Hoppers

 

Daniel Chong's animated feature Hoppers is the most fun I've had at the movies in quite a while.

It's the tale of a spirited young environmental crusader named Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda) who takes on an ambitious public official (Jon Hamm) to save a beloved beaver pond from highway development. 

Mabel uses an outlandish mind-transferral device -- that is decidedly NOT like Avatar -- created by a university researcher to infiltrate the natural world and recruit animals to return to the spot and thwart the development plan. 

Mabel moves into a convincing robotic beaver suit created by the professor, Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimi), and heads out on her crusade. 

The array of critter characters she encounters in the wild is endlessly delightful, none more so than George, the crowd-pleasing partymaster and king of the mammals (Bobby Moynihan). And the film's serious message about peaceful coexistence is needed in these dismal times.

As with most recent Disney / Pixar productions, Hoppers has something for all ages, but I believe it will resonate best with oldsters who not only get the sight gags, but who recognize what is truly at stake for our present and future survival -- working together.

Elmer Gantry (1960)

A friend's note this morning about a Texas mega-preacher who promoted the war with Iran as a holy testament to the Second Coming got me thinking about Richard Brooks' Elmer Gantry (1960).

Brooks may have inserted this opening crawl in the film to appease the film review panel or perhaps his own conscience. Dunno.

The note about the impact on children seems quaint, doesn't it?

"We believe that certain aspects of Revivalism can bear examination—that the conduct of some revivalists makes a mockery of the traditional beliefs and practices of organized Christianity!

"We believe that everyone has a right to worship according to his conscience, but Freedom of Religion is not a license to abuse the faith of the people!

"However, due to the highly controversial nature of this film, we strongly urge you to prevent impressionable children from seeing it!"

I LOVE the posters.

Becket (1964) redux

 

I don't think of Peter Glenville's Becket (1964) as a particularly "religious" film, even though its title character is Roman Catholic prelate and martyr Thomas Becket.

It is, however, a very political movie, which might amount to the same thing these days.

The film, whose screenplay received an Academy Award, recounts the power dynamic between England's Henry II (Peter O'Toole) and his former chancellor, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket, played by Richard Burton. The king and Becket were once carousing friends.
In the movie, Becket takes on a different posture after agreeing to become the king's man in the church and help him control powerful bishops. Becket is ordained and elevated, rapidly.

Becket's crisis of conscience over the king's desire to control church leaders leads to a rift between the old friends. At one point before his miserable end, Becket is approached by armed men who threaten to arrest him.

Watching from a window, Henry sees Becket warn soldiers that if they lay a hand on him their souls will be damned. The men retreat. Henry smiles and says to himself, "Well-played, Thomas."
The impasse is brief, the battle of wills continues and Henry eventually exclaims, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" It is taken to heart by his guards, who descend upon Becket while he's at mass. Becket's dying words: "Poor Henry."

It is unclear if Becket is speaking spiritually, bemoaning the king's damnation, or is referring to the inevitable war with Holy Mother Church. Henry eventually does public penance for his rashness.

In either case, the picture IS crystal clear that power often rests with those who can make the most compelling argument about the nature of God's will and commands. That might be why the film's script was so celebrated.

We are seeing similar tactics today, in bloody, brutal dispatches and pronouncements about the war in the Middle East. Its defenders are invoking the Almighty. Even as the head of the Roman Catholic Church condemns it repeatedly.

The Hobo

 

This reproduction by vintage Americana artist Jim Daly was a gift from an aunt who bought it for a few coins at a thrift store. She thought I'd like it.

It's battered and water-stained and has been owned and handled.

It's kitsch -- and is in abundance like those Guardian Angel prints from the 1800s -- but I like it, quite a lot.

I like that the hobo is reading a newspaper, and that it's the WSJ and that it costs 15 cents.

I like that he's a financial stumblebum, but he's not bummed out. I like that he's on-the-move, as his suitcase suggests. I like that he's dressed up and giving the day a go.

