The Grapes of Wrath

In the 1940 classic film Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) delivers the famous “I’ll Be There” speech just before walking out of the government migrant worker camp in California to avoid arrest for an earlier justified killing. Joad’s speech — earnest and inspiring — surely had audiences back in the day pushing out their chests a little more. And it probably resonates for many even today because that scene (the entire film, actually) evokes, brilliantly, something that America has long promised but has not fully delivered — justice for common folks. Joad’s everyman set out from the camp to find what was wrong and put it right — worker exploitation and police brutality were in his sights. He left his Ma (the wonderful Jane Darwell) and the rest of the Joad kin with a promise that wherever wrongs were being answered he would be there. 

The speech and the character are as iconic as they come — in both film and literature. John Ford delivered a faithful rendering of Steinbeck’s classic 1939 novel of a family of Dust Bowl Okie’s run off their land by faceless bankers and former fellow tenant farmers on Caterpillar tractors. He and Steinbeck were both squarely on the side of those who were ravaged by circumstances and indifference, pushed close to losing their dignity but never, in the end, doing so. 

It is a beautiful film, shot in stark black and white, and the use of shadow is particularly evocative and menacing. The picture features strong performances by Fonda, Darwell and, especially, John Carradine as the fallen preacher Jim Casy (J.C.), who sacrifices himself for his fellow man. Yes, it’s stagey and occasionally a little tart but it’s not cynical. In many ways, it’s quite affirming in its unblinking celebration of human worth. As Casy says early in the film, “All that lives is holy.” Amen.

Whiplash

Damien Chazelle’s propulsive and profane Whiplash is an exhausting film about a talented and obsessive young drummer named Andrew (a terrific Miles Teller), who attends a New York conservatory where a demonic sadist named Fletcher (a terrifying J.K. Simmons) is the resident jazz guru. The film’s title is taken from a Hank Levy composition that Fletcher wants his ensemble to master for competitions. He doesn’t use the charts to teach his students how to play their instruments. Rather, he stabs  and eviscerates his players with music for reasons that are not altogether clear. Fletcher tells young Andrew that he is looking for his Charlie Parker, who, according to folklore, only became “Bird” after his mentor, Jo Jones, threw a cymbal at him in a fit of pique. That tale is probably apocryphal but Fletcher, a shameless manipulator, recounts it to beguile young Andrew, whom he then intimidates, threatens, curses and belittles. And still, amazingly, the boy, battered and bleeding, literally, wants to play for the bastard. Chazelle’s script is not without its narrative flaws, but the interplay between these two fine actors is combustible, and the words he puts in their mouths are rude and rhapsodic. Highly recommended.

The Searchers

John Wayne’s irascible Confederate soldier returns from the war bitter but unbroken in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). It’s unclear why Ethan Edwards is such a cussed mess but, for me, he is one of the most unlikeable non-villains I’ve encountered in a feature film. Perhaps Ethan is tortured by the Northern victory, three years past, or that his brother is married to the woman he himself fancies. Whatever the case, at the end of the opening homecoming sequence when Ethan ambles up on his horse to the hearty, but uncertain, cheers of his brother’s family, the former rebel sits out on the steps of his brother’s house in the middle of Texas, alone, under the sky. And this seems to be where he is destined to be. Rugged Individualism, writ large.

Ethan’s part-Cherokee nephew Martin, played by Jeffrey Hunter, is treated especially coldly by the old soldier who hates Indians more than he hates Yankees. When a Comanche raid led by a particularly fearless chief named Scar (Henry Brandon) wipes out their kinfolk, Ethan and Martin set out to recover Martin’s sisters who they hear were taken alive. The two track for five years — covering a lot of beautiful, expansive territory — before they finally catch up with Scar and discover the one surviving girl has grown into a young Comanche woman (Natalie Wood), who warns them not try to rescue her.

Of course, they do. Scar is vanquished, the girl is returned to her people, and Ethan ambles off into the distance.

It’s a peculiar film, an oater with a dramatic sweep and cast of oddballs that at times feel Shakespearean. The search is the thread that ties together a romantic subplot that has Martin ineptly courting the vivacious Laurie (Vera Miles) and the antics of a ragtag band of deputized marshals, clowns and fools led by a Bible-toting Texas ranger (Ward Bond).

