SHE'S GOT LEGS

RIP to the brilliant, versatile, prolific Patty Duke, passed on at 69.

In her honor…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree is the giant black widow into which she periodically shape-shifted in 1977’s Curse of the Black Widow, one of her innumerable TV movies…

THE CAPES OF WRATH

Opening this week:

  
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—The title sounds like a Supreme Court Case, but it just refers to a spat between the two biggest names in the DC superhero stable. The Man of Steel thinks Gotham’s Dark Knight is a creepy vigilante, while the Caped Crusader thinks that the near-omnipotence of Krypton’s Favorite Son represents an existential threat to all humankind. Can either be called wrong with perfect confidence?

This had possibilities, certainly, and a deft director in Zack Snyder. And the film has its moments. The acting is quite strong—Ben Affleck makes a brooding, intriguing, suavely attractive Bruce Wayne, and his costume gives a perfectly competent performance as Batman. He’s far more credible as a superhero here than he was as Daredevil back in 2003.

Henry Cavill makes a serviceable Superman—like most actors who have played this role, his charm doubles whenever he’s in Clark Kent drag—and Jesse Eisenberg darkens his persona as a manic, nattering Lex Luthor. A young Israeli actress named Gal Gadot is introduced as Wonder Woman; she doesn’t get much to do, but she is unquestionably a wonder.

Parts of the clash between the title icons are amusing, but mostly Batman v Superman is an overwrought, laborious, punishingly heavy slog. The conflict is muddled and lacking in urgency, there isn’t nearly enough humor, and, above all, the movie is too freakin’ long. It’s TOO. FREAKIN’. LONG. By at least twenty minutes, probably more.

Various theories can be advanced as to why so many blockbuster action movies insist on being so outrageously overlong. But I would rather this review, unlike Batman v Superman itself, remain brief. 

City of Gold—This documentary challenges the commonplace that good stories require conflict. It’s a portrait of Pulitzer-Prize-winning L.A. Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, and it has almost none.

For an hour and a half, we watch the pleasant fellow galumph around the Greater L.A. area, going to Mom and Pop ethnic restaurants where adoring owners serve him plates of delicious-looking food. He takes a brief side trip to New York to dine with his idol Calvin Trillin, but otherwise that’s pretty much the whole movie, in terms of content. None of the talking heads have an unkind word to say about him; no appalling personal tragedies are revealed.

Of course, we do learn that Gold is a chronic procrastinator. A newspaper columnist who procrastinates? What a shocker! And his environmentalist brother gently reproves him for his fondness for overfished varieties of sushi. That’s about as much Shakespearean drama as we get.

But director Laura Gabbert, abetted by Bobby Johnston’s fine score, keeps City of Gold gliding along enjoyably. Gabbert’s bird’s-eye dissection of L.A.’s neighborhoods is fascinating and undeniably glamorous, and the movie works as genteel food porn as well. Mere humans may feel a pang of envy at seeing someone so seemingly contented with and well-rewarded by his talents, but Gold comes across so unassumingly that it doesn’t deepen into resentment.

BAD RAPTOR

With Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice opening this weekend, Your Humble Narrator is reminded of the Fleischer Superman cartoons of the ‘40s, which constitute some of the most visually beautiful superhero art ever. So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week our honoree is the King or Duke or Grand Poobah of the underground race of hawk-men…

 

…who try to sacrifice Lois and her Professor pal in 1943’s The Underground World.

Spoiler alert! The Man of Steel shows up to discourage the birdbrains from this plan… 

MEDAL HEAD

Opening this week:

  

The Bronze—Along with Race and Eddie the Eagle, this is the third movie in the last month or so about the Olympic Games, and all three are very different from each other indeed. Diminutive Melissa Rauch, who plays the squeaky-voiced Bernadette on The Big Bang Theory, stars in this comedy, which she co-wrote with her husband Winston Rauch. She plays Hope Annabelle Greggory, who finished her routine in Women’s Gymnastics at the Olympics in heroic, soul-stirring fashion, fighting through an ankle injury a la Kerri Strug.

Unlike Strug, however, Hope took the Bronze rather than the Gold, and the injury effectively ended her career. She returned to Amherst, Ohio (“Sandstone Center of the World”), where more than ten years later she’s still treated like a privileged celebrity—her own parking space, free stuff at the mall and the diner, her name on the sign coming into town. Unemployed, she still lives with, sponges off of, and verbally abuses her long-suffering widowed postman Dad (Gary Cole). She’s bitter, selfish, defensive, deceitful and extremely foul-mouthed.

Despite the raunchy, raucous tone, this very plausible story has a poignant edge, and for a while I thought it was going to sink the movie. An ongoing shtick on The Big Bang Theory is the steeliness and bullying threat that regularly burst out of Rauch’s Bernadette, in contrast to her superficial cuddly sweetness. The Bronze starts out as, more or less, a whole movie hinged on this gag, and while it’s funny for a while, Hope seems too mean and unpleasant to hold our interest at feature length.

When her old coach dies, however, Hope receives notice of a sizable inheritance, if she takes over the training of the promising young gymnast Maggie (Haley Lu Richardson), who idolizes her. At first, fearful that her pupil will outdo her and usurp her place in town, Hope blatantly sabotages her, but eventually…

Well, you see where it’s heading. There’s even a love interest, in the form of the talented young comic Thomas Middleditch. The good news is that Rauch shades her characterization from despicable to sort-of-likable gradually and incrementally, and director Bryan Buckley keeps the proceedings lewd and crude throughout. As a result, the story’s potential sentimentality is held at bay, and sure enough, we start to care about, and develop some hope, for Hope.

