Better Man

 

What Aussie director Michael Gracey's The Greatest Showman (2017) may have lacked in historical authenticity, it certainly made up for in spectacle and verve.

Gracey has applied his substantial chops for creating high-powered music videos to his latest feature film, "Better Man," the blood-and-sinew biography of British pop star Robbie Williams, who was a member of the boy band Take That in the early 90s and later a record-breaking solo performer.

Williams' rise-and-fall story involves the all-too-familiar catastrophic descent into drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness that accompany stardom. As an ingenious twist, Gracey subs a CGI chimpanzee for Williams, whom we meet as a child in the English Midlands (motion-capture actor Asmara Feik) who idolizes his father (Steve Pemberton), a modestly talented crooner, and dreams of being not just a great singer but a great "entertainer," like Frank, Dean and Sammy.

Williams begins battling the demons of insecurity and isolation as a child, and the skirmishes get worse as the years progress and his fame builds. He finds stability during this time in his loving grandmother Betty (Alison Steadman), who stokes young Robert's need to be special and makes up for his father's inattention and then absence and his mother's (Kate Mulvaney) busyness keeping the food on the table and a roof over their heads.

Though Williams narrates his story, Jonno Davies is the motion-capture actor playing the mature Williams with stunning agility, and Adam Tucker provides the soaring vocals on the baker's dozen songs in the picture.

To Gracey's credit, the CGI chimp doesn't come off as gimmicky as one might think. In fact, it's amazingly seamless, even during the big production numbers. Rock DJ is a mind-blower.

Williams' legion of fans -- among whom I do not count myself, to be honest -- will undoubtedly lap up the movie's cinematic indulgence and party fever like kittens to milk. Cinephiles, like myself, will be delighted by the film's audacity, which matches Williams' own bravura, beat-for-beat.

The Fire Inside

Rachel Morrison's The Fire Inside is an uplifting and provocative sports movie that, like sports themselves, is about more than competition -- even though it is about winning and losing. 

Singer / actress Ryan Destiny stars as the real Olympic gold medal boxer Claressa Shields, who under the tutelage of her devoted coach Jason Crutchfield (the always enjoyable Bryan Tyree Henry) rose above the challenges of urban distress in her hometown of Flint, Michigan, to stardom in a male-dominated sport.

The screenplay by writer / director Barry Jenkins, who won an Oscar in 2017 for Moonlight, is by-the-numbers in plotting and structure but goes beyond a run-of-the-mill recitation of overcoming adversity and landing the killer blows over cheers and a triumphant soundtrack. In fact, half of the story is about life after getting the medal. It asks, "What comes next?" -- especially for women in unconventional arenas, even those at the elite level.

Sheilds, at 17, was juggling a fractured, dysfunctional family to which she was committed, being the person best positioned to make a difference in their fates. Despite her coach's attempts to help Claressa temper her expectations and set aside disappointments, she grew increasingly bitter, feeling she was being unfairly penalized for being female -- which, of course, she was.

Ryan Destiny's scowling fierceness conveys Shield's intensity in and out of the boxing ring for most of the picture. When she finally moves beyond self-defeating fixations, her face blooms and radiates, which is the point of the movie, I think.

Female athletes are not free to "brutal" ... they must in the end be "beautiful"  or they will be denied the benefits of their achievements. 

As Claressa says with her usual unvarnished candor, "That's bullshit." 

Nosferatu (2024)

Robert Eggers has directed only four films, but his list of pictures for which he served as a director of art or production or both is much more substantial. This might explain the extraordinary visual impact of his movies -- The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, and his latest, a wonderful remake of the silent classic Nosferatu (1922)

Eggers' auteurism pays homage to the work of masters like James Whale (Dracula), Jean Cocteau (Beauty and the Beast) and Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) while retaining a bold originality, especially in the worlds he creates. I suspect Eggers felt especially free to experiment with the familiar Dracula story in his crafting of the narrative for his Nosferatu. 

Eggers turns the tale of the undead predator sideways. As played with shadowy menace and pounds of prosthetic make-up by everyone's favorite beastie Bill Skarsgard, Eggers' ancient bloodsucker is a victim of grave misfortune (pun intended). The Transylvanian Count Orlok is entrapped by the beautiful Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), a young woman who is married to the handsome Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a clerk for a dodgy real estate agent named Knock (pronounced Ke-nock) who is also Orlok's ravenous toady (Simon McBurney). 

Ellen is barely aware of the power she has over the haunted Count Orlok, but warns Thomas not to go on the mission to the count's castle, an assignment he'd received from Knock. Danger awaits, she warns, having developed clairvoyance and somnambulance. Her condition draws the attention of a local master of the occult (Willem DaFoe), who is convinced she's possessed by a demon but eventually concludes it's Nosferatu.

