This Is It Remembered

 

According to headcounters, about 1/4 of the people on the planet were not alive when Michael Jackson was ... but I would wager many of them know his music, if not the man.

The rumors, the charges, the trials, the (startling) physical metamorphosis, and the death might, for some, overshadow Jackson's importance to popular culture worldwide.

No shortage of material about Jackson -- warts and all -- is available for those who aren't familiar. I think the most fascinating document is the film that was released just months after Jackson's death -- This Is It. It's a record of his rehearsals for an upcoming tour.

I watched this engrossing picture three times over the course of its opening weekend in October 2009.

First, I wanted to see if there were any signs of illness captured on film. Aside from his gauntness, he didn't appear to be ailing.

Then, I watched it to think about the choices made by veteran TV and video director Kenny Ortega in compiling what would be Jackson's last performance.

Finally, I watched it to be astounded, once more, by the preternatural artistry that defined Jackson from his childhood.

I left the last viewing having affirmed something that really didn't need affirmation -- we are all more than one thing.

In the case of Michael Jackson, this may have been truer than it was for most of the rest of us. Tragically so.

A Haunting in Venice

 

Actor / director Kenneth Branagh's latest Hercule Poirot mystery -- A Haunting in Venice -- is a predictably entertaining picture with those anticipated Agatha Christie twists and misdirections and some added spookiness, presumably an early nod to Halloween.

Poirot (Branagh) has retired to Venice to tend a garden, eat pastries and avoid crowds wanting to contract the famous Belgian detective for some private sleuthing.

It's there he is found by mystery writer Ariadne Oliver (a cheeky Tina Fey), who invites her old friend to attend a seance at a local villa that will be conducted by a celebrated medium, Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), at the request of the villa's owner. Oliver suspects Mrs. Reynolds is a fraud but has not been able to figure out her gimmick. Poirot is, of course, skeptical but agrees to attend, reluctantly.

Stories of a child-killing physican at the villa have given rise to the legend of vengeful spirits murdering residents. The seance is being held to settle some unanswered questions.

Assembled for the seance are the mother (Kelly Reilly) of a young woman (Rowan Robinson) whose dead body was pulled from the canal, presumably a suicide; the girl's former boyfriend (Kyle Allen) and the villa's housekeeper (Camille Cottin). Also present are the battle-scarred doctor who retrieved the girl from the water and his young son, played by Jamie Dornan and Jude Hill, respectively, both of whom starred in Branagh's award-winning Belfast (2021).

Christie fans will no doubt wonder about the suggestion of horror hoo-doo but the story, which feels a bit more contained and claustrophobic than others, stays true to the spirit of the great writer's work and provides some satisfying surprises.

Outlaw Johnny Black

 

Michael Jai White's Outlaw Johnny Black is witty and culturally insightful but suffers from some distracting production design and casting choices that might be intentionally slipshod to be read as parodic of Hollywood Westerns, but they might actually be signs of the movie's lack of polish.

White stars as the title character, a fugitive gunslinger on a 25-year hunt for Brett Clayton (Chris Browning), a fast gun who shot and killed Black's father (Glynn Turman), a rodeo marksman and preacher.

When the film opens, Black has followed leads to the town of Cheyanne (sic) where through a series of outlandish events he gets charged with the murder of the town sheriff.

Black is saved from hanging by two Indians (white actors cast in the roles) he'd earlier rescued from a mob. He resumes his quest and soon meets a preacher (co-writer Byron Minns) on his way to the town of Hope Springs (as in "eternal") to take over the church of a recently killed minister and to meet and marry the beautiful Bessie (Erica Ash).

[Both White and Minns are veteran television and film actors. Outlaw Johnny Black is their second feature film collaboration; their first was Black Dynamite (2009), which was adapted into a successful animated series.]

Over the course of an eventful evening, the preacher is shot with an arrow, Black assumes his identity and leaves for Hope Springs, a town that seems to be run by Blacks, except for law enforcement. While there he meets and falls for Bessie's sister Jessie (Anika Noni Rose).

Disputes, mistaken identities and buried "treasure" lead to the (inevitable) showdown between townspeople and wealthy rancher and resident bad guy Tom Sheally, played by Barry Bostwick, who wants to take over the town and will burn it down if he doesn't get it.

