Is This Thing On?

 

In actor/director Bradley Cooper's dramedy Is This Thing On?, Will Arnett (Arrested Development) and Laura Dern (Little Women) play Alex and Tess, a middle-aged couple and parents of 10-year-old boys (Blake Kane and Calvin Knegten).

When we meet the family, they are entering that murky territory of trial separation that will surely be followed by a divorce.

Why they're so unhappy with each other is never crystal clear, but whatever damage has been done seems irreparable, at least at first.

The couple's boys are handling the disruption better than Alex's parents (Ciarán Hinds and Christine Eberole) or longtime frenemies Christine and Balls, played by Andra Day (The United States vs. Billie Holiday) and Cooper. They offer consolation and condemnation at various turns.

Alex purportedly works in finance, but we see him mostly palling around with his boys and dodging Tess's darts, which are sharp.

One evening, Will wanders into the New York stand-up circuit despite never having done a comedy routine. As expected, he begins to channel his pain and confusion through the mic, which offers him cathartic release, even though, as one of the regulars tells him, he's a nice guy who is awful at stand-up.

When Tess discovers Alex's moonlighting, the anticipated explosion never comes, and the story takes an unexpected turn, which reveals a bit more of the dynamic between these two ambivalent people.

Cooper and Arnett wrote the often insightful screenplay with Mark Chappell (Spotlight), but offer no easy answers to the questions posed ... the main one being, what if the "for better" and "for worse" parts of marriage are actually indistinguishable from each other?

Unlike Cooper's other directorial forays in feature film (Maestro and A Star is Born), Is This Thing On? misses some narrative notes. For example, Sean Hayes (Will and Grace) and real-world husband composer Scott Icenogle are never fully integrated into Alex and Tess's trusted inner circle. They are present at gatherings but contribute little to the story or provide any real counterpoint to the other marrieds on the screen.

Luckily, Arnett and Dern are so wonderful at playing befuddlement and frustration that it seems petty to carp about a few loose threads.

 

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and The Testament of Ann Lee

 

Nia DaCosta's 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and Mona Fastvold's The Testament of Ann Lee are visually intoxicating treatises on religion, the former being a musing on faith's corrupting power and the latter on the twin paths of sanctity and delusion.

DaCosta's entry in the "28" zombie apocalypse franchise picks up the story from last year's 28 Years Later, which introduced Ralph Fiennes's survivalist/scientist Dr. Kelson, Jack O'Connell's shamanistic sadist Jimmy Crystal, and the young boy named Spike (Alfied Williams), who stumbles into Jimmy Crystal's camp and reluctantly becomes a member of his tribe of muderous renegades.

Jimmy Crystal wears a gold inverted cross and preaches about Old Nick (another name for Satan), whom he claims to serve. As part of their worship, he and his followers dispatch the naked, raging undead with great skill and torture survivors who wander into their paths. (This is what lawlessness and hopelessness produce, I suppose.)

Kelson has become "friends" with the brutish alpha male he's named Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), and has been calming him with a concoction that contains morphine. DaCosta stages an interesting interlude during Samson's drugged lucidity that provides a valuable, humanizing backstory for the giant and transforms him from horror to hero.

When Jimmy Crystal finally encounters Kelson, he mistakes the doctor's coating of red iodine for a devilish hue and asks for his commands. Thus begins the film's stunning last act, where Fiennes turns his character up to 11.

*****

Norwegian director Mona Fastvold's Ann Lee adapts the apocryphal account of the life of the title character, one of the founders of the Shaker religion and the person who established the sect in America in the late 18th century.

As played by Amanda Seyfried, Lee is a prophet and martyr to the faith that she claimed was revealed to her in visions. One of the central tenets of the faith was celibacy, a condition Lee's husband Abraham (Christopher Abbott), eventually rejected, leaving Lee and marrying another woman. It is left to the viewer to connect Lee's disdain for sex and procreation with the loss of four children in their infancy.

Lee's most devoted companions during the growth of the movement and the creation of the sect's compound in upstate New York are her brother, William (Lewis Pullman), her emissary and protector; and her friend Mary, played by Thomasin McKenzie, who narrates the tale.

Seyfried delivers a performance of remarkable conviction, despite the astounding nature of Lee's revelations and her claims to being Jesus Christ returned to earth. The unsustainable nature of the faith's doctrine of celibacy for all members would suggest it was not divinely inspired.

The film is superbly crafted and artful and partly told through lovely, minimalist songs written by alternative composer Daniel Blumberg and based on Shaker hymns. And the movie's intricate dances were choreographed by Celia Rowlson-Hall.