I sense that Ford respected both westward expansion settlers and the Indians they confronted. Maybe this film is a study of the toll war and warring takes on the human spirit. A scene in which Ethan, over Martin’s objections, fires round after round into a buffalo herd in a futile attempt to starve his enemy shows, in pretty startling terms, the depths of Ethan’s animosity and his thirst for vengeance. Not a heroic moment but this is a film where true nobility appears to be in short supply.

The Interview

Evan Goldberg’s and Seth Rogen’s The Interview is what it is, and it’s academic to point out all that it isn’t — mainly because the co-directors didn’t intend for it to be anything other than what it is: a spectacular, vulgar bromantic mess. So why bother wishing and wondering? It is NOT art even though we know that at least one of the film’s leading men, James Franco, is capable of much more than mugging and hamming. It seems to carry a message about truth, honor and trust, but it’s not peddling philosophy. In fact, it’s pretty lunkheaded, and unapologetically crass, which is Rogen’s (highly bankable) hallmark. Yet, alas, it’s frequently quite funny. Randall Park is a toothy riot as Supreme Leader of North Korea Kim Jong-un, an eternal adolescent with daddy-issues, who pits wits and dentia against Franco’s vain celebrity reporter who is commissioned by the CIA to poison the pesky dictator during a globally televised interview. Rogen plays the producer of Franco’s popular program. Goldberg and Rogen (who worked together on Neighbors, This is the End,and Pineapple Express in various capacities) make movies that are National Lampoon without the restraint and razor sharp satire. Instead, Goldberg and Rogen offer a no-limits buffet of low-culture references and sendups that seem to have more in common with vaudeville than with motion pictures.

In the Heat of the Night

Based on the novel by John Ball, In the Heat of the Night (1967) is a layered whodunit that stars Sidney Poitier as a redoubtable hepcat, big city detective who, on the way back from visiting his mama Down South, stumbles onto an investigation that will surely be bungled by the police chief and his inept squad. Midway through Norman Jewison’s Oscar-winning film, the mayor of this Mississippi cotton town tells Chief Gillespie (Oscar-winner Rod Steiger) to keep the black Philadelphia homicide detective Virgil Tibbs on the case of a Chicago manufacturer found dead in the street the night before. The mayor tells the chief, with a wink, having Tibbs on the case will mollify the victim’s wife (Lee Grant), and, if Tibbs solves the case, the chief can take credit for it. Likewise, if Tibbs doesn’t find the killer, the town can’t be blamed. The chief nods.

In the next scene, Gillespie meets with Tibbs at the depot and convinces him to stay on the case by appealing to his pride and Tibbs’ desire to show up the town rednecks, who he has already demonstrated he is sharper than. Tibbs nods and returns to the case.

In the course of helping with the investigation, Tibbs faces bigotry in every corner, at every level of that miserably stratified town. He’s cursed and threatened by street toughs and the town’s chief employer. From cotton fields to the roadside diners, Jewison shows race prejudice suffusing every aspect of life in Sparta. But he also shows that sometimes racism can be defused by the pursuit of the truth and fairness. So, in that way Tibbs is not only smarter than the white folks he is also nicer.

In the Heat of the Night emits a post-Kennedy era positivism that says prejudice is quite often just ignorance and given proper circumstances even the most despicable person will embrace the better angels of his nature. But, too often, those folks would rather just stew in their hate.

Broadcast News

We’re approaching 30 years since James L. Brooks released Broadcast News, a funny and insightful indictment of style-over-substance television news. Holly Hunter played a brilliant and obsessive producer who is pulled into the orbit of a handsome, and unschooled, rising star played by William Hurt. She is repelled by his folksy charm and that he admits to not getting the news he’s reading. But her iciness slowly starts down that slippery slope as the “woman” in her begins to overrule the “journalist.” (Yes, it’s a bit sexist but Hunter’s character remains conflicted throughout.) Watching with wounded bemusement is an ace reporter, the multi-linguist Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), whose stark cynicism might be read as James Brooks’s own view of the current (and future) state of affairs for an industry that he clearly loved. (James Brooks was also executive producer of The Lou Grant and Mary Tyler Moore shows, each of which was set in the world of television.) Talk of tape and scenes of linear editing and camera crews and the like do date the film technologically, but its events and sentiments — the decimation of a newsroom, the promotion of feelings over facts, the pandering and pettiness — are most assuredly as a relevant as today’s headlines.

