DYSTOPIA, DAT TOPIA, DE UDDER TOPIA

Check out my preview of Southwest Shakespeare Company's 1984...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

BURDEN OF ROOF

Opening this weekend:

Roofman--The story of Jeff Manchester, known as "Roofman," sounds like a tall tale. After serving in the U.S. Army, the California native robbed dozens of McDonalds restaurants, among other businesses, usually by cutting through the roof before opening time, politely and apologetically sticking up the arriving employees at gunpoint, locking them in the freezer, and looting the registers.

He was caught in North Carolina in 2000 and sentenced to 45 years in prison--his gentleman bandit routine cut no ice with the judge--but escaped in 2004. He then hid out inside a Toys "R" Us in Charlotte, subsisting on Peanut M&Ms and baby food, for around half a year.

But even that isn't the most astounding part of the story. During his Toys "R" Us residency Manchester, calling himself "John Zorn," slipped out into the community. He started attending a Presbyterian Church, dating a local single mother with two daughters, and generally acting like he was putting down roots.

The title role in this new film about Manchester's exploits seems tailor made for Channing Tatum. At one point in this film a cop remarks that Manchester is extremely smart, probably genius level, but "also an idiot." Few contemporary stars seem better equipped to get across that combination of resourceful ingenuity with extravagantly imbecilic recklessness, or of sweet, guileless, well-intentioned decency with dangerous obtuseness.

Most of Tatum's costars seem shrewdly cast to come across as sharp and intelligent by contrast to Manchester: Kirsten Dunst as Leigh, the Toys "R" Us employee to whom he takes a shine; Peter Dinklage as Mitch, the store's snide, toxic manager; LaKeith Stanfield as Manchester's shady old army buddy and Lily Collias as Leigh's elder daughter all seem, if they don't always act, dauntingly smart and perceptive. The faithful, led by Ben Mendelsohn as the pastor and Uzo Aduba as his wife, amusingly show us the seductive aggression with which a new face in church, especially a young single man, may be greeted. 

Directed by Derek Cianfrance from a script he wrote with Kirt Gunn, the movie unfolds in an America in which many of us live--fast food restaurants and chain stores and apartment buildings--but which we only occasionally see convincingly depicted. It's skillfully crafted, but it depends for its light tone on us finding Roofman lovable. Because no irrevocable tragedy resulted from Manchester's crimes, but perhaps even more importantly because he's played by Channing Tatum, we can.

BRIM VIEW

Moon Mammoths update: Long on back order, my Moon Mammoths cap...

...a kind gift from one of my sisters, has finally arrived!

The Erie Seawolves/Moon Mammoths had a fine season, finishing 39-30 and winning their division before losing to the Binghamton Rumble Ponies (AA affiliate of the New York Mets) in the Eastern League finals. If they bring back the Moon Mammoths identity next season--as they most certainly should--I have a modest proposal for their marketing team: How about a Fuzz E. Mammoth bobblehead? I would be proud to have Fuzz E. standing watch on my desk!

HANS ACROSS AMERICA

Friday night Your Humble Narrator had excellent seats to one of the more peculiar orchestral concerts I've ever attended: The World of Hans Zimmer.

(apologies in advance for my atrocious performance photographs)

My pal Kate kindly offered me a ticket to the Arizona stop of the show's current U.S. tour, at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale. I had never heard of it, but it clearly has a following; though not quite a sell-out, the place was full and the crowd screamed and cheered like they would have for Barry Manilow or Kenny G, at least.

At a glance, the audience members looked roughly like the folks you might see at a film festival. Zimmer, as you may know, is a prolific, Oscar-winning German composer of film scores, usually for big Hollywood blockbusters. He wasn't present at the concert, except in video segments during which his giant mug bantered with the maestro, Matt Dunkley, or chatted onscreen with the likes of Jerry Bruckheimer or Guy Ritchie. The show is a multi-media event, with lighting effects and video screens showing expressionistic patterns...

...or clips from the movies.

But the stars were the onstage performers; according to Dunkley, 60 musicians from 18 countries, from Ukraine to Brazil to Lithuania to Turkey to Israel to Kenya to Lebanon to Northern Ireland to the United States, playing and singing lengthy suites from Driving Miss Daisy, The Rock, Gladiator, Interstellar, Dune, Pearl Harbor, The Prince of Egypt, Wonder Woman and others. They made up, quite simply, the most glamorous-looking orchestra I've ever seen.

Kate got her tickets from the solo cellist, Timothée Berte-Renou, seen here, or rather not visible here, behind a column of otherworldly light...