John Wick Revisited

At the beginning of John Wick (2014), the arrogantly entitled son of a Russian mobster (Alfie Allen and Michael Nyqvist, respectively) approaches Wick (Keanu Reeves) -- a recently widowed, retired master assassin -- and asks how much he will take for his vintage Mustang while petting Wick's beagle pup, not knowing who Wick is.

"She's not for sale," Wick says, turning the key.
The kid says in Russian, "Everything has a price, bitch!"
Wick, whose native language is Russian, responds, "Not this bitch." And drives off.

But, rather than leave it alone, the kid and his henchmen come to Wick's home in the middle of the night, beat him, kill the dog his wife left for him, and take the car -- not knowing the "bitch" and "little nobody" they'd just rolled is a sleeping giant.

Thus begins the globetrotting film franchise about a good man born into circumstances he could not control, who must nonetheless return to a life he despises to be free of it.

Never afraid to stretch a metaphor, I see parallels between this scene and its aftermath and the current episode of the executive and Greenland. The executive comes from and thrives in a purely transactional world, where everything has a price, and where that which can't be bought will be taken.

Nothing has intrinsic value, like Wick's beloved Mustang; the only value to the regime is material. Everything is boiled down to attributes that can packaged, monetized and sold. (While some might find a disconnect between this viewpoint and the executive's supposed Christianity, to me, it matches the christianist approach to religion, which turns Jesus into a brand and church buildings into malls, which, ironically, more than a few of them once were.)

In the case of Greenland, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization might reveal itself to be the sleeping giant that has stated without equivocation the Danish island is not for sale and will be defended if that declaration is not sufficient. Undoubtedly, NATO would like to avoid major military confrontation, but senseless provocation demands a response.

The executive's recent hedging on moving forward with his threat to take the island might suggest he is not like the arrogant thug in John Wick and will not press the matter ... for now. But, unfortunately, the giant is awake and won't be slumbering again.

The Secret Agent

Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent is essential viewing for cinephiles, globalists, social justice warriors, and, well, anybody who loves human beings.

The film is a slow-burn, with a deliberate and strategic pace that reflects Filho's background as a journalist. His camera is steady and patient, and true to the thriller genre, dread lurks just outside of each frame.

In the first minutes of the film, Filho shows us Brazil in the '70s, a violent and corrupt place, where corpses lie in the sun for days, drawing vermin but no police.

Golden Globe-winner Wagner Moura (Narco) plays Marcelo, a Brazilian man who takes shelter in a refugee lodge in his hometown of Recife, Pernambuco, for reasons that become clearer as the story unfolds.

Before we even know why, we learn Marcelo's young son (Enzo Nunes) is being reared by the boy's grandparents, cinema operator Alexandre and his wife, Lenira (Carlos Francisco and Aline Marta Maia). Marcelo sees his son and promises they will be living together soon. (One of the more endearing scenes in the entire picture, which is at points violent, grisly and forbidding.)

Marcelo, whose real name is Armand, gets help from a member of the resistance underground (Buda Lira) in landing a position in the office that issues state IDs. It is there Marcelo looks for papers about his birth mother and meets with other members of the resistance to get passports for him and his son.

In the meantime, assassins have been contracted by a murderous and vengeful industrialist (Luciano Chirolli) to find Armand and silence him. Once that is revealed, the picture becomes a race, the story driven by uncertainty of who will succeed.

Along the way, we see the faces and hear the voices of castoffs trying to find safety in the open, a condition that until then has eluded them. I trust some American audiences will find haunting parallels between these displaced people, the political corruption and law enforcement abuses in 1977 Brazil and the state of affairs in the U.S. today.

The Five Chinese Brothers

 

I start volunteering with a reading program at a neighborhood grammar school this week, and I've been reflecting on my experience with reading, something I've always loved.

Folks of a certain age might remember The Five Chinese Brothers storybook from their school library. It was one of the first books I read on my own.

The book was written by Swiss-American author and librarian Claire Huchet Bishop and illustrated by Kurt Wiese, and published in 1938. It was based on the ancient Chinese folktale The Ten Brothers.

The story is about the eponymous siblings who have special gifts or abilities. In the Chinese folktale , which has been traced back to the 14th-17th centuries, the abilities were of the super-power variety. Interestingly, in some versions the great talents included diplomacy and strategizing.

Over time, the number of brothers in the tales flexed from five to six to seven, and in at least one adaptation the brothers are sisters.

