Barbie (2023)

Apparently it’s been Barbie’s world all along, folks; we just live and dream in it. In this topsy-turvy summer where the pink day-glo sparkle of Barbie can open on the same day as the portentous and sobered Oppenheimer – and both can make a boatload of money – Barbie ends up being an excellent reminder that we can have both. If Barbie can have it all, so can we, and we don’t need to take ourselves too seriously in the process.
 
Things are great in Barbieland, a paradise populated only with Barbies and Kens (and Allan, played by Michael Cera). It’s all good until Barbie (Margot Robbie) begins to experience flat feet, anxiety, and cellulite. At the insistence of Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), Barbie ventures out into the real world with Ken (Ryan Gosling) to find out why her worldview has gotten so grim – much to the consternation of the president of Mattel (Will Ferrell).
 
From its earliest trailers and first-looks, it was quite clear that Barbie’s secret weapon was going to be self-awareness. An early trailer cast Barbie in a send-off of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with children gleefully smashing baby dolls, and the hard cuts to the pristine plastic of Barbieland reassured us that director Greta Gerwig knew exactly what we might expect from a corporate Barbie film – and she was steadfastly opposed to creating a two-hour toy commercial. Instead, we get The Lego Movie by way of Enchanted, a film that shouldn’t be this delightful for a movie based on a narrative-less toy. (The antithesis, I suppose, is something like Transformers, a joyless toy commercial mired in its own monastic mythos.)
 
Margot Robbie is perfectly cast as “stereotypical” Barbie, the ur-doll from which all other Barbies (even President Barbie) draw their inspiration. Indeed, so immaculate is Robbie in this role that even the narrator (Helen Mirren) cannot help but comment on the utter absurdity of her lament that she’s not pretty; “Note to filmmakers,” she opines in one of the film’s many terrific jokes, “Margot Robbie is not the actress to get this point across.” Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling is, if it can be imagined, even doofier as Ken than Michael Keaton was in Toy Story 3. Gosling’s Ken is a true buffoon, a self-described accessory and self-insistent “ten” whose job is “beach” despite an apparent inability to perform CPR or even swim to shore on his own. Together, the two have some of the funniest chemistry imaginable, particularly because of the perennial lack of clarity about the precise nature of their relationship.
 
Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach are delightfully cavalier about most of the rules that govern Barbieland. Some of this is due to the logic that governs a child’s play, but more of it is in an embrace of fantasy and dreams at large. In two sequences, Rhea Perlman appears (particularly jarring for someone who, like myself, has binged nearly all of Cheers in about four months), and there’s an explanation provided in a hand-wavey kind of way that rolls over the audience like a wave. In another scene, someone ponders the possible differences between Barbieland and the real world, and in asking which difference is key, he receives a unanimous answer, “Yes.” Whether Barbieland is just down the block, like Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, or whether it is a creation of a child’s fictional dreamscape, is the kind of question that only an adult reviewer would begin to ask – and Gerwig’s response is, “Don’t worry about it.”
 
The film is bracingly unselfconscious, with no one afraid to embarrass themselves or lean into the broad absurdism of playing a plastic doll come to life. Simu Liu is wickedly fun as a Ken consumed with himself (as they all are), a walking/talking competitive vanity incarnate. Similarly, Gerwig is undaunted by the prospect of directing cardboard montages, placing a corporate boardroom on the world’s longest tandem bicycle. It’s peppy and poppy, a little subversive and a little heavy on the ‘message,’ but if anyone’s upset by the film, they’re taking it – or themselves – a little too seriously. It’s a film where Gosling’s Ken is both perplexed and disappointed about the number of horses involved in a “patriarchy,” where Weird Barbie is unapologetic about smelling like a basement. The little nine-year-old boy next to me was as enchanted as his younger sister a few seats over. Their mother, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be enjoying herself, but then again she didn’t seem like a person who enjoyed much of anything. Perhaps she needed a Barbie of her own to inspire her, to remind her that it’s okay to feel joy. 
 
That message is Barbie’s greatest gift – that it’s tough out there, but it’s okay to laugh, to dream, to blaze your own path forward on tippy-toes, wearing so much more pink than any one retina can handle – just as long as you’re you while you’re doing it.
 