As we know, Thomas arrives at the count's castle, falls under the vampire's spell but escapes and finds his way back to Ellen, just as Orlok arrives, having devoured the crew of the ship that brought him from Transylvania. Orlok means to move into a delapidated castle and claim Ellen as his own. His plan does cannot withstand the light of day, however.

Eggers Nosferatu is marvelously constructed -- as one might expect from a director with his gifts -- but the writing is also quite grand. Theatrical. Shakespearean. The picture is as delightful to hear -- especially Skargard's guttural intonations as Orlok -- as it is to see. Those early 19th-century streets, overstuffed interiors and diaphanous gowns (watch for the dust rising off of DaFoe's robe as he is patted on the back) gives testament to Eggers eye for telling detail.

It's a feast (pun intended) for the eye and ear.

A Complete Unknown

 

The rootlessness that comes from pride and calamity threading through Bob Dylan's 1965 hit single "Like a Rolling Stone" also courses through James Mangold's biopic "A Complete Unknown," a phrase from the chorus of the aformentioned song.

The picture features another transformative performance by Timothée Chalamet as the youthful Dylan, who we meet when he has just arrived in New York City, seeking an audience with his hero, the ailing social justice songwriter Woody Guthrie (Scoot Mcnairy). It was during his first visit with Guthrie at the psychiatric hospital where he is receiving treatment for Huntington's disease that Dylan met Guthrie's close friend, singer and activist Pete Seeger (Edward Norton in wonderfully assured performance), who would become the early Dylan's champion, recognizing the taciturn singer's talent immediately and ushering him into the vibrant musical underground that would launch his career.

It was during these early days of playing coffee houses and old haunts that Dylan met Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), the celebrated folk singer who would have a storied, fiery romantic and creative relationship with Dylan, and the young painter and civil rights worker here named Sylvie Russo but based on Dylan's actual girlfriend Suze Rotolo (Elle Fanning). It was she who posed with Dylan for the cover of his "Freewheelin'" album.

In Mangold's compelling recreation of Dylan's nascent musical exploration, these women are alternately mates and muses, confessors and competitors, and "Bobby," a charming but unreliable companion. He's an unapologetic, preternaturally gifted user.

Mangold tracks Dylan's emerging brilliance along with his emotional and professional evolution, culminating in his "switched-on" appearance at the formerly acoustic Newport Folk Festival in 1965. In the picture, which is based on Elijah Wald's Dylan Goes Electric!, the act, familiar to pop culture mavens, reflects Dylan's need to rebel, the changes in contemporary music and the shifting underground folk scene of the late '50s and early '60s.

As delivered through Chalamet's remarkable portrayal, Dylan is driven to be an iconoclast, growing increasingly dissatisfied with the expectations held by Seeger, his manager Albert Grossmen and record producer James Hammond (Dan Fogler and David Alan Basche, respectively), all of whom have their own agendas -- some noble, some commercial. 

The picture doesn't reveal the reason for Dylan's self-absorption and perennial coldness but neither of these qualities dims his creative spark or his need to push himself to higher creative levels while pushing away those closest to him. He was enigmatic then and continues to be at age 83.

A Complete Unknown is not as thoroughgoing in its story as some would like, but it has enough narrative heft -- and wonderful musical performances -- to satisfy even the most critical of audiences. 

The Six Triple Eight

 

Tyler Perry's The Six Triple Eight takes an inspiring story of the crucial role Black women in the Army Corps played during World War II and cleaves it into two unequal parts. 

The first part is a romance between an African American high school student living near Philadelphia and her "secret" Jewish boyfriend (the beauteous Ebony Obisidian and dreamy Gregg Sulkin, respectively). This being the '40s and Perry being Perry, their relationship is more of a chaste abstraction in the film, so the boyfriend's death on the battlefield, which devastates young Lena, feels as remote as the shores of France. We've seen little of the ardor they claim to feel for each other, and a scene of the two at a social gathering where she is part of the wait staff and he an invited guests doesn't serve the grounding purpose I think is intended by Perry, who wrote the screenplay with Kevin Hymel. 

The second part is a more fulfilling story of defiance and dignity, as Kerry Washington's Captain Charity Adams takes command of a ragtag group of female enlistees, young Lena among them, and turns them into a force to be reckoned with. Despite Adams' insistence that the women under her command can do more than work switchboards and prepare meals, her superior officers deny her requests at every turn, sometimes in stark, racists terms -- until a task they are convinced is beyond the  ken of Black women arises. The generals are certain the Black WACs will fail, Adams disgraced and the notion of equality scuttled.

