Monster March: The Invisible Man (1933)

Monster March gallops on with See-Thru Thursday, and The Invisible Man is something unique in the Universal Monsters pantheon. He’s not a creature or a supernatural being, nor does he have a lair, a costume, or even a particularly distinctive physical feature (aside, perhaps, from his bandages). What he does have on his side, however, is horror legend James Whale, a surprisingly nimble special effects crew, and a shockingly violent debut film.

Covered head to toe in bandages and overcoat, Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) takes up a room at the Lion’s Head tavern, where his innkeepers discover that their new lodger is actually an invisible man. Griffin flees, abandoning his scientific work to reverse his invisibility, and sets about seeking revenge instead – particularly on fellow scientist Arthur Kemp (William Harrigan).

 

The Invisible Man has the unique honor of being the fifth and final Universal Monsters film to be released before the Hays Code was enforced, beginning in 1934. (We’ll see next Friday whether the Hays Code had much effect on the first monster sequel, 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein.) Among its monstrous predecessors, The Invisible Man is by far the most violent. Frankenstein may have it beat for gruesome subject material, but The Invisible Man, while not overtly gory, is garish and unflinching in its brutality. Within the body of the film, Griffin bludgeons a policeman to death, derails a train, and murders a man by driving his car off a cliff – and all of this is shown in clear detail on the screen! Moreover, each sequence is scored by the gleeful laughter and grim humor of the titular Invisible Man, juxtaposing terror with sardonic cheer to brilliant horrific effect. Where each preceding monster had some redeeming quality about him, the Invisible Man revels in the violence he’s all too happy to wreak.

 

So very much of The Invisible Man works because of Claude Rains’s go-for-broke vocal performance. Selected for the role after Boris Karloff’s contractual pay fell through, Rains was evidently a favored choice for Whale because of his crisp delivery, and in terms of elocution Rains is a champion. More victorious, though, is the way Rains is able to fluctuate between cold rationality and mad misanthropy, hooting and cackling as he goes. It’s no wonder that Mark Hamill has admitted he drew a great deal of inspiration for his Joker voice, making this performance a bit of a Rosetta Stone for Hamill’s Batman work. Completely unseen until the literal final frame of the film, Rains is nevertheless commanding, compelling you to hang on his every word. It’s a shame, then, that Rains, like Lugosi, would never truly return to the role, though Rains enjoyed a much more extensive career in Hollywood than Lugosi ever did.

 

It’s a good thing Rains is so first-class as Dr. Griffin, because the rest of the cast is serviceable at best. Gloria Stuart has a role that amounts to an extended cameo as Griffin’s fiancée Flora, who nominally incites the action of the film by announcing her paramour’s disappearance but never fully selling her affection for him. William Harrigan, too, is largely indistinguishable as Arthur Kemp, to the point where I had legitimate difficulty picking him out of crowd scenes. Elsewhere in the film, Henry Travers puts in a memorable turn as Flora’s father, though I can’t be sure if he’s exceptional here or if I simply recognize (and will always love) him from It’s a Wonderful Life. If there is a scene-stealer in the bunch, it’s Una O’Connor, whose shrieking innkeeper is both hysteric and hysterical, hollering her way through the film’s first act. It’s certainly one of those performances that leaves you wanting more.

 

After Rains, though, the star of the film is its special effects team. Even by 2020 standards, the 1933 special effects are fairly stellar. Sure, you can see the seams and strings on a 4K television today, but nevertheless it’s effectively spooky to watch Griffin unravel his bandages to reveal the hollowness underneath. There are several sequences where one senses Whale and his crew are just showing off – as when Griffin removes his bandages and tucks himself into bed. It’s a scene that serves no real purpose in the plot other than to highlight the uncanny special effects of the day, but this sort of narrative indulgence, even in a film that’s a tight 71 minutes, can be pardoned because of how well it works. It’s all well and good to be told that Griffin is invisible, but seeing – or not seeing, as the case may be – is believing.

 

The Universal Monster movies are nominally horror films, though there is seldom anything truly horrific about them, particularly to a desensitized audience in 2021. There’s gothic drama in spades, suspense and chills, but is anyone truly terrified of Frankenstein’s monster or of vampires? (Van Helsing’s admonition, “there are such things,” notwithstanding.) Meanwhile, the Invisible Man is genuinely scary, preying on the visual nature of film to expose the purest terror in cinema – the terror of the unseen. “There is no terror in the bang,” Hitchcock famously said, “only in the anticipation of it.” Likewise, the true terror of The Invisible Man is in not seeing him, not knowing when this otherwise common murderer may wrap his unseen fingers around your throat. The only warning you’ll get is that velvety voice snapping into a snarl before your car plummets off a cliff – that’s the stuff, Bogart might say, nightmares are made of.

 

The Invisible Man is not rated. Directed by James Whale. Written by R.C. Sherriff. Based on the novel by H.G. Wells. Starring Claude Rains, Gloria Stuart, William Harrigan, Henry Travers, and Una O’Connor. 

Tune in tomorrow for Franken-Friday, with Frankenstein (1931) starring Boris Karloff and Colin Clive.

Next week for See-Thru Thursday, The Invisible Man Returns (1940), though he does and doesn’t, starring Vincent Price and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. But for bonus invisible shenanigans, Silly Sunday kicks off with Invisible Woman (1940), starring Virginia Bruce and John Barrymore.

Monster March: The Wolf Man (1941)

“Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night / May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” Half of the Universal Monsters had some sort of literary inspiration, but only The Wolf Man had his own rhyming couplet to sum up his tragic fate. It’s a clever little jingle that echoes through the film, haunting its protagonist – and the audience – until that moon shows itself and the curse manifests. Like the moon peeking out from behind the clouds, Lon Chaney Jr.’s debut as The Wolf Man proves that, after a decade of monster movies, Universal still had a few new tricks up its sleeve.

Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) returns home to Wales after the death of his brother, hoping to rekindle his relationship with his father, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains). Smitten with Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers), who runs the antique store in town, Larry squires her and her friend to a traveling group of gypsies to have their fortunes read. When one of the women is attacked by a wolf-like creature, Larry rushes to her defense but is mauled in the process. Gradually he begins to fear that the creature was a werewolf – and now he’s under the transformative spell.

 

It’s interesting to think back and reflect that the bulk of the Universal Classic Monsters were all introduced within two years – and that The Wolf Man made his debut a full decade after Dracula kicked things off in 1931. (A sixth and final, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, would not emerge until 1954.) At a time when monster sequels were starting to run stale (I’m thinking especially of The Mummy’s Hand and The Invisible Woman, which immediately preceded The Wolf Man), the introduction of the werewolf into the pantheon of monsters almost revivifies the genre. Indeed, the presence of the Wolf Man ends up serving as a kind of backdoor pilot to bring all the monsters together for the “monster mash” sub-genre – but that’s a story for later on in Monster March. Suffice it to say, though, that the advent of the Wolf Man feels a bit like the final piece of the puzzle.

 

Lon Chaney Jr.’s performance as Larry Talbot is really quite remarkable among the Universal Monsters canon because it’s the first bit of acting that feels human. We’ve had campy caricatures and stock archetypes, but I’ve never gotten the vibe that any of the performances before 1941 were of real people with natural emotions. It sounds like a low threshold – and it is – but Chaney’s Talbot is imbued with genuine humanity. He’s compassionate with his loved ones (though his pick-up skills could use a little work), and he’s compellingly fearful when he believes his life is at stake. Moreover, he’s concerned for the fate of his soul, and he evinces a deep pathos when he assumes the burden of guilt for what he’s become. Larry Talbot is almost more interesting than the Wolf Man himself, which is a definite and welcome change of pace for the genre.

 

Having said that, though, this is a Wolf Man movie, and the sequences where Talbot goes wild are the stuff of gleeful popcorn matinees. Chaney mugs for the camera, sniffing and snorting, such that his Wolf Man is almost more dog man. It’s a far cry from what we’ll see next week in Werewolf of London, with a carefully groomed wolf man; there is very little sophisticated about Talbot as the Wolf Man. It is a shame that we don’t see more of the Wolf Man in this film, though I suppose it follows the old maxim of “leave them wanting more.” Indeed, one could imagine a version of this movie that doesn’t show the Wolf Man at all, leaving room for the possibility that Talbot is merely going mad, that his lycanthropy is all in his mind.

 

The rest of the cast is engaging enough, though very few of them get much of anything to do. Claude Rains is magnificent (and, unlike in tomorrow’s film, entirely visible) as Talbot’s father, though one wonders what he might have done with a meatier role in the vein of what Anthony Hopkins achieves in the comparable role in the 2010 remake. Evelyn Ankers is suitably shrieky in the role of the distressed damsel, but I confess that many of the other supporting players – Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Patrick Knowles – I would struggle to point out in a line-up. Instead, my focus was hypnotically drawn to Bela Lugosi, who I hadn’t expected to see in a werewolf movie (though his role as Ygor in a few Franken-films is delectably wolfish), and to Maria Ouspenskaya, who quietly steals the show with a gravitas-laden performance. I’m legitimately excited to see that Ouspenskaya will be back for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man – as if that title weren’t enough to augur good things!

 

Chaney said that he regarded Talbot as “my baby.” Considering how often Universal recast or outright replaced its monsters, it’s remarkable that Chaney stayed in the role for as long as he did – which is to say, permanently, never being supplanted as Talbot. With a debut as strong as The Wolf Man, though, maybe it’s not that much of a surprise. Larry Talbot might be vulnerable to silver, but this reviewer is a sucker for cinematic gold. 

 

The Wolf Man is not rated. Directed by George Waggner. Written by Curt Siodmak. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Evelyn Ankers, Patrick Knowles, Bela Lugosi, and Maria Ouspenskaya. 

Tune in tomorrow for See-Thru Thursday, with The Invisible Man (1933) starring Claude Rains.

Next week for Wolf Man Wednesday, we’ll get a big dish of beef chow mein with Werewolf of London (1935), starring Henry Hull and Warner Oland.

 

Monster March: Dracula (1931)

Viewing Dracula is a bit like remembering a dream you might have had. I can’t recall if this was my first time sitting down to watch the film front to back, but there were moments that stood out vividly in my memory. Other parts, though, seemed strange and foreign, diversions from the Bram Stoker novel I know so well. It is, then, like the old line from Inception, a half-remembered dream – and the half you remember is very, very good.

Bela Lugosi stars as Count Dracula, the role that made him infamous and the role that he made famous. After arranging a real estate deal with the mad solicitor Renfield (Dwight Frye), Dracula travels from Transylvania to England, where he preys upon socialite Mina Seward (Helen Chandler), her fiancé John Harker (David Manners), and her physician father (Herbert Bunston), who has already enlisted the help of Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) in understanding the unscientific maladies plaguing London since the Count’s arrival.

 

It is not quite the first vampire film – that honor most likely belongs to 1922’s Nosferatu, itself the subject of a plagiarism lawsuit brought by the Stoker estate – but Dracula is certainly the archetype. I don’t think I’m overstating things to say that just about every visual impression you have of the Dracula myth starts with this Tod Browning adaptation. He’s cribbing liberally from the Stoker novel (by way of the Deane/Balderston stage adaptation, about which more in a bit), but the definitive visual stamp of Dracula gives one the acute sense of déjà vu. If you haven’t seen the Browning film, shame – but also, in a sense you always already have, because it’s become a kind of cultural shared memory. This deep primordial memory is never clearer than in the film’s riveting first act, set in Transylvania; though the film places Renfield in Castle Dracula (rather than the novel depicting Jonathan Harker’s descent therein into madness), everything else about this opening sequence is uncannily familiar – the demented carriage ride, the castle itself, Dracula’s three brides and his own hypnotic stare.