Barbie is rated PG-13 for “suggestive references and brief language.” Directed by Greta Gerwig. Written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Based on the Barbie dolls by Mattel. Starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon, Michael Cera, Issa Rae, Rhea Perlman, and Will Ferrell.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)

All too often, sequels fall into two categories – retread the boards of the first film, playing all the hits; or take a darker bent, reminiscent of The Empire Strikes Back. Unfortunately and perhaps surprisingly, Shazam! Fury of the Gods is neither. It is a two-hour coda to the first film’s third act, overly expository and largely tepid, far from an entertaining flop but somewhere just shy of memorable.
 
Billy Batson (Asher Angel) and his superheroic alter ego (Zachary Levi) are trying to keep their family together in a city that doesn’t quite love them. Dubbed “The Philadelphia Fiascoes,” this super-gang keeps saving the day, but Mary (Grace Caroline Currey) wants to go to college, while Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer) longs to strike out on his own. Meanwhile, the Daughters of Atlas (Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu, and Rachel Zegler) are desperate to recover their father’s strength in order to conquer the world.
 
From the earliest trailers, I had a sense that something was wrong. Why wasn’t I excited about this movie? I had liked the first Shazam film well enough, and its third act twist – that the entire family had been granted magical powers – was the sort of thing that most franchises would have held in reserve for a second or third installment. Taking off those restraints, then, should have made for a very exciting and fresh sequel, covering ground that even the comics haven’t had much time to tread. (Though Mary and Freddy had been super since their debut, the rest of Billy’s foster siblings didn’t get their powers until 2011.)
 
Unfortunately, straying from the comics seems to be the film’s biggest downfall. The erstwhile Captain Marvel (don’t ask – it’s a whole thing) is one of the oldest superheroes in comics, debuting in 1940, and he has a fairly deep bench of supervillains and stories worth adapting.¹ Yet the filmmakers here have invented a trio of antagonists out of whole cloth and forgotten to give them personalities along the way. Hespera (Mirren), Kalypso (Liu), and Anthea (Zegler) have a set of powers that allows them to do whatever the plot needs of them, taking only a negligible amount of inspiration from the Greek myths that named them – never mind that Shazam is only half Greek myth (with two Roman gods and a Judaic monarch in the mix, as well). Consequently, Fury of the Gods never gels into a Shazam story, even over and against the fact that the protagonist, shockingly, still doesn’t know what to call himself.
 
This Shazam hangs a lantern on itself by name-checking the Fast and the Furious franchise, invoking a film series that clenches its jaw every time it insists that it’s actually a story about “family.” There are two families pitted against each other in Fury of the Gods, though the comparison isn’t belabored as much as one might have expected. (I kept waiting, for example, to learn that the Daughters of Atlas, of varying ages and ethnicities, were actually adopted, something that might have added weight to their conflict with Billy and his foster family.) Yet while that particular horse isn’t beaten, much of the film is overloaded with exposition, saddling charismatic performers with dialogue that forces them to explain MacGuffin after MacGuffin. Character conflicts are spoken, never quite depicted, and much of the movie quite literally reads books of mythology at us, perhaps in the hopes that we’ll fall asleep before remembering that the myths aren’t actually like that. By the time the dragons and minotaurs show up, it felt like a much longer film than it actually was.
 
There is a hint of something in the film that seems to work. Director David F. Sandberg is quite good at sleight of hand, balancing elements in the first act without tipping his hand that they’ll manifest in the finale. A pocketful of Skittles, for example, seems like a throwaway gag but ends up being of the utmost importance in a way that feels perfectly organic for these characters. Yet in other moments, the film fumbles its own ball, as when we learn that Eugene has been meticulously cataloguing the magical doors that pervade the family’s lair, the Rock of Eternity. Naturally, there comes a moment when the characters must choose the right door, but rather than rely on Eugene’s magic maps, the film biffs the landing by having Billy (and I could not make this up) follow the lingering scent of a porta-potty.
 