The matter at hand? Letters to and from the battlefield are not being delivered. Rather, they're being stored in hangars where they are subject to the elements and rodents. Morale among service members is suffering, which undermines the war effort. Both President Roosevelt and the First Lady (Sam Waterston and Susan Sarandon) demand something be done.

Though the two parts of film are intertwined -- young Lena is inspired to join the ranks to "fight Hitler" after her beau goes missing -- it's the mobilization of the women to take charge of a seemingly impossible task that carries the greater weight and importance for me, despite Perry's signature speechifying and sass. 

The scenes of the Six Triple Eight's transformation into a logistics powerhouse are stirring, and Washington is a formidable actress and presence. Despite some narrative weaknesses, the pictures carries and delivers a message that is valuable, and timely, considering recent events, about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of searing doubt and stifling disrespect.

Queer

 

Luca Guadagnino's sweaty and smoky adaptation of William S. Burroughs' 1985 novella Queer might strike some as oddly retro in subject matter, considering the amount of LGBTQ+ themed film and television content being produced now. But this fever dream of stifled desires strikes familiar notes in different ways.

Burroughs' story tells of William Lee, a drunken junkie writer in Mexico in the 1950s, and his obsession with a younger ex-Navy man of opaque sexuality, Eugene Allerton. It stars Daniel Craig as the boozy and blistered Lee and Drew Starky (Outer Banks) as Allerton.

Craig trimmed a bit of his famous James Bond musculature for the role of the anxious intellectual in linen and fedora searching for love (or its approximate) in all of the wrong places. Though he doesn't look like he would have any trouble in that respect, Lee wears misery like a cheap suit. He finds solace with a coterie of equally verbose lonely hearts, primarily his friend Joe (a plump Jason Schwartzman in good form), with whom he frequents the local watering holes to trade gossip.

For his part, Starky's Allerton presents an inscrutable figure: his bearing is ramrod straight, spit and polish, and he keeps company with a local woman but doesn't shut down Lee's pursuit of him. He gives little away, aside from tales of his military exploits. He seems to be innocently oblivious at times, and at other times, cagey and cruel.

This uncertainty only fuels Lee's desire to explore a rumored jungle plant that supposedly enhances human telepathy, which might help him make fulfilling human connections. Though he seems impervious to ridicule, it's clear that he wants more out of life, though what that would be in its totality, like so much else in this picture, is not apparent.

Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers) is an exacting director with an eye for environmental detail. When the story takes Lee and Allerton into the jungles near Quito, Ecuador, in search of a botanist (Lesley Manville), the heat and primordial vegetation press in, just like Lee's lonely desperation. It's stifling.

But with the help of herbal hallucinogens, Lee's anxiety takes flight, and the audience accompanies him in the last quarter of the picture on a lengthy trip that finally offers the realization that maybe what's in front of us is all there is. This table, this drink, this friend, this day.

The Piano Lesson

Netflix's 2024 adaptation of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Piano Lesson is a family affair, both within the story world and behind the camera.

Directed by Malcolm Washington, one of Denzel Washington's sons, The Piano Lesson stars John David Washington, Malcolm's brother and high-wattage screen performer, and was produced by their father.

Set in Wilson's beloved Pittsburgh, The Piano Lesson is part of the American Century Cycle, ten plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, that tell stories of Black life among the African American diaspora, mostly in Wilson's neighborhood, the Hill District. 

The plays are expansive and poetic, many bridging the gulf between history and myth, incorporating large passages of monologue and memory. Though varied in focus and execution, the plays are all robust representations of Wilson's view of the American experience, a mix of drama and comedy, realism and fantasy, dreams realized and deferred. They are hugely important parts of the country's theatrical and literary history. 

(Denzel Washington has appeared in several Century Cycle productions and has committed to adapting Wilson's work for the screen.)

The Piano Lesson, first staged in 1986 and filmed for television in 1995, is set in 1936 and tells the story of the Charles family, whose members have gradually moved from the segregated South to Pittsburgh. Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson) is the patriarch of the family home that he shares with his niece, Berniece, (Danielle Deadwyler) and her young daughter, Maretha, (Skylar Aleece Smith). They are visited one night by Berniece's brother Boy Willie (Washington) and  a family friend, Lymon (Ray Fisher). 

Boy Willie and Lymon have driven a truck filled with watermelons to sell in hopes of raising part of the money Boy Willie needs to buy land once owned by former slavers.  He means to stay in Mississippi, despite the hardships, and farm the land.  Boy Willie wants to get the rest of the money by selling a cherished piano that was engraved by their grandfather with images of the enslaved family members. The piano was taken from the slave owners 25 years before and moved with the family to Pittsburgh.

