From the World of John Wick: Ballerina

 

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina has the kinetic mayhem that has made the venerable series so addictive, but it lacks the elegant grace notes that made Wick's World so freaking entertaining, both unbelievably violent and surprisingly droll.

 

Director Len Wiseman certainly has an appealing star in Ana de Armas, whom I first noticed in her star turn as the lovable but gutsy caregiver in the original Knives Out (2019). In that film, she faced down an enraged family of entitled brats who resented being cut out of the patriarch's will while his wealth is bequeathed to his gobsmacked nurse (Armas).

 

In the latest Wick chapter, Armas's Eve doesn't let her exotic beauty detract, too much, from her deadliness -- she's all business as an orphan reared and trained by the doyenne of death, The Director (Anjelica Huston), in the same murky world of the Ruska Roma that created John Wick's Boogeyman. 

 

Eve is determined to avenge her father's death when she was a child, a hit by a clandestine cult led by a character called The Chancellor (a menacing Gabriel Byrne). Fan favorite Ian McShane has a cameo as Winston, the cagey manager of the New York Continental hotel, who rescued Eve from a shelter when she was a child. She visits Winston as an adult, and he, reluctantly, gives her information on a cult member (Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead) who is hiding in Poland. And she's off. 

 

Ballerina delivers the exotic scenery and runway fashions of previous entries but little of the knowing winks that lightened the murderous proceedings and amazing body count.

 

Keanu Reeves makes an appearance in Ballerina as Wick, but his part feels underwritten and, frankly, that is disappointing but understandable, I suppose. Wick's future in the franchise's narrative world is not certain; Reeves has said he doesn't have the knees for the balletic hand-to-hands that have driven the action in 80 percent of the series.

The Phoenician Scheme

 

Oscar-winner Wes Anderson is a contemporary absurdist filmmaker. His peers include Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster), Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) and Lars van Trier (Melancholia). Fans know when they sign on to screen a film by any of these or the dozen or so other masters of the irrational that it won't be easy sledding -- but it will be rewarding.

 

I am fascinated by Anderson's approach to movies and admire his pictures more than I enjoy them, usually. That is, Anderson never fails to stun me with the complexity of his constructions, but they don't generate warmth. His worlds are like architectural dioramas in their precision and that seems to be where he enjoys putting most of his attention. Still, he draws cinematic A-list actors to his projects for the unique experiences. 

 

Even though each of his films, including his latest The Phoenician Scheme, has leading actors -- in this case, Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton and Michael Cera -- the performances are deliberately monotonic -- impressive in their lack of expressiveness. There is nothing classical about the casts' line deliveries because the movies' resonance is in their visual sumptuousness. One could study stills from The Phoenician Scheme's opening credits for the depth of its scenic design -- colors, shapes, textures. The art direction for all of his pictures -- including his animated features -- is brilliant. And therein lies my fascination with his work.

 

The Phoenician Scheme, like others of Anderson's more recent features, has a story (co-created with frequent collaborator Roman Coppola) that bobs and weaves between sense and nonsense. Del Toro plays an unprincipled industrialist, Zsa-zsa Korda, who has a plan to get investors to foot the bill for a plant of ambiguous purpose built in an area that one might assume is the Middle East. 

 

The lucky survivor of multiple assassination attempts, including one that opens the film, Korda has arranged for his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) to sign on as his heir and executor in case his luck runs out. He does this despite his having nine male heirs and Liesl's intentions to soon take vows to enter a convent.

She accompanies him on a ridiculous tour of his investment partners to see which of them can be convinced / coaxed / tricked into covering an anticipated shortfall, the Gap. They are joined by a German tutor named Bjorn (Michael Cera), who Korda assigns additional duties as his administrative assistant. Little goes as planned -- as one might expect -- but lessons are learned, identities clarified and trust earned or restored.

 

At least, this is MY reading of The Phoenician Scheme's convoluted plot. It actually might be about something else, but that hardly matters, as the point of the movie is not in the story but in the telling.

 

Friendship

 

 

To say that Tim Robinson's brand of cringe comedy is an acquired taste is to understate the obvious for those familiar with his Netflix comedy series "I Think You Should Leave, " and, frankly, I was only able to hang with this champion of discomfort for two episodes before having to bail -- ditto for Dave, Rami and Fleabag.