I hadn’t realized it at the time – I was actually trying not to fall asleep – but that sequence ends up being a microcosm for all of Fury of the Gods. So many of the pieces are in place that the film should be working, but all too often the audience is promised that something great is just behind Door Number Three. Yet the film ends up, time and again, choosing the easy, lame, and somewhat stinky path, hoping the audience is in on the joke. A film with the pedigree of this Shazam deserves better – Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu, at least, deserved better; they are clearly relishing the opportunity to chew the scenery and bathe in a river of ham, but too many of their scenes are shot as though their contracts were just about to lapse.
 
Maybe I’m becoming a curmudgeon. Maybe I’ve seen too many superhero movies in the last fifteen years for the genre to hold much allure for me any longer. Maybe I’ve seen all the tricks in the bag – Fury of the Gods never does anything catastrophically wrong, but nor does it have any surprises in store. Then again, I usually ask myself whether the children in my audience enjoyed it. They certainly did in Black Adam, leading me to think that Black Adam might have been worth it after all. But the few kids that accompanied my screening of Fury of the Gods seemed somewhat lackadaisical; they reacted only to the souped-up remix of an Elvis Presley song that played out over the credits. 
 
And this is all to say nothing of the corporate horsetrading that is on naked display in this Fury. The DC Extended Universe, born in 2013 with Man of Steel, seems to be whimpering its way to an early and untended grave; even after James Gunn’s much-heralded announcement of the advent of his DC Universe (subtitled “Gods and Monsters”), we’re being regaled with four films set in a dead franchise. Warner Brothers cancelled Batgirl and seems not to know what to do with The Flash or the next Aquaman sequel, while all of us (Warners included) seem to keep forgetting that Blue Beetle is still going to be released. Fury of the Gods contains cameos from abandoned franchises, teases for sequels that probably won’t come to pass, and a post-credits scene that may or may not know how ironically it’s satirizing the very notion of a post-credits scene. Meanwhile, Shazam’s most famous antagonist can’t be bothered to appear, either from Dwayne Johnson’s intervention or studio resentment of the same.
 
All the while, one hears Sandberg and the rest of the crew begging and pleading for another shot at the Shazam family. Next time, they promise, they’ll get it right; but with a new creative driver who seems keen on cutting everything that didn’t originate in or advance his own sub-franchise, I’m skeptical about the prospect of a Gunn-era Shazam. We’ll need a new magic word, or at least a superhero whose nose isn’t clogged with sewage.
 

Shazam! Fury of the Gods is rated PG-13 for “sequences of action and violence, and language.” Directed by David F. Sandberg. Written by Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Zachary Levi, Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer, Grace Caroline Currey, Rachel Zegler, Lucy Liu, Djimon Hounsou, and Helen Mirren.

---

1 Arguably his most iconic storyline, “The Monster Society of Evil,” was ostensibly being held in reserve for a third film that may never come to pass. One is reminded all too belatedly of the advice of comics writer Tom Taylor, who is said to have advised new writers, “Use your best ideas now.”^↩

Monday at the Movies - May 15, 2017

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” There’s a new King Arthur film at the box office this week... this is not a review of that movie.

Excalibur (1981) – Amid the dismal reviews for Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, I went back to the well for an ostensibly definitive film of the Arthur legend which I’d managed to miss, even amid an Arthurian phase in my adolescence. Although there are moments that, oddly enough, recall a straight-faced Monty Python and the Holy Grail, John Boorman’s Excalibur is otherwise iconic and epic, sweeping in a way that sometimes makes the film seem episodic because of its steadfast refusal to identify a singular protagonist. Is it Merlin (Nicol Williamson, delightfully quirky as the aging wizard), the magician who shepherds England to prominence even as his time is passing? Is it Arthur (Nigel Terry), the squire who has greatness thrust upon him? Or is it the sword, whose absences and presences account for the failures and triumphs of Camelot? Boorman isn’t choosy, which allows the legend to spread out and take on a proper epic fantasy form. In just over two hours, Excalibur squeezes in the sword in the stone, the assembly of the Round Table, the grail quest, Lancelot’s affair with Guinevere, and the final battle with Mordred – a far-reaching and ambitious effort that aims to do more in one movie than most trilogies accomplish. Keep your eyes open, since Excalibur stars a number of soon-to-be major stars in supporting roles: Helen Mirren turns up as the sultry Morgana, the mother of Arthur’s adversary Mordred, while Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson, and Ciarán Hinds pop in as knights of the round table. Excalibur has a visual style that sets a standard for mystical medieval fare and an admirable amount of ambition befitting its subject matter.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

Red 2 (2013)

Red 2, the closet comic book film of the summer, has been marketing itself as the antidote to the monster/superhero bombast of the summer season, and while that’s certainly true it might have been wiser to play up the film’s strengths – its exuberant sense of fun executed by professionals who aren’t afraid to take themselves a little less than seriously.