The picture is overly long (2 hours 15) and is hit-and-miss but includes sharp commentary on disunity, fraud and the criminal taking of Black-owned property by the powerful.

The Nun 2

 

Titles like "The Nun 2" strike me at first as a studio placeholder used until something better is offered but then nothing ever is.

I understand the marketing purpose of using numbers in titling sequels and prequels (dayquels? nightquels?) but I wish studios would give more thought to individualizing the chapters in a franchise.

I do like that this branch of the popular Conjuring movies (a half-dozen pictures by now) went for something different in 2018 with The Nun, even if the demon-possession plotlines and the jump scares are pretty standard fare.

In The Nun series, Taissa Farmiga plays Sister Irene, which this former Catholic schoolboy thought was an interesting naming choice considering the story is set in 1956, before the Vatican let nuns keep their birth names.

Irene is a Vatican-trained and endorsed exorcist, another progressive move for the famously conservative Roman Catholic Church of the '50s. But, then, who am I to cavil about sensible narrative choices in a picture about a devil nun seeking the gouged eyeballs of a third-century saint.

Irene, who is living quietly in a convent when the story opens, is contacted after a priest in France is immolated by the evil sister Valek. Church sleuths figure the spirit is after St. Lucy's eyes because with them she would be unstoppable in her pursuit of, well, it's not entirely clear what but let's assume its world domination.

Irene is joined in her righteous crusade by a spunky novice at the convent named Debra (Storm Reid). Debra is having a crisis of faith that sounds mostly like bitterness about her father ordering her into a nunnery. Irene proposes that facing a fallen angel will square away all of Debra's doubts.

The pair eventually find themselves at a girls boarding school that was once a monastery and is likely where they will find the holy relic Irene will use to send the demon "back to hell" -- a line anyone who has seen a horror flick will surely anticipate. The caretaker at the school, a young hunk named Maurice (Jonas Bloquet), who was in the previous film, seems to be unwittingly transporting the demon from place to place. Must he die for the world to be free of Sister Valek? Meh.

Michael Chaves' The Nun 2 is diverting with some solid scares but the story seems to lack conviction beyond keeping the Conjuring franchise moving forward.

Theater Camp

 

Like the world it depicts with such goofy joy, Theater Camp is a celebration of creative collaboration and sends a glitzy affirming message to all those kids picked last for sports.

Co-directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, a first feature for both, Theater Camp was co-written by Gordon, Lieberman, Noah Galvin (who plays Glenn, the stage manager with the big secret) and Ben Platt (Tony-winning star of Dear Evan Hansen). It's a sometimes grainy mockumentary about a financially strapped summer stock program in the Adirondacks for young thespians, "Adirond Acts," that is on the verge of being shut down.

The camp has been shepherded, more or less responsibly, by two women -- Rita (Caroline Aaron) and Joan (Amy Sedaris). Joan falls into a coma just before camp opens, and her clueless son, Troy, played by the eternal Bro Dude Jimmy Tatro, takes over for his mother. Troy doesn't get theater and so is dismissed by the camp's crew, who, except for Glenn, are as clueless as Troy in their own ways. But Troy persists until faced by the inevitable.

Gordon and Platt play Rebecca-Diane and Aaron, former lovers and now devoted friends and collaborators (perhaps modeled after Gordon and Lieberman) who are committed to keeping the camp going despite being blind to their own deficiencies and vanities and perhaps using the camp to hide from their inadequacies.

The large cast is a delightful smorgasbord of drama types, some gifted, others not; they will undoubtedly be familiar to theater nerds in the audience. The "drama" of Theater Camp is in the "inside baseball" chatter and chaos surrounding staging live performance, with the legendary queerness of musical theater on full display in heels and feathers.

And to that latter point, I can imagine some reactionaries questioning the propriety of having such young Out and Proud characters in the story. I suspect Galvin and Platt, both openly gay, would argue many kids today are owning their sexuality when they first recognize their attractions. Theater Camp, perhaps both in the film and in real life, is telling them you're safe here.