For Friendship, Robinson (primarily a television performer) teams with writer / director Andrew DeYoung and perennial chummy good-guy Paul Rudd to tell the story of bad relationships getting worse despite the efforts of all parties involved to .... nah, I can't say they work hard or smartly to avoid the series of disasters that follow Robinson's Craig meeting new neighbor Austin (Rudd).

Craig is a gratingly clueless manchild married to cancer survivor / floral designer Tami (Kate Mara), who has renewed a relationship with her ex-husband. Craig and Tami are parents to the weirdly oedipal 16-year-old Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer). They live in suburbia in a stateless town named Clovis and are trying to sell their house.

When Craig, a predatory marketing consultant with no filter, meets local weatherman Austin, their friendship blossoms quickly but just as quickly starts to lose its petals ... in fistfuls.

The film is a series of bad notions that lead to worse problems and disastrous fixes. Though frequently hilarious -- both Robinson and Rudd are totally committed to the chaos -- the friendship spin-out might be exhausting for those who do not give themselves over to the insanity.

For those who stick with it, the genius in all of this stupidity might be in how it gets the audience to reflect on these enormously unlikable characters to see if we have any of their distasteful traits.

When viewed that way, Friendship might be a good thing. 

The Sty of the Blind Pig (1974)

 

 

In 1974, PBS broadcast a production of Philip Hayes Dean's The Sty of the Blind Pig, masterfully directed by Ivan Dixon. (A link to the YouTube video of the Blind Pig broadcast is below.) Dixon was best known to television audiences as Kinchloe on Hogan's Heroes and to movie buffs as the male lead in Nothing But a Man (1964), opposite Abbey Lincoln.

Like Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Dean's play is set in the Chicago apartment of a Black family -- the scolding and sanctimonious matriarch Weedy Warren (Maidie Norman) and her long-suffering and repressed daughter Alberta (Mary Alice). The pair are frequently visited by Weedy's brother, called Uncle Doc (Scatman Crothers), a boozy gambler who is trying to get back to the sportin' life in Memphis.

It's the early years of Civil Rights protests in the South, a region both familiar and foreign to the Warrens. (Out of sight ...) From her seat by the living room window, Weedy needles her daughter about her appearance and secretiveness, and Alberta pacifies her mother with grudging compliance. Uncle Doc ineffectively referees disputes between his sister and his niece.

One day, a sightless musician who calls himself Blind Jordan (Richard Ward) knocks on the door asking after Grace Waters. Alberta lets him in, tells him she doesn't know the person he seeks, but soon joins him in his search, which, as one might expect given the symbolism invested in the story, leads to the discovery of a different kind of grace.

Being a theater kid, I remember lending the broadcast my rapt attention, not picking up on every nuance Dean had woven into his wonderful play but enough to appreciate how important this story was. Later, I came to further understand that it was telling the world, at least that portion that watched public television, something about the souls of Black folks.

The play was also telling African Americans who may have been feeling as if they were in another country that life was unavoidably complex, a strange mix of the profound and the profane, and the blood spilled over the years -- in slaughterhouses, under lynching trees and in city streets -- may have blinded some to the truth but gave others greater clarity.

This play is one of many I would likely never have seen if public broadcasting had not scheduled programs that spoke to all of us.

 

The Name of the Rose redux

 

 

    In Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1986 thriller The Name of the Rose, Sean Connery stars as a spirited and independent medieval Franciscan friar, William of Baskerville, investigating the deaths of monks in a remote Italian abbey. He is accompanied by a youthful novice named Adso, played by Christian Slater. They discover much devilment going on within the hallowed halls of the monastery, which is also a scriptorium for copying sacred texts and a library for storing them.

    William, a sagacious scholar, was originally called to the monastery to take part in a debate on heresy but found himself called to ferret out "Satan's work." All of this is happening during the time of the Catholic Church's inquisitions, when skeptics and questioners were harassed, driven out or burned in the name of God.

One fascinating aspect of both the film and the novel, written by puzzle-master Umberto Eco, is the maze of stairs that is the heart of the monastery, connecting the various stacks where the books are stored but rarely distributed or read. Only a few librarians can navigate the stairs.

    What a wonderful metaphor for religious and political institutions that use byzantine dogma to confine followers and confound outsiders. They are unholy bedfellows, aren't they?

    Those of us who are serious and sane and trying to make sense of GOPer religio-politico plans and messages might find ourselves looking at a nonsensical web of half-baked concepts, fully baked falsehoods, circular reasoning, contradictory claims and hypocrisy. Venturing in is not for the faint-of-heart, and if we're not up to the challenge might find ourselves overwhelmed.