Enjoying retirement to the dismay of his girlfriend Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), former special agent Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is pulled back into the life by his old partner, the mentally dispossessed Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich).  While another old friend, Victoria Winters (Helen Mirren), takes a contract on their lives for MI6, these Retired/Extremely Dangerous agents scramble to find a nuclear device mislaid during the Cold War before engaging Edward Bailey (Anthony Hopkins), the criminally insane genius who built the bomb.

Let’s get the obligatory stuff out of the way.  Red 2 bears none of the gravitas of Skyfall and probably won’t be making any best-of lists come December (although it’s #1 on my list of “Top 10 Movies of 2013 Where Helen Mirren Blows Stuff Up”).  And while the concept demands aging actors, there are moments when an abler, more spry spy might have shaved about fifteen minutes off the plot; there are moments in Red 2 where Willis seems tired and not, I suspect, because his character needs a breather.  (I hesitate to say “phoning it in,” although it’s clear he’s not having as much fun as everyone else at all times.)

But even though the director’s seat has a new occupant this time (Dean Parisot replacing Robert Schwentke), screenwriters Jon & Erich Hoeber return to make sure that the Red franchise keeps its identity secure.  This is a film that knows itself well and in the end does right by itself.  The Hoebers don’t lose sight of what made the first film work – its melding of no-frills action and an infectious sense of fun.  But a movie premised just on being fun doesn’t quite cut it.  Fortunately, Red 2 is also deft at including the other elements – plot, character, acting – that a film needs to “work.”

The plot is, admittedly, a little thin – we’ve seen “ticking time bomb” plots before – but it succeeds at giving events a sense of significance rather than just a skeleton on which to graft special effects sequences.  That is, we care about the stakes, and the characters are compelling enough to bring it to life; we want to see them defuse the bomb not because they have to but because the narrative structure imbues importance on the issue.

Much of that work of significance comes from the acting cast, who are as resplendently entertaining as they were in the first outing.  Willis, Malkovich, and Mirren continue to do well in their roles (the latter practically demanding a spin-off with a near-cameo Brian Cox, whose infatuation with her never gets old), their taut chemistry losing none of its fizzle in the interim, but it’s Parker who’s the surprise hit, amping up her damsel-in-distress with a strong shot of thrill-seeking.  Parker’s everything you want in an unlikely action heroine – strong, sexy, hilarious, and just the right amount of clumsy-yet-capable.

New face Catherine Zeta-Jones is somewhat less inspiring as a Russian femme fatale, though her scenes with Willis allow the latter to play a stellar moonstruck.  The other big additions, however, are much more pleasant.  Byung Hun Lee is a treat as an assassin with a revenge plot for Frank Moses, and his fight scenes get the blood pumping where the older stars can’t.  But by far and to no one’s surprise, the best addition to the cast is Sir Anthony Hopkins as the insanity-addled scientist, who’s gone mental after years of solitary confinement.  If Red 2 is understood as a space where scenery chewing isn’t just permissible, it’s encouraged (cf. Malkovich), Hopkins goes to the head of the buffet line for an all-you-can-eat performance, greeting invisible cows while distractedly fidgeting with nerve gas.  It’s the kind of role that exudes entertainment, with Hopkins’s gleeful mania suggesting not just the depths of his character’s insanity but also the sheer enjoyment factor that must come from playing such a part.

At the end of the day, Red 2 doesn’t break much new ground, nor does it distinguish itself as mind-numbingly brilliant.  But what it does, it does quite well – entertain, distract, and divert for two hours with a serviceable plot, a solid ensemble cast, and a breathless sense of fun.  Count me in for Red 3 (especially if you get someone like Michael Caine in there)!