One retailer on Amazon is selling a hardback of the first edition for $134, which is excessive considering modernized versions and adaptations are readily available, and they don't feature Wiese's dated "pie-face" drawings.

Then again, maybe some buyers think this curious anachronism, which at one time might have been used to shape children's thinking about Asians, is worth owning.

 

The Plague

 

The horror of Charlie Polinger's unnerving debut film The Plague is in how close the picture's story cuts to the bone of the viewer's own experiences with childhood isolation, cruelty, and general confusion. 

 

Joel Edgerton, one of the film's producers, stars as a boy's water polo coach at a summer camp where young Ben, an impressive Everett Blunck, is the new player, paddling fiercely to be accepted as one of the lads while also wanting to befriend another boy, Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), a strange lad who has a serious skin condition. The team has dubbed Eli's pimples and scars "the plague," and spun a story about its contagiousness, turning the boy into a pariah.

 

Check that. One teammate, the stunningly sadistic and machiavellian Jake (Kayo Martin), concocted the story and has imposed his will on the other campers, especially the half dozen in his select circle. Many viewers will be chilled by Jake's cold detachment from the harm he does to those around him, his control over others, how he gets them to do his bidding through sheer will and a needling smile.

 

The nightmare for Ben -- an insecure, gangling 13-year-old whose homelife has been disrupted by divorce -- is finding a safe space in such a toxic place where his attempts to win Jake's favor are disastrous. Edgerton's Coach Wags is well-intentioned but poorly equipped to handle a team of pre-adolescents poised on the edge of true ferality.

 

Polinger's script and direction are razor sharp; his keen insight into human behavior -- not just that of young people, mind you -- makes The Plague an intriguing motion picture, with three terrific central performances by young actors. The film is a bitter but brilliant first feature film for Polinger.

 

X2: X-Men United (redux)

 

 

In 2003's X2:X-Men United -- Bryan Singer's folo-up to his Marvel extravaganza from 2000, X-Men -- a crazed mutant-hunter named Stryker (Brian Cox) secretly stages a mutant attack on the U.S. president (Cotter Smith) so that Stryker's special forces will be authorized to round up and imprison mutants all over the country, starting at a school run by mutant champion Professor X (Patrick Stewart).

 

Stryker, the self-loathing and war-mongering father of a mutant, wants to cleanse the population, make the world safe for normal people. He has created a mind-control drug that turns mutants into compliant servants and then turns them on one another. 

 

Stryker wants a war and is ready to use fear and disinformation to ignite one. 

 

But he underestimates the resolve and resources of those willing to fight forces blinded by hate.

 

Great Lesson.

 

Pluribus

What makes Apple TV's Pluribus so compelling?

I think it's the essential question at its core:

What do we do when peace, love and understanding are obtainable but at the risk of individual free will?

The story's central character -- a bestselling author of sci-fi / fantasy fiction -- finds herself one of about a dozen people on the planet who have not been assimilated into a collective that was spawned by an alien transmission.

The audience's assumption is a race of beings light years away thought the Earth could use a communitarian boost and sent the formula. Once absorbed, the assimilated person becomes one with all life on the planet, which means nothing is killed or harvested, which, as one might expect, leads to complications other than the agency matter mentioned earlier.

The dyspeptic novelist Carol Sturka is played by a tireless and committed Rhea Seehorn, the recent Globe winner for her performance. The calculus in creator Vince Gilligan's series has viewers being both drawn to and repulsed by Carol's crankiness and the easy peace the rest of the world seems to have found through "Joining."

Most interesting is recently widowed Sturka's relationship with her "chaperone," Zosia (Karolina Wydra), and the evolution of their platonic and romantic dance. Through this element and a host of others, Pluribus probes perhaps in ways never done before, the human conundrum of uniting heart and mind -- not from person to person -- but in each of us, individually.

Pluribus invites us to search for certainty in existence, make our own choices, avoid the temptation to exploit those who would allow such abuse, and accept that sometimes "love" and "kindness" are NOT the same thing.

 

Summer of '42 redux

Word got around pretty quickly that the high school library had gotten a copy of Herman Raucher's autobiographical novel Summer of '42, which is based on his screenplay for the '71 film directed by Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird) that starred Jennifer O'Neill and Gary Grimes, and a beautiful Michel Legrand score.

The librarians keptthe book behind the desk. I had to ask for it, and I read every word of this tale of a teenage boy and his crush on the young wife of a soldier fighting in WWII.

I had and would read much steamier stuff on my own during those years -- Puzo's The Godfather, Heller's Catch 22, Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk -- but felt privileged that the librarians trusted me with the book; I took special care with it. I remember it being quite entertaining, engaging and real.