    Those familiar with the film know how it ends -- the real culprits are revealed, the human devils are struck down and the structure built to sustain all of this deceit destroys itself, reduced to ash and rubble.

    Amen.

 

Mission: Impossibe -- The Final Reckoning

 

Christopher McQuarrie has directed the four most recent Mission: Impossibles; the earlier installments were directed by a variety of other Hollywood notables -- De Palma, Woo, Abrams, Bird.

McQuarrie's pictures, which have all starred Tom Cruise as undercover superstar and reliably insubordinate agent Ethan Hunt, are big concept / big bang thrillers known for complicated plotting and outlandish stunts, many Cruise famously performs himself. 

Except for the stunt work, the films are constructed like the TV series of the '60s and '70s -- receive the mission, pull together the squad, infiltrate the enemy, set a "plan" in motion that will result in the bad agents turning on themselves and adjust to the occasional setback and disruption along the way.

Speaking of bygone days, Cruise will be 63 in July and looks amazing for a man of his years. We're left to wonder if it's all diet and routine (with a little Scientology thrown in) or are those abs as sculpted as his face, which still reads as "toothy badass" from where I sit. But no matter, his features and feats meet expectations of audiences drawn into the spiraling world of intelligence, counter-intelligence and existential threat.

The Final Reckoning delivers on all fronts with Cruise's Hunt "finishing" a mission left hanging two years ago (Dead Reckoning), in which a malevolent artificial intelligence called The Entity sits poised to take over the nuclear arsenals of all of the nations on the planet that have them -- including, of course, the U.S.  Hunt has a key that will give him access to the soulless brain.

After receiving a plea from the president (Angela Bassett) to turn himself in, hand over the key and not go rogue again, Hunt reassembles what remains of his team (Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Hayley Atwell) and recruits a few more (Pom Klementieff and Greg Tarzan Davis) to locate The Entity's brains in a sunken Russian submarine near the Bering Strait, use the key to immobilize it and avert global annihilation. He must do all of this while avoiding being captured or killed by the evil master mind Gabriel (Esai Morales) who wants to takeover control of The Entity, which we're all aware would be impossible.

McQuarrie, who also co-wrote the screenplay, takes full advantage of the series' expansive story world, taking audiences on a trot through world cities, into the blood-chilling depths of the northern Pacific and finally into the skies above South Africa, with the countdown to disaster pushing events along. 

Final Reckoning will make hundreds of millions in theaters and through streaming but it will also continue Hollywood's steady drumbeat of resistance against whitewashing through deliberately inclusive casting and narratives that challenge bias, ancient tropes and stereotypes. Yeah, Ethan Hunt is still a white guy saving the world, but the messaging in Final Reckoning is clear -- "team" means all of us.

Final Destination: Bloodlines

 

I am unabashed in my affection for the Final Destination franchise, whose pedigree extends back to the beloved X-files TV series and film.

As I told a friend, I'm a fan of the movies' commitment to the conceit that Death is a relentless hunter and humans are the game. Some of the game try mightily to outwit the hunter and might successfully delay being bagged, but, in the end, the hunter will win. Well, we ARE talking about Death here.

Death as an invisible but sentient force is off-putting to some, and I can appreciate that, but this creation is not original to this 25-year-old franchise. In fact, Final Destination clearly draws from classical myths about the Fates, the goddesses of destiny who stood above all other deities.

In Bloodlines, audiences -- who come for the creative gore more than the story, which, again, is pretty much set -- are introduced to an extended family whose grandparents escaped death back in the '60s because of a premonition.

College student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is failing her courses because she can't sleep, her dreams interrupted by scenes of people dying in a catastrophic disaster in a tower restaurant called The Skyview.

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein stage a long but impressive opening sequence that is unmatched by any of the individual "reckoning" moments to follow. Still, it whets the appetite for a feast of tension and "tongue-in-cheekery". The movie is loaded with visual and musical puns. (You'll never hear the Isley Brothers' "Shout" or any of the other music in this picture quite the same. LOL)

Stefani meets with her grandmother Iris (Gabrielle Rose), whose premonition at The Skyview saved many lives from being lost in the tower collapse. Iris has been locked away in a fortress that keeps Death at bay; but Death has been playing catch-up and reaping the descendants of those who survived and Iris has been keeping track. It's not clear at this point how she's been doing this since she never leaves her home. In fact, we must take it on faith that she's been able to get food and other vitals without human contact for 30 years.