The Honourable Woman

The Honourable Woman’s geographic and psychological expansiveness is impressive, and its acting BBC-impeccable, especially Maggie Gyllenhaal and Lubna Azabal. The story takes Gyllenhaal’s Baroness Nessa Stein, the head of a British philanthropic concern with strong ties to Israel and an interest in fomenting peace between Arabs and Jews, through the fires of hell in the company of Azabal’s Arab translator Atika, but doesn’t completely deliver her on the other side.  The complexity of writer / director Hugh Blick’s story defies neat summation because The Honourable Woman’s eight, dense episodes explore the murky waters of political gamesmanship, international trade, terrorism (traditional and cyber) and affairs of the heart. The voice-over for the series’ opening credits asks “who is to be trusted?” Though that certainly sets the proper frame for a series about spies, it does not approach the depths of deceit  and betrayal this program explores. Highly Recommended.

Do the Right Thing

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) on one level attributes the infamous confrontation at its climax to the heat that’s settled over Bedford-Stuyvesant and shortened tempers but there is so much more going on in this film. Written by and starring Lee, the picture follows a dozen or so residents (played by Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Esposito, Martin Lawrence, among others) of one of Bed-Stuy’s city blocks as they swelter one long summer day. They bounce between the stoops of their apartment buildings, the Korean-owned grocery and the Italian pizzeria for whom Lee’s character Mookie makes deliveries at the end of the block. Interactions between the black residents and the pizzeria owner (Danny Aiello) and his sons (John Turturro and Richard Edson) are often flinty and foreshadow the film’s fiery ending.

The picture is beautifully shot by Ernest Dickerson; it’s imaginative and exuberant, though narratively uneven — and maybe a smidge too street in the scenes between Mookie and his baby mama Tina (Rosie Perez’s debut role). Lee is an infinitely better director than he is screenwriter, although his writing has a laudable earnestness about it. And he is willing to take chances with flow and composition that match the syncopation of the film’s score, composed by Lee’s father, Bill Lee. Though one of Lee’s earlier features, Do the Right Thing shows Lee’s now familiar affinity for capturing engaging exchanges between his characters — he truly loves filming people talking. He’s a patient and generous director and storyteller in that regard. What his characters say when they’re together is, at least for me, what makes Lee’s work so valuable and, well, dear. His is a singular and important voice, deeply entrenched in African-American culture and sensibility.

Do the Right Thing is dedicated to the memory of men and women who died suspiciously during encounters with the police, among them Eleanor Bumpurs, a mentally ill woman who shot while being evicted from her apartment, and Michael Stewart, a graffiti artist who died of cardiac arrest while in custody. Recently, the film has been mentioned in commentary about the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner on Staten Island. Watching it today, the choking death of Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) during the film’s riot scene is eerily prescient, newly shocking and sad.

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

The poster for John Madden's film The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel features the slightly retouched images of stars Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Bill Nagy, British cinema royalty, which is fitting because the film itself is a "retouching" of the "first" BEMH, which starred the same. Both pictures are set in the crowded but charming Indian city of Jaipur, and tells the story of aging Brits living in a worn but not unappealing inn run by an excitable, jug-eared kid named Sonny. Sonny (played by the wonderful young actor Dev Patel) wants to expand his popular enterprise and is hoping to make a good impression on a stealth American inspector who he suspects is in the guise of a recently arrived guest (Richard Gere). Sonny is the embodiment of accommodation and self-deprecation. He's spry angularity to the rest of the cast's sometimes lugubrious doughiness and is pure joy to watch. The movie, like the inn, has a radiant warmth that embraces but doesn't overwhelm. Though I'm a fan of most of the movie's stars, I went to SBEMH with no expectations but was beguiled by its colors and refinements. Recommended.

