DON'T FEED THE TROLL

Just because Comet TV is showing the film Saturday night, as part of a festival of cat-oriented scary flicks...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week's honoree is the coxcombed little troll from the third story in Cat's Eye...

...the 1985 movie anthology of Stephen King tales. It plans to suck the breath out of the young Drew Barrymore, but her valiant cat has other ideas...

RUNDOWN

Opening this weekend:

Blade Runner 2049—As the makers of 2001: A Space Odyssey learned, it can be risky to put a specific year into the title of a futuristic sci-fi movie. Ridley Scott’s 1982 favorite Blade Runner, set less than two decades off, in 2019, showed us a Los Angeles in which special cops of the title moniker hunt synthetic humans called “replicants” who have gone rogue. The film’s smoggy, neon-lit vision of the future was scary, but it also had a garish glamour, and accordingly it was done in the style of an old-school film noir—in its original release, it even had hard-boiled narration by Harrison Ford’s title character.

That’s the version I saw back in ’82. I remember enjoying it enormously, but it didn’t become the cultural touchstone for me that it did for so many others. I remembered it less for its plot and more for its details—Joanna Cassidy and the snake, Brion James getting a bullet in the head, William Sanderson’s little guys wandering around the Bradbury Building, Daryl Hannah doing somersaults, Edward James Olmos doing origami. I never saw any of the various director’s cuts and alternative versions that became as complicated as the quarto-versus-folio textual history of a Shakespeare play. I think I may have only seen it the one time, and in any case I hadn’t seen it in decades when I saw this sequel.

This one is set thirty-some years from now, and the glamour is gone. The environment has collapsed, California is a hazy, snowy, defoliated wasteland, and farmers raise grubs for protein. But there are still fugitive replicants, and thus still blade runners. Our title character this time is K (Ryan Gosling)—a spiritual cousin of Kafka’s Josef?—and the twisty, violent mystery he chases unfolds against backgrounds that feel almost like expressionistic stage sets.

That’s about as much of the story as I feel comfortable describing, however. After the screening I attended, a studio rep read us a lengthy list of “requests” from the filmmakers about what we mustn’t reveal, even going so far as to suggest wording to us—they seemed to want to bioengineer replicant movie reviews.

I will say that while the script, by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, shows influences ranging from Soylent Green to Logan’s Run to Cherry 2000 to Children of Men to Her to, just maybe, Kurosawa’s Ikiru, it’s ingenious and intriguing, and that director Denis Villeneuve, abetted by the great cinematographer Roger Deakins, gives the film a superb look. Villeneuve also gets strong performances, from Gosling, from Harrison Ford as Deckard, the now-reclusive hero of the first film, from Robin Wright as K’s boss, from Sylvia Hoeks as a relentless corporate operative stalking the same quarry as K, from Jared Leto as her satanic boss, and from the beguiling Ana de Armas as K’s roomie. There are startlingly erotic passages, and terrific touches of verisimilitude, like when Gosling stares in fascination at a dog, presumably a rarity in that world.

On the downside: As he showed in last year’s impressive Arrival, Villeneuve is great at generating a brooding sci-fi atmosphere. He does the same for Blade Runner 2049, but the result, this time, is that the movie is glacially paced. It feels almost an hour longer than it needs to be, and even the action and fight scenes, though often shockingly violent, feel oddly lacking in urgency. And the movie’s environmental bleakness, though marvelously realized on a visual level, also grows a bit oppressive over nearly three hours. I just wish that forecasts like this didn’t seem so plausible these days.

 

My Little Pony: The Movie—Not a whit less bizarre and immersively imagined than the Blade Runner flicks is this new animated feature realization of the Hasbro toy line from the early '80s. It centers on the relentlessly cheery equine inhabitants, mostly distaff, of Equestria, some of whom are winged, some of whom are horned, all of whom are colored like Jelly Bellies.

The story involves an incursion into the city of Ponyville by Tempest (well voiced by Emily Blunt), a sinister magical pony with a jagged stump where her unicorn horn should be. She and her minions are trying to corral four top Pony Princesses in order to steal their magic on behalf of the demonic Storm King (Liev Schreiber), in return for a restored horn.