Again, the photo does him zero justice, but the French native's long flowing hair and romance-novel costumes gave him quite the dramatic stage presence as his mournful strings essentially stood in for the voice of Billie Eilish in the Bond movie No Time to Die. He was one of the stars of the evening, but far from the only one.

The show's apparent strategy was to let top-notch classical musicians behave onstage like rock stars, dancing, mugging, emoting, interacting, working the crowd, goofing around. The audience ate it up. 

The finale was from The Lion King...

...and the encore was a rousing suite from Pirates of the Caribbean. 

Genius though Zimmer unquestionably is, after hearing such a generous helping of his music all at once, I must admit that a large percentage of his work seems a little on the unvaried side. Some of his scores are distinctive, like Driving Miss Daisy with its delightful if ear-wormy clarinet theme. But when it comes to his action and superhero movies, I'm not sure I could confidently identify, without the intros and clips, which solemn, brooding, bombastic score went with The Rock or Interstellar or a Batman flick. On their own merits, however, each of them is potent.   

On balance, The World of Hans Zimmer was one of the nerdier shows I've ever been to, and that is surely saying something. I had a blast.

ANEMONE FOR NOTHING

Opening here in the Valley today:

Anemone--As a movie star, Daniel Day-Lewis seems like an old gunfighter in a western; wishing he could hang up his six-shooters but repeatedly pulled back into the game for one more job. And any time he does, allegorically speaking, strap on his holsters, it's probably going to be worth a look.

This new movie, his first since Phantom Thread in 2017, is no exception. It's directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis from a script they wrote together. Day-Lewis pere plays Ray Stoker, a former English soldier who has withdrawn to live in a cabin deep in the woods, chopping firewood and eating sardines and silently exuding bitterness. One day his brother Jem (Sean Bean) shows up, delivering a letter. Jem, who now lives with Ray's wife Nessa (Samantha Morton) and son Brian (Samuel Bottomley), wants Ray to return home with him, to connect with Brian, now brawling and otherwise screwing up.

It's immediately clear that Ray is deeply wounded in multiple ways, related both to his and Jem's Catholic upbringing and to his experiences as an occupier during The Troubles. Very, very gradually the details of the harrowing backstory emerge, and they're more or less what you might expect. Even though the movie's agonies are rooted in two of Britain's primal eldest curses, there's nothing particularly revelatory about them. But they allow Day-Lewis a series of opportunities for increasingly intense showcase acting.

Ray's fury and grief boil up almost into a kind of glee at times; at others he recounts his traumas straightforwardly. Either way, he's riveting. Adding this to his gallery of roles, from the homicidal ire of his Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood to his subtly comic passive aggression as Abraham Lincoln, it's hard not to conclude that Day-Lewis is simply one of the best, most charismatic and most versatile actors in the history of movies.

It should be said that while Sean Bean's role consists mostly of glowering at Day-Lewis while watching him act, he too holds his own with a veteran star's presence. Samantha Morton and the rest of the small cast are entirely convincing as well.

The movie isn't just an acting vehicle, however; despite the bleak story, it's visually sumptuous, almost hallucinatory at times. The verdant forest, seen from above, has a fairy-tale atmosphere, and the thrashing limbs of the trees seem almost to externalize Ray's seething soul. As a director, Day-Lewis fils seems like a potentially talented new gunfighter.

PTA MEETING

Opening this weekend:

One Battle After Another--The erotic power of revolutionary violence is the initial theme of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest. Set in a strife-torn, more or less contemporary U.S., it follows the exploits of "The French 75," an SLA-like cadre who liberate immigrant detainees and blow up communication towers and banks and the like.

A French 75 operative known as Perfidia Beverly Hills (the goddessy, imperious Teyana Taylor), finds political mayhem an aphrodisiac; she's desperately turned on whenever her sheepish explosives expert squeeze "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) is about to blow something sky high. Her seditious salaciousness isn't limited to Calhoun, however, but also to her enemy, the reactionary Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn)--there's a loathing sexual tension between them the second they meet, at gunpoint.

Anderson's strange saga, very loosely derived from Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (much like There Will Be Blood was vaguely inspired by Upton Sinclair's Oil!) soon fast-forwards seventeen years. The theme then shifts from uncontrolled libido to domestic complacency. Perfidia is long out of the picture, and Calhoun, now known as "Bob Ferguson," is living incognito and raising the teenaged Willa (Chase Infiniti) in an A-frame in Colorado.