Daniel Oyelowo

I don't know why Daniel Oyelowo was not nominated for an Oscar for Selma but I certainly don't see it as a case of racist Hollywood not paying due diligence to diversity. I think questioning the diversity of the assembly of top performances for a year is an after-the-fact gesture, almost meaningless. Diversity concerns should have been addressed when the roles were being cast, films greenlighted. Still, I do understand folks' feelings of disappointment. And I think I understand why Academy members did not give Oyelowo a nod for his performance as Martin Luther King Jr., whose memory we commemorate tomorrow. For many folks, Oyelowo looked and sounded like MLK, his bearing was spot on. He embodied a man whose 30-foot monument stands on the Mall in D.C. Ironically, I think it was Oyelowo's replication of King's cadence in his public orations that may have sunk his nomination. I've not read a word from anyone about this but suspect some Academy members, the purists in the thespian tradition, may have struggled with the precision of Oyelowo's delivery. It was marvelous but was this acting or mimicry? Eddie Redmayne and Benedict Cumberbatch scored for leading roles in two other bio-pics but Redmayne's transformation into Stephen Hawking was a Day-Lewis scale physical feat and Cumberbatch's recreation of a man who few knew and who died so many years ago (1954) could hardly be classified as mimicry and yet it was mesmerizing. Oyelowo will not suffer from the lack of a nomination. His star is on the rise -- as, no doubt, are his pay checks.

Foxcatcher

Much of Bennett Miller's unswerving psychodrama Foxcatcher is tough to watch. It's not bloody or violent even though it is set in the world of championship wrestling and has Valley Forge as a backdrop. It is difficult -- but essential -- viewing because it reminds us that once all material desires have been sated the wealthy too often turn to owning and controlling people. Steve Carell stars as John DuPont, a scion of that legendary dynasty, who is an egregiously unaccomplished and unattractive middle-aged man living with his mother (Vanessa Redgrave). He fancies himself a molder of men though there is no evidence he's ever done so and he is himself a phantom of contrivances and vanity. DuPont holds target practice on his estate with members of the local constabulary, buys himself a tank and two Olympic gold medalists, the Schultz brothers, first Mark (Channing Tatum) and later older brother David (Mark Ruffalo). The brilliance of this tragic and true  story is in Miller's slow reveal of how those who value little often destroy what they own, even if those possessions are other people. Highly Recommended.

12 Angry Men

Sidney Lumet’s stirring motion picture about injustice, 12 Angry Men, was released in theaters in 1957, after incarnations on the stage and television. Written by Reginald Rose, the film follows a jury’s deliberations over the guilt or innocence of a young man charged with stabbing his abusive father. The original dozen “angry men” were white, reflecting the reality of America’s judicial system in the Eisenhower-era, even in New York City, where the story is set. (When it was restaged for television in 1997 -- several black men were on the jury panel and the judge was a woman.) The accused, a young man of unspecific ethnicity, is seen only at the beginning of the film as the judge, in an oddly insouciant manner, gives the jurors their charge. This indifference is the earliest suggestion that something is amiss.

Juror #8, played by the ever-earnest Henry Fonda (who also produced the film with Rose), lets his fellow jurors know that he is not interested in rushing things. He wants to talk about the case. A boy’s life is at stake. Most of the other jurors display a detachment from the defendant that mirrors the judge’s; they resist the call to talk but cannot return anything less than a unanimous decision to the judge. Slowly, with Juror #8’s patient prodding, they examine their own assumptions and biases, and the “shadow of a doubt” begins to descend.

Juror #8’s prime nemeses during the deliberations are an inflexible brute, Juror #3 (George C. Scott), and an elderly bigot, Juror #10 (Ed Begley). Rose puts words of such hateful trenchancy in these men’s mouths that compassionate viewers will likely feel shame for them rather than anger. At one point near the end of the film, Juror #10 rails against “scum” with such vile contempt that the other men rise and turn away from him. It’s an elegant moment that, typical of Lumet’s best work, is powerful because it is understated.

This remarkable picture's commentary about prejudice and conscience is just as searing today – maybe more so, in light of recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York. Despite the weightiness of the issues raised in 12 Angry Men, the film never preaches. It pricks, leaving the heavy lifting to the caring viewer's own conscience.