Tempest imprisons three of the princesses, but the fourth, Princess Twilight Sparkle (Tara Strong), eludes capture. She and her friends, which include a manically upbeat pony, a fashion-and-design-obsessed pony, a Reba McIntire-ish "cowgirl" pony and a diminutive dragon, set out in search of help, with only the mysterious clue “hippo” to guide them. In the course of their quest they encounter everything from airship-borne pirates (Zoe Saldana among them) to a sly, dandified feline hustler (Taye Diggs).

For followers of the franchise, which I'm told include not just children but many adult fans, this movie may hit it out of the park, but I found it a trifle flat. The plot seems boilerplate, and with the exception of a witty line here and there so does the dialogue. The theme is the value of friendship, which is preferable, at least, to the believe-in-your-dream platitude that's usually shoved at us as the moral of this sort of movie. But the songs in which this ideal is extolled are insipid recitatives without a memorable melody in the bunch.

Well, I take that back. "Rainbow," the song that Sia co-wrote and sings at the finale, is quite pretty.  And the pony character through which she sings it has a mane that hangs down over her face. Nice touch.

FALL FLING

Happy October everybody! My favorite month of the year is off to a horribly rough start; let's hope it gets better.

Check out the October edition of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...

...for Your Humble Narrator's article on the origins of Lost Lake, Phoenix's big new music festival debuting later this month in Steele Indian School Park, and also my "4 Corners" column on new and new-ish Valley chowhouses, especially those in which one might obtain a nice bowl of soup for the cooler weather.

A few days ago I accompanied The Wife on one of her favorite fall traditions, going to Target and checking out the Halloween decorations and other merchandise...

 
It was there I obtained...

Monster-of-the-Week: ..this week's honoree, one of a box of Peeps Frankensteins...

Have no fear, I assure you that the abomination in question was devoured mere seconds after this photo was taken. Along with his box-mates.

VICTORIA IS HERS

Opening this weekend:

Victoria & Abdul--Judi Dench returns to the role of Queen Victoria in this jaunty historical drama, which serves as a sequel to 1997's Mrs. Brown. Both films have roughly the same point: That poor old Vickie, famed for her dour asperity, was as capable as any schoolgirl of developing painful crushes, even into her dotage.

In Mrs. Brown her favorite was John Brown (played by Billy Connolly), a Scottish groom who had the temerity to treat her like an adult human during her lonely widowhood. The naughty nickname was bestowed upon her, behind her back, by the courtiers and lackeys who were, essentially, her jailers.  In this new film, set many years later in the last stretch of her life, she develops an infatuation with an Indian servant named Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), and the same sniggering, disapproving lot refer to him as "The brown John Brown."

He's one of two Indian Muslims sent to make a ceremonial presentation to Victoria who, stuporous with boredom, happens to glance up and notice him. Later she pronounces "I thought the tall one was terribly handsome" and requests him as a personal manservant. Eventually he becomes her "Munshi," or teacher, tutoring her in Urdu and accompanying her on trips. Her family--especially her son and heir apparent Edward (Eddie Izzard)--and the servants grow increasingly scandalized over the relationship. His less dreamy fellow flunky Mohammed (the dryly fatalistic Adeel Akhtar) likes it no better, calling Abdul an "Uncle Tom" and predicting disaster.

A sly, winking title at the beginning of the film admits that this is a "mostly" true story, but there really was an Abdul Karim, he really did become close to Victoria in the last decade and a half of her life, and it really did drive those around her crazy. An attempt was made to destroy most of the correspondence and other records of the relationship after the Queen's death, but a diary survived and was published in 2010.

The director is Stephen Frears, a master of this sort of thing, and he keeps it bouncing along merrily, even though much of the story is sad, from the point of view of both title characters. Dench makes us see, once again, the appalling personal powerlessness that was the price, for a woman of passionate nature, of serving as the figurehead of that particular crime family. Fazal, a Bollywood star, is harder to read. The smiling, unctuous Abdul does indeed seem like a bit of an Uncle Tom, and it's hard to see whether he's a calculating climber, a sincerely besotted gull, or a heroic self-appointed ambassador of his culture. Or a bit of all three?

It's also hard to see exactly what Frears and screenwriter Lee Hall want us to take away from this interesting but enigmatic historical episode. Is it the story of a woman, isolated all her life at the heart of an Empire, getting an improbable belated broadening, or of her getting worked by a conman? Karim lived lavishly for a time, at Victoria's insistence, and was accused, among other things, of steering Victoria to sympathy with Muslims over Hindus.

