Okja

Bong Joon Ho's Okja filled me with ambivalence. I have respect for Bong's craft, but felt this was little more than a live action remake of a Miyazaki film: Spirited Away with My Genetically Altered Neighbor Totoro. Miyazaki's films are critiques of the elite as is Bong's previous feature, Snowpiercer. Tilda Swinton is on hand in Okja, as in Snowpiercer, to reprise her parody of Mrs. Thatcher, albeit in American guise this time. 

She is excellent, performing with a knowing bravura that is choice ham and zesty burlesque. Bong also gets nice performances from Paul Dano and Hee-Bong Byun, but such interesting performers as Giancarlo Esposito and Shirley Henderson are left with little to do. Jake Gyllenhaal is deplorably giddy and giggly, making one think that Bong left his thesps to their own devices. 

Okja is beautifully designed, shot, and costumed film that suffers from a second rate premise. We know that our young heroine will rescue her genetically modified porcine friend, but when she does, Okja's fellow prisoners in the giant slaughterhouse are left to their fate. Okja frolics with her young friend in a verdant natural setting and while this will surely please young viewers, their elders would be justified in viewing it as a sop. 

Bong cannot reconcile the ambivalent nature of this film: one half gentle children's fantasy, the other half a dystopian nightmare that features slaughterhouse footage and genetic pig on genetic pig rape. Black comedy seems to be Bong's forte, but he cannot quite reconcile with Okja's sap. I would rate this slightly above The Host, but below Snowpiercer, much less Memories of Murder or Mother. (6/24/22)

Humor Me

Jemaine Clement and Elliott Gould in Humor Me

Sam Hoffman's Humor Me was released, briefly, in 2018 to minimal box office. What little critical response it gathered was mixed. I saw it on TUBI, the crippled step-child of streaming services. I do have a small place in my heart for crippled step-children, TUBI and, subsequently, Humor Me. The film breaks no new ground, especially visually, but it is a pleasant kvetch leavened with schtick.

An expansion of Hoffman's show, "Old Jews Telling Jokes", the film is utterly predictable. Jemaine Clement plays a stunted playwright dealing with the fallout of an unexpected divorce. He is forced to seek the shelter of his father's house in a senior community monikered "Cranberry Bog". The jokes write themselves. There is power walking, seniors going to pot, and an octogenarian puts the make on Clement. A ramshackle production number from The Mikado suddenly turns magical in the last reel and there is a brush with death, happily averted.  

Gould plays Clément's dad. He uses humor to deflect questions that provoke his fears and anxieties. Black and white interludes illustrate his lengthy jokes. Joey Slotnick, forever fated to be a second banana, is wonderful as "Zimmerman", the perpetual protagonist of the gags. These joke sequences suggest not only alternate worlds to the drab reality of "Cranberry Bog", but different perspectives from which to view the calamities of life. 

What won me over to Humor Me, despite it formulaic nature, was the warmth and dexterity of its (well) cast. Elliott Gould was born to play an old Jew. Annie Potts is a delicious Yum-Yum. Clement is too ugly and inert to be a popular leading man, but he is expert at playing off his fellow actors. He establishes an easy rapport with both Gould and Ingrid Michaelson, who plays his romantic interest. Mike Hodge, Bebe Neuwirth, and Priscilla Lopez all have nice moments. Hoffman overdoes the horny senior bits, but keeps the pace brisk. Comedy is hard, folks, and you could do worse than this inconsequential and pleasant film.

Let Me In

Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloe Grace Moretz in Let Me In

Matt Reeves' Let Me In, from 2010, is an OK, if somewhat pointless remake of the very good Swedish film, Let The Right One In. Reeves gives us some nice pictorial moments. A shot of hospital doors with a reflection of Reagan decrying evil places us convincingly in the 1980s. However, Reeves can't really develop this theme, despite gratuitous pondering of the nature of evil by the twelve year old protagonist (Kodi Smit-McPhee), because perfidy is personified by a junior high bully; a straw dog.