Inherent Vice

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice pairs the hyper-literate cogitations of Thomas Pynchon with Anderson’s own rhapsodic storytelling. This film is based on Pynchon’s 2009 novel about a 1970 LA stoner/private investigator named Doc (Joaquin Phoenix), who is commissioned by his ex-girlfriend (Katherine Waterston) to foil a plot to commit her current lover (Eric Roberts) to a mental institution. Conflicted about her request but rendered cooperative by drugs and hope, Doc investigates and stumbles upon dirty cops (Josh Brolin) missing persons (Owen Wilson), dead informants, Aryan Nation bodyguards, pervy dentists (Martin Short)  and a mysterious shipping enterprise named Golden Fang. All this may or may not be connected to anything of significance — in fact the story itself may be more about the journey than the destination — but it’s a trip watching it and hearing Pynchon’s wonderful prose (or Anderson’s approximation of it). Anderson has not directed nearly as many feature films (7) as I feel he has. I think his impact outweighs his output because his productions are evocative and provocative, colorful and dense. Maybe in some cases too layered, containing one ironic moment or coincidence too many. Inherent Vice, the term refers to the nature of an object that renders it uninsurable, is a fresh cinematic experience that is probably best enjoyed as free jazz — as waves of creative expression. Recommended but contains carpet and drapes nudity, sex talk and endless drug use.

Foxcatcher

Much of Bennett Miller's unswerving psychodrama Foxcatcher is tough to watch. It's not bloody or violent even though it is set in the world of championship wrestling and has Valley Forge as a backdrop. It is difficult -- but essential -- viewing because it reminds us that once all material desires have been sated the wealthy too often turn to owning and controlling people. Steve Carell stars as John DuPont, a scion of that legendary dynasty, who is an egregiously unaccomplished and unattractive middle-aged man living with his mother (Vanessa Redgrave). He fancies himself a molder of men though there is no evidence he's ever done so and he is himself a phantom of contrivances and vanity. DuPont holds target practice on his estate with members of the local constabulary, buys himself a tank and two Olympic gold medalists, the Schultz brothers, first Mark (Channing Tatum) and later older brother David (Mark Ruffalo). The brilliance of this tragic and true  story is in Miller's slow reveal of how those who value little often destroy what they own, even if those possessions are other people. Highly Recommended.

American Sniper

In Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Bradley Cooper plays real Navy SEAL marksman Chris Kyle, who did four tours of duty in Iraq before leaving military service, physically whole but emotionally ruined. Kyle’s rise to glory as a sniper is of legend; he’s hale and hearty, tall, brave and handsome. He’s a patriot who learned love of country at his daddy’s dinner table and to aim and shoot while hunting deer with his old man in the woods of Texas. He’s the manliest of manly men. When Kyle is stateside with family, however, he is absent, even when present. His fall into despondency is not pathetic; it’s tragic because the reason for his sacrifice, those unseen injuries, and that of his SEAL buddies is unclear, the battle seemingly unwinnable. 

Playing opposite Cooper, who is terrific, is Sienna Miller as Kyle’s wife, Taya, a distressed dynamo who watches helplessly while her husband retreats into the hell of PTSD. She fell for a rodeo cowboy, married a fighter, but lost him to a military campaign that Eastwood, who has filmed some of the most compelling war stories in recent memory, has long viewed as senseless. Taya recognizes she has only part of her husband’s heart, the rest belongs to SEAL team but that doesn’t make watching him pack for another tour easy, just inevitable.

In many ways, the themes in American Sniper are familiar. Eastwood’s presentation is as efficient as most of his other films — the narrative is crystal clear, the performances are top drawer, and void of politics, perhaps to make room for the human heart. Highly Recommended but bloody. Not for children.

Selma

Ava DuVernay's Selma is stylistically riveting and has a narrative complexity that raises it from "theater of the aggrieved" onto another iridescent plane. Of the three main bio-pics I've seen this season -- the others being The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game -- Selma is the most elegant in dealing with its lead character's flaws. A brief but powerful scene between Martin (a mesmerizing David Oyelowo) and Coretta King (the lovely Carmen Ejogo), on the eve of yet another confrontation between black citizens and Alabama police, has the couple engage the civil rights leader's infidelities without rancor. This is not to say the moment is painless, for Coretta is clearly wounded and Martin, decisive in his dealings with President Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), is cowed not so much by his wife's injury or disapproval but, it seems, by his own sinfulness. Masterful. Yes, the film is about King's efforts to rally a somnolent nation to force Selma to do the right thing and stop blocking blacks from voting. But, the greater the distance from that event and the heroism reflected in facing down hate, the clearer the picture becomes of the levels of engagement needed to get hundreds of people over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 and on to freedom. Highly recommended.