Again, these are not mutually exclusive possibilities, but the way the movie declines to dig too deeply into them leaves it less satisfying than Mrs. Brown. All the same, it's perfectly enjoyable, in an undemanding, Masterpiece Theatre sort of way. Dench is always worth watching, Fazal is charming, Izzard is impressive as the furious "Bertie" and there are nice supporting turns by Olivia Williams, Michael Gambon, Fenella Woolgar and the late Tim Piggot-Smith, whose last film this was. Simon Callow also pops up, in an amusing cameo as Puccini, so if you like the sort of movie where Simon Callow might pop up in a cameo as Puccini, this is probably for you.

Woodshock--With the abundance of redwood trunks, wooden paneling and cut lumber, I began to wonder if "woodshock" might be a condition into which this movie could put you. In shot after shot, Theresa (Kirsten Dunst) wanders languorously and depressively, usually wearing a white camisole, around her mother's beautiful old house in northern California, or among the titanic trees nearby, caressing the wooden surfaces.

Near the beginning, we see Theresa use a vial of some unnamed drug to assist her terminally ill mother in ending her life. Seemingly poleaxed by grief, she nonetheless returns to work at a medical marijuana emporium. Trouble ensues, first when she attempts another such mercy killing, and later when she starts smoking the lethal stuff herself, and grows increasingly paranoid.

Dunst is good, intense without hamminess and with a low-key, gentle manner that's believable and touching. But Dunst is always good, has been ever since she was a kid. Alas, Woodshock isn't the sort of movie that can be carried by a fine lead performance alone. It's the feature debut of Rodarte fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy, and it's too self-consciously an exercise in directorial style to work as a vehicle for a performance.

Peter Flinckenberg's gauzy cinematography gives the picture a lovely look, but the persistently ominous score and the Easy Rider-like flash-cutting give it the unearned portentousness of a student film, stretched out wearyingly to feature length. It's also more than a little reminiscent of cautionary drug movies of earlier eras, like Psych-Out or The Trip, minus the energy.  I kept waiting for a scene at a hippie club, with low-angle, solarized shots of The Seeds or Strawberry Alarm Clock jamming. Couldn't have hurt.

FEEL THE BERN

RIP to Bernie Casey, passed on at 78. The San Francisco 49er and L.A. Ram turned actor in 1969 with Guns of the Magnificent Seven, and racked up credits in high-profile stuff like Brian's Song, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Sharky's Machine, Never Say Never Again, the Revenge of the Nerds flicks and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, as well as Charles Burnett's neglected 1994 The Glass Shield. But he also did some cool scary flicks; he wore Stan Winston's makeup rather elegantly as the studly lead Gargoyle in 1972's Gargoyles...

...though his voice was needlessly dubbed by the Outer Limits "Control Voice" Vic Perrin. Casey also played both title roles in...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde, a hilarious "blaxploitation" shocker of 1976...

The murderous, pasty-complexioned half of that title combo is this week's honoree:

GIVE THEM A CLINCH, THEY TAKE A MILE

Having kindly been given free tickets, The Wife and I and The Kid betook ourselves to Chase Field yesterday to see the Diamondbacks take on the Miami Marlins. These were the looks on our faces after the game...

(That's right, that's Randy Johnson with us. These were good seats.)

Back in May, The Wife and I went to the game on Mother's Day, only to see our beloved Snakes beaten by the Pirates. But they made up for it Sunday. Not only did we have the pleasure of seeing the great Giancarlo Stanton not hit his 58th home run of the season for the Marlins, we also got to be there when the D-bax clinched a playoff spot, their first since 2011, in the middle of the 4th Inning courtesy of losses by the Brewers and the Cardinals. Then J.D. Martinez won the game, 3-2, at the end of a nail-biting 9th Inning with a two-out, bases-loaded walk-off smash, thus clinching home field advantage.

TROPHY LIVES

Opening this week:

Trophy--If you want to hear the incongruously squeaky bleating that a young rhino makes beside its dead mother, or the oddly resigned groans and sighs of a mortally wounded elephant, this is the movie that will put them in your head, along with many other unshakeable sounds and sights. In other words, this documentary is not the sort of thing you recommend to just anybody.

It is, however, a painfully potent work that digs into commercial big-game hunting, and that industry's claim that it's a part of wildlife conservation efforts. It's full of blood-boiling sequences of pampered rich tourists being led by local guides within rifle range of pre-selected majestic animals, then giggling with excitement after they put a bullet in them, which usually only begins the process of killing them. The hunters seem entirely without self-consciousness about behaving this way on camera; they don't seem to realize that they're coming across like happy psychopaths.

