it has the best final shot of the year.

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On--This feature expansion of the 2010 viral short by Dean Fleischer-Camp, with Jenny Slate voicing the tiny title character, is sunny and hilarious, but with improbably dramatic and poignant undertones. Isabella Rossellini is exquisite as the voice of Marcel's "Nan."

The Banshees of Inisherin--Martin McDonagh's black comedy about the agonies of friendship goes so sour in its later acts that I almost didn't put it on the list. But the brilliance of the initial conception and, especially, the magnificent acting of Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon demand its inclusion.

One more list, while I'm at it; for anyone who might unfathomably be interested, here is the embarrassingly short list of books I read this year (as always, it doesn't include short stories, poems, comic books, essays, articles, reviews, automotive manuals, skywriting, menus, fortune cookie fortunes, etc etc)...

The Silent Gondoliers by William Nolan

Sucker's Portfolio by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

The Spread by Barry Malzberg

Ben by Gilbert A. Ralston

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem

The Werewolf Principle by Clifford D. Simak

Destry Rides Again by Max Brand

WOMEN TALKING; WOMEN NOT TALKING

In theaters today:

Women Talking--In a hardcore religious farming colony, a group of men have been arrested for repeatedly tranquilizing and sexually violating women of all ages, including young children. The attacks have been attributed to ghosts or the Devil, or to "wild female imagination." With the farm to themselves for a couple of days before the men make bail, the minimally educated women sit around the barn and debate whether to forgive the men and carry on as before, to "stay and fight," or to leave the only home they've ever known. They've been told that if they leave, they will forfeit their place in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Written and directed by Sarah Polley from the novel by Miriam Toews--inspired by a real-life 2011 case at a Mennonite community of Canadian origin in Bolivia--this drama opens by calling itself, in subtitle, an act of female imagination. It certainly feels convincing. Superb actresses of all ages, ranging from Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy and a particularly forbidding Frances McDormand among the elders to Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley and Claire Foy among the younger adults to some fine, lively women among the youth, embody the various responses, from seething, vengeful fury to sad acceptance.

Though the tone is inevitably somber, Polley's direction is deft, and she leavens the gloom with some high-spirited moments. Looking in from outside their world, many of us in the audience are likely to feel the most sympathy with the viewpoint of the enraged women who favor a violent response; the idea of a mass exodus from the scene of these atrocities sounds like a solid idea too. Forgiveness and a return to the status quo feels, in this instance, like a very distant third.

The movie also includes a token adult male, a gentle schoolteacher (Ben Whishaw, excellent as usual) not implicated in the attacks, who is allowed to take the minutes of their discussions because he can write. He's been to university outside the colony, and when a census-taker drives by in a car, blaring "Daydream Believer" by the Monkees, he softly sings along. The moment makes a pretty strong case for secular pop culture.

Now streaming:

She Said--This chronicle of the struggle of New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey to break the Harvey Weinstein case could be seen as a sort of companion piece to Women Talking (Brad Pitt was among the Executive Producers on both). At one point in the investigation Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Twohey (Carey Mulligan) wonder if anyone will care about the story if it runs. People did--the story, which ran in October of 2017, was not only one of the factors that led to Weinstein's arrest and conviction, it also helped get the #MeToo movement rolling.

The initial response to the movie, directed by Maria Schrader from a script by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (based on Kantor and Twohey's book), was less explosive, however; it bombed in the multiplexes in November. It's worth a watch, though. While it lacks the precision and tension of the greatest of investigative-journalist buddy pictures, All the President's Men, it's still an absorbing account, focusing on the extreme reluctance of the targets of Weinstein's savagery to be first to go on the record by name.

Schrader's direction generates a palpable atmosphere of the gloomy anxiety that life in the 45 era had for many of us, but probably more intensely for women, but we're spared graphic violence. While we hear a skin-crawling audio tape of Weinstein with one of the women, the actual assaults are kept offscreen. Much of the dramatic potency in the film derives from the stunned faces of Kazan and Mulligan as they interview the women; the horror that quietly registers in their eyes effectively takes the place of seeing what they're hearing.

TOXIC CLOUD; TOXIC FRIENDSHIP

Now streaming...