As the Fates would have it, Iris is brutally killed in one of Death's ingeniously diabolical Rube Goldberg convoluted Mousetrap-y devices (for those who remember both Goldberg and the board game), leaving her granddaughter covered in bloody goo and holding a book that Iris said might change her family's fate.

On the matter of the family -- an assortment of annoying Boomers and Z-ers -- they all seem to be addled and vacuous, incautious and weary of dire warnings of Death descending. They're easy to like for their comedic appeal and not difficult to say goodbye to, as is inevitable.

Amidst all of the death and devastation, writers Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor have inserted some grace notes about family unity that sweeten, just a bit, the bitterness of watching death by lawnmower, MRI and runaway train, but doesn't turn the movie into a sentimental goo.

It's gooey, yes, but not sentimental, except in Tony Todd's appearance as William Bludworth, a medical examiner and one of The Skyview survivors who worked with Iris to create her fortress and track the deaths. Todd was actually in the final stages of cancer when he filmed his scenes for Bloodlines and died in November.

 

Thunderbolts*

 

 

 

Jake Schreier's Thunderbolts* (the asterisk is part of the title) takes the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a refreshing direction, with stars Florence Pugh and Sebastian Stan leading a decidedly second-string ensemble of stealth fighters as the heroic misfits Russian assassin Yelena Belova and American Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, respectively.

 

They are two of a half dozen supercharged agents, who dub themselves the Thunderbolts, the reason is an important part of the film's narrative world. They are set up to fail by a scheming CIA chief whose name is too long to include here and played with impressive cheek by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The agents are loose ends of a discredited program that was operating off-the-grid and wreaking havoc with the nation's readiness to respond to intergalactic threats (see every previous MCU installment for that history).

 

What make Thunderbolts* such an enjoyable update of the Marvel Universe's sprawling mythology is the affability of the players and the brightness of the writing. The humor is on the scale of Deadpool and Guardians of the Galaxy in profane sharpness; the language is decidedly street but the picture's treatment of the characters' backstories is inventively tender. 

 

The wild card in this picture is Lewis Pullman's disarming character Bob Reynolds, a morose laboratory subject with extraordinary abilities and a lethal dark side. Bob's character fits the movie's reflective tone and the narrative's turn away from numbing sequences of CGI-enhanced battles to more quieter moments that explore the human connections among folks who are quite a bit more than human. Yes, the picture is still loaded with amazing stunts of daring and destruction but is much more than that.

 

The choice to make this turn in a reliable winning formula may reflect the creative team's determination to state, both directly and obliquely, that our survival depends on getting over our pettiness, we all have our bad shit, and pulling together to save and serve the collective. 

 

It's a needed message presented for our consideration.

 

The Surfer

 

 

Few living film actors do "crazy" with greater ease than Nicolas Cage.

In Irish indie director Lorcan Finnegan's The Surfer, Cage physically, mentally and emotionally unravels on the screen. He raves as the title character tries to get access to a local beach near his childhood home in Australia. He wants to surf the waves with his teen-aged son (Finn Little), and grows increasingly, well, Cage-y, as the film progresses.

Cage's unnamed character's quest is frustrated by a band of bully boys led by an oily shaman (Julian McMahon), who terrorize and drive out foreign visitors, and drives mad The Surfer and The Bum (Nicholas Cassim) living in his car on the rise above the beach after losing his son to the bully boys.

The film is pretty contained, the action limited to the environs of the bully boys' surf-side enclave and the parking lot just above. Cage's outsized personality fills the space but it doesn't make up for the noticeable lack of wave footage or actual surfing.

The ending unfolds predictably, but leaves one to wonder if taking the film in a different direction -- one that explored more deeply its psychological underpinnings -- would have been a better call.

As it is, the audience is left pondering if the delusion we had been riding stops at the shore or extends all the way to the horizon.

 

The Accountant 2

 

It's been a fat minute since the Gavin O'Connor / Ben Affleck vehicle The Accountant stormed into theaters in '16, so one can be forgiven if some of the finer points of the tale of the killing autist have receded.

As introduced then, Affleck's Christian Wolff was a CPA by day and a hired assassin during his off-hours, which seemed to exceed those during which he was actually crunching numbers. In the O'Connor-directed sequel, Wolff's backstory is filled in a bit -- he's a member of a tribe of savants trained by a school for neurodivergent sleuthing youths, led by the nonverbal Justine (Allison Robertson). Wolff's stony facade begins to crack and let some sunshine in, slowly and winningly.