Berniece reveres the instrument, even though she refuses to play it, prizing the memories it contains. Her brother sees it as a wasted opportunity, and most of the play, which is set mainly in the living room and kitchen of Doaker's house, is the battle of wills between the siblings, which, in turn, represents the tension between the Black past and Black future, both haunted, literally, by spirits of injustice and pain.

The performances in Malcolm Washington's adaptation of Wilson's staging are superb, with Jackson, Deadwyler and John David Washington solidly delivering the emotional peaks and valleys of this stirring and punishing study of a family struggling with their individual and collective identities. 

Highly Recommended.

Wicked

 

John M. Chu has transferred Act 1 of the theatrical phenomenon Wicked to the big screen with an abundance of imagination and vitality and two award-worthy performances that will make everyone associated with this behemoth even wealthier than they already are.

Why didn't I LOVE it as much as I wanted? I've not come to a definitive answer to that, but I just didn't. I certainly liked it and was entertained but I couldn't fight the feeling there was a lot of hard work on the screen but not enough "heart."

There is no arguing with success, and the 2003 Broadway musical based on Gregory Maguire's 1995 iconoclastic recrafting of the L. Frank Baum 1900 classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a defense of the much-maligned Wicked Witch has been nothing but successful, despite receiving weak applause from theater critics early on. It received a handful of Tony Awards and quite likely will be among the list of Oscar nominations, if not wins, in 2025, in both performance and technical categories.

Why do I say "if not wins"? I think even if I set aside the endurance of Baum's venerable story and the 1939 film (which has a much more memorable score, BTW), there is something familiar about Chu's directing choices, i.e., the inestimable opulence of the production design and the hugely bankable leads and stunt cameos. It's all stunning work but ... hmmm.

There is no question in my mind that film and stage diva Cynthia Erivo and pop songstress Ariana Grande-Butera, both diminutive powerhouses, are commanding presences in the picture who can handle the stratospheric score by Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Pippin). And the show's story of fraudulence, injustice, manipulation and vengeance is even fresher now than it was 20 years ago.

The huge ensemble of supporting players is delightful to watch in the big numbers -- as they usually are in such films -- but there is so much book here that I wished there was more music and less talk.

Having seen a touring company of Wicked some years back at the Fox in Atlanta, I know how grand a show it can be and the film is both more and less grand. It's a wonder but is it wonderful?

Gladiator 2

 

Director Ridley Scott is a master of both spectacle AND character study films. He has blended those thematic emphases in Gladiator 2.

Some folks are arguing about the narrative merits of this sequel to Scott's 2000 original, debating whether it can stand on its own without the connective tissue to the first picture, whether it does enough that's new.

I think it does and remarkably so, even though it doesn't really need to. If it had simply built on the richness of the first picture, more sword and sandal battles, gristle and brio (Are you not entertained?), that would have provided plenty for most audiences to enjoy, I think.  But Scott has more things on his mind, this time.

The Russell Crowe starring original felt romantic, love and loss and envy and vengeance.  This sequel -- with the young Irish actor Paul Mescal in the lead -- has a bit of that but feels more political. Roman corruption, decadence and impoverishment abound, and the twin emperors' (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) insatiable appetite for conquest and sport serve as the backdrop for the blood sport in the Colosseum that gives the picture its title and the means to bring the city down.

2 summarizes the central plot from 1 during the opening credits and makes references to other important points as its complex story unfolds. 

Mescal is Lucius, the son of Crowe's Maximus, an arena champion who died at the end of 1 and was last seen by audiences walking through Elysian fields. Lucius, who has been known as Hanno, has been living in North Africa since he was a boy and sent away from Rome by his mother Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), daughter of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, to save his life from plotters and schemers.

During a siege of his adopted homeland by Roman soldiers under the command of General Acacias (Pedro Pascal), Lucius, who was reared and trained for battle by the nation's chief, is captured, taken to Rome and sold to a menacingly oily merchant named Macrinus (Denzel Washington in American Gangster form). 

Lucius distinguishes himself in the ring and draws the attention of the emperors and the admiration of the crowd. This is exploited by Macrinus, who hopes to build his personal wealth and position himself within proximity of the throne, which he covets and is actively plotting to take in due time. Lucius's consuming hatred of Rome, and particularly Acacias, who has married Lucilla, serves Macrinus well. 

Thus, Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa have placed the major pieces on the board, with other notable characters set strategically about, one of the more pivotal being a former gladiator Ravi (Alexander Karim), who bought his freedom but patches up wounded fighters. He becomes Lucius' counselor and guide.