Reeves gets some nice Rear Window effects with his protagonist's telescope spying on his neighbors in his apartment complex. The film's tone, however, is off. In the original, the dead end nature of the apartment dwellers lives was mirrored by the spartan and bleak character of the complex itself. In Let Me In, the complex is just too darn gentile for people trending downwards. When the protagonist talks with his deus ex vampire on a jungle gym in the original, the spot seemed like an oasis in relation to its surroundings. In Let Me In, the effect is negligible.

Part of the problem is that the sexuality of the vampire is foregrounded instead of being implicit. Chloe Grace Moretz's vampire's untouchable glamor and otherness is plain to see from the start. Despite Ms. Moretz's effective performance, it is obvious that she is just not some young chick in a hoody. The film is thirty minutes too long and talented performers like Richard Jenkins and Elias Koteas barely register.

Post Tenebras Lux

                       
Carlos Reygadas' Post Tenebras Lux, from 2012, is a bewildering art film that packs a punch as a pagan hymn to the beauty of nature. The film has no plot to speak of, but does loosely follow members of an elite Mexican family across time and, at least, two continents. Despite their relative affluence, most of the clan are unhappy. Listlessly, they pursue their appetites, be it at a Christmas feast or a sex club. A sequence at an AA meeting populated by rural laborers demonstrates that Reygadas does not believe modern malaises are limited to the upper crust. The film is one designed to be grokked, rather than give us catharsis or an epiphany. There is no tidy moral, but an overflow of life.

Reygadas and his cinematographer Alexis Zab utilized beveled lenses to give the film a refracted look. Images, particularly the outdoor sequences, consist of gorgeous shots of horses, dogs, children, and twilight skies that have been given an extra twinkle. This stresses the magical nature of life that jaded adults, like myself, often overlook while getting caught up in the daily grind. Shots are often at a dog's eye level. Thus, when the protagonist brutally punishes one of his dogs, we cannot but condemn his actions as evil.

That the protagonist seems to be a stand-in for Reygadas adds to the queasy complexity of the viewing experience. A visit to the families' abode by the devil, reminiscent of the zombie bunnies in David Lynch's Inland Empire, seems trite. However, those who seek adventurous cinema, like that of Mr. Lynch, will find many rewarding moments in these flickering images.

Aurora

Cristi Puiu's Aurora, a long art film from 2010 that is both agonizing and exhilarating, takes the who out of the whodunit. The director plays the main character, a sociopath who commits multiple murders. The rationale for the crimes is hard to fathom, but not the main character's pathology. Puiu's warts and all commitment to the role is one of the most harrowing and self-abnegating performances I have ever witnessed. A scene where he takes a shower and prods his midsection to adjust a hernia gives a good idea of the lengths Puiu has gone to in laying out this very repellent character for us. 

Some viewers are going to be bored or highly frustrated by this vexing film, but I was intrigued. Puiu gives us mostly mid-shots, often backgrounding the action down a hallway or corridor. The drama of this film, or lack thereof, is continually hidden or partially obscured. The film is a trudge through the labyrinth of a sick mind and, from what we see of Romanian society, a sick culture.

Puiu foregrounds the banality of bourgeois culture, much like another tale of murder: Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. Ugly, half finished walls in cramped apartments are the hallmarks of this bitter and uncompromising film, one that is best left to aficionados of European art films and not the general audience. 

Parallel Mothers

Penelope Cruz and Milena Smit are Parallel Mothers

Pedro Almodóvar's Parallel Mothers is an effective melodrama and showcase for Penelope Cruz that seems overladen with cultural baggage. Almodovar has long ceased to be the transgressive provocateur of his youth. That mantle has been passed to Bertrand Mandico, Julia Ducournau, and a host of others. Rather, Almodovar has spent the second half of his career reworking  his themes in a host of genres including broad comedy (I'm So Exited), horror (The Skin I Live In), the psychological suspense thriller (Julieta) , but most fruitfully in melodrama. This female centric genre is a good fit for Pedro because, though he does love the beautiful boys, his empathy is more often extended to women in his films; most especially mothers.