 

Indeed, if the film can be said to succeed at all, it’s because of the inspired (or perhaps cursed) casting of Bela Lugosi as the titular vampire. Lugosi would only play Dracula once more, in 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, but it was a role that haunted him and typecast him. But typecasting only really happens when one is exceptionally good at a particular role, and Lugosi is Dracula. This performance works on every level – the look, the posture, the voice, the mannerisms. Even the line “I never drink... wine” (which originates here) has become a central precept in the Dracula gospel, right down to Lugosi’s distinctive intonation. When he’s on screen, the movie is solidly arresting, almost as though Lugosi is himself hypnotizing the audience.

 

When Lugosi’s not on screen, though, unfortunately Dracula becomes a bit boring. None of the other performers is as charismatic as Lugosi, so when the script turns its attention to Dr. Seward and the London social scene, the film slows into a snooze. Similarly, where Browning’s direction is electric and moody during the Dracula scenes, the sequences without the vampire are stagy and dull, doubtless a consequence of the film’s shared DNA with the stage adaptation. The momentum of the film winds down considerably, as though the very projection reels grind to a crawl. Just about the only saving grace in this middle act is Edward Van Sloan’s turn as Van Helsing, which he plays a bit like a cross between the screen presences of Anthony Hopkins and Max Von Sydow – fiery and wise. The immediate adversarial nature established between Dracula and Van Helsing is never more riveting than when Van Helsing quickly realizes that Dracula casts no reflection, followed swiftly by Van Helsing’s modest ability to resist the Count’s hypnosis.

 

However, the push and pull between Lugosi and Van Sloan never quite takes over the third act of the film the way one might hope. Instead, the film becomes an unquestionable product of its time when it focuses on John Harker’s quest to free his beloved Mina from Dracula’s thrall. Here, Helen Chandler is suitably convincing as the possessed Mina, though David Manners is forgettably milquetoast, even for a pre-Hays Code film. Yet despite the film predating the Hays Code by more than three years, its climax is straight out of the playbook, with its focus on ensuring a happy ending for a soon-to-be-married couple, while the nefarious foreigner is dispensed with off-screen. Browning (or perhaps cinematographer Karl Freund, who is largely assumed to have taken control of the picture) stages the final shot as an ascent from Dracula’s dungeon – unfortunately, he leaves the two most interesting characters in the catacombs.

 

For what is essentially the first monster movie, Dracula is a real trailblazer, and it’s not hard to draw a straight line to nearly any other creature feature. Browning was working without a map here, but he ended up playing cartographer to an entire genre. And at the edge of the map he drew, we can faintly read the inscription, “Here be monsters...” Whether any of them could live up to Lugosi’s mantle is, perhaps, a question for the rest of Monster March.

 

Dracula is not rated. Directed by Tod Browning and Karl Freund. Written by Garrett Fort. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker, and on the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. Starring Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye, and Edward Van Sloan.

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday, with The Wolf Man (1941) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week for Transylvania Tuesday, let’s do it again but in Spanish this time, with Drácula (1931) starring Carlos Villarías and Lupita Tovar.

Monster March: The Mummy (1932)

We’re kicking off Monster March with Mummy Monday, and who better to usher in a month of monster movie reviews than Boris Karloff himself? The Mummy is a real doozy, a whopper of a horror film that goes for Golden Age restraint with equal maximums of pathos and terror, and at the center of it all is a delightful performance by Karloff.

Ten years ago, the mummified remains of the high priest Imhotep disappeared from an archaeological expedition, and the explorer Sir Joseph Whemple (Arthur Byron) renounced his work after his assistant Ralph Norton (Bramwell Fletcher) went mad. A decade later, Sir Joseph’s son Frank (David Manners) is on a dig of his own, and with the help of Ardeth Bay (Boris Karloff) he locates the unbroken tomb of Princess Anck-es-en-Amon. But when the princess’s remains are transported to the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, Ardeth Bay reveals that he is the resurrected Imhotep, and his plans to revive his beloved revolve around Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann), who may be the princess reincarnated.

 

I don’t think it’s much of a secret around these parts that I’m an inordinate fan of Stephen Sommers’s 1999 film The Mummy, which is just about one of my favorite movies of all time. (I’ll say it just about every Monday this month, for those who aren’t paying attention.) Watching the 1999 Mummy directly before this Mummy might have been a mistake if 1932’s Mummy weren’t so engaging – I was struck by how captivating the movie was, despite having next to no resemblance to the Brendan Fraser vehicle I love so much (other than a few names in common). There’s none of the action/adventure swagger or sense of humor that hooked me in 1999; instead, what we get is a kind of mystical Romeo & Juliet, draped in Egyptian finery and laden with magical menace.

 

We’ll never be able to review a monster movie without turning to the creature at its center, and Karloff is divine as The Mummy. He’s only in rags for the first act of the film, where makeup artist Jack Pierce is the undisputed star of the film. This prologue, in which Imhotep is resurrected by Ralph Norton (no Honeymooners jokes, please), is the perfect tee-up for the film, loading it with dread right at the top as The Mummy lumbers away into the night. The next time we see Karloff, his skin looks like wizened parchment, and his hulking shuffle tells us straightaway that Ardeth Bay is barely among the living. Karloff’s voice, too, gives us the sense of the long-dead, a low roar coming from an expressionless visage. But there is a fire in his eyes (only occasionally literally), and we get the distinct impression just from his presence that he’s not to be taken lightly.