No, he's probably not reading that day's edition, but it doesn't matter. He's putting something in his head, something that might prove useful.

I like that the drawing speaks to a lot of former journos who believe newspapers were a public good and worked hard at newspapering because folks outside the newsroom valued them, too.

 

The Bride!

 

Maggie Gyllenhaal's feminist-horror shriek, The Bride!, is a cinematic Rorschach that I hope will pull patrons into lively discussions of its many themes.

Jessie Buckley delivers a fully committed performance as the title character -- a revivified murdered moll in the '30s, Ida, who occasionally channels the spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of horror classic Frankenstein. Buckley (celebrated for her bravura performance in Hamnet) struts, spews and contorts as a resurrected discarded woman in search of a "name," which, of course, is the film's marker for "identity."

Joining Buckley at center stage is Christian Bale as a lovelorn suitor, the centuries-old Frankenstein's monster, who comes to Chicago to seek help from Dr. Euphronious, played with gusto by Annette Bening. Euphronious has been conducting her own experiments on animal cadavers. Together, the monster and the doctor unearth Ida's corpse and bring to life this broken but spirited woman who seems indifferent to love -- at first.

Gyllenhaal blends Old Hollywood pastiche with neo-punk stylings, casting her famous brother, Jake, as a Silver Screen song and dance man on whom Frankie, a movie buff, is fixated. Swept up in Tinsel Town romance, Frankie and Ida give dating a whirl but find only rejection and brutality in the clubs they visit. They retaliate, police get involved, and eventually the film turns into an homage to Bonnie and Clyde.

Much of The Bride! is presented with knowing winks and nods about its "shocking" elements. But there is quite a lot to reflect on here -- most pressingly society's visceral, violent response to women who step out of line and dare to say, "I am NOT who you say I am! Who am I?"

 

Broadcast News redux

 

I saw Broadcast News with a buddy as part of a double-feature with Wall Street at the Jefferson Square Theater back in '87.

I've not watched ace provocateur Oliver Stone's Wall Street again since then, but have re-screened James L. Brooks' dramedy numerous times.

Those who know the film will recall that it ends with a mass firing of newsroom personnel from the Washington, D.C., office of a major television network.

Holly Hunter's high-strung / neurotic / perfectionist producer Jane Craig -- just the kind of person news organizations love, BTW -- is retained, as is her pal and confidante, high-utility reporter Aaron Altman (the always brilliant Albert Brooks). Promoted out of the D.C. office to a major slot in London is the pretty and dim Tom Grunick, a small-market sports reporter who finds himself batting 1.000 in the big leagues with the help of the previously mentioned Craig.

How these three cross paths and clash is the substance of this picture, which asks us to pull for the standard-bearers even though they have glaring personal blindspots.

Broadcast News is biting and brilliant and offers more than a little insight into the turbulent '80s, when style was winning over substance -- from Reagan's White House on down. Though Craig is swept up in the flash flood of superficiality, Altman tosses her a line of truth with which she saves herself and her integrity.

She confronts Grunick about his faking tears for a cutaway in an interview, saying he crossed the line of professional ethics. He responds, not ineffectively or untruthfully, "They keep moving that line though, don't they?"

Touche'.

And, sadly, here we are 40 years later. The line is not just moving, it's faded away.

 

War and Man

 

During the opening segment of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, mankind's hominid predecessors are depicted waging battle over a watering hole with screams and flailing arms. The more fearsome -- or more numerous -- win rights to the water. This appears to be a ritual.

The hominids are not the apex predators, however, as leopard attacks show. The victors crouch together in the darkness of their cave dwellings, listening to leopard breaths, waiting for mortal threats to pass.

The hominids are "transformed" one day after the arrival of the mysterious singing monolith that is the physical representation of human evolution in Kubrick's film. After touching its lustrous black side, the previously herbivorous hominids discover, idly, the utility of dry bones.