I understood why the book was not on the shelves, too. The lead character, Hermie, and the lonely Army wife, Dorothy, are intimates, emotionally if not physically, though the latter is implied. And Hermie and his friends talk and act like puerile, coltish adolescents. It's all spicy stuff for a 9th-grader.

Reflecting on this, I looked to see if Summer of '42 had been banned from school libraries and was surprised to find it had not been. I was gratified but then wondered why.

Maybe libraries haven't been carrying the book for some time, which I think would be a shame. It's a modern bildungsroman -- a young man coming into his physical, emotional and intellectual maturity. Young people would still find it entertaining and insightful.

Maybe Epstein and company's sexual exploitation of young people would make even this book too hot to handle.

Then again, maybe the book is still in school libraries, but the scolds who go around pulling books from shelves think this story of a cisgender teenage boy and his older lady friend is a "normal" coming-of-age tale that counteracts all of the "abnormal" grooming going on by woke warriors and trans terrorists. Their books are being tossed.

When trying to guess how book-banners think, we can let our imaginations run wild, can't we, and still not be far off the mark.

Marty Supreme

 

 

Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme is a thrilling, exhausting, enraging, endlessly creative, chaotic, coarse and tender, and superb character-driven escapade that has a turbo-charged Timothée Chalamet at center stage (center screen?) -- a space he was born to occupy.

Chalamet, who also produced the film, stars as a New York table tennis phenom in the '50s who can't get out of his own way. Though he has lightning reflexes and a blazing entrepreneurial spirit, he is also a liar, conman, emotionally stunted lothario who can smell money when it enters a room and will debase himself -- and others -- to get what he thinks he wants.

That alone would make Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein's tale of games won and lost a fascinating venture, but they also surround the "hero" with other conniving personalities, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A'zion, Kevin O'Leary and Tyler Okonma, among others.

Marty Supreme is a wonderland of mirth and misery featuring a commanding central performance by a star who just keeps rising. 

The Beverly Hillbillies

The Clampetts were worth $100 million by the time they left the air after a decade at CBS 50 years ago. That would be $800 million today.

Though stinking rich, Jed, Daisy, Elly May and Jethro still found it in their hearts to hold a benefit for Glorie (sic) Swanson when they mistakenly thought she was dead broke and having to sell her house and her winter coat (Season 5, Episode 12). Swanson was actually just moving.

They made a silent movie with Swanson at the studio Jed owned and sold tickets at a screening back in Bug Tussle.

Despite appearances, the Clampetts were not Ozark MAGA heads, that's for sure. They were Hollywood liberals who wanted life to be better for others.

They actually cared about people.

(In the real world, Ebsen was a pretty arch conservative and had a rocky relationship with the outspoken and queer Nancy Kulp, who played uber-secretary and bird-watcher Jane Hathaway.)

Train Dreams

 

The late Denis Johnson's stories are often poetry that contain aspects of both outsider and insider fiction -- the lives of people living both on the outside and on the inside of their times.

Clint Bentley's visually captivating film version of Johnson's celebrated Train Dreams (2011) gets as close as possible to capturing that which breathes best and most believably on the written page. It's a stunning accomplishment.

Aussie Joel Edgerton, an actor who is gifted at personifying quiet introspection, plays Robert Grainier, an Idaho logger in the first half of the 20th century, experiencing life's exigencies and horrors with stoic detachment. Then Robert falls in love with Gladys (an iridescent Felicity Jones) and discovers connection and beauty and joy, but then loses them, and perhaps his grip on sanity, to nature's seeming indifference. It's an existentialist's dream (nightmare?).

Grainier speaks maybe 200 words through the entire picture, but Edgerton's essential, "articulate" presence never leaves the screen. The character's longest speech comes as he stands on a Forest Service tower with a ranger named Claire, the always wonderful Kerry Condon, and tells of his great loss and sorrow in words that are both spare and resonant.

Edgerton's delivery is the work of a master craftsman, delivering with truth and maybe reverence Bentley's benediction for Johnson, who died of cancer in 2017, and for true purity of purpose and the human ability to find even small things restorative and affirming.

Merrily We Roll Along

 

I rarely get to see Broadway shows ON Broadway, so I was excited when I read Maria Friedman was directing a film version of her 2023 revival of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along for a December 2025 release. I couldn't recall ever having seen a touring company or local theater production of this wonderful show, so I was thrilled.