Red 2 is rated PG-13 for “pervasive action and violence including frenetic gunplay, and for some language and drug material.”  Yeah, that’s a weirdly specific rating... certainly lots of guns get fired and plenty of stuff blows up.  The profanity is pretty tame, and Marvin’s history with LSD is cited a few times.

Check back with us on Wednesday for another action film, Pacific Rim!

Monsters University (2013)

Aside from Cars 2 (which, if we’re being honest, felt a little like a cash grab), Pixar’s made a name for itself for high quality original material, only dipping a second time into the well when the story merits it.  We go all the way back to (before) 2001’s Monsters, Inc., which gets the prequel treatment with Monsters University.  And like a matriculating monster, Monsters U stumbles at first but finds itself and recovers by film’s end.

Set to fulfill his lifetime dream of becoming a professional scarer, Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) heads to top college Monsters University.  There, studious Mike meets James P. Sullivan (John Goodman), son of a top scarer and more party-hearty than study-buddy.  Antagonized by the stern Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren), the two enter into the college’s olympian Scare Games, with their reputations and their standing at the college on the line.

Entering prequel territory for a buddy picture like Monsters, Inc. verges on predictable in the sense that the film has to cover the “adversaries turn amigos” plot beat in order to feel narratively fulfilling.  Monsters U hits those moments without feeling too forced; remember, Mike and Sulley were hardly birds of a feather in Inc.  Monsters U does not, however, spend too much time making Mike and Sulley polar opposites that meet in the middle, casting them more as contrasting types who begrudgingly work together.  (More interesting for the prequel enthusiast:  the way that Monsters U recasts the tension between Mike and in-crowd wannabe Randall [Steve Buscemi], now college roommates divided by fraternity loyalties.)

There are lots of very interesting things going on in the movie, which aren’t explored at much length in order to focus on the intramural Scare Games.  I see the value in concentrating on the Scare Games; the episodic nature of an event-based competition helps us to see how Oozma Kappa (Mike’s fraternity) improves, and it allows the filmmakers to expand the Monsters world by showing various other creatures (plus it boosts the toy line significantly).

But even in spite of the parts where Monsters U feels paint-by-numbers – which, in Pixar’s hands, is still plenty enjoyable if more generic than usual – there are moments of pure genius that remind us why Pixar movies are still the pinnacle of animated film (or, perhaps, even above most live-action storytelling).  I’ll pit the last twenty minutes of Monsters U against any of the other great Pixar moments for genre-bending imagination and exuberant pathos.  It’s almost too good to spoil where the movie goes, but the film quickly shirks that cliché you feel it’s embracing before contorting 180 degrees into a monster-inflected take on the “Play nice” scene from Toy Story. 

It ends with a callback to a bit of Inc. you didn’t expect to see, but the real heart comes when Dean Hardscrabble – in a turn delivered strongly by Mirren – warms up ever so slightly to our heroes.  It’s comparable to Anton Ego’s change of heart in Ratatouille, and as with Peter O’Toole it’s a reminder that the film needs as much of these top thespians as we can get.  Otherwise, the voice cast is what you’d expect from Pixar – pitch-perfect and full of aural treats (like Aubrey Plaza’s laconic sorority president, though Nathan Fillion’s swagger is more distracting because of how larger-than-life his voice tends to be).

In the end, I find myself having written a more positive review than I anticipated, in part because there’s nothing about Monsters University that is entirely irredeemable; even when they’re not pulling out all the stops creatively, the Pixar team is still lightyears (pun intended) ahead of the competition.  But when they do, Monsters University is a real scream.

Monsters University is rated G.  A few monsters have tricks and skills that might scare the wee babies, but overall most kids can handle it.

Monday at the Movies - June 24, 2013

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies” – this week, we massage the title of this feature by profiling two HBO biopics from the past year.