White Noise--Noah Baumbach's adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel begins on the quaint campus of College-On-the-Hill, where mortality-haunted "Hitler Studies" prof Adam Driver lives with his wife Greta Gerwig and their talkative but deadpan blended brood. His wife's pill usage and other academic-life worries are intruded upon when the collision of a train with a tanker truck and the resulting "Airborne Toxic Event" requires the family and their neighbors to flee and take refuge in summer camps, Chinese restaurants and other makeshift shelters. Baumbach's style here seems to pay homage to other directors; the early college scenes suggest the twee formality of Wes Anderson, there's a big dose of the Close Encounters-era Spielberg later on, a hint of Jason Reitman's Juno here or of David Byrne's True Stories there. 

The movie feels large and consequential; there are many funny and fascinating passages, and the '80s period look is colorful. But while the story's elusive ambiguities are intriguing for a while, they gradually start to get irritating, particularly when it moves from the epic-scale first half to the more personal and anticlimactic second half. Still, the cast is strong, Driver is paradoxically both commanding and neurotic in the lead, and Gerwig is a doleful, troublingly erotic presence--at one point Driver's colleague Don Cheadle observes, accurately, that she has "important hair." 

The Banshees of Inisherin--Colm and Padraic live on a bleak island off the coast of Ireland in the 1920s. Artillery fire from the Irish Civil War can be heard from the mainland, but the islanders pay it less attention than they do the trouble that arises when Colm, a fiddler played by Brendan Gleeson, abruptly stops speaking to and socializing with his lifelong companion Padraic, a dairyman played by Colin Farrell. Colm admits, bluntly but without rancor, that he simply finds Padraic intolerably dull, and doesn't want to waste any more time drinking and talking with him when he could be working on his music. He'll still chat amiably with the other islanders, but something about the very presence of the dear, baffled Padraic seems symbolic to Colm of his life being squandered on triviality, and he'll go to extremes to reject it.

The great Martin McDonagh was really on to something here; it starts out as one of the most original, grimly funny and painful takes on friendship in some time. But as the conflict escalates, it's as if the writer-director remembers he's the Martin McDonagh of films like In Bruges and plays like A Behanding in Spokane, and feels obligated to take the story in a gruesome, Grand Guignol direction. It throws the balance off here as it didn't with In Bruges; it sours the movie's comic side and feels psychologically reductive to its tragic side.

Even so, Gleeson and (especially) Farrell are both sublime, as are Kerry Condon as Padraic's sensible sister and Barry Keoghan as his hapless backup friend. McDonagh narrowly missed making a masterpiece here, but these performances are not to be missed.

WHILE STREAMERS WATCHED THEIR FLICKS BY NIGHT...

Merry Christmas Eve Eve everybody! The Phoenix Film Critics Society...

...of which Your Humble Narrator is proud to be a founding member, recently announced our 2022 Award winners. As always, some of the winners--like Best Actor--reflect my voting, others don't, but there are a lot of movies worth seeing on the list.

A few other odds and ends...

Cash on Demand--Last week I was shown this 1961 gem I had never caught up with, a no-kidding Christmas movie from Hammer Films! It's available on DVD; I highly recommend. Peter Cushing plays a joyless bank manager, cold and critical toward his employees, who gets his Christmas Eve ruined when a suave bounder (Andre Morell) tells him that his cohorts are holding Cushing's wife and son hostage while he plunders the vault at the provincial branch. Cushing, unsurprisingly, is great--despicable at first, gradually shading into sympathy as his desperation rises--and Morell is sensational, in maybe the best role he ever had, as the sinister yet curiously charismatic thief.

Richard Vernon nicely leads the small ensemble that plays the branch employees. It's a gripping, imaginative caper, though of course it's just one more variation on the Scrooge story, with the robber serving as a felonious Ghost of Christmas Present.

Something From Tiffany's--Two guys, played by Ray Nicholson (Jack's kid) and Kendrick Sampson, buy jewelry at the title shop as Christmas presents for their respective lady friends (Zoey Deutsch and Shay Mitchell). One's a pair of earrings; the other's an engagement ring. A mishap mixes up the gift bags, and wackiness ensues. I was recently pointed toward this romcom, streaming on Prime. It's very undemanding, but it's inventive, Zoey Deutsch makes a sweet heroine and her costars, including the great Rose Abdoo as the Tiffany's clerk, are pleasant company. And it seems like it's a cut above most of the Hallmark Christmas movies.