PK

Before Rajkumar Hirani’s PK, the closest I got to Bollywood was Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Boyle’s superb film, whose honors included Best Picture and Best Director at the 2009 Academy Awards, was a sprawling and engrossing movie about India’s human clutter and the desperation of the exploited children in its teeming slums — and it was musical, brilliantly so.

So is Hirani’s PK, which tells the story of a big-eyed, jug-eared alien astronaut (Aamir Khan) who lands in Rajasthan and is immediately robbed of the jeweled amulet he needs to return home. (E.T. can’t phone home.) Because of his odd behavior, the alien is named “Tipsy” by the constabulary and frequently jailed as he learns how to survive while searching for his purloined property. Eventually, Tipsy finds his way to Mumbai and then to New Delhi, for he has been told that God will return what was stole. He is has in search of the Creator.

This movie is not a pilgrim’s journey, however, but Hirani’s clever exploration of man’s own creation — God, in all of its Indian manifestations. Accompanying Tipsy on this disruptive quest is a beautiful and disillusioned television reporter (Anushka Sharma), whose love life is collateral damage in the war between Hinduism and Islam, India and Pakistan.

Most assuredly, PK is not for all tastes. The merging of music, drama and comedy might be off-putting to some but I found PK a spangling gem of a movie.

The Gambler

Rupert Wyatt’s remake of Karel Reisz’s 1974 film The Gambler is a pendulous story that swings between gangsters and Gurdjieff, that is, between the material and the immaterial. Mark Wahlberg stars as a casino-addicted, possibly suicidal professor of literature, Jim Bennett, who values little — neither money nor status nor affection nor even his own life. His inability to win and walk away has indebted him to ruthless bookies (Michael Kenneth Williams) and gambling den lords (Alvin Ing) — and they want to get paid. Bennett seems incapable of making sound decisions; he bullies his students, and treats his wealthy but weirdly contemptible mother (Jessica Lange) with, well, contempt. Much of this movie feels flighty and random, but Bennett’s conversations about life’s meaning and actualization with an eager young coed who moonlights as a casino waitress (Brie Larson), a conflicted basketball player who wants to quit school (Anthony Kelley) and a doughy but deadly loan shark who seems to want to save Bennett from himself (John Goodman) are actually well-written and insightful. 

The Imitation Game

Danish director Morten Tyldum (Headhunters) and screenwriter Graham Moore have set at the center of this remarkable World War II period film several puzzles. One relates to the German’s Enigma device, which every day generated the codes the Nazis used to relay messages and orders to military forces. The British war department had found the code formidable but were determined to give a team of mathematicians and logicians led by the human conundrum Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) a chance to break it. And therein lies the second puzzlement: what could Turing — an inapproachable and mercilessly disapproving cuss — have possibly told Prime Minister Winston Churchill to convince him to hand over more than 100,000 pounds so that Turing could build a decoding machine that no one except Turing was sure would work. The audience is never told directly, although the answer is hinted at during a conversation Turing and the lone woman on his team, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), have with MI6 liaison Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong). For you see, in that world of secrets and subterfuge,Turing, a closeted homosexual during a time when British laws were especially draconian, surely knew how to guard confidences. Moore’s brilliant screenplay is based on Andrew Hodges book and elegantly weaves three stories — the code breaking challenge, another from Turing’s schooldays and the third that recounts his arrest on a morals charge in the early ’50s. Each of these three tales reveals a different aspect of Turing’s genius, his obsession and, ultimately, his unrelenting pain. Highly recommended.