Wolff is recruited by Treasury Department agent Marybeth Medina (a returning Cynthia Addai-Robinson) after her mentor Ray King (the always-welcome J.K. Simmons) is killed while trying to recruit a spectral assassin known as Anais (Daniella Pineda) to find a missing mother and son trapped in a trafficking operation near the U.S. / Mexico border. Medina needs help making sense of the web of King's investigation, so she calls "the accountant," following the final message King left.

Wolff joins the case and brings in his rival assassin brother, Braxton (nobody plays a cantankerous but lovable sibling better than Jon Bernthal) and off they go, kingpins and cartels swirling about. In the moments between the mayhem and the gun-play, writer Bill Dubuque (The Accountant, Ozark) has scripted some nice scenes that explore just a bit of the nature of autism (everything about this story feels timely AF) and the brilliance (and affection) that lies beneath the surface of what some shallower minds would perceive as an empty well.

As with the first film, the body count is enormous but certainly not on the scale of the John Wick series. Still, Affleck -- a performer who doesn't always get a fair shake from critics -- is on his game from start to finish. Yes, the movie hits its mark and plays by the numbers but it's a thoroughly enjoyable and humanizing picture, too.

 

Sinners' Music

 

 

If one needed even more reasons to love Ryan Coogler’s masterful Sinners, look to the use of music in the film’s complex narrative.

This movie’s musical integration moves seamlessly from church to field to cathouse to juke joint, from dusty trails to highways to ocean waters, from the Delta to Dublin. It traces many of the strands of American cultural and political evolution – including enslavement and integration.

Just as this story of the vampiric undead set in the Jim Crow South rides on history and testament, folk tradition and myth, faith and magic, the film’s music is infused with these threads.

Just as the images provoke deep reflection about Coogler’s intended messages, these songs and performances will undoubtedly lead invested audiences to see how much music contains America’s worldview – how we view ourselves, one another and the world.

As is true about music in other contexts, Coogler’s selection of voices – and most importantly that of Miles Caton as the bluesy young reprobate Sammie / Preacher Boy – will lead many to think about its power to ignite passion (and other things) and to liberate.

 

Sinners

 

 

One-third of the way into Ryan Coogler's masterful world-unification, consciousness-raising vampire flick, Sinners, he and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw stage a jaw-dropping dance hall spectacle that is a testament to the creative verve of these frequent collaborators.

The film is set in 1932 during the opening of a new juke joint set up by twin gangsters Elijah and Elias / Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) in a barn acquired from a white landowner (David Maldonado), who assures the battlefield-hardened duo the Klan was no longer around to terrorize folks. Of course, we'll discover this is not true.

Smoke and Stack left their home in Mississippi as boys looking for better opportunities, but as they tell young sharecropper / bluesman Sammie / Preacher Boy (a terrific Miles Caton), Chicago was Mississippi with tall buildings and no plantations. They've come home to fight the devil they know. Of course, we will take this tossed off remark literally before the film is over.

The opening night gutbucket (the soundtrack for Sinners is a full-blooded character) is interrupted by a white trio led by red-eyed creeper Remmick (Jack O'Connell), who the audience was introduced to earlier when he descended on the home of a Klansman (Peter Dremainis) and his wife (Lola Kirke).

Remmick asks to come into the party but he gives off enough bad vibes to be refused entry. He and the others will eventually find their way into the compound, of course, after much blood is shed and after Coogler, who wrote the screenplay, lays out some intriguing ideas about how best to identify and respond to an existential enemy.

Sinners spans genres, audiences and tastes, but will undoubtedly be appreciated on its deepest level (and there are many levels to this story) by those familiar with the adage "every closed eye ain't sleep, every goodbye ain't gone."

And, of course, are ready to take this quite literally.

Jay North

 

Jay North, who died yesterday at age 73, was one of the scores of child television stars from 60 years ago who could not outgrow their characters. Some did not survive to see adulthood.

Domestic comedies like Dennis the Menace were the staple of Kennedy-era America. They offered gentle humor as counterpoint to hard-boiled crime dramas and dusty westerns. Performers became household names because there were so few networks creating product, and North along with the child stars of Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, Donna Reed, Family Affair, etc. were familiar faces, plastered on the cover of TV Guide. They were members of our mediated community.

It's tragically ironic that these shows so often created upheaval in the lives of young people on the screen.