Screws are tightened. Identities are revealed. Trusts are betrayed. Plots are uncovered. Revenge is executed. And around all of this are   wonderfully staged arena battles. (The fight with the voracious apes is ferocious.)

I think Scott has given Washington more than just the pivotal role of merciless schemer but the film's overarching message to those angered by corruption -- rage is both a gift and a weakness. It's a gift that keeps us invested in finding a better way. It's a weakness when our rage blinds us and others can turn it against us.

Secret Television

TV babies of a certain age (read "old") no doubt remember the sitcom trend of the '50s and '60s where the lead character, usually a guy, was keeping a big secret from family and friends, and around which many of the shows' storylines revolved.

I've come to believe this theme spun out of national paranoia about commies and other "enemies within" [see McCarthyism, '47-'59], especially in show biz. Series creators were taking those worries and suspicions and making hay of them.

There was Leo G. Carroll's TV-adapted stage character Topper and his ghostly friends ('53-'55), Alan Young's Wilbur Post and his talking gentleman horse in Mr. Ed ('61-'66), the original My Favorite Martian ('63-'67) with Bill Bixby as a newspaper reporter and Ray Walston as the stranded alien passing as his "Uncle Martin," David Crabtree (Jerry Van Dyke) and the vintage car through which his dead mother (Ann Sothern) spoke to him in My Mother the Car ('65-'66), Maj. Tony Nelson (Larry Hagman) and his winsome genie housemate (Barbara Eden) on I Dream of Jeannie ('65-70) and the especially long-running ('64-'72) "my wife is a witch, but in a good way" series Bewitched (Elizabeth Montgomery).

Some of these venerable shows were remade more recently as movies -- I never could bring myself to see any of them. I guess I resisted wanting to reframe them into something more contemporary. They'll always represent for me that time when Tinsel Town struck back against lingering insulation and distrust and helped us lower our guard just a bit, if only for a while.

The Sound of Music (1965)

 

We're coming up on the 60th anniversary of the film The Sound of Music, released in 1965. It was adapted from the Broadway musical that opened in 1959 and ran for more than 1,400 performances. Its stage production has been in revival a few times, but the movie has been a perennial holiday release on television for generations.

Though based on the memoir of Maria von Trapp, the Austrian postulate-turned-governess-turned-Nazi-resister and her family, the movie is a fairly sanitized treatment of the rise of the Third Reich. There are no scenes of mass arrests and deportations or concentration camps. Just an ominous feeling for those aware of the history. (Unlike the starkness of Sophie's Choice and Schindler's List, for example.)

You can't blame folks for missing the underlying ugliness in the picture when they are distracted by pretty music and pretty scenery and pretty people.

And I guess that's what's fascinated me about network TV's scheduling of the movie during the holidays. It's most decidedly NOT A Christmas Story, even though "Edelweiss" is sublime.

I do like the subplot about lovestruck Liesl von Trapp and her Nazi Youth beau Rolf Gruber. They represent for me tyranny's seductive quality and the sobering realization that, unlike in Oklahoma and The King and I, also Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, love does NOT conquer all.

Rolf and Liesl's lovely courtship number in the garden ("Sixteen Going on Seventeen") is a high point of Act One and serves as a nice counterpoint to a similar moment between the Captain and Maria in Act Two ("Something Good"). But young Rolf, the officious telegram deliverer, would be the one to blow the whistle on Liesl and the Von Trapps, showing his true love was named Adolf.

Maybe this year, in anticipation of what the future might hold for this country, folks will watch TSOM with new eyes and ears and resolve to kick Rolf to the curb before it's too late.

Benjamin Clementine

 

Some faces stick with me.

Benjamin Clementine's face is one of them.

The British singer / composer / actor had a small but memorable role in Dune: Part 1 (2021) as the Herald of the Change. He was on screen for about 5 minutes but made a huge impression on my brain. His eyes, skin tone, bone structure, voice. Unforgettable.

I'd never seen Clementine's face before and had not since, until today, when I got a glimpse of it in the trailer for Steve McQueen's upcoming feature film.

I went on a hunt and discovered Clementine has a remarkable story. Born in London, moved to Paris, slept in the streets, busked in subways and was discovered. He has an even more remarkable talent.

In 2016, Clementine appeared on NPR's wonderful Tiny Desk concert series, performing original compositions that are nearly impossible to describe. https://youtu.be/00yQGeJ6AOM?si=5NcJ8sUOY7Gj9bej

One commenter on the video of his appearance mentioned Nina Simone. She is absolutely present, along with Anohni Hegarty and other more contemporary baroque pop artists.