Parallel Mothers is filled to the brim with melodramatic tropes: infants switched at birth, family secrets, and fades to black. Almodovar is in his wheelhouse here and Cruz, in her eighth film with Almodovar, is relaxed enough to bring off a full blooded embodiment of a flawed heroine who has her reasons. Almodovar undercuts his younger mother, Milena Smit, with an unbelievable backstory involving gang rape and a narcissistic mother. Like the expensive bric a brac that fills his coddled characters' apartments, Almodovar tends to overload his films. Whether it be homoerotic canvases by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida or the entire subplot of a mass Spanish Civil War grave, there are many elements in Parallel Mothers that are not organically integrated with the main melodrama, but exist as signifiers of Almodóvar's sensibility.

One of the few aspects of the film that differentiates Parallel Mothers from a 1934 melodrama is the sapphic idyll enjoyed by the titular characters. All nice and good I say, I look forward to Eve Harrington going down on Margo Channing in the All About Eve remake, but Almodovar slights the junior partner in that relationship by ultimately pairing Cruz with the father of her child in an extremely perfunctory fashion. They are all one happy extended family and rainbow coalition at the fade out, but Parallel Mothers, despite its attractive and well fashioned surface, does not provide one much to muse about.  

Ned Rifle

Aubrey Plaza and Liam Aiken in Ned Rifle

Hal Hartley's Ned Rifle is a welcome return to form by the 90s Indie stalwart. A lean mean film machine that clocks in at 84 minutes, Ned Rifle is the third film in the director's "Henry Fool" trilogy. It is expertly cut and directed. Hartley's post-ironic, deadpan style has always been an acquired taste, but his touch here is so assured that Ned Rifle ranks with his best films: Trust, Simple Men, and Henry Fool. 

Hartley  has always been adept with actors and Ned Rifle is teeming with smart performances by such distinguished members of the Hartley stock company as Parker Posey, Martin Donovan, James Urbaniak, Karen Silas, Thomas Jay Ryan, and Liam Aiken. Hartley newcomer Aubrey Plaza fits in nicely whether lolling seductively on a bed or demolishing badly conceived philosophical paradigms. The dialogue is a treat, both learned and tart.

What particularly piqued my interest in the film was its spiritual dimension. Hartley still has plenty of  post-ironic vinegar in him, witness Ms. Plaza's wry take on the "coffee product" in a roadside convenience store, but his decision to regard his protagonist's religious dilemmas seriously is a sign of artistic growth. Ned Rifle is a Dostoyevskian figure whose struggles with the sacred and the profane brand him a modern day Raskolnikov. 

Another link to the past is Ned Rifle's quoting of a Robert Bresson title when asked, by his mother, what path he will follow, "The devil's, probably", he replies. Bresson has his characters struggle between their spiritual aspiration and material desires, albeit with a Marxist tang that was anathema to Dostoyevsky. Bresson twice filmed adaptations of batty Fyodor: "White Nights" as Four Nights of a Dreamer and Une Femme Douce. Nonetheless, Ned Rifle is a treat on its own terms as crisp modern cinema. (5/25/16)
 

Silver Lode

                   
Alan Dwan's Silver Lode, from 1954, is a good B Western. The film, like that year's Johnny Guitar, is a cautionary allegory about McCarthyism. The villain is not too subtly monikered "McCarty". Four self-proclaimed lawmen ride into the town and accuse a solid citizen of perfidy. The town, done up in red, white, and blue bunting for a Fourth of July celebration, soon descends into paranoia, distrust, and violence. A host of familiar players are in the cast: John Payne, Lizabeth Scott, Dolores Moran, Emile Meyer, Alan Hale Jr., Harry Carey Jr. The acting laurels go to Dan Duryea for his usual masterful portrayal of anguine cunning. Dwan, at this stage of his long career, was an expert at cranking out taut B pictures. He groups his players (as above) most often in the efficient American shot. When appropriate, he was still capable of bravura effects: a long tracking through town capturing an extended gunfight brilliantly evokes a community's descent into madness. 