North, who reported suffering abuse at the hands of his guardians, was Dennis Mitchell for four seasons from '59 to '63 and finally moved on from the towhead in overalls to star in a very different and wholly unsuccessful TV adaptation of the motion picture Maya, in which he starred in 1966. North was one of two young lads, the other being a Hindu boy played by Sajid Khan, traveling India on the back of the eponymous pachyderm.

I remember little about the series except feeling at the time that it reminded me of another NBC series, Tarzan (1966-1968), and the CBS jungle show of the same period, Daktari (1966-1969). Looking back, I guess I would describe them as "white folks in the wild."

By all reports, North was a good guy with a good heart. He served in the Navy, briefly, and did some TV and stage work, guest appearances and such, but finally became a correctional officer for juveniles in the Florida prison system.

I hadn't thought about Dennis Mitchell in years. Reports like this make me wistful but then I recognize I never actually knew Jay North, just what the entertainment factory showed me he was. But I suppose that's true for everyone. We're so much more than what's on the outside.

The Residence

 

As thoroughly delectable as Paul William Davies' White House murder mystery The Residence is, Episode 7, The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb, is the most brilliantly written and performed.

The miniseries' wonderful wit is delivered by Uzo Adubo as savant birdwatcher / detective Cordelia Cupp and her FBI sidekick Edwin Park (Randall Park) as they try to piece together the disparate clues and toss out the red herrings in search of a killer. It's a cagey story about the death of the White House Chief Usher (Giancarlo Esposito), who died during a State Dinner, where nearly everyone on the White House staff is a suspect in his demise.

The penultimate episode, though tremendously funny like the others, is tender in its treatment of love in the time of chaos. It is presented in the persons of Julieth Restrepo and Mel Rodriguez, the amiable housekeeper and long-suffering maintenance engineer, respectively, who may or may not have killed Esposito's officious A.B. Wynter, who may or may not have had it coming.

The section of the episode that recounts the unfolding of their chaste romance is marvelous and sweet and totally beguiling as it also might contain the answer to the question that's boggled both the executive and legislative branches -- Who killed the chief usher and why did they do it?

The show earns every accolade that has been showered on it, and much of its beauty -- the intricacy of this production -- is on display in Episode 7.

 

Repulsion (1965)

 

A senior theater kid at the university told a group of us back in '76 we HAD to see the film playing at the Russell House. She'd seen it for her film studies class. It was about a white woman in Paris who goes mad and thinks all men are after her. 

"There's one scene where the walls reach out to grab her, " I recall her saying.

Not familiar with art house pictures or know Polanski from Tchaikovsky at that point, I was game. Hell, that's what's great about universities! Exploring the unknown and unfamiliar. Being open to experiences. Even if we ended up not caring for it.

And it was free!

Needless to say, I loved Repulsion (1965) -- everything about it was wild and provocative and messed up and meaningful. 

Catherine Deneuve is not just a sexually repressed young woman having a bad weekend; she is all of humanity in a paranoid, untrusting world, isolated, victimized by our own dark distrust, abandoning sanity and goodness and letting them rot as we wander about in fearful delusion.

Of course, I didn't see that then. I just saw it as strange and sophisticated, as a child would, through a glass, darkly.

But as I have matured, I see it better. Even more clearly 50 years later.

That's how life works -- if we're lucky.

The Amateur

 

 

British director James Hawes moves out of his usual terrain of series television to tackle the globe-trotting revenge thriller, The Amateur starring Rami Malek. A picture that is undermined by the thinness of its premise and the thoroughness of its trailer. 

 

Every big moment in the story of a CIA analytical genius's quest to hunt down the people who killed his wife is contained in the picture's 2-minute trailer, including most of Laurence Fishburne's featured turn as a trainer of agency assets who tells Malik's Charlie Heller he doesn't have the heart of a killer. Heller, of course, spends most of the movie showing there's more than one way to kill a black-ops spy. 

 

The Amateur is a bit of fun at times and owes much to the Bourne catalogue but could use a bit more derring-do, another car chase or two and villains that snarl better than Holt McCallany and Danny Sapani.

 

Appropriate

 

I read Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' award-winning play Appropriate some months back and have let its searing story of race, retribution, familial dysfunction and denial marinate.

The 2023 Broadway revival of Appropriate, which was first staged in 2013, won a Tony. Jacobs-Jenkins is a MacArthur Fellow, a true genius. I've not read Jacobs-Jenkins' other works but his status as a theatrical savant is supported by this one piece alone.