I don't remember why I bought the '81 original cast recording of that featured Jim Walton, Ann Morrison and Lonny Price as the leads; it was probably part of my everything-Sondheim phase I was (am) in. Aside from its terrific songs, I liked the show's reverse-chronology structure that traced the dissolution of the friendship of three creative people from its ending in the late '70s to its beginning 20 years before. It's a mystery to me why critics hated it so much when it premiered in 1981.

In the film of the '23 show, Jonathan Goff plays Frank, a brilliant composer of stage and movie music who has become a high-dollar industry of sorts (Franklin Shepard Inc.); Daniel Radcliffe plays lyricist, playwright and Frank's former best friend Charley; and Lindsay Mendez is author / journalist Mary, who has hidden her amorous love for Frank for years and finds shelter in the safety of the trio (Like It Was).

When we meet these three, the enormous affection that we will eventually learn they had for one another as Old Friends doesn't exist anymore, primarily because of Frank's self-centered destructiveness and their inability to fulfill the dreams they'd sworn to see through on a rooftop in '57 (Our Time)

The tale in reverse is an interesting storytelling device that has become more common in recent years. It gives audiences so much more information about the character the deeper we get into the show than the characters know themselves. In this way, the songs they sing in reprise often have different meanings -- some ironic, some rueful, some painful, as in As the Days Go By.

This production won Tony Awards for Best Musical Revival and Best Actor and Featured Actor (Goff and Radcliffe). Both Friedman and Mendez were also nominated.

This film, one of the special Fathom Entertainment events, is not a blockbuster affair. I think it will be enjoyed most by theater geeks and folks who have wondered what Harry Potter has been doing since leaving Hogwarts.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

 

Rian Johnson's Knives Out series is entertaining because Daniel Craig's embodiment of the Cajun dandy and disarmingly intuitive detective Benoit Blanc is always surrounded by a posse of unlikable characters, any of whom could be the murderer, and, if we were given our druthers would all be carted off just for being despicable.

In this episode, Blanc is summoned by the police chief in sleepy Chimney Rock, New York, to investigate the "impossible" murder of the tyrannical priest Monsignor Wicks (a terrific Josh Brolin), pastor of the dwindling Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude church. The chief, played by Mila Kunis, needs Blanc to answer questions that have stumped law enforcement.

The recently arrived young and idealistic priest, Father Jud (Josh O'Connor), is accused of killing the senior priest, with whom he has had a combative relationship that has been witnessed by the church's core members, all of whom are held captive by Father Wicks' charisma or intimidation.

The death happened during Good Friday services, with Jud seemingly the only person with opportunity to kill Wicks even though the congregation was just feet away and nobody actually saw him put the knife in. The forensics of this puzzling crime are handled deftly. The interrogation of the aggrieved, greedy and guilty (Daryl McCormack's Cy, Jeremy Renner's Dr. Nat, and Glenn Close's Martha, respectively) is the usual delicious craftiness.

Johnson's Wake Up Dead Man probes issues of deception and faith, manipulation, false history and false memory, and the church's obligation to right the wrongs its prelates have allowed for generations.

O'Connor's Father Jud, an audience-pleasing mess of regret and repression, may or may not be Johnson's idea of what organized religion ultimately needs to restore confidence in its institutions, but sincere acts of contrition and compassion will do for now.

Jay Kelly

 

Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly takes a dewy-eyed look at relational superficiality through the film's title character, played by Oscar-winner George Clooney. The movie is a sobering statement on the search for connections after all bridges have been burned or left to rot.

Kelly is a wealthy, aging Hollywood superstar, whose closest "relationship" appears to be his manager Ron, a pitch-perfect Adam Sandler. Ron has been Jay's companion, coach and counselor for 30 years, which has done harm to his own life and relationships with his family. Kelly's uncapped self-centeredness is beginning to wear on Ron, as Jay grows increasingly difficult.

Jay begins an examination of his life at the funeral of his close friend and former director Peter, played in flashbacks by Jim Broadbent. He continues the memory trip while catching up with a drama school classmate Tim (Billy Crudup), who was at the funeral.

The meeting between the international leading man and the now child therapist turns ugly, as Tim admits still resenting Jay for taking a movie part he worked hard to test for when they were in school and later stealing away Tim's girlfriend. Comically and pitifully, Tim is itching for a fight, and the confrontation, though not shown, gets physical, with Tim receiving most of the punishment.

The next day, Jay, with a black eye, decides to cancel his plans for a new film and follow his high-school-graduate daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards) on a trip to France and Italy. Despite her objections and without her knowledge, he and his cadre of helpers book the trip, which will include a stop in Tuscany for a tribute to his career that Ron arranged.