Even so, this isn't just agitprop. The movie makes a serious attempt to get the bottom of the psychology that drives people--like the Jimmy Johns guy, like Trump's sons, like the dentist from Minnesota who killed Cecil the Lion--to seek grinning selfies with the carcasses of animals they've just killed. It also tries to make sense of the weird and maddening economics that underlie the pursuit, like the irony that "canned" hunting may indeed, through the breeding it requires, bolster the populations of some threatened animals.

Trophy focuses on several figures, but probably the most intense scrutiny is of a man named Philip Glass, not the minimalist composer but a sheep farmer and hunting enthusiast from Texas. Glass hopes to kill the "Big Five" of African game: Cape buffalo, leopard, lion, elephant and--most expensive because most scarce--rhino.

Near the beginning, Glass, speaking as a farmer, dismisses the naivete of people who view "all animals as pets" and can't see that "you raise a chicken to kill a chicken to eat a chicken." Even those of us who aren't vegetarians and live daily with some version of that equation can admit (if we're honest) that its implications aren't quite so simplistic, but in any case what Glass does on his carefully guided "hunts" in Africa has nothing to do with where McNuggets come from.

A soft-spoken, seemingly sweet-natured man, Glass insists, and truly seems to believe, that he loves the animals he shoots, and says that the act fills him with joy. But a different sort of release is suggested when he shoots a young elephant in Namibia, crows "Got him runnin' away!" and then smokes cigarettes with his guides, as if post-coital. This is tacitly contrasted, later, with the reflections of a Zimbabwean anti-poaching official who must occasionally, in the line of duty, legitimately kill an elephant that has become a threat to local people, and who describes how sad he finds it.

On the anti-hunting side of the equation, we meet John Hume, a South African businessman turned conservationist who keeps more than a thousand rhinos on his ranch. His tactic is to regularly harvest the horns. This makes the beasts worthless to poachers, but Hume would also like to be allowed to legally sell the horns in order to finance his operations. The trouble is that the South African government banned the sale of rhino horn, with the result that illegal poaching promptly spiked. It's another infuriating irony: the desperate Hume wants to use the absurd belief in the medicinal value of rhino horn--the main threat to the creatures--as a means to continue his preservation efforts.

The director here is Shaul Schwartz, of 2013's remarkable Narco Cultura, which explored a similar kind of cognitive dissonance in the form of the Mexican Narcocorrida music culture that celebrates drug-gang murders. With Trophy, Schwartz (with co-director Christina Clusiau) manages an even more epic sweep and, more significantly, richer and more disturbing human insights.

In an interview late in the film, Glass seems on the verge of revealing something telling about his relationship with his late father, who taught him to hunt (as he is shown teaching his own young son). But he just hints at his anger and stops short, and his smile seems frozen and queasy. It's intensely poignant and uncomfortable; one more in a movie full of moments that make you want to turn away, but also demand you look.

Stronger--Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jeff Bauman, a Bostonian Costco employee. A nice enough guy but an unreliable, less-than-ideal boyfriend, Jeff did manage to show up to cheer on his fed-up girlfriend Erin Hurley as she ran in the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. As it happened, he was standing right next to one of the explosives that went off during the terrorist attack that morning. He lost his legs.

This sort of material has TV-movie written all over it, but director David Gordon Green and screenwriter John Pollono keep things restrained, refusing to exploit the story for melodrama or lurid shock. Make no mistake, there are brief scenes of graphic horror from which Green's camera doesn't flinch. But the focus is on Bauman's painful physical and psychological recovery, and the new level of maturity it gradually brought him.

On the other hand, Stronger doesn't offer us cheap uplift either. As played by Gyllenhaal, Jeff is fully-equipped with self-pity and excuses, not to mention confusion at why people keep calling him a "hero" for happening to stand next to a bomb. Yet what comes to the surface at his moments of greatest crisis--like when he learns his legs are gone--is humor, courage, perception. It's believable that his far more responsible girlfriend would be unable, despite all his faults, to fully disconnect from him.

Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black is very touching as said girlfriend, by the way. Also excellent is Miranda Richardson as Bauman's addled mother, the best loving but dysfunctional Boston Mom since Melissa Leo in 2010's The Fighter.

One other thing: Costco comes across so well in this movie that you may wonder if they paid for product placement.