Behind the Candelabra (2013) – “Too much of a good thing is wonderful,” the late Liberace was fond of saying, but the trouble with Behind the Candelabra is that there’s not enough of a good thing to be wonderful in the first place.  Ostensibly Steven Soderbergh’s last film, this biopic stars Michael Douglas as the flamboyant pianist who woos Scott Thorson (Matt Damon) in a complicated and torrid relationship not unlike the stuff of Lifetime movies.  Therein lies the problem; the story as we have it isn’t substantive enough to sustain a full two hours without feeling thin or repetitive.  As is often the case in biopics like this, Michael Douglas is note-perfect as Liberace, capturing the extravagance of the performer while layering in just enough of the creepy menace the film suggests was key to understanding Liberace (then again, when is Douglas not exceptional?).  Doing less exceptional work by virtue of being in the shadow of a great performance, Damon’s Scott Thorson is also less compelling, largely due to Damon’s failure to transcend his own ethos in the way Douglas does; moreover, Damon as Scott is petulant and largely static, equal parts the fault of the slim script and the muscled actor.  Kudos, though, to the makeup department for creating a lifelike Liberace and an uncanny doppelganger after Scott undergoes plastic surgery to look more like his lover.  Keep your eyes peeled for a gaggle of cameos – Dan Aykroyd, Rob Lowe, Paul Reiser, and an unforgettable Debbie Reynolds as Liberace’s mum – though ultimately the film is a great deal like Liberace himself:  talented, but more style than substance.

Phil Spector (2013) – Pacino, Mirren, Mamet.  Throw these three into a crazy (semi-) true story, and I’m there.  Oddly, the film begins with a disclaimer absolving itself of facticity, a bizarre technique which distances the audience until the true game reveals itself.  What David Mamet’s really after is a character study unfettered by pragmatic (and legal) concerns, profiling defense attorney Linda Kenney Baden (Helen Mirren) as she’s drawn into the entirely strange orbit of famed music producer Phil Spector (Al Pacino) when he’s accused of murder.  The film wisely avoids finger-pointing (indeed, the film leans toward but never fully endorses Spector’s innocence), and it’s to Pacino’s credit that he reins in his stereotypical “big voice” for a more subdued portrait.  The real star – and the vehicle which communicates the degree to which Spector seems wholly unhinged – is Mamet’s dialogue, as snappy as it’s ever been.  In many ways more a stage play than a fully cinematic film, Mamet’s script includes long dialogues, compelling conversation pieces where the restrained delivery allows us to appreciate the subtext; it’s especially worth rewatching the conversations between Spector and Baden, as the former reveals his madness while the latter, astoundingly, becomes convinced of his legal innocence.  Pacino pulls back, as I’ve noted, but Mirren really lets loose the full range of her craft; Baden is suffering from pneumonia during the trial and – like Cosmo Kramer’s gonorrhea – you feel it all the way in the back row.  It may not be the all-out crazy train that the actual trial was, but Mamet’s script is riveting in a slow-burn kind of way.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Monday at the Movies - June 3, 2013

In honor of last month's stellar first season finale of Bates Motel, the A&E show I ended up loving more than I ever thought I would, we take a look at the myth behind the filming of Psycho before turning to the film itself.

Hitchcock (2012) – One of our finest actors portrays one of the greatest directors of all time, yet somehow the results leave something to be desired.  Sacha Gervasi’s directorial debut follows the corpulent Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) during the making of his ostensible masterpiece, Psycho.  It sounds like a recipe for success, but something’s missing; my vote is that, engaging though they all are, there are far too many subplots going on in the film.  We’ve got Helen Mirren doing fab work as Alma Reville, but it’s a performance dulled by a lifeless tease of adulteries (Danny Huston, usually equally compelling, is uninteresting here).  The bits where Hitch hallucinates encounters with Ed Gein are wacky in a Tim Burton kind of way, but these scenes are mere sidebars to other narratives.  And the making of Psycho itself, which was the major draw for me, gets short shrift – a shame, since it’s Hitch/Hopkins at his liveliest, and we have solid turns from Scarlett Johansson and James D’Arcy (as Janet Leigh and an uncanny doppelganger of Anthony Perkins, respectively).  On top of all that, though Hopkins is divine as always, his own star power sometimes overshadows the role, so it’s difficult to see him just at surface level; his Hitch voice is killer and his mannerisms accurate, but Hopkins still bleeds through.  All told, there’s nothing wrong with the movie, but it teases so many fascinating movies within itself that nothing feels fully fleshed out.  If nothing else, you’ll be itching to rewatch Psycho when all’s said and done.