 Allegiant—As with the high school romantic comedies of a decade or so ago, the futuristic teen dystopias are starting to run together in my head. It takes me a minute to be sure that I’m not mixing Divergents with Maze Runners and Hunger Gamers and Surfers of the 5^th Wave.

Assuming I’m not, then this third entry in the series based on Veronica Roth’s Divergent books—it’s called The Divergent Series: Allegiant on the posters—has heroine Tris (big-eyed Shailene Woodley) and her pals fleeing Chicago, now in a turmoil of summary trials and executions. Beyond the city’s walls they find a toxic wasteland, beyond which they find a force field, beyond which they find a futuristic complex in what used to be O’Hare Airport.

Presiding over this is Jeff Daniels as a scientist who’s been studying Chicago’s various factions, trying to produce a person who is “genetically pure” instead of “damaged.” Talk like this tends to make people uneasy, but the guileless Tris thinks Daniels is a good egg. The hunky Four (Theo James), quickly pronounced “damaged,” isn’t buying it, however.

That’s just the gist of the plot of Allegiant, which is a good deal more twisted, with schemes and betrayals and redemptions spilling out everywhere. The dialogue is quite poor, but luckily it occurs mostly in little pockets, linking together director Robert Schwentke’s big, lavish action scenes. These are reasonably exciting, in their mindless way.

Alongside the pretty youth are some vets, like Naomi Watts, Octavia Spencer and Ray Stevenson. The unctuous Daniels makes a capable if less elegant replacement for Kate Winslet, whose honking American villainy was the best aspect of the previous flicks. Or at least the sexiest.

NEVER A DULLAHAN MOMENT

Happy St. Paddy’s Day everybody!

Who knew the Irish had their own version of the Headless Horseman?

Meet…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree, the Dullahan, seen here...

...as depicted in the video game Blue Dragon, and here…

...as depicted in the Rage of Bahamut card game. No doubt the Dullahan predates by many centuries our Yank Horseman who chased Ichabod Crane through Sleepy Hollow.

BUNKER CHILL

Opening this week:
  

 10 Cloverfield Lane—After a car crash on a rural Louisiana road, a young woman named Michelle wakes up imprisoned in an underground bunker equipped for doomsday. Her survivalist host/captor Howard tells her that there’s been an attack—maybe nuclear, maybe chemical, maybe alien, he’s not sure—that the air outside is toxic, and that they’re stuck underground for at least a year or two.

At first Michelle thinks Howard’s crazy, and tries several times to escape, but indications start to accumulate that maybe something apocalyptic really did happen outside. Corroborating Howard’s story, for instance, is the bunker’s uninvited third resident, Emmet, a young local guy who helped Howard build the shelter, and forced his way in, to Howard’s dismay, when he saw disaster starting to strike. All the same, over time Michelle also sees signs that Howard may not be entirely trustworthy.

This chamber-piece thriller, directed by Dan Trachtenberg from a script by John Campbell, Matthew Stuecken and Damien Chazelle, is being marketed as somehow very vaguely a companion piece to the 2008 found-footage monster picture Cloverfield. Any such connection seemed tenuous at best to me, but this isn’t a complaint, as 10 Cloverfield Lane is, on the whole, a stronger, more memorable movie than Cloverfield. The new film, for one very welcome difference, unfolds in conventional narrative rather than through the overused device of found footage.

Better still, this set-bound movie is of necessity driven by dialogue and acting—and, to some extent, by an old-school, high-tension score by Bear McCreary—and it’s anchored on the masterly turn of John Goodman as Howard. Aside from an occasional angry outburst, Howard is soft-spoken, patient, even kindly in a brusque sort of way, and he has moments, like his purse-lipped little smile when he and his guests sit down to dinner, that even suggest ironic humor. Yet a terrible, longing mania keeps seeping out of his eyes and from the corners of his mouth, signaling his scary potential to turn monstrous. Goodman doesn’t hit a false note, and his riveting performance gives the impression of effortlessness, of not breaking a sweat.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, from the third version of The Thing and Tarantino’s Death Proof, among others, makes Michelle a courageous and resourceful heroine—her frightened but never paralyzed reactions win the audience’s admiration. And John Gallagher, Jr. is touching as the dim but decent Emmet; the bond he forms with Michelle is nicely underplayed and convincing.

Near the end, 10 Cloverfield Lane finally gives us a look outside. Without going into details, suffice to say that, for ten minutes or so, it turns into a different sort of movie, and, though entertaining, a lesser one, I’d say. It’s a testament to the claustrophobic force of 10 Cloverfield Lane that it still feels liberating, almost joyous, just to get out of that hole in the ground.

IN A FRANKIE MOOD

This week…

Monster-of-the-Week: …our honoree is John Cleese as The Frankenstein Monster, from the classic Monty Python sketch “The Dull Life of a City Stockbroker”:

 
He’s on my list of Strange Versions of Frankenstein, coinciding with this week’s Blu-Ray release of Victor Frankenstein, on New Times Blogs; you can peruse it here.