A white Arkansas family meets at the homestead to settle accounts on the property, divide up whatever spoils they are able to realize, and go their decidely separate, bitter ways. While going through the detritus of the life of their recently departed patriarch, they discover hideous photographs of lynchings in an album. Additionally, unmarked graves are found on the property.

The already fractured family grows even more so as they debate what's to be done with the property in light of the discoveries. Old resentments are resurrected, and the three central siblings -- a domineering older sister and her two brothers -- spin out of control -- their spouses, companions and children tossed about and variously used as shields and deflectors.

It's a brutal and devastating work that Jacobs-Jenkins closes with the set falling into ruin in front of the audience.

The metaphor is stark and pointed and brilliant and real -- and now.

I love that the play's title, Appropriate, can be read as either "proper" or "theft," depending on one's disposition, where one stands in relation to what is going on.

Again. How fitting.

 

Magazine Dreams

 

 

When critics say Jonathan Majors gives a "committed" performance in Elijah Bynum's brutal character study Magazine Dreams, they mean the actor plows through physical, emotional and psychological terrains with a competence and complexity lesser actors would only get partly right. 

 

Majors -- whose bright career was scuttled by his conviction two years ago on charges of domestic abuse -- convincingly sells the whole persona of his damaged bodybuilder, Killian Maddox, and the man's pursuit of perfection, recognition, acceptance, maybe even human connection despite not wanting to be touched.

 

Majors spends much of the film in his skivvies, posing in front of the mirror, recording clunky workout reels for social media, or in the gym, pounding out reps and cursing himself. He pushes steroids into his hip and does lines of cocaine to get him through his training, all while caring for his ailing, war-veteran grandfather, played by Harrison Page. Maddox is a loaded, imposing powder keg, and audiences will sit anxiously waiting for the explosion. The brilliance of the film is the blast doesn't come in the expected ways. 

 

Maddox's mental illness will be immediately clear to observant audiences, but nonetheless it is affirmed by his counselor (Harriet Sansom Harris), who can barely contain her painful worry about the young, likely schizophrenic who struggles with murderous ideation. 

 

His attempts at outreach are cringe-inducing -- he sends mash notes to his bodybuilding idol (Michael O'Hearn), whom he eventually meets, and moons over a young supermarket cashier (Haley Bennett), a co-worker Maddox asks on a date in THE most awkward proposition I've seen on film in quite some time. Both of these explorations are bruising disasters for very different reasons, but each pushes the volatile Maddox close to the edge. 

 

Bynum's film, his first major feature, is being compared, favorably mostly, with Scorsese's classic Taxi Driver (1976). Magazine Dreams simmers and steams and occasionally boils over. Majors delivers every level of intensity, leaving audiences pummeled and breathless.

 

It's a bravura performance in an unnerving and exhausting film, tough going from start to finish.

 

Kendrick Lamar: Super Bowl 2025

 

Kendrick Lamar has never been an easy lift, so I'm not surprised many folks didn't pick up on the messaging last night.

Many words have been written since then and no doubt more will come in the next hours and days.

Even if you didn't catch a single lyric in his intentionally densely coded flow, the visual presentation alone -- the colors of the dancers and the colors they wore -- was serious counter-MAGA Nation signalling, trust that.

A demonstrated hip-hop genius from Compton, performing in New Orleans, sending a message to D.C. that the whole world was party to. Righteous!

I spend a lot of time watching and thinking about how performers construct themselves and their messages. Not all are successful, and audiences will be divided over Lamar's 20 minutes. That's inevitable.

For me, I channelled a bit of Divine G from Sing Sing when he said to Divine Eye after he'd nailed Hamlet's soliloquy, "You did your thing, Beloved!"

Captain America: Brave New World

 

Julius Onah's Captain America: Brave New World scores major points with the earnestness of its intentions -- and the enormous appeal of its title star Anthony Mackie -- but it feels draggy and inert in more places than it should.

That's not for the lack of spectacular fight scenes -- both close quarter and aerial -- and some villainous characters -- Tim Blake Nelson as the brainy and bitter Dr. Sterns and the ever-watchable Giancarlo Esposito as the assassin Sidewinder -- that promise to expand the Marvel Cinematic Universe of perils even more.

This might actually invite some to wonder when will it all end? Probably not soon.

In Avengers: Endgame (2019), Mackie's Sam Wilson inherited Captain America's togs and shield from Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). Wilson refused to take the Super Soldier Serum that turned Rogers into an invincible fighting machine. He preferred to go natty, but he is still formidable as the winged Captain America, a sterling inspiration to all.