American Murderer--A stalwart FBI man played by Ryan Phillippe searches for fugitive Jason David Brown, who was on the Ten Most Wanted List at the same time as Osama bin Laden and Whitey Bulger for killing an armored car guard here in Phoenix in November of 2004. As Phillippe talks to Brown's family and acquaintances we get his story in flashback (it's often different from what they're telling the agent). I'm late to the party on this true-crime drama released earlier this year, written and directed by Matthew Gentile and available on various streaming platforms. Don't let the poster fool you into dismissing this as a routine action flick; it's an absorbing feature debut for Gentile, a tense, believable piece of work, full of disturbing scenes that feel like something you'd witness as a passerby. Soap actor Tom Pelphrey plays Brown as a tightly-wound obsequious hustler, sort of a coked-up Eddie Haskell. Though he worms his way into the house and bed of his single-mom neighbor (Idina Menzel) and plays video games with her son, and though he can still get over on his own siblings, his Mom (Jacki Weaver) has long since recognized him for the callous creep he is. But even he isn't prepared for the psychic weight of murder, and Gentile gets across this internal horror impressively. It's worth checking out, maybe after Christmas.

SIZE DOES MATTER

Now playing:

The Whale--Charlie is an English professor, passionately teaching online courses in essay writing, but his center square on the Zoom grid is always blacked out. He claims the camera on his computer doesn't work, but his students, inevitably, are intrigued. Ever self-deprecating, Charlie assures them that they're not missing much.

This isn't really true. Charlie, played by Brendan Fraser, is morbidly obese, weighing in at 600 pounds. He lives alone in, and works from, a shabby apartment, visited by his sole friend Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse who tries to warn him about the imminent danger of death he's in. At the same time, she serves as his pained enabler, supplying him with fried chicken and candy bars. The two share a link to the tragedy which led to Charlie's self-destructive eating habits.

In the course of the story, Charlie bribes his furious estranged teenage daughter (Sadie Sink) to spend time with him; he's also pestered by a young missionary kid (Ty Simpkins). Eventually we get to meet Charlie's ex (Samantha Morton) as well. Almost everything takes place in or just outside the apartment; director Darren Aronofsky wisely hasn't bothered to "open out" Samuel D. Hunter's play (Hunter wrote the adaptation). This concentrated setting only adds to the claustrophobia of Charlie's situation.

It's hard to miss the story's parallel to that of Aronofsky's 2008 The Wrestler--a guy at the end of his physical rope tries for an eleventh-hour reconciliation with his daughter. And as Mickey Rourke, in a comeback role, was the story with The Wrestler, the story here is Brendan Fraser, likewise in a comeback role.

I've always found Fraser enviable--hunky looks plus an unpretentious likability. Thus even the many terrible movies he's starred in come across like they were fun to do, and that in itself made stuff like George of the Jungle and Journey to the Center of the Earth less dreary, at least a little (maybe not Furry Vengeance).

But in The Whale, Aronofsky has put Fraser's soulful sweetness to use beyond merely ingratiating himself with the audience. Working inside harrowingly convincing prosthetic makeup by Adrien Morot, Fraser is an angelic presence as Charlie, radiant with compassion and love, yet also with reflective intelligence, and depths of unexpressed sorrow and anger and desperation.

There may not really be a lot to the film beyond Fraser's performance, and the crisp, controlled mix of anger and adoration in Hong Chau's Liz. Some scenes here verge on the overwrought, I suppose, and there are revelations that would probably play better on the stage. But nothing seems campy or patronizing. The Whale is a vehicle, perhaps, but it's a vehicle for an unforgettable, maybe even classic star turn.

PUP RALLY

Now streaming:

Free Puppies!--The directors of this documentary, Samantha Wishman and Christina Thomas, are yankees, from New York and Philadelphia respectively, chronicling a little-reported story from the American rural South: A lack of resources for animal welfare. The filmmakers seem struck by the degree to which dogs in Dixie are neglected and allowed to breed, and the frequency with which their offspring are abandoned, often on a roadside in a box marked "FREE PUPPIES!"