Psycho (1960) – What do you say about a movie which the universe has already agreed is a landmark classic?  Alfred Hitchcock, the undisputed master of suspense, directs the hell out of Robert Bloch’s pulpy novel about the shady Bates Motel and its troubled proprietor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), burdened with his own unique brand of mother issues when Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) arrives with a bundle of stolen cash.  Though it’s part of the air we breathe, the rest is criminal to spoil just in case, and I can only say that what Hitch does with the material is nothing short of golden.  He’s helped by a more than able score by the legendary Bernard Herrmann, who crafts no less than three unforgettable themes for the film (including those unmistakable violin screeches); indeed, Herrmann’s compositions are almost characters in themselves, governing the mood almost as much as Hitch’s own deliberate direction.  But oh, those directorial decisions:  the black and white, the montage (Eisenstein’s idea of montage as violence never felt so appropriate), the angles, the shadows, even the color of Janet Leigh’s underwear – all are the marks of an obsessive genius lending all his skill to a real project of passion.  Each visual is a treat unto itself, the shots of Norman’s taxidermy lending a beautiful horror to his calm conversation.  And from an industry standpoint, much about the film is delightfully innovative, making twist endings and arriving on time part of the moviegoing lexicon.  In short, it’s not crazy to love Psycho.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here on Friday for the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month!

Monday at the Movies - December 31, 2012

Welcome to Week Forty-Five of “Monday at the Movies,” the final installment for 2012 (and, I think, also the final numbered installment).  We close the year with another arbitrary theme, movies that start with the word “The.”

The Debt (2011) – The Debt barely got any play when it came out under the radar last year, which is both a surprise and a shame, because there’s enough A-list material here – done successfully, to boot – to entertain most audiences.  Parallel narratives reveal what really happened when three Mossad agents (Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, and Marton Csokas) pursued a fugitive Nazi official (Jesper Christensen) and how the experience affected them later in life.  The older agents are portrayed by “big names” – Helen Mirren, Ciarán Hinds, and Tom Wilkinson – all of whom turn in their usual exceptional work; Mirren and Wilkinson find themselves at moral odds over the truth of their experience, with Wilkinson’s determination matching Mirren’s internal and external scars.  But it’s Chastain who gives the best performance; granted, she gets the lion’s share of the film as the younger Rachel, but her work in The Debt proves why she’s a rising star in Hollywood.  She is tough and vulnerable, holding her own against Christensen’s Dr. Vogel (who’s the smarmiest Nazi this side of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List) as a proper action heroine while also allowing the audience to see just how traumatic her encounter is.  It’s an interesting companion piece to Munich, but director John Madden wisely avoids the preachy moralizing Spielberg deployed in his 2005 Mossad movie (which, coincidentally, also co-starred Hinds).  It’s hard to believe this is the same director behind Shakespeare in Love and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, since The Debt is more intense and more severely compelling than those two (not to denigrate either, of course), smartly playing on the relationship of past to present while brilliantly leading the audience to several premature conclusions.  In short, The Debt is overwhelmingly underrated.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) – After 12 Angry Men, I’ll follow Henry Fonda into any movie, particularly with the expectation that he’ll be playing a character of similar moral fiber (Juror #8 is, after all, one of cinema’s best good guys) – even if I’m not the world’s biggest devotee of westerns.  The Ox-Bow Incident, regarded as a classic, stars Fonda as a drifter suspected of rustling before he gets enfolded into a lynch mob in pursuit of a trio of suspected murderers.  The “plausible doubt” element (familiar to us 12 Angry Men fans) is of course the central conceit of the film, as is an interrogation of the validity of vigilante justice (familiar to us Batman fans).  My father rightly pointed out that the film feels a bit like a Twilight Zone episode, and I think he’s onto something; the film is sans the supernatural, but it includes the morality play aspect and the simplistic cinematography, as well as the cast of character actors in smaller roles.  What’s disappointing is that the film feels a bit like a 22-minute story stretched into 75 minutes, repetitive at times and unfulfilling in others (as in a hasty subplot involving Fonda’s sweetheart).  Perhaps worse, Fonda is criminally underused, likely due to the size of the large supporting cast.  It’s not that the movie is bad – it just isn’t great.  And it suffers by the unfair comparison to 12 Angry Men (which I contend is a perfect film) that I held in my head the whole time I was watching The Ox-Bow Incident.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  Happy New Year, loyal readers! 