 

As with any monster movie, the supporting cast in a film like The Mummy is largely negligible. A mere year after his star-making turn in Frankenstein, Karloff was surely the box-office draw. Yet the cast of The Mummy is pleasantly up to the task of supporting Karloff, particularly Zita Johann, who’s given the generally-thankless role of “damsel in distress.” In the moments when she contemplates her own mortality, though, Johann is triumphantly terrified, and her reaction to being reincarnated is pretty compelling stuff (doubtless helped by Johann’s own belief in past lives). Elsewhere, Bramwell Fletcher practically steals the show in his one scene, in which he’s driven mad by witnessing The Mummy’s resurrection; it’s a classic example of “This isn’t going to go well” as the scene unfolds, the audience waiting on tenterhooks for the inevitable, and Fletcher’s manic giggle is the perfect punchline. And Edward Van Sloan, who’s fast becoming one of my favorite faces in the Universal Monsters canon, turns up to do another variation on his “man of science” routine from Dracula – this time, however, he’s the only character to admit that a resurrected mummy isn’t such a ridiculous proposition, and his particular brand of gravitas renders the absurd eminently plausible.

 

One thing to appreciate about these early monster movies is that they’re extremely lean, economical not just in terms of budget but in their approach to storytelling, as well. At 73 minutes, The Mummy doesn’t waste any time. It doesn’t try to fool you into thinking Ardeth Bay might not be The Mummy, nor does it bother to explain the magic behind his scrying pool or the resurrection ritual he’s plotting. In this way, The Mummy is deliciously refreshing – “just go with it,” the movie requests, and the result is that you see a language being built, establishing the iconography for every mummy film to follow.

 

It helps that this Mummy is fun in a different way; where my beloved 1999 Mummy is self-reflexive and gleefully camp, this Mummy is deadly serious about its own hokum. The result is that the film washes over you like a tidal wave of superstition and becomes very nearly scary in its intimation that there is a whole cosmology – not just a singular creature – beyond our understanding, so when the ending comes quite literally as a deus ex machina, it doesn’t feel like a storytelling cheat. Rather, it’s a fulfillment of Van Sloan’s warning at the top of the film to take curses seriously – in effect, it’s Chekhov’s Curse. Or in storytelling terms, don’t put a sarcophagus in your film unless it’s going to be opened, and don’t mention a curse if it won’t be levied against some unwitting fool.

 

The Mummy is not rated. Directed by Karl Freund. Written by John L. Balderston. Based on a story by Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer. Starring Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners, Edward Van Sloan, Arthur Byron, and Bramwell Fletcher.

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi.

Next week for Mummy Monday, behold the horror of The Mummy’s Hand (1940), starring Tom Tyler and Dick Foran.

Coming Soon to The Cinema King...

“It is one of the strangest tales ever told. It deals with the two great mysteries of creation: life and death. I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you. So, if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now’s your chance to uh, well––we warned you…”

Tomorrow, we begin a marathon of reviews. Each day in March, The Cinema King will be looking at an early – if not the very first – cinematic universe. It’s not Star Wars or The Avengers, though its inhabitants are just as colorful. It’s not Alien or Predator, but you wouldn’t have those series without the dangers of… the Universal Classic Monsters. Stay tuned for thirty reviews in thirty-one days as we linger in the graveyards and haunt the mausoleums for… Monster March.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

Whatever the anthesis of “cynical” might be – earnest, genuine, or just plain optimistic – Wonder Woman 1984 is that. It’s a bit less prestige than its first-rate predecessor, using the 1980s as lavish set decoration rather than World War I as historical fiction, but it’s no less engaging, even as it goes for broke in the direction of a bit more silly. Indeed, WW84 is possessing of the kind of idiosyncratic confidence that comes when a filmmaker like Patty Jenkins has made the film she truly wants to make, rather than bow to studio meddling (as we have since learned happened in Wonder Woman’s climactic third act).

It’s 1984, and Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) has made her way to Washington, D.C., where her job at the Smithsonian brings her into contact with the Dreamstone, a veritable monkey’s paw that grants a wish to anyone who wields it. In ways you might and might not expect, the Dreamstone entangles Diana’s coworker Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), infomercial huckster Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), and Diana’s late lover Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), giving lie to the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for...”

 

I truly loved WW84, breathlessly exclaiming once or twice, “That’s terrific.” I’m aware that not everyone did love it – its fortunes are in decline over on Rotten Tomatoes, for one – and I can’t speculate as to whether the streaming service simulcast does WW84 a disservice, whether the spectacle plays better on a more impressive theater setup. (The Cinema King has no complaints on that front.) What I can say is that I was captivated by the film’s earnest whimsy, its confident suspension of disbelief, and its certainty in its own moral position. There is not much hemming and hawing over the right thing to do, and there is seldom any question that Diana has the strength to do it. Nor is there much self-reflexivity or embarrassment about the inherent silliness of the MacGuffin and the source material, and for that I’m eternally grateful. I’ve long since grown bored with comic book movies that have to point a mocking finger at the comic books. Of course they’re silly; all of this is silly, and yet Jenkins and Gadot are having a blast with it.

 

At its peak, WW84 reminds one of Richard Donner’s Superman movies, leavened with a bit of Indiana Jones, none of it too worried about how the film fits into a larger cinematic universe. As much as I’m a fan of the Zack Snyder DC Extended Universe – and as breathless as I am for Zack Snyder’s Justice League (now rumored for March 2021) – there is something delightfully un-corporate about WW84, by which I mean the film is largely unconcerned with setting up sequels or homaging past films. It’s very much its own thing, content merely to deliver up the continuing adventures of Diana Prince. In fact, the film buckles a bit when it gestures toward Snyder’s “Wonder Woman walked away” metanarrative, as when Diana takes care to dismantle security cameras. It’s a quick perfunctory note, and one senses that Jenkins dispenses with it as quickly as she can at the top of the film because she has her own things to say about Diana.