The entire excursion is unpleasant for the actor's entourage, who are tired of trying to accommodate Jay's lack of focus and inattention. Baumbach capsulizes Jay's insularity in the several instances of him talking over others and drifting off while they are speaking to him. He's numb to his own discourtesy.

Members of his team and his own rather dyspeptic father (Stacy Keach) gradually abandon him, and he is left with Ron in Tuscany. Jay soon realizes he lacks the mettle to make real human connections; his life has been scripted for decades. He is a fabrication, and he has forgotten how to live with authenticity.

The scene at the Jay Kelly tribute includes clips from Clooney's own pictures. This invites viewers to wonder, especially when the fourth wall appears to be broken at the end, how much of Jay is George, who by most published accounts is one of the most beloved living Hollywood actors.

And further, we members of the audience might ask how much of Jay Kelly is in us.

She (1965)

 

Back Before the Great Awakening (BGA), Hollywood released a slack spectacle from England's Hammer Studios titled She (1965).

The movie, which can be streamed on YouTube, starred the Swiss actress and model Ursula Andress in the eponymous role of the tragic queen of the fictitious East African nation of Kuma. Her name is Ayesha (same as the subject of Stevie Wonder's song Isn't She Lovely), but the queen is also called "She Who Must Be Obeyed," thus the name of the picture.

Because She bathed in a magical fire many years before, Ayesha has eternal youth, but, alas, She is alone, having killed her lover millennia before for cheating on her with a servant girl.

The picture also stars Hammer Studios horror features regulars Peter Cushing, as an archeologist, and Christopher Lee as Ayesha's majordomo, along with Bernard Cribbins as a wise-cracking sidekick and John Richardson as a handsome swain who catches the lonely queen's eye and heart.

Ayeshas is attended by two young Black women who are silent throughout, and her armies rule over a barbaric Black population called the Amahagger. In the 1888 source novel by H. Rider Haggard, the Amahagger is an all-female tribe. In both the book and the film, the queen is white and fierce.

The only female Amahagger with a speaking role was played by the Mexican actress Rosenda Monteros. Her father, Haumeid, was played by duskied British actor Andre Morell.

I remember seeing She when it was in general distribution back when I was a kid. Of course, back then major features played in the cinemas for months and months, were pulled back, sent to drive-ins, and then re-released to the same movie houses six months or a year later.

Movies were distributed widely across the U.S., North and South, which might account for why none of the Black characters in She had speaking lines or appeared in any role that was dominant to the white characters. In this way, She was perfect fantasy fare for Dixie during Jim Crow -- except for that Amahagger uprising against the mean queen.

It's all ridiculous storytelling in these enlightened days of the Great Awakening (GA) but serves as a reminder of how culture both reflects and shapes popular perspectives, as we see with BGA folks believing Black Africans are lesser beings, unworthy and unwelcome in the USA, and women really ain't nothing without a good man.

Life of Chuck

 

On one level, The Life of Chuck, which is based on the Stephen King novella of the same name, is a rich, mentally invigorating viewing experience. Three roughly chronological chapters are presented in reverse order, with two unifying themes threaded through them -- time and mortality.

The title character is played at various points by the ever-versatile Tom Hiddleston (The Night Manager, Avengers), Jacob Tremblay (Room) and the wonderful child actor/dancer Benjamin Pajak. It is not entirely clear if Chuck is an actual person, an archetype or a totem, but whatever the case, he appears to be a soul out of time, in many senses of that expression. His purpose is to prompt those in the narrative world and in the audience to take a breath ... look around ... be in the moment.

On another level, The Life of Chuck is an ambitious and not wholly successful attempt to transfer King's heady contemplations to the screen, despite the constraints inherent in movies. Some notions are most genuinely appreciated on the written page.

Having said that, Flanagan's construction of Chapter 2, Buskers, is beyond exhilarating, with Hiddleston, Analise Basso's Janice and drummer Taylor Franck's Pocket Queen turning an uncanny musing on creativity and mindfulness into a masterclass on sound and movement.

 

Casualties of War (1989)

 

Three years before Rob Reiner's A Few Good Men (1992), Brian De Palma released Casualties of War, the harrowing film of a squad of American soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam who were ordered by their sergeant (Sean Penn) to kidnap and rape a young woman for their amusement.

One squad member (Michael J. Fox) doesn't participate in the assault and tries to help the woman escape, but she is killed by the other members of the squad. Her body is left in the brush.