Monday at the Movies - May 14, 2012

After a brief hiatus, welcome to Week Nineteen of “Monday at the Movies.”  Between reading Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest and attending a second screening of The Avengers (still highly recommended), we’ve only got one movie on the docket today.

RED (2010) – Can it be?  A comic book movie whose source material I’ve never read?  But the premise of the film – Hollywood’s finest senior citizens (a cast of all-stars, including Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, and Brian Cox) portraying “retired” intelligence agents – was too good to resist.  And on this, my second viewing, I realized that the plot is really ancillary.  What gets these agents out of retirement is a series of assassinations which eventually finds them in the crosshairs, but very few moviegoers are going to latch onto that in the way that they’ll latch onto the character types.  Ringo Starr thought he might win an Oscar if he acted naturally, but while you won’t see any Oscar-winning performances here you will see actors playing to their strengths:  in essence, the aged Avengers.  Willis is the strong, silent type; Freeman is the jovial elder with a voice of gold; Malkovich is the nutty and unstable one; and Mirren and Cox are the romancing agents from opposite ends of the Cold War.  The chemistry – and extreme sense of fun – flies off the screen and will leave you with a big smile on your face.  It’s not the deepest spy film you’ll see all year, but it’s probably the most fun. 

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Monday at the Movies - March 5, 2012

Welcome to Week Ten of “Monday at the Movies.” While I had never intended this series to be themed each week, it seems that it’s worked out that way so far. And so in that spirit, here are “Movies You Might Have to Watch in School!”

Persepolis (2007) – Adapted from Marjane Satrapi’s much-loved graphic novel, Persepolis is the memoiristic story of Marji’s coming of age during the events of the Iranian Revolution. The film captures the tone of the original perfectly, blending hilarious humor with profoundly moving pathos, and the unique visual style of the comic is not lost in translation to motion. There are a few interpolations – several color sequences and a delightful scene in which Grandma and Marji go to the movies to see Godzilla – which enhance the visual experience. While I haven’t watched the French language original, I can vouch for the English language track, featuring (among others) Chiara Mastroianni as Marji, Sean Penn as her father, Gena Rowlands as the wise yet witty Grandma, and Iggy Pop as the brave and heroic Uncle Anoosh. While there are moments when Penn seems to be phoning it in, Rowlands and Iggy Pop are perfect choices, as is Amethyste Frezignac, who voices young Marji with just the right amount of joie de vivre. The story is deeply affecting, nuanced without reducing the story to an endorsement or rejection of the Revolution, and it hits the audience on several important emotional levels – humor, tragedy, sympathy, love. The film lost “Best Animated Feature” to Ratatouille, but in this case I’m not convinced that Pixar made the better film that year (as much as I love Ratatouille and the idea of a red-headed protagonist).

The Tempest (2010) – If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s Shakespeare at the movies, and this film had enough to lure my butt to a seat: director Julie Taymor at the helm (I loved Across the Universe and especially her other Shakespeare flick, Titus, with Anthony Hopkins), striking visuals, great source material, and an intriguing gender reversal with Helen Mirren as Prospera in place of old wizard Prospero. I love Titus and could watch it many times over, but I’m less impressed with The Tempest; it’s a perfectly adequate adaptation, but it seems to rely too much on the Prospera gimmick without doing anything inventive with the rest of the material – especially when it comes to the setting, which is lifeless and uninspiring. It’s a classic case of “nothing wrong” – even Russell Brand as one of the drunken clowns (with Alfred Molina) isn’t irritating or offensive. Perhaps worse, the film doesn’t weigh in at all on the Caliban controversy, arguably the current focal point of the play’s cultural significance. While I admit to being bored to tears with postcolonial readings of this play in particular (there seem to be other things going on, as well), the fact that Taymor almost ignores Caliban, especially when Djimon Hounsou is doing such fascinating work. But she handles the comic scenes well, with sufficient clowning in abundance, although the effect is that one wishes more for a “Stefano and Trinculo” sitcom than for the rest of this adaptation.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!