Bob learns that he, and Willa, are again targets of the forces of Lockjaw, who's trying to gain membership in an order of wealthy old white guy racists, the "Christmas Adventurers." The French 75 start getting the band back together to protect Willa, but after years of sitting on the couch smoking weed, Bob finds his revolutionary chops are rusty. Besides, he's forgotten all the passwords.

A wild and blood-soaked cat-and-mouse game ensues across the west. Bob and Willa's allies range from radical nuns to a native tracker to Sergio, a relaxed but capable martial arts sensei and immigrant underground railroad conductor played by a scene-stealing Benicio del Toro. The action is often laugh out loud funny, and though the comedy is grim and splenetic, these characters are weirdly endearing.

Partly this is because DiCaprio, Penn, del Toro and others are about as good here as they've ever been. But it's also because Anderson puts them through standard action movie paces--gunfights, rooftop scrambles, interrogations, and one of the more original, woozily effective car chases in some time--but they execute them like real human beings, fumbling in uncertainty. "Tom Cruuuuuise!" Sergio crows at one point, trying to encourage Bob to some derring-do, and it's a funny yet rueful reminder of the contrast between what we're capable of and what the movies have taught us we should be capable of.

If there are real-life revolutionary groups in the style of The French 75 of any significance currently active in this country, I haven't heard about them. But One Battle After Another still has the ring of emotional truth. It all may seem crazy, but it sure doesn't seem nearly as outrageous and improbable as it would have, say, ten or twelve years ago.  Like Ari Aster's recent Eddington, this is a flailing, angry satirical portrait of where we are emotionally right now. But unlike Eddington, it gives us characters we can root for rather than just pity.

Eleanor the Great--Like last year's Between the Temples, this one is about an elderly woman connecting with a younger person, and preparing for a very belated Bat Mitzvah. June Squibb the Great plays the title character, a sassy 90-something widow who moves in with her daughter (Jessica Hecht) in New York after many years in Florida when her beloved longtime roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) passes on. 

Eleanor accidentally wanders into a Survivors Support Group at the Jewish Community Center, and finds herself telling everyone about her experience during the Holocaust. Nina (Erin Kellyman), a young journalism student who's there observing, understandably latches onto it as a great story, and she and Eleanor quickly bond as friends. The trouble is that the story isn't really Eleanor's; it's Bessie's. Eleanor is from Iowa; she converted to Judaism when she married.

It's clear that Eleanor's impulsive act isn't just angling for attention; she's trying to keep Bessie's story, which she never told anyone else, from fading away. Nina is deeply bereaved over the recent death of her mother, and her father (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a famous TV journalist, has been distant from her since the loss. But he takes an interest in the story, and pretty soon poor Eleanor is in over her head.

This peculiar but painfully plausible comedy-drama marks the directorial debut of Scarlett Johansson. Her work is crisp and proficient, but the script, by Tory Kamen, is unsteady; the attempt to pull everything together toward the end doesn't quite come off. None of this, however, is an impediment to the indomitable Squibb, whose fearless, direct performance transcends any shortcomings in the material, as she did in last year's similarly uneven Thelma. And despite the unsavory tension behind the situation, her scenes with the excellent young Kellyman have a sweet hum.

The intriguing film programs at Scottsdale's Western Spirit Museum probably don't get as much notice as they should. The movies are free with museum admission; $10 for just the movie.

The current series is Robert Rodriguez: Sinema Sin Fronteras. The next selection by the Texas auteur, the charming Harryhausen-esque fantasy Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams, shows at 2 p.m. this Sunday, September 28. It's followed by Once Upon a Time in Mexico at 6 p.m. Wednesday, October 1; Spy Kids 3: Game Over at 2 p.m. Sunday, October 5; the vampire yarn From Dusk till Dawn at 6 p.m. Wednesday, October 8, and the bloody actioner Machete, starring Danny Trejo, at 6 p.m. Wednesday, October 22.  

The Spy Kids flicks are great for children; the evening Rodriguez movies are decidedly for grown-ups. Go to westernspirit.org for details.

CHIN GAME

Some recent movie schwag, the gifties given away by movie marketers in the shameless and often successful attempt to buy the goodwill of movie reviewers:

Even though I have a goatee, I was given a goatee, in connection with Leonardi DiCaprio's, at the screening for the upcoming One Battle After Another...

I wonder if this item reflects astonishment that DiCaprio, who once seemed so perennially boyish, can grow a goatee.

Whatever one thinks about The Roses, now playing, it must be admitted they certainly gave away first rate schwag, like this bag...

...this obsidian salt...

...and this truly yummy crab cookie...