 

Of course, none of WW84 would work if Gal Gadot weren’t an inspired vision as Wonder Woman. She plays the character with such sincerity that you believe she stepped out of a comic book and onto the silver screen. She continues the bravura work she began in Batman v Superman with the full emotional range we saw in Wonder Woman; Diana Prince can believably swing from dread and resolve into elation over the existence of ice cream. Pedro Pascal, who’s done so much with only his voice over on The Mandalorian, makes a veritable three-course meal out of the scenery as a surprisingly topical Max Lord, while Kristen Wiig’s Barbara Minerva is the sort of antagonist you’d love to see recur in the franchise.

 

I’ve seen a lot of reviews talk about WW84 as exactly the kind of movie we need to clear the cobwebs from this wretched year. I don’t know that I’d take it quite that far – it’s not a perfect movie, but it is a breezy confident romp that does justice to its inspirational main character while not shortchanging an audience who’s coming for thrills and good cheer. For moviegoers who demanded that Zack Snyder’s DC universe lighten up, be careful what you wish for – bright colors and super-camp and parachute pants abound. For me, it’s almost as if Wonder Woman stepped into Zack Snyder’s Watchmen with a smile, and it’s hard to imagine a movie that could be more up my alley than that one.

 

Wonder Woman 1984 is rated PG-13 for “sequences of action and violence.” Directed by Patty Jenkins. Written by Patty Jenkins, Geoff Johns, and Dave Callaham. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal, Robin Wright, Connie Nielsen, and Lilly Aspell.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

When The Last Jedi came out two years ago, I observed of its theme (but for whatever reason did not say so in my review) that it seemed to be the story of “looking for hope in Alderaan places.” The film had been a tale of failures, of misplaced hope and crushing defeats, but it also ended up reaffirming that the Resistance’s true hope lay in the princess of Alderaan and her brother in exile, and the legacy they were building for the next generation. In the follow-up, The Rise of Skywalker, that legacy comes to bear in unexpected ways, crowd-pleasing and recontextualizing for an emotionally successful finale to this Sequel Trilogy and the Skywalker Saga writ large.

(As ever, there won’t be spoilers here; even the major reveal, divulged in the film’s opening crawl, is a sacred mystery in this review.)

After narrowly escaping The Last Jedi with their lives, agents of the Resistance are on the run from the First Order, gathering what few allies they can find in a galaxy that’s given up. While Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) marshals the forces of the First Order, Rey, Finn, and Poe (Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac) head into the unknown in search of a way to prevent the complete obliteration of the Resistance, meeting new friends and old while Rey decides, once and for all, what her destiny will be.

So much exhausting ink is being spilled about whether or not The Rise of Skywalker “betrays” The Last Jedi by walking back or diminishing certain aspects of the film, whether or not this film “ruins” Star Wars or if returning director J.J. Abrams hates predecessor Rian Johnson. All of this is to say that no one hates Star Wars more than Star Wars fans, especially that vexing vocal minority monopolizing internet chatter. In the case of The Rise of Skywalker, I found myself strongly reminded of Return of the Jedi, itself a capper to a trilogy and an ostensible end to a story. Both films play it a little safer than their edgier forebearers, but both make up for that decrease in originality by dialing up the emotional resonance. Where Return of the Jedi reunited its heroic trinity for one last mission, Rise of Skywalker gives us Rey, Finn, and Poe properly together for the first time, having kept them apart for much of the preceding two films. It’s a real joy to see these three side by side, and their interactions carry the weight of all the adventures we didn’t get to see between films.

Critics have lamented the way the film is perhaps overfilled with setpieces, characters, and side quests, to which I have to say, I hope they enjoyed their first Star Wars film – because this is a franchise that has always been overfull of bits, fodder for imagination and tie-in media alike. True, Rise of Skywalker begins with its foot on the gas and never quite lets up, but as the third film in a trilogy there’s not a lot of time for much else, especially when the stakes are as dire as they are here. In fact, however, there’s a beat near the end of the second act where the plot does slow down, and it’s one of the most emotionally resonant corners of the film.

I was disappointed to find my audience so quiet during the film because there are a number of moments where you want to pump your fists and cheer. (The biggest laugh seemed to be who gets the line, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”) Perhaps audiences have been down this road so many times since 2015 – where, recall, the Milennium Falcon’s appearance got a big cheer – but suffice it to say I was charmed and cheered by more than a few sequences, including, and this is not a spoiler, a silent cameo from the Maestro himself, John Williams. Speaking of Williams, it’s his grand finale, too, and there are only so many ways to praise a man with more than 50 Academy Award nominations; he’s got an impressive body of work on which to draw, and he does so in ways that are breathtaking. I sense, however, that J.J. Abrams is still less comfortable with an orchestral score than Rian Johnson was, so I’m eager to see the film again after getting more familiar with the score (which remains, incidentally, my favorite component of any Star Wars material, period).

In the way that Return of the Jedi was an ending that gestured at a beginning, Rise of Skywalker is the final act in a nine-piece story, with plenty of space for what happens next, but it’s also acutely aware that there are things it needs to resolve. Leavened with the usual amount of space nonsense – which I love – the film cobbles macguffins together to get us to a sequence that orbits around Chekhov’s gun while wrapping up one of the Sequel Trilogy’s most potent emotional questions, and my only complaint is that it does so in a way that makes me want a whole movie or two of just thatcomponent. But taken as part three of three (and I feel I must be terribly vague here) the impossibility of continuation is perhaps for the best, as it needs first to resolve an entire arc, not establish a new one. That’s what the toys are for, folks.

As with nearly any film, there are moments I would have done differently. I’d have liked to see a few returning faces have a few more scenes, but there isn’t really anything to trim to make room for that. (In a post-Endgame world, though, I’d have been up for a three-hour space opera!) But in a world where toxic fandom demands that a piece of art conform to every single expectation, where the villains of the story are the ones who insist on rewriting history to accede to their vision for the galaxy, I find it’s much healthier to review the film we actually got instead of the one I might have made. And the Rise of Skywalker before us is pretty swell.

Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi violence and action.” Directed by J.J. Abrams. Written by Chris Terrio, J.J. Abrams, Derek Connolly, and Colin Trevorrow. Starring Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, and Anthony Daniels. (And a few more!)

Joker (2019)

I wasn’t going to review Joker. As you can probably tell from the infrequent updates here, I’ve been taking a little hiatus from movie reviews to recharge, focusing on other creative projects while waiting for the right film to spark up my reviewing energies again. But I can’t get Joker out of my head – nor, it seems, are media outlets interested in letting this movie just get away. On the one hand, you’ve got ardent comics fans who are beating the drum and hard for this movie; on the other, you’ve got the media at large trying distressingly to will into existence a mass shooting in this film’s name. Then again, the movie seems to anticipate and decry the media’s bloodthirsty and misguided reaction… all of which makes me wonder how certain I am that as movies go Joker is, well, just fine.

Joker is part Batman prequel, part Taxi Driver remake, leavened with The King of Comedy and flame-broiled by an incendiary performance courtesy of Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix stars as Arthur Fleck, a sad clown-for-hire with a bevy of psychological problems and a handful of pills whose prescriptions are about to run out. He’s the caregiver for his addled mother (Frances Conroy); he’s carrying a torch for Sophie (Zazie Beetz) down the hall; and he never misses a late-night episode of Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). But Gotham City circa the 1980s is a pressure cooker of decadence and madness, and it’s about to boil over.

But is it? And is he? Or did he…? One of the central tenets of The Joker is that he’s an inscrutable cipher, a man without an identity or an origin. “If I’m going to have a past,” Joker says in Moore & Bolland’s Killing Joke, “I prefer it to be multiple choice!” (Bolland gets a “special thanks” credit, and if Moore didn’t hate movie adaptations he probably would have, too.) Without giving away too much of the game in Joker, director Todd Phillips is very careful to intimate (and at one point outright declare) that Arthur Fleck is an unreliable narrator. For any of my grievances about the film, I have to give Phillips a strong pat on the back for circumventing the certainty that would have run this film counter to The Joker’s innate unknowability; indeed, the one moment where Phillips baldly explains that a thing we saw happen did, in fact, not happen is one of the film’s major missteps, assuming the audience is not clever enough to understand that what Arthur sees isn’t always what’s real.

Joker has been surrounded and very nearly drowned in a morass of “hot takes” and cultural extrapolations that wonder if the film is “bad for society” or “dangerous.” And the truth of the matter is, Joker is nowhere near dynamic enough to merit such extensive commentary. It is, in a word, fine, elevated by Phoenix’s bravura performance as the man who would be clown prince. Phoenix is stratospheric as Arthur Fleck, manic depressive and skeletal with a painful persistent laugh that nags at him like a hiccup. Wholly void of mirth, Arthur’s laugh is, like its owner, a shell of humanity, an empty imitation of glee. He’s trying to fit in, trying to find joy, but the world beats him down again and again. It is in this sense that Joker is a kind of four-color Taxi Driver, and if you’ve seen the preceding film you’ve seen much of what makes this Joker tick. (Perhaps I would have loved Joker if I didn’t already love Scorsese.)

The comparison to Taxi Driver explains and simultaneously deflates the hogwash claim that the movie is sympathetic to the kind of lunacy the media has feared this film will inspire because – and this is key – presentation is not sanction. Or, as Mark Kermode so eloquently puts it, “He’s not sympathetic; he’s pitiful.” It would take a very special and deliberate misreading of the film to find unchallenged sympathy for The Joker in this film. Again, Phillips is quite deliberate about deflating Arthur’s own notions about himself, about unbalancing the audience just when it thinks it understands him. In that sense it’s a surprisingly smart and nuanced film, coming from the director of the hilarious but hardly erudite Hangover, whose sequels were the very definition of diminishing returns. 

In another sense, though, the film is brutally one-note, single-minded in its relentless bleak worldview. Its gags (if one can call them that) are telegraphed loud and clear, with all the subtlety of an oncoming train. This brutal directness works to the film’s advantage in a climactic third-act sequence, which works like a perfectly tense setpiece, though the film doesn’t quite build to the scene in a unified manner. Throughout the film, everything is terrible, no one is trustworthy, and hope – so key to what I love about comics and the superhero genre – is nowhere to be found. Batman, too, is just out of reach, though the sidelong glances Phillips throws his way are among the more interesting pivots from conventional mythology, interesting precisely (though perhaps only) because they are pivots. In a genre that is constantly imperiled by sameness, persistently in danger of being “note-d” to death by bonebrained studio heads, I’ll always be a champion of the peculiar, of the different, of the unique, though I find I can’t quite muster up the enthusiasm for Joker in the same way that I did and continue to do for Batman v Superman. Where the latter is positively bursting with ideas, doomed like Icarus never to see its full potential met, Joker contains only about one or two – intriguing ideas, no doubt, but hardly enough to merit the vociferous condemnation of those who haven’t even seen the film.

Ultimately, I think Joker ends up as a cipher, a bit like its titular character. It means what you bring to it, and it doesn’t quite challenge any of those notions – except, I maintain, that we are meant to sympathize with Arthur Fleck. In true noir fashion, every scene is told from Arthur’s perspective, so even in those moments where you might feel sympathy, you must recognize that it’s because the story has been filtered through a teller who is (perhaps willfully) unstable. If you want to read this as an “eat the rich” Occupy fable or a prayer for mental health care or an argument on one or the other side of the gun debate, Joker gives you a coil of rope but doesn’t commit enough to hang you with it. Put another way, Joker is only ever really dedicated to showcasing Joaquin Phoenix’s idiosyncratic madman, and in that regard it’s the only place where the film unapologetically succeeds. 

Anyone who has a passing familiarity with my review style and my tastes in pop culture should know that I would love nothing more than to love this movie. I should probably see it again to make sure I’m confident in my take on the movie, but I’m not in a particular rush to see it again. It was fine.