Cap' has an ace computer geek apprentice named Joaquin (an engaging Danny Ramirez), who doubles as Falcon, another flying avenger (small "a"). They make a winning, trash-talking, homeboy team of Top Dogs, and I wish they had been given more screentime for their amiable banter.

Brave New World's 8-member writing team has packed a lot of exposition into this picture -- partly as fan service and partly to move the larger narrative forward, if only a few inches.

Harrison Ford plays newly elected President Ross, a formerly unscrupulous agent who is now trying to get himself straight. He is working on a treaty with other nations concerning an enormous piece of space debris that landed in the Indian Ocean. It contains an alien substance that would be of great benefit to humankind.

Nelson's Dr. Stern has been slowly poisoning Ross with pills the president believes are keeping him alive. They're actually altering his body chemisty and turning him into glowing red rage monster, to misquote Tony Stark / Iron Man -- The Avengers (2012).

An assassination attempt by a former Super Soldier (Carl Lumbly) sets in motion a series of investigations and interventions that ultimately result in American and Japanese battle cruisers facing off and a knock-down drag-out between Cap' and the Red Rage Monster.

Brave New World plays to the MCU formula, which might be why it felt so under-energized at times. Its production values are certainly on par with other Marvel Studio pictures, but the story feels a bit too grounded. It's polemical when it should be pulverizing.

Companion

 

Drew Hancock's imaginative "love story" Companion might just as easily have been titled "Iris" because Sophie Thatcher's captivating performance as the love slave of Jack Quaid's Jake is a role and a half, work that carries the substantial weight of the picture's wicked little heart and soul.

Thatcher, who played the defiant and deadly Mormon missionary in last year's Heretic, takes Hancock's deftly constructed character -- a kind of 21st century Stepford, if you will -- and lends her wonderful dimensionality, even as the layers of the movie's narrative onion are peeled away.

Iris and Jake arrive for a weekend at a remote "cottage" where friends Kat (Megan Suri), Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lukas Gage) are partying with Kat's paramour Sergey (Rupert Friend). Everyone except Iris is clued in on a major secret around which the movie's central premise turns. It is that secret, which involves Iris, that leads to a tragic encounter between her and the mysterious Sergey and the mad scramble to not only save the weekend but the group's hides as well.

Hancock, a young director whose credits are mostly in television, has crafted a clever story that twists notions of identity into knots, and invites audiences who are inclined to think big thoughts to ponder what is it that makes us who we are, and is it, as the picture's soundtrack of '80s A.M. radio hits suggests, all about who loves us ... and how much.

Hard Truths

 

Celebrated British writer / director Mike Leigh's latest film, Hard Truths, is described in some promotional materials as a comedy-drama.

It would more appropriately be described as a harrowing psychological family drama with humorous leavening that lightens, somewhat, the enormous weight of the movie's distressing story of the toll mental illness can take on a family.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who appeared in Leigh's wonderful 1996 film Secrets and Lies, carries this heavy picture on her back as Pansy, a wife and mother in London who appears to be suffering from at least a half-dozen mental and emotional problems ~ paranoia, agoraphobia, social anxiety, bipolar, obsessive compulsive, narcissistic disorders and hypochondria. She's an unholy mess, a terror to her emotionally trampled plumber husband, Curtley (David Webber), and her diffident and depressive son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who receives the bulk of Pansy's verbal abuse because he's 22, unemployed and living at home, arrested in his development to adulthood.

Pansy's beautician sister, Chantelle (played with wonderful bonhomie by Michele Austin) is at a loss for how to help her older sister, whose anger and resentment seem to grow worse by the day, if not by the hour.

A visit to their mother's grave followed by a Mother's Day gathering at Chantelle's home with her daughters (Sophia Brown and Ani Nelson) turns into a nuclear meltdown that only hints at the extent of the damage has been done to Pansy, herself.

To its great credit, Hard Truths is not delivering easy answers or sunny platitudes. There are no bromides about the healing power of love and devotion because in Pansy's world, even the most innocent gesture is a threat, every extended hand holds a knife, every compliment is condescension and relief only comes in sleep.

Leigh, who wrote the wonderful screenplay, keeps the story free of psychological diagnoses, preferring to "show" rather than "tell" the audience what life is like in Pansy's world, that seems to be shrouded in darkness and misery, and determined to keep the curtains drawn.