In the midst of so much mediocrity, spending time with excellence is enriching.

Clementine will be on a world tour starting in December.

Beaver Becomes a Hero (Leave it to Beaver, 1960)

 

TV babies of a certain age might remember the Leave it to Beaver episode where Theodore and Wally find a missing canoe at the lake while fishing one Sunday (Beaver Becomes a Hero [1960]). It was re-run on MeTV this morning. https://tubitv.com/.../s04-e03-beaver-becomes-a-hero...

Beaver tells his class about the "adventure," and they build the story into a daring rescue involving a millionaire and his daughter. (Kids can be forgiven for letting their fakery run wild. Adults? Not so much.)

After school, Beaver's classmates, including toothy Whitey and annoying Judy, ask their teacher Miss Landers to help them pitch the story to the Mayfield Press. She agrees and off they go, without Beaver's knowledge.

The paper runs the story on the local front, misspells Beaver's name (Theodour) and turns him into a hero. (Newspapers are not treated well in this ep.) June and Ward read the paper together when he gets home from work and complain about the downer headlines. They see the story and are amazed the boys kept the good news from them.

Then the calls begin, congratulating the Cleavers on Beaver's heroism. (It's gratifying to know so many people read the paper back then.) Wally comes in and hears about the story, hits the roof because it's all lies and tells Beaver to come clean on what happened, which he does.

Miss Landers commends Beaver for admitting the story was false, and his classmates are told to write a letter to the editor that cleans up the mess.

As is true with all of the Beaver's misadventures, solid humanistic morality is at the heart of this Eisenhower-era program. Winking at its cultural monochromatics, Leave it to Beaver's messaging, what it said about American values, stands in startling contrast to today's cynicism.

Nostalgia gives a warm feeling, but we can't really build on it and we can't reshape the present to be the past. But I think we can find some comfort in knowing we are capable of being better than we are going into the future because we know that we have been better.

A Real Pain

 

First, you either get actor/writer/director Jesse Eisenberg or you don't. Full Stop.

His frantic twitchiness and searing braininess are your cup of tea or they're not. Again, full stop.

That being said, I still find it puzzling that so many people DON'T get his disarming unconventionality. I dig his defiant lack of Hollywood manner; his angular, ungainly features; rapid-fire delivery and ticks. They make me want to listen to him closely to hear what's on his mind.

Judging by his second directorial feature film, A Real Pain, Eisenberg has been pondering many big questions about human damage, the cataclysmic variety and that which is much more intimate but still devastating.

In the film, Eisenberg, who also wrote the remarkable screenplay, stars as Dave, an online marketer living in New York with his wife and child. He and his seemingly rootless cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin in a marvelous performance that's not to be believed) go on a Holocaust tour of sites in Poland and an added trip to the home of their grandmother, a camp survivor who died recently.

The two -- quite different in demeanor and outlook -- join a small group that Benji, a manic bundle of love and judgment, begins first to smother then to seduce. Watching this happen, as both a fly on the wall and through Dave's long-suffering eyes, makes this journey both bracing and unnerving.

Eisenberg reveals late in the picture the source of Benji's need to love and annihilate and this casts new light on a character that seems intent on being both embraced and scolded. Culkin's work is amazing from start to finish and leads one to wonder if Eisenberg had the actor in mind when he wrote the part; he owns it completely.

The film is psychologically layered and emotionally complex and the backdrop of atrocity and extermination adds an important dimension to the work the two main characters clearly must do to repair their damage -- if they can.

Superman and the Mole Men (1951)

 

Before The Adventures of Superman became a television series in 1952, the film Superman and the Mole Men (1951) was released to theaters. It would be added to the 1953 television season as the two-parter titled "The Unknown People."

In this episode, Clark Kent / Superman (George Reeves) and Lois Lane (Phyllis Coates) go to a Texas town to cover the drilling of the world's deepest oil well for The Daily Planet. They discover that the well has struck radium rather than oil.

One night, a couple of mute, bald dwarves dressed in black come out of the well and start exploring the surface world, leaving glowing flowers and children's toys in their wake.

Predictably, townspeople freak out over the strange-looking men whom they call "monsters." One of the mole men gets shot while trying to flee a lynch mob and, saved by Superman, ends up in a hospital where folks don't want to treat him.

Other mole men come to retrieve their injured friend. They're carrying a huge device that shoots laser beams. It's not clear why it is too big for any one of them to fire alone. Perhaps it was never intended to be used as a weapon.

It looks like there will be a stand-off between the townspeople and the mole men. Superman, of course, intervenes before things get further out of hand. The mole men are permitted to return to their underground world. From below, they fire a beam that destroys the drill and seals the well. Closing off any future exploration.