Joker is rated R for “strong bloody violence, disturbing behavior, language and brief sexual images.” Directed by Todd Phillips. Written by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, and Brett Cullen.

Monday at the Movies - July 1, 2019

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, and there have been a good number of summer blockbusters since. So, let’s do this one more time.

Shazam! (2019) – DC has had a rocky road to a shared universe, never quite managing to find its crowdpleasing niche until solo outings for, of all people, Wonder Woman and Aquaman. With Shazam! DC is starting to recognize that its characters fare best when handled in standalone adventures that play to the characters’ strengths. Here, it’s Billy Batson (Asher Angel) with a chip on his shoulder, learning that family is where you find it, while his magical-heroic alter ego (Zachary Levi) plays out a superpowered take on Big and fending off attacks from the Seven Deadly Sins. It’s quite fun and a fine double-feature with, ahem, the other Captain Marvel this spring, and director David F. Sandberg does a keen job straddling the line between the boisterous antics of Shazam and the genuinely scary menace of Mark Strong’s Dr. Sivana, striking a notable balance between competing tones in a demi-franchise that has drawn audience derision for seldom transcending the dire. (As for this filmgoer, why can’t we have both?) You know that I think Batman v Superman remains the gold standard for DC’s latest efforts, but Shazam! is roughly the third winner in a row for DC (because the less said about Frankenstein’s Justice League, the better). And for those who haven’t seen it yet, it’s truly remarkable that a third-act development wasn’t spoiled in the marketing – even though the comics-initiated among us anticipated it coming in a sequel or two, it was great fun to see the film play with its family dynamic in a bold and inventive way.

Avengers: Endgame (2019) – How do you review a masterpiece in 250 words? (You’d need, perhaps, 3,000 to do it justice.) Make no mistake, true believers – Endgame is an impossible film that shouldn’t work at all but manages to work perhaps the best of any Marvel movie at what it sets out to do. Here’s a three-hour film with no baggy weight that manages to tie together 21 preceding films while doing something new; its greatest-hits nostalgia tour is baked seamlessly into the narrative, but it advances the Marvel Cinematic Universe by leaps and bounds while setting a daunting precedent for whatever comes next. The movie is chock-full of things that, even if I spoiled them, you wouldn’t believe me, as when the film hard-180s within its first fifteen minutes by breaking a cardinal rule of superhero epics and then manages to deal with that game-changing plot point with enviable aplomb, both having its cake and eating it too. Recency bias is still pretty strong with this one, so I’m not quite ready to say if it’s the best of the 22 MCU movies just yet (Winter Soldier remains a perfect movie). But I think it’s handily the best of the four Avengers movies for its audacious scope, unreasonable challenge, and entirely confident triumph. How a three-hour film leaves you wanting more is beyond me, so hats off to Anthony and Joe Russo for turning in what very well might be Marvel’s finest hour(s). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and if you’re anything like the two audiences with whom I saw this one, you’ll be outright sobbing in equal parts sorrow and jubilation. “Part of the journey is the end,” indeed, though I’ll expect you haven’t heard the last from me on Endgame.

Dark Phoenix (2019) – I said it with Venom, and I’ll say it with Dark Phoenix – this movie is fine. It’s a perfectly serviceable X-Men film, and since it’s ostensibly the last one for a while, some of its more compulsory plot beats can be forgiven. In the title role, Sophie Turner slays it as Jean Grey, and Hans Zimmer turns in a great score that sounds like Dark Knight had a baby with Interstellar. It’s probably not as epic as the source material (which, nerd confession time, I’m only just getting around to reading), and the villains led by Jessica Chastain are the very definition of undercooked. More noticeable, Magneto is really only there because it’s the last X-movie from Fox (though his best line, from the trailer, is sadly omitted – “You didn’t come here looking for answers. You came here looking for permission”). But there’s something to be said about the way this movie shows the X-Men at their peak, emphasizing their family dynamics. The film’s action, too, is pretty cool, especially that climactic train sequence. Most importantly, it’s light-years better than The Last Stand. So maybe the X-Men didn’t go out on their highest note (which is, I believe, still X2: X-Men United?), but it’s a perfectly fine capper to twenty years of X-movies, and it seals off this iteration just in time for the MCU to adopt the mutants into their new home. In short, it does just about what you’d expect an X-Men movie to do, and it does it better than some of its predecessors without feeling too much like a retread of familiar ground.

Men in Black: International (2019) – Mark Kermode took the word right out of my mouth when he said that the latest Men in Black film is “perfunctory.” The premise of an MiB reboot with Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson (late of Thor: Ragnarok), with Emma Thompson and Liam Neeson on either side of the pond, practically sells itself, and indeed it seems the film was sold primarily on the chemistry between its two leads. What the movie is lacking, however, is precisely character because its protagonists are sadly underwritten, its villains are maddeningly vague, and its structure is bizarrely shambolic as it careens from setpiece to setpiece. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t need a Men in Black film to be Shakespearean in its plotting, but I do prefer that it make a modicum of sense without leaning on attitude as a special effect. (Though if it does, the ever-watchable Tessa Thompson is ILM-levels of sassy.) It feels as though the studio is rolling the franchise out on a lunch tray, as if to say, “Want some more of this?” And in that respect the possibility is about as tantalizing as mystery meat casserole – perfectly edible, but hardly anyone’s first choice. Several times throughout the film, I found myself wishing I were watching the original Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones vehicle. International gestures at an intriguing sideways take on the central conceit, but man oh Manischewitz did the script need another pass to make it anything but generic and forgettable.