And that, along with all of the great lines, terrific songs and the fact that they didn't invert the "e" and "r" in Theater, is welcome indeed.

The Equalizer 3

 

Antoine Fuqua likes directing pictures about bad good men or men who aren't sure which they are, as Denzel Washington's Robert McCall describes himself when asked by a doctor tending to the wounds McCall sustained in Equalizer 3's opening sequence.

In either case, Fuqua's protagonists are often engaged in quests that are partly vengeance and partly redemption.

Washington, who is almost 70, reprises his role as an anal-retentive killing machine who finds himself in a beautiful village on the Amalfi coast of Italy after methodically neutralizing a drug-smuggling operation in Sicily. The mafioso in picturesque Altamonte terrorize the people and cow the police for reasons that aren't made clear until the final reel.

McCall is ambivalent about playing avenging angel as he settles into life in the village and meets the criminal "cancer" (Andrea Scarduzio) that's intent on turning the town into his base of operation.

A former Marine and black ops asset, McCall passes along information about the drug-smuggling in Sicily to a junior CIA agent named Emma Collins, played by Dakota Fanning. Collins tracks McCall to the village. She is both challenged and intrigued by the mysterious informant.

When it becomes clear that peace will not come to the village without his help, McCall, with his trademark precision, takes on the Mob with slasher intensity.

The body count might lead some to compare the Equalizer franchise to the much more cartoonish John Wick series, but the ethos at work in the former is much more righteous, in a twisted Hollywood way, than the latter. Both McCall and Wick are lethal assassins, but McCall is indeed a decent human being, while Wick is more of a determined victim of unsavory circumstances brought on by his former underworld occupation.

Equalizer 3 underscores what the two previous pictures established -- nothing is deadlier than a good man pissed off.

Past Lives

 

Director Celine Song's quietly iridescent feature film debut Past Lives is the kind of movie cinephiles love -- unpretentious, stunningly beautiful stories that are driven by characters we care for deeply.

In Past Lives, Song, with masterful visual eloquence, tells the story of a young Korean immigrant woman, Nora (an enchanting Greta Lee in her first lead role), who reconnects with her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (an endearing Teo Yoo) after nearly 20 years of separation.

Since the two were schoolmates in Seoul, Nora has moved to New York to become a playwright. She has married

Arthur, a white Jewish American writer (the ever-wonderful John Magaro) she met during a residency in Montauk, and she has become a Korean-American, a distinction that grows more salient as this involving story unfolds.

Arthur has come to love Nora deeply but accepts that he might not be whom she was meant to be with, in keeping with the Buddhist belief in fated destiny. Magaro (a personal favorite of mine since his delightful turn as Charlie in The Big Short) plays Arthur's fear and uncertainty with brilliant understatement. We feel and fear for him.

For his part, Hae Sung has pined for Nora, whom he knew as Na Young when she was a girl. After an initial attempt to reconnect with her 12 years after her departure, Nora insisted that they not continue their regular Facetime conversations. The wounding for Hae Sung was deep, and he was unable to let go of the possibilities that slipped away.

When Hae Sung finally makes the trip to New York City -- reputedly for vacation but actually to see Nora / Na -- 12 years after their last conversation, the meeting is fraught with the awkwardness on can imagine. This scene of the old friends' initial meeting is lovely, wistful and, yes, quite sad.

The film is deliberately paced and structured around the interactions among its three principal characters who epitomize what is (mostly) good in (most) human beings -- tenderheartedness and ambivalence, uncertainty about our decisions but resolve to see through our commitments, be they fated or not.

Song's film, one of the best I've seen this year, matches the hope and heartache at its center with breathtaking photography of both cityscapes and those dimly lit, intimate spaces where people have difficult exchanges about which the outcomes are uncertain.

Blue Beetle

 

Puerto Rican director Angel Manuel Soto's Blue Beetle feels a bit like a retread, but it is so sweetly pimped-out that audiences are not likely to care -- which will do wonders for the DC Universe's limping feature film franchise.

Xolo Maridueña (Cobra Kai) lends abundant charm to the role of Jaime (pronounced Hy-me not Jay-me) Reyes, who returns to fictional Palmera City (think a Southwest version of Gotham City or Metropolis) after having graduated from college.