The scene of the first murder is chilling, as the "monkeymen" scream and flail their arms as they had before but now they also swing femur and tibia as weapons. The startled, unarmed hominid tribe retreats -- either to study war themselves or to be destroyed by others.

And thus it is ever so.

Ready to Rumble?

 

Rumbles in Cackalackey? Well .....

You know that scene near the end of DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) when the Children of Israel are caught worshipping a gold-plated cow? (When the Deliverer's away and all that.)

Moses (a burly and bearded Charlton Heston) arrives with the titular orders from Jehovah, the first being NOT to worship other gods, BTW, and the party stops.

Moses issues an ultimatum -- Choose your side! -- and squares off with the Hebrew turncoat Dathan (a Foxy Edward G. Robinson), who claims Moses is bringing fake news from the top of the mountain and shouldn't be trusted.

Things get tense, and the horde starts scrambling.

Moses, armed with the tablets, trashes the Temu god in a fiery display of righteous indignation. A mighty earthquake opens a chasm, the road to perdition, and the unjust fall in, right after their idol.

It's all pretty spectacular and skunks the other miracles that came before in the picture -- including the Red Sea parting, IMO.

I say all that to say, it's been 70 years so MAGA has had plenty of warning.

Life and Art

 

     

Near the end of Stanley Kubrick's cinematic reshaping of Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1971), "reformed" teenage degenerate Alex DeLarge is pummeled by the homeless upon whom he used to prey and arrested by two of his former sadistic cronies, Georgie and Dim, who were recruited to be police officers by the new authoritarian government that rules by intimidation and subterfuge and mind-control.

Life and Art?

History written with LYING!

 

D.W. Griffith cast white men in blackface as the lecherous freedmen creeping after the virginal Lillian Gish in Birth of a Nation (1915).

Uber racist and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson loved the movie -- history written with lightning, he said of the film, endorsing the picture as an accurate record of Black predation and Reconstruction corruption, celebrating the "birth" of the robed and hooded Christian Nationalist Klan.

Today, our uber racist and U.S. president and the regime propaganda machine are telling Griffith and Wilson "hold our beers" as they warn of skulking dusky men waiting to rape and rob -- as they do those very things on an unconscionable scale.

"History written with LYING."

Crime 101

Bart Layton's Crime 101 invites the audience into a world of corruption that is not so different from the real world, where even decent people can be compromised if the price is right.

Chris Hemsworth plays Davis, a gentleman thief in L.A. who robs jewel couriers during their deliveries. He's a gentleman because he is measured and methodical and never hurts anybody. He has popped up on the radar of a grizzled detective named Lou (Mark Ruffalo), who feels isolated from the rest of the force, is going through a divorce, and fixated on catching the thief.

Davis works for a big-dog smuggler and trader called Money (Nick Nolte) but falls out of favor with him after a heist goes south. When Davis steps back, Money hires Ormon, a renegade stick-up boy on a motorbike (Barry Keoghan) who is not afraid to break a few heads or lay out a few bodies during a job.

Into the mix comes gig-worker Maya (Monica Barbaro), who runs into Davis, literally, and begins a tenuous relationship, through which the audience learns a bit of crucial backstory of the secretive thief and the reason for his peculiar drive.

A separate storyline involves a high-dollar insurance agent named Sharon (Halle Berry), whose promotion to partner has been put on hold again. A big delivery to one of the firm's wealthy clients (Tate Donovan) offers Davis the kind of payday he needs to quit and the retribution that Sharon needs to heal her wounds.

Layton, who wrote the screenplay based on a novel by Don Winslow, manages to keep all of these threads tightly in hand as he weaves a fascinating story about the price of personal integrity in a world that places no value on it.