When the men return to base, company officers aren't interested in pursuing an investigation into the incident or prosecuting the soldiers. The soldier reporting the crime is shunned and threatened by his squad mates, and nearly killed. After an Army chaplain hears of the woman's death, he presses for action. The sergeant and the others are court-martialed and imprisoned.

The film, which is based on true events, is typical de Palma -- chilling and disturbing and brutal -- and it raises many vital questions about codes of conduct, loyalty and solidarity and justice, all of which are especially relevant these days.

Yes, war IS hell, and some men who are put into a cauldron of desperation and madness can turn into devils.

Rental Family

 

Japanese director Hikari's Rental Family is Oscar-winner Brendan Fraser's loving entry into another award-season competition for best actor consideration.

In this film, Fraser delivers an understated but highly affecting performance as a lonesome and emotionally isolated American actor living in Japan, piecing together a living with spot gigs in commercials and the occasional feature film or series.

One acting job asks him to appear at a funeral as a "token white guy." He discovers the funeral is a fantasy being lived by the "deceased" and learns from his employer, Shinji (Takehiro Hira), that such contrived experiences with surrogate performers are common in Japan.

Shinji offers Phillip, who does not connect with people below surface levels, more lucrative jobs that will require complex role-playing -- as the groom at a wedding the bride is staging to placate her parents so that she might begin her life with her female companion and as a gaming partner/friend for a recluse.

The film, which was written by Hikari and Stephen Blahut, spends most of its time on two jobs that lead Phillip into personal emotional spaces he hasn't visited in many years.

He is contracted by a mother (Shino Shinozakito) to pretend to be the long-absent father to her young biracial daughter (Shannon Mahina Gorman) so that she can get into a prestigious school.

He is also hired by a daughter (Sei Matobu) to play a journalist interviewing her aging actor father (Akira Emoto), who is drifting into dementia. Neither the child nor the actor knows Phillip is pretending.

As one might expect, the subterfuge eventually becomes untenable, and Phillip finds himself crossing lines that could spell disaster for him and the agency.

Fraser's Phillip is not expressive without a script, and when he's off the book, when his guard is down, the audience can read his thoughts and feelings on his face. At various times, his face reads perplexed, uncertain, determined, frightened, forlorn, elated, enamored, dazzled, and smitten.

Rental Family is a fine film with a fine star turn from a fine actor.

Hamnet

 

In a pivotal scene near the close of Chloé Zhao's achingly romantic and heartbreaking adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet, Jessie Buckley's Agnes (pronounced "Annis") attends the premiere of husband William Shakespeare's latest work, a tragedy titled Hamlet.

Both brittle and flinty from the recent death of Hamnet, their young son (a heart-tugging Jacobi Jupe), Agnes enters the Globe, not believing that Will (a virtuosic Paul Mescal) has written a play bearing the boy's name without telling her, and that so many people have come to see it. She's stunned and mystified and furious.

Agnes is accompanied by her brother Bartholomew (a steady Joe Alwyn), who urges her to keep her heart open, echoing their herbalist/animist mother. Though those words are spoken near the end of the picture, it's great advice to anyone venturing into Zhao's world of love, labor and loss.

Of course, keeping your heart open will be painful. Much is asked of the audience, but nothing close to what is demanded of the players, especially Buckley. She's honest and visceral, fully owning every embrace and every tear. Hers is a showpiece of film acting.

Other standout performers are Emily Watson as Will's loving, puritan mother Mary; and Noah Jupe, older brother to Jacobi, as Hamlet in the Globe staging of the play.

Agnes asks Will during their first meeting to tell her a story that moves him, and Hamnet delivers.

Blue Moon

 

Director Richard Linklater's latest project with actor Ethan Hawke is a dream for lovers of film and/or theater.

Blue Moon has an outstanding script, wonderfully evocative art design and costuming, a transporting score and award-caliber performances by a cast led by Hawke, who transforms into the brilliant but tragic songwriter Lorenz Hart, who co-wrote the song in the film's title and hundreds upon hundreds more.

The movie is set mostly in legendary Sardi's in 1943, on the night Oklahoma! opened on Broadway. Hart leaves his box seat in the middle of the show written by his former longtime songwriting partner and friend Richard Rogers (Adam Scott) and Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney).

Hart has taken his regular seat at the bar in Sardi's lounge, and it is there he holds court, with the bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and a piano player in an Army uniform (Jonah Lees), whom he dubs "Knuckles," as supporting players. In meandering, vulgar but fascinating anecdotes, Hart recounts his relationship with Rogers and trashes Oklahoma!'s homespun sentimentality, admitting he's bitter and jealous of the show's success.