Into the Woods

Rob Marshall’s Chicago won honors from the Oscars and Golden Globes in 2003. It was hailed as having, miraculously, revived the moribund Hollywood musical. To my ears and eyes, Chicago was a surreal. high-wattage spectacle of music and dance that retained much of the original Broadway show’s contagious staginess. Marshall’s film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods is not nearly as fresh and electrifying (no pun intended), and for one who holds great affection for the stage version of this cagey show, Marshall’s picture feels enervating and forced. It’s not a bad film, and it has the blessing of both Sondheim and James Lapine who wrote the book for the stage show and the screenplay. It’s just that it seems out of place and out of step on the screen. Probably my bias. Yes, all of the principal players in this fantastic (and insightful) story of quests for wish fulfillment are fine. James Corden and Emily Blunt are particularly good as the childless baker and his wife. Their duet “It Takes Two” is the high point of the movie for me. (The moms in the audience seemed to delight in Chris Pine’s and Billy Magnussen’s dreamy narcissism as miserable princes in the duet “Agony.” Me? No so much.) Still and yet, Meryl Streep seems a lazy choice as the vengeful witch whose charge to the baker and his wife to go “Into the Woods” to lift a curse starts the play’s fateful events. Of course, she hits the notes and her marks but what’s the fun in that? She’s a world-class performer when an unknown would have added spice. See it if you must but rent the DVD of the 1991 stage production with Bernadette Peters as the witch and Joanna Gleason as the baker’s wife, too.

Big Eyes

A sad irony rests at the center of the story of popular painter of saucer-eyed waifs Margaret Keane and her Svengali of a husband Walter: though Margaret (played by Amy Adams) believed the eyes were the “windows of the soul” she managed her career with a frightful lack of self-awareness, naivete and untoward trust in the charming Walter (Christoph Waltz). Set in San Francisco in the late ’50s and ’60s, Tim Burton’s Big Eyes borrows a bit from the Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows) playbook in its color-saturation and celebration (and criticism) of mid-20th century middle America. Margaret meets Walter while drawing $2 portraits at a street fair. She and her daughter Jane (Delaney Raye) were on their own after fleeing Margaret’s stifling husband. Walter purports to having studied at Beaux-Arts in Paris and to knowing gallery owners and art patrons. Margaret’s desperation is palpable and soon they’re wed. Walter takes over the promotion of Margaret’s big-eyed paintings and quickly realizes that her work is more evocative (and marketable) than the pedestrian streetscapes he has been hawking. When a sniggling newspaper columnist (Danny Huston) overhears an argument between Walter and a local clubowner (Jon Polito), the painter and the doleful children he claims to have painted become causes celebres. Margaret goes along with the ruse for the sake of peace and profits but soon begins her slow descent into regret and recrimination. This is not particularly edgy material as compared to Burton’s other works but it is a credible and, yes, artful treatment of fraudulence and authenticity. 

Wild

Director Jean-Marc Vallee’s Wild is revelatory in ways Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007)  was not, though I think the latter film may be the more popular of the two. Penn’s movie, which starred Emile Hirsch, was the true account of a foolishly adventuresome man who wandered into the Alaskan wilderness with more guts than luck and perished while there.  In Wild, which is based on the memoirist book by Cheryl Strayed, Vallee tells the stark though compelling story of the loves and losses of a young woman from Minnesota (Reese Witherspoon) who confronts self-destruction by hiking the 1,100 miles of the Pacific Coast Trail from Mexico to Canada. Heat, hunger and thirst effectively exorcise many of her demons and strip away, at times literally, the calloused layers of her own disaffection and self loathing after a family tragedy. Vallee weaves through flashbacks Strayed’s story of abuse (domestic and drug), her failed marriage and promiscuity and her loving and contentious relationship with her remarkable mother (a stellar Laura Dern). The film’s exteriors are lovely but its interiors are not pretty and our heroine stinks (literally and figuratively) but all of it feels real from start to finish. Witherspoon is intrepid in her depiction of Strayed, who now lives in Portland, and is resolute in this journey to self. I asked my viewing companion if she thought Wild was a women’s picture. In doing so I was wondering if the pain that drove Strayed to tackle those many miles might be unfamiliar to man — much like the pain of childbirth. My friend said she thought the meaning was transcendent. I agree but also think men won’t connect with it as much, perhaps, as women who have known the fears and losses that Strayed shares in her story. Highly Recommended.