To this day, I love "The Unknown People," despite the cheesy effects, unconvincing makeup and mime-school costumes. I love what it says about our irrational fear of strangers, our need to attack what we don't understand, and how we so quickly assume those who are not like us are dangerous. And the trouble prejudice causes.

Needed messages these days, for sure.

Superman and the Mole Men can be rented on YouTube and Amazon.

Heretic

 

Writers / directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods take matters of belief and religiosity and set them ablaze in their chilling horror thriller Heretic.

In the film, two young female Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) ride their bikes up to a deceptively charming house in response to an internet inquiry for more information about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (a real giveaway that something is amiss, IYAM).

The door is answered by a cheery Hugh Grant, who says he did indeed ask for the visit and invited the missionaries in for a chat. They ask if a woman is present in the home, as per the church's practice, and Grant's Mr. Reed says his wife is in the kitchen baking a blueberry pie. 

The missionaries, Sisters Paxton and Barnes (East and Thatcher, respectively), slip easily into their witness but are quickly challenged by Reed about Mormon beliefs, including the church's former practice of polygamy. 

The missionaries acquit themselves admirably at first, but the visit becomes ominous as Reed's inquiries about faith systems become more pointedly hostile and his wife's mysterious absence becomes more concerning.

The film's narrative -- which is more psychological thriller than full-blown horror -- includes a central passage about religious institutions' claims of authenticity. Grant, in sparkling form in a unique character mode, picks at the missionaries' composure and slowly reveals their growing dread of him is warranted. 

The film then moves into the familiar territory of entrapment but adds the twist that gives the film its title, pulling in the picture's bloody aspects. 

Beck and Woods, who co-wrote and produced John Krasinski's 2018 alien invasion hit A Quite Place, know that the most compelling and enduring fright is that which does not just repulse but unmoors the viewers' sense of reality and gets the audience to enter into spaces they know they shouldn't but can't resist -- including the questioning of one's long-held beliefs.

Danai Gurira

 

I don't know all of Danai Gurira's story but what I do know is every bit what America is about when it's functioning properly.

Gurira, despite one's assumptions based on her name and bearing, was born in Iowa to Zimbabwean immigrants, a chemistry professor and college librarian. Her family returned to Africa after some years in the U.S., but Gurira returned and earned a bachelor's in psychology from a small college in Minnesota and an MFA from NYU. She has appeared on and written for the stage, acted on television and in films. By all accounts, Gurira, the 46-year-old daughter of immigrants, has thrived.

She is perhaps best known as the swordswoman Michonne in the ravenous fan favorite The Walking Dead (2010-2022) and later as Okoye the Black Panther series of Marvel Cinematic Universe films, both critically acclaimed and celebrated productions.

But I first saw her in Tim McCarthy's highly engaging The Visitor (2007), in which she co-starred with Richard Jenkins, who played an emotionally isolated Connecticut university professor, and Haaz Sleiman, in his role as a Syrian drummer who along with Gurira's Senegalese merchant were undocumented immigrants living in the professor's vacant New York apartment without his knowledge, having been conned by an unscrupulous rental agent.

McCarthy's screenplay explores many human connections, and the audience is drawn into the dynamic of affection and trust that grows among these three and a fourth, the drummer's mother, who illegally immigrated to the U.S. with her son and fears their deportation.

The professor tries to facilitate the young man's release from detention after he is falsely accused on jumping a subway turnstile, but the drummer is quickly deported back to Syria and to an uncertain fate. The mother decides to join her son in Syria.

Gurira's jewelry merchant moves in with family, disappearing into the mist of anonymity that shrouds the millions who come to the U.S. seeking safety, hoping to thrive. And if not to thrive, to simply stay alive.

I loved this distressing picture, the clarity of the presentation of the thorny immigration issue but also the underlying optimism of the professor's arc of going from detachment to boldness, isolation to openness.

Perhaps he recognized that the label "visitor" could be applied to himself, as well, as we are all just visiting this old world for a while.

Conclave

 

Oscar-winning director Edward Berger's Conclave is as pristine as the marble floors of the Vatican halls that serve as the location for this engrossing adaptation of Robert Harris's novel of the same name. The screenplay, which I suspect will get nods during awards season as will the film itself, is by dramatist Peter Straughan, and involves the election of a pope after the sudden death of a beloved though controversial pontiff.

The film presents with immaculate precision the age-old process of convening the College of Cardinals -- a segment of the Curia, the body that runs the Vatican -- to select the church's new leader from among its 100+ members. Berger doesn't dwell too long on the machinery, which is as byzantine as the garments worn by these princes of the church. He prefers to dive quickly into the politics that permeates everything in the Holy See.