But Wishman and Thomas also find heroes: The focus is on a few women in Dade County in northern Georgia who work quixotically to rescue, spay, neuter, foster and find adoptive homes for these strays. They do this work seemingly at their own expense, with very little help from the local government--no funds for a shelter, veterinary care, etc. This problem is hardly confined below the Mason-Dixon line, of course, but conditions there seem particularly bad.

The most vividly presented of these women is the voluble and energetic Monda Wooten, who runs a discount flooring business in the town of Trenton when she can squeeze it in between looking after strays and browbeating her snickering colleagues on the City Commission to prioritize building a shelter. She and her friends Ann Brown and Ruth Smith, among others, seem to live in a constant, self-imposed on-call state, taking calls about strays or other imperiled animals as they drive around, shlepping dogs to low-cost spay and neuter clinics, negotiating with dog hoarders, helping facilitate a huge diaspora of strays to adopters in the North, and more.

I was braced for a miserable time going into this one, but while the movie's implications, both cultural and logistical, are certainly sad, it's not depressing to watch. In part this is because it's full of adorable dogs; we, of course, mostly get to see the luckier ones. But it's also because the women's unhesitating dedication and courage are inspirational, and their characters are funny and fascinating.

Though it isn't stated explicitly, Monda comes across like a Trumper (I found a picture of her and other local politicians in the Dade County Sentinel posing with Marjorie Taylor Greene, in whose congressional district Trenton is located). At one point Monda mentions that their shared passion for dogs is just about all that she and Ann--who wears a peace sign on her shirt--have in common. The fact that, in our supposedly hopelessly polarized society, they're able to put aside their differences for the sake of this work is immensely cheering, both for dogs and for our nation.

That said, there's also a striking moment in which Monda explains, rather defensively, that when she takes a pregnant dog to a vet, she'll have the vet abort the puppies, on the grounds that it's better than bringing more mouths to feed into a world that won't care for them. She doesn't say whether she would extend this option to pregnant humans.

Two other documentaries, both short subjects about the plight of arctic animals, are available for free from The New Yorker; both are tough but worth your time...

Nuisance Bear--This wordless wonder, directed by Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden and running just under 14 minutes, shows a polar bear wandering around the outskirts of Churchill, Manitoba--famous as a stop for tourists to watch the creatures on their migratory route. Local officials, faceless in pickups and vans, chase the harried, unassuming beast away from town, while nearby kids in costume trick-or-treat, under police escort, in the icy streets. The soulful title bear is the only real character, and is entirely sympathetic.

Haulout--This one, directed by Evegnia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev and running less than a half-hour, has a human protagonist, Russian scientist Maxim Chakilev, keeping vigil in a cabin on a desolate stretch of Siberian beach. He's waiting for a "haulout," a mass beaching of sea mammals to rest during migration. Sure enough, one morning he wakes up and opens the cabin door to find himself surrounded...

...by tens of thousands of walruses. As a surreal image, this is worthy of Bunuel, and initially there's something whimsically appealing, almost cozy, about the idea of spending a day hemmed indoors by a sea of these lolling, snorting pinnipeds. But it's soon clear that this is not a healthy phenomenon; the animals have bunched on land in such numbers because of a lack of sea ice on which to rest, and the density is dangerous to them. What Chakilev finds after the walruses depart is appallingly sad and ominous, and the film is beautiful, haunting and heartbreaking.

SHOWERS AND BLADES

Happy Psycho Day everybody!

That's right, December 11 (at two-forty-three p.m.) is the day when, according to the opening titles, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho begins, right here in Phoenix, Arizona...

Saturday before last was, by Phoenix standards, pretty rainy. Your Humble Narrator was driving home up I-17 and listening to Reel Music, the movie music show on KBAQ...

...which was devoted that evening to scores from Hitchcock flicks. So there I was, listening to Bernard Herrmann's great theme from Psycho, with my windshield wipers keeping time, and it occurred to me that this was likely as close as I would ever get to knowing what it felt like to be Janet Leigh...