Though Rogers, Hammerstein and the show's producers will be arriving shortly for a celebration, Hart announces he is actually in Sardi's to meet a young woman with whom he's been corresponding, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley of The Substance and Kinds of Kindness), a Yale student who aspires to working in the theater and wants to meet Rogers.

As Hart waits, he regales all listeners -- eventually to include the writer E.B. White (Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web) played by Patrick Kennedy -- with his amorous intentions for 20-year-old Elizabeth, even though Eddie and Knuckles assume the flamboyant gadfly is attracted to men. When Hart explains he is "omnisexual," listeners will no doubt wonder if he is revealing truth, a bit of self-deception, or some emotional or mental disturbance. As we discover, it's all of the above.

As the story progresses, Hart's insecurities, and the alcoholism that destroyed his career and relationship with Rogers, become increasingly visible. His need for affirmation, reflected in his final exchanges with Rogers and Elizabeth, is sad and distressing.

The screenplay, written by first-timer Rober Kaplow and based on letters between Hart and Weiland, virtually sparkles with wit and insightful nuance. It will surely get nods come awards time.

The final minutes of Linklater's tale of love found and lost will slowly ring down the curtain on one of America's greatest theater talents, who nine months after Oklahoma!'s premiere would be found drunk and unconscious on a street corner. Hart died just a few days later, but the American songbook he and Rogers created lives on.

Sisu: Road to Revenge

 

Finnish writer / director Jalmari Helander's Sisu: Road to Revenge is the sequel to his 2022 marauding mayhem movie Sisu, which also starred his brother-in-law Jorma Tommila, as a Finnish WWII soldier battling in the first film thieving Germans and this time sadistic Russians.

Tommila's Aatami Korpi has killed scores of Russian officers to avenge the destruction of Finnish villages annexed by Russia after the war. Homes were destroyed, people were displaced or killed, like Korpi's family. Korpi has returned to the homestead, with the family's Bedlington terrier (a nice touch, BTW) to retrieve what's left of his life.

A Russian officer (Richard Brake) tells a psychopath chained up in a Siberian prison -- Stephen Lang's curdling Yeagor Dragunov -- that in exchange for his freedom and a sizeable monetary reward, Dragunov is to take out Korpi before he makes it back across the Finnish border.

The stage is set for a chase, and like all films in the road rage genre that began with George Miller's Mad Max in 1979, Sisu 2 is structured around escalating levels of vehicular carnage. In this case, deaths start with evisceration and decapitation and increase outlandishly over the picture's 90 minutes.

Tommila is in his mid-60s and is an impressive avenging angel; he doesn't speak a word in the picture but conveys great emotional intensity, nonetheless. Though covered with grime, dirt and blood for the entire movie, Korpi's pure industriousness will win over audiences, even while he's emptying machine guns into a platoon of Red Army fighters.

In a way, Road to Revenge could have been given the pitch line "Wicked for Good," but I understand that's been taken.Finnish writer / director Jalmari Helander's Sisu: Road to Revenge is the sequel to his 2022 marauding mayhem movie Sisu, which also starred his brother-in-law Jorma Tommila, as a Finnish WWII soldier battling in the first film thieving Germans and this time sadistic Russians.

Tommila's Aatami Korpi has killed scores of Russian officers to avenge the destruction of Finnish villages annexed by Russia after the war. Homes were destroyed, people were displaced or killed, like Korpi's family. Korpi has returned to the homestead, with the family's Bedlington terrier (a nice touch, BTW) to retrieve what's left of his life.

A Russian officer (Richard Brake) tells a psychopath chained up in a Siberian prison -- Stephen Lang's curdling Yeagor Dragunov -- that in exchange for his freedom and a sizeable monetary reward, Dragunov is to take out Korpi before he makes it back across the Finnish border.

The stage is set for a chase, and like all films in the road rage genre that began with George Miller's Mad Max in 1979, Sisu 2 is structured around escalating levels of vehicular carnage. In this case, deaths start with evisceration and decapitation and increase outlandishly over the picture's 90 minutes.

Tommila is in his mid-60s and is an impressive avenging angel; he doesn't speak a word in the picture but conveys great emotional intensity, nonetheless. Though covered with grime, dirt and blood for the entire movie, Korpi's pure industriousness will win over audiences, even while he's emptying machine guns into a platoon of Red Army fighters.

In a way, Road to Revenge could have been given the pitch line "Wicked for Good," but I understand that's been taken.