Ralph Fiennes is splendid as the reluctant dean of the College, whose job it is to "manage" the election, which straightaway becomes mired in turfism, with liberal and conservative factions naming their champions and carving up the delegates. At one point, Fiennes's character, Cardinal Lawrence, who is in the midst of a private crisis of faith, compares the conclave to a political convention. It's not as much of a throwaway line as one might think, which becomes clear as the story progresses, hidden agendas and secret transactions are revealed.

Lawrence's closest ally is the liberal Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), who was a confidante of the late pope and the man Lawrence would like to see as head of the church. Bellini says he would refuse the election if chosen, but his actions suggest otherwise.

Several others whose ideologies range from moderate to ultra-conversative (played by John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati and Sergio Castellitto) are much more deliberate in making their intentions (ambitions) known.

An additional complication is the arrival of the newly installed Cardinal Benitez (Mexican actor Carlos Diehz), who was secretly anointed as archbishop of Kabul, Afghanistan. He's unknown to the other cardinals and so little attention is paid to him, his arrival or the impact he will have on the election (and only a cinema novice would think likewise).

The august body is sequestered in the Sistine Chapel to make their choice, and they will stay locked away until a candidate wins a majority of the votes. With each passing ballot, and explosive discovery, the field gets smaller and tensions mount.

How much does Catholicism play into the drama? The church's practices, dealings with marginalized communities and failures regarding children will likely register more with observers of that tradition than others. But the film's overarching issues of conscience and truth will have universal resonance with those open to personal reflection using the picture's intrigues as a backdrop.

Highly recommended.

Rebel Ridge

 

Jeremy Saulnier's Rebel Ridge (Netflix) is not as coiled and precise as the film's star, British actor Aaron Pierre, but it's still an entertaining diversion and welcome introduction to Pierre's measured intensity.

The picture is set in a present-day Louisiana town that is scamming motorists and falsely detaining minor offenders to put money in the town's coffers. Pierre's ex-Marine Terry Richmond is on the way to deliver bail for his cousin when he runs afoul of the police, who seize the bail money as asset forfeiture and warn Richmond to move on or else.

Of course, he doesn't, and thus begins a pretty convoluted scheme to avenge himself, his railroaded cousin and deliver some payback to the police. He receives some help from a court staffer (AnnaSophia Robb) who has her own worries with law enforcement.

Rebel Ridge reminded me a bit of the Black avenger flicks of the '70s -- Fred Williamson, Jim Kelly, Jim Brown -- sans the blatant racism and more politics. Saulnier isn't peddling easy tropes but does leave some narrative gaps, especially in the Third Act showdown.

Still well worth a watch for Pierre's performance and the primer on how to stay alive when stopped by police.

Smile 2

 

I didn't hate Parker Finn's opening salvo for the Smile horror / gore franchise back in '22 and thought it had some solid jolts and a freakish gimmick (the facial expression of the title) to set it apart from the plethora (to actually mean "excessive amount" rather than just "a lot") of other cinema blood fests that seem to appeal to millennials and their juniors.

In this serving, Finn delivers the story of a musical superstar Skye Riley (a commendable singing / screaming Naomi Scott) who is returning to the concert stage a year after being seriously injured in a car wreck that killed her boyfriend (Ray Nicholson, son of Jack), whom we meet in harrowing flashbacks and spectral visitations.

Because she's still recovering from painful injuries, Skye, who was already a coke fiend, has a wee-bit of a drug problem, a stage-mother-from hell (Rosemarie Dewitt) and recurring hallucinations {?) about eerily grinning people offing themselves in front of her. It's a lot for a young woman to handle -- even one who lives in a Chrysler building apartment and has an eager assistant (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) to indulge her spoiled ass.

In the first Smile, Finn's protagonist was a therapist who discovered this suicidal phenomenon first in her weirdly smiling patients and later among strangers. In #2, Finn merges the worlds of emotional trauma, mental deterioration and the supernatural to bend the audience's perceptions (one might say twist them into pretzels) about what we're seeing as Skye makes her descent into hell.

As is true for the rest of this money-making genre, much of this filmmaker's budget has been spent on raspberry jam, fake entrails and gross prosthetics. Depending on one's expectations about gore, Smile 2 will deliver bucketsful.

That's not to see there aren't other interesting things going for it. In fact, I thought the film's cold opening was especially keen; kudos to cinematographer Charlie Sarroff for setting the bar high for the rest of the picture, which often meets but does not exceed those first minutes.