Toy Story 4 (2019) – “Did we need a fourth one of these?” I asked myself when Toy Story 4 was announced. Hadn’t Toy Story 3 been a perfect capper to a perfect trilogy? (This has to be the last one, though, right?) And yet, as they usually do, Pixar found a way to surprise me, with 4 tying up 3’s loose end with the absence of Bo Peep (Annie Potts). Bo ends up being only one of the core ideas in 4, including also Woody (Tom Hanks) and his struggle to fit in with new kid Bonnie, while the playroom crowd grapples with the creation of Forky (Tony Hale), Bonnie’s new toy molded from garbage. I think your mileage on this film will depend very much on how much you indulge the movie’s central premise that there’s another story to be wrung from this universe; I myself was sold fairly quickly, particularly with the way Forky – omnipresent in marketing and toy aisles – allows the film to do something quite unique while giving us a fascinating angle into Woody’s psyche. And yes, 4 is well and truly Woody’s show, even more than Toy Story 2 was. It’s a bit of a shame, because we love all the other toys so very much, but it’s very challenging to imagine, for example, what more Rex or Mister Pricklepants could have done in the movie. It’s a thoughtful and engaging romp through the standard Toy Story plot – toys get separated and find their way back together after meeting shady toys and new friends like Duke Caboom (Keanu “Yes He Canada” Reeves) – but it’s as emotional and essential as the preceding installments. 

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” This was fun; we should do this again some time...

Captain Marvel (2019)

Twenty-one movies in, the Marvel Cinematic Universe makes winning look effortless. As its original crop of Avengers begins to rotate out (so we assume), Marvel’s been marching toward Avengers: Endgame with the dually unenviable tasks of wrapping up a decade’s worth of stories while seeding another decade’s. With Captain Marvel, the franchise tries so many new things that it’s a wonder the film seems so comfortable, with its star Brie Larson feeling right at home as the hero who’s always already been woven into the Marvel tapestry.

Circa 1995, the Kree warrior Vers (Larson) crashlands on Earth, where she’s met by rising SHIELD agent Nicholas Fury (a de-aged Samuel L. Jackson). Fury is understandably baffled by her stories of intergalactic war and an invading army of Skrull shapeshifters, but it’s Vers who finds herself jumbled by impossible memories of a life on earth. As her commanding officer (Jude Law) sets out to rescue his protégé, the Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) searches earth for a device that will turn the tide in his peoples’ war against the Kree.

It used to be that the phrase “comic booky” was thrown around derisively, to cast the aspersion that a film emulated the gaudiest, most puerile impulses of the medium. Now, however, I’m comfortable saying that Captain Marvel is the best kind of “comic booky” movie, in the sense that it packs in an expansive mythology, replete with nods forward and backward to the MCU’s continuity (Djimon Hounsou and Lee Pace reprise – or is it preprise? – their roles as Korath and Ronan from Guardians of the Galaxy). It’s also delightfully comic booky in its use of the cinematic screen as a comics frame, with visual images overlapping and echoing in a way that reminds me of how well Zack Snyder mastered the technique in Watchmen; directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck manage to communicate almost exclusively visually, as in the myriad ways they use, for example, the color of blood to indicate chronology, revelation, and memory. 

Moreover, Captain Marvel is exceedingly comic booky for its willingness to reinvent what came before. I won’t spoil any of the film’s big twists, but suffice it to say that the movie’s Captain Marvel does not have the same secret origin as she does in the comics, largely because the comics are as tangled, refracted, and impenetrable as the stereotypes portend. In streamlining and refashioning, though, this Captain Marvel’s origin echoes all the versions from the comics and repurposes the story into something new and potent, something that works for this character and for the trajectory of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With its mid-90s setting, the film does fascinating work fitting into this long-running story, particularly with young agents Nick Fury and Phil Coulson.

But the film is rightfully Brie Larson’s, and she is far and away dynamite as the woman who would be Captain Marvel. Her performance is being compared to Gal Gadot’s in Wonder Woman or to Chadwick Boseman’s in Black Panther, but I think she’s much closer to Chris Evans in Captain America: The Winter Soldier – coming into herself with ease and a grin, effortlessly comfortable with herself and her friends even as her world is changing seismically around her. She’s funny, she’s confident, and she’s able to sell the trust and intimacy that comes with the kind of deep friendship she forms with Fury and others. It’s the kind of performance that can carry a franchise quite readily, and I for one am ready for Captain Marvel 2 (Kree Boogaloo?).

Special shout-out section: Samuel L. Jackson is a blast as a young Nick Fury. We get to see shades of the hardline Director Fury, but his youth and inexperience lets some of the Sam Jackson charm trickle in, and we never tire of seeing him cozy up with Goose the cat. Ben Mendelsohn is buckets of fun as Talos, who’s got more personality than a lot of unmemorable Marvel villains; Mendelsohn’s play with accents and his dexterous hand at manipulating his Skrull prosthetics make me hope that if/when the Skrulls do return, Mendelsohn will pop back into the MCU. Finally, much has been made of the fact that Pinar Toprak is the MCU’s first female composer, and she turns in a pretty exciting score. The music has often been a sticking point for Marvel, who are usually criticized for bland forgettable scores, but I’ve loved most of them and hope to hear more from Toprak in the future. Like Larson, she fits right in.

The Winter Soldier remains the gold standard for me, but Captain Marvel continues very nicely the easy-winning streak of debut films like Doctor Strange and Black Panther. It’s a movie with plenty of surprises, for newcomers and true believers alike, and it clicks into place with the delicate precision of the best comic book “retcons,” asking us to look back at the past and wonder if it really happened the way we think it did. At one point in the credits, we’re promised “Captain Marvel will return” – though where precisely, I shan’t spoil – as if we had any doubt that Marvel’s latest gamble would have a long-running payoff. Marvel has been on a real winning streak, and for a character whose namesake is, in a way, the very studio that’s introducing her, Captain Marvel is another success.

Captain Marvel is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and brief suggestive language.” Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Written by Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Nicole Perlman, and Meg LeFauve. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee, Gene Colan, Roy Thomas, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and David López. Starring Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Lashana Lynch, Annette Bening, Clark Gregg, and Jude Law.