Sentimental Value

 

Norwegian writer/ director Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value will remind many of Ingmar Bergman's most touching and introspective films (Cries and Whispers, Persona, Autumn Sonata) as it recounts with brilliant deliberateness the strained relationship between a famous movie director Gustav (that wonderful Stellan Skarsgård) and his daughters, Nora (an amazing Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (an equally affecting Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas).

Nora is a stage actress whose bouts of paralyzing anxiety are a symptom of deep, troubling wounds she carries, made even more pronounced by the death of their mother. Agnes, a wife and mother, offers Nora support and champions her work in the theater. Their devotion to one another is luminescent.

When Gustav moves back into the family home, he brings a screenplay he has written and wants Nora to star in. Nora refuses to even read it, saying only that she can't work with her father. His abandonment of the family to make movies planted seeds of resentment in Nora, seeds she has watered the many years he's been absent. Perhaps she fears letting the resentment go. She needs it.

Gustav invites an American actress Rachel (Elle Fanning) to take on the role he offered his daughter, clearly in an attempt to wound Nora and pull her back into the project. This move is indicative of Gustav's Machiavellian tendencies, which themselves are rooted in childhood trauma. He is a master at withholding love and disappointing others.

Trier offers audiences a glimpse at how we fail to uphold both personal and universal truths. Rather, we opt for deception to avoid the pain that honesty often brings.

Sentimental Value is a powerful, thoughtful film that nonetheless might be difficult for some because of its tone and pacing.

The Beatles' Yesterday and Today

 

Old people stuff ...

Sixty years ago, Capitol Records freaked out at the response from radio stations and record stores to The Beatles' Yesterday and Today's infamous "butcher cover" of band members in white smocks and holding pieces of meat and dismembered dolls.

John Lennon said the grisly image was a comment on the Vietnam War. Others said they were also sniping at how Capitol cobbled together American releases from cuts the band had recorded for their UK albums.

Capitol retrieved the record as best it could, and a new cover was shot with Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr posed around a steamer trunk. The record was re-released and has sold millions of copies since the summer of '66.

As one might expect, the original cover is a highly valued collectible, in some cases, selling for more than 30,000 dollars.

Send Help

In Sam Raimi's pitch-black thriller-comedy Send Help, Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien play highly efficient budget analyst Linda and her nepo baby boss Bradley, respectively, who find themselves stranded on an island in the Gulf of Thailand after a plane crash kills everyone else on board.

When we meet Linda, she's a bundle of slatternly social awkwardness, who, nonetheless, had been promised a promotion by the company president before his death and the ascendance of his feckless, frat-daddy son, who gives the job to a golfing buddy.

Linda and Bradley are so brilliant rendered that we feel repelled by both of them for different reasons, reasons that are undoubtedly intensified as the story unfolds. Linda has aspired to "Survivor" notoriety, so she takes on the challenge of keeping the nagging / whining Bradley and herself alive. Linda's amazing fortitude and resourcefulness do not temper Bradley's domineering selfishness -- at first. A campfire heart-to-heart midway through sheds some light, so to speak, on Bradley's narcissism and Linda's neediness.

As the hours and days pass, the animosity ebbs and flows, and to the viewer's delightful surprise, the tables turn and turn again, until the last minutes of the picture when all bets are off on who will be the real "survivor" -- the analyst or the asshole

The Odyssey beef

Christopher Nolan cast Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy for his upcoming epic, The Odyssey.

Some folks are having a ball trashing the choice as inaccurate and not true to the original material etc. Helen was white!

Me thinks this is rage baiting from folks who have too much free time.

Counter-arguments against finding offense in the casting of a mythical character are sensible to me but don't seem to get much traction -- evidence this is all social media chirping.

Nolan's work is routinely visionary, and, IMO, he can do as he pleases because the film will most assuredly be a quality production.

Folks SHOULD be asking why he wasn't able to get the executive to play the part of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who, after entrapping and eating some of Ulysses' men, was outwitted and blinded by a smaller and smarter being and left crying that "Nobody" had hurt him.

 

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.