He returns to the loving embrace of his partly undocumented Mexican immigrant family -- Damián Alcázar as father Alberto, Elpidia Carrillo as mother Rocio, Adriana Barraza as Nana, Belissa Escobedo as sister Milagro, and George Lopez as Uncle Rudy. They're all full of fire and vinegar and optimism, but it's Rudy who delivers copious amounts of lunacy, wisdom and, not coincidentally, skepticism.

The family bears news that they are being forced out of their home by the locally headquartered, voracious weapons manufacturer Kord Industries, which has essentially ghettoized Latino residents onto a slip of land the people call the Keys.

The corporation is headed by the viperous CEO Victoria Kord (a delectably evil Susan Sarandon), whose rebellious niece Jenny (Bruna Marquezine) steals Victoria's secret weapon, alien technology known as "the Scarab," which ends up first in Jaime's possession and ultimately taking possession of him, turning the affably innocent kid into the ultimate fighting machine.

Even though the Blue Beetle series has a long history, this telling turns the story of a minor league superhero into not just a cautionary tale about those historically cozy bedfellows -- private industry and the Pentagon -- but a welcome take on cultural annihilation and the spirits that are awakened in the face of existential threats, even when those threats are backed by the government.

Note to Soto -- this viewer is eagerly anticipating Nana's freedom fighter backstory -- ¡Abajo los imperialistas!

Passages

 

Ira Sachs' psychological drama Passages is only in the loosest sense about a "love triangle" because the three principals -- Tomas, Martin and Agathe -- are not actually in love. It would be more accurate to say they are in love with notions, and not necessarily romantic ones. They are a mess, individually and collectively.

Tomas (Franz Rogowski) is a self-indulgent German filmmaker living in Paris with his patient and enabling husband, Englishman Martin (Ben Whishaw), when they meet a young French woman Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) at a night club. Tomas, apparently bored with the predictability of his life with Martin, goes to bed with Agathe for no reason other than he wanted to.

Martin takes the news of Tomas's encounter with Agathe with an equanimity that Whishaw plays with such weary acceptance that it must be his character's usual response to his husband's flights and attention-seeking.

For her part, Agathe, a school teacher, breaks up with her boyfriend in the first minutes of the film with a curt dismissal that would be imperious coming from an older woman, but with the 20-something Parisian, it seems just callow and wounding.

It's not clear why Tomas and Martin are still together considering how indifferent Tomas is toward Martin's existence, except in the ways it affirms his own.

And it's hard to pity Martin for being in an increasingly toxic relationship with Tomas; the source of his spiritual weakness is a mystery. The trio's damage is confounding but seems rooted in sexual expressiveness, which Sachs stages in lengthy scenes among the principals.

While its story is a bit sour and distancing, Passages is refreshing in that it doesn't try to salvage its characters from their bad choices. That's not to say Tomas, Martin and Agathe are not better off by the end of the picture but it does leave open what their next chapters will be like and if they will be substantially different from what we have just witnessed.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is as family-friendly as a Seth Rogen and Jeff Goldberg-written / produced film can ever be without it turning into something completely out-of-character for the highly bankable moviemakers.

The four angsty adolescent turtle-boys of the title -- Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello -- are aching to explore the world of the humans (a familiar plotline in youth-market entertainment products) in hopes of showing that mutants are not that different from them. Everybody loves Beyonce!

The actors voicing the quartet -- Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu and Brady Noon -- are joined by The Bear's MVP Ayo Adebiri as high school journalist April on a crime-fighting expedition. They venture out of the sewers over the objections of the turtles' adoptive father, the sensei rat Splinter (voiced by Jackie Chan), who warned them the humans can't be trusted.

While above ground, the turtles get to display their martial skills while battling a group of fellow mutants led by the mouthy Superfly (Ice Cube) as an ol' skool gangster intent on destroying the humans and freeing the mutants, and an evil mastermind (Maya Rudolph) who is eager to get her hands on the "ooze" that makes the turtles so special.

Rowe and Spears' Ninja Turtles, the latest in a host of related products in the venerable franchise, displays Rogen and Goldberg's long-standing fascination with youth and popular culture, and their humor and humanity to great gritty effect.