Exodus: Gods and Kings

Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings is a long movie that does little. Because this umpteenth retelling of the battle between Pharaoh Ramses II (Joel Edgerton) and his adopted brother Moses (Christian Bale) is such a familiar tale, Scott needed much more than a few new  tricks -- in exposition AND execution -- to make the film worth its nearly 2 and half hours. Although the picture is pretty (how could it not be?) and the recreation of the plagues on Egypt is thrilling, I was frustrated and peeved that the story was so thin, the personal intrigues vaporous and talent wasted unchartable. It's been a while since so many people gave so much for so little. Biblical epics often resort to "proverbial" dialogue -- that rarefied cadence and text in which the characters talk in aphorisms and inscriptions. It was pure camp when DeMille staged it in The Ten Commandments. But not so much here. The script is not so much about art-speak as it is about shadowy nods (Ben Kingsley as Nun), knowing glances (Aaron Paul as Joshua) and fiery interjections (Sigourney Weaver and nearly every other credited actor in the cast). That's the main problem for me, I fear. In this age, big pictures are relying less on denseness of story or richness of character than on an unending parade of cinematic acrobatics and magic -- in this case, repulsive flies and frogs, boils and bugs. And that's a shame. The movies that linger longest with me touch my heart; they don't trigger my gag reflex. I have to hand it to Scott though. It took real stones to cast God's heavenly messenger Malak as a petulant 10-year-old boy. I would say "Good show, Sir Ridley!" but it's not really.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Those of the mind to see the final chapter of Peter Jackson's fairly bloated staging of Tolkien's The Hobbit must come to peace with the film being good but not great (by Jackson's standards), too "spectacular" by half and an unblinking bore in the final reel. Jackson and his team of screenwriters have hammered a decent screen narrative but the core struggle of one man's, er, dwarf's battle with his inner demons is overwhelmed by too much swordplay and an irritating clownish hamming. As Thorin, the British actor Richard Armitage has three or four solid Macbethian moments as his greed for the golden riches within the mountain chambers once guarded by the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) turns him ever more indifferent toward his kin and paranoid. But once the dragon is defeated, the former flotsam of Middle Earth come a-knocking. Thorin's  moments of introspection are replaced by the Sturm und Drang that both of Jackson's trilogies have centered around, that is, scads of indistinguishable grotesqueries battling on one side against the scrubbed beauty of the Elves, led by the effete but deadly Thranduil (Lee Pace), his son Legolas (Orlando Bloom also of the Lord of the Rings trilogy) and the dashing she-elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly of Lost) and on the other by the hapless though hearty forces of mortal men, led by the archer Bard (Luke Evans). As always Ian McKellen's Gandalf is on hand to dole out wisdom and crack a few skulls with his staff and Martin Freeman's amiable Bilbo Baggins, the Hobbit of the title, provides ample heart to help keep the magical mayhem grounded.  Recommended.

Top Five

Chris Rock's Top Five is the densely comical and thought-provoking story of a former standup comedian and costumed film star whose "funny" was stolen by alcohol. (Whisky shtick?) On the wagon now with the help of his babalicious reality TV star fiancee (Gabrielle Union), Andre "Dre" Allen (Rock) is celebrating both the release of his first dramatic feature -- Uprizing, an unintentionally ludicrous recounting of a slave revolt  in Haiti, the first such revolt in the Western Hemisphere -- and his marriage to his Dream Girl. Allen is being interviewed by a skeptical and, herself, "recovering" New York Times arts writer played by Rosario Dawson. After they lay down a few ground rules about the interview, they have some interesting conversations about fame and family, love and trust, sex, sanity and sobriety. These Rock has explored in his stand-up routines for years. Rock, who also has written and directed this entertaining romp, is offering two things to his fans: (1) a soulful and insightful statement about celebrity, and (2) a house party to which he has invited a couple dozen of his favorite people -- Cedric the Entertainer, JB Smoove, Jerry Seinfeld, SNL's Lisa Jones, Kevin Hart, Tracy Morgan, among them. Rock smartly maneuvers this picture between the rocky shoals of race, class and gender politics and comes out, in the end, with an enormously enjoyable piece of work. Highly recommended.