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

                             

Sam Raimi's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has enough of Raimi's manic glee and energy poking through its comic book shell to be passable entertainment. Raimi excels at the choreographed fight scenes that are de rigueur for a Marvel movie and sprinkles enough personal touches (the 2003 Detroit Tigers, Bruce Campbell) to distinguish this film from the usual assembly line MCU product. Still, even if one is hip to the backstories of the various comic icons, Dr. Strange 2 lacks thematic resonance. The film is an impeccably designed mechanism, but has little to impart besides old bromides like there's no place like home or with great power comes great responsibility.  Raimi's gifts are suited to this type of film, but I wish he would make something along the lines of A Simple Plan again before he enters his dotage. 

Bounty Killer, The Witch

Bounty Killer

Two B movies I have seen recently have far different approaches and pedigrees, but point out my desire for a personal approach to filmmaking. Robert Eggers' The Witch has been praised an unusual amount for a horror movie, perhaps as much for its Merchant Ivory verisimilitude as anything else. Henry Saine's Bounty Killer is a disreputable mutt, a third rate Mad Max ripoff. Yet, I preferred Bounty Killer. 

Bounty Killer is assured within the limits of its own genre. It is a play on the Hawksian buddy movie with one of the protagonists being female, like Hildy Johnson in His Gal Friday, and more than capable of holding her own in a man's world. Mary Death and her fellow bounty hunter Drifter, aka the man with no name from the high plains, are cartoon figures drawn with affection and just the right amount of blood and mascara. They are locked in an everlasting ritual of attraction and rejection, where the idea of domestic bliss is a false chalice compared the the real romance of adventure on the road; to possible sequels.

My main thought as I watched this tawdry little spectacle was that it was much better than it had any right to be. Bounty Killer gave me the small exquisite pleasure a good genre film can give. The two leads are no more wooden than Jeffrey Hunter, Farley Granger, Alida Valli, Keanu Reeves, Gregory Peck, etc., in effect, fellows thesps who have been in genuine masterpieces. The film's Sancho Panza figure (he hurls automatic weapons to his knight cruising at eight on a Harley), Barak Hardley, is outstanding. A somewhat forgettable, yet entirely entertaining flick.

The Witch

The Witch is memorable, yet somewhat pointless. Costumes, sets, and makeup are very good. The acting is alternately wooden and hysterical, a sign that the hand on the tiller is not yet firm. The film fails ultimately because it is mechanical and without a strong directorial point of view. Is it a critique of the patriarchy, an investigation of female sexuality or a recruiting film for Satan? None of the above, I'm afraid. The Witch is a decent enough film, I suppose. However, compared to such recent horror standouts as It Follows and Oculus, I found it wanting. (5/30/16)

Quick Takes, May, 2022

Paul Henreid and Rex Harrison in Night Train to Munich

Carol Reed's Night Train to Munich is a slight, but enjoyable spy thriller from 1940. Screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder recycle many of the elements of their work on The Lady Vanishes for this picture: kidnappings, intrigue on a train, choice parts for the comedy duo of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, and Margaret Lockwood. Hitchcock had decamped to Hollywood and a comparison of The Lady Vanishes and Night Train to Munich show the differences between the touch of a master and that of a very good director. Rex Harrison is shown to good advantage in a role that shows off his chief attributes, suave urbanity and an endearingly poor singing ability. I wonder if this is the first English language film to depict a Nazi concentration camp. 

Mike Mills' C'mon C'mon is deadly earnest social realism with postmodern touches. Robbie Ryan's black and white cinematography is splendid to behold, but the narrative, in which Joaquin Phoenix has to squire his irritating nine year old nephew around the country, is paper thin.

After the treacle of C'mon C'mon, I felt in the need of some cinematic vinegar, So I watched Fritz Lang's House by the River, from 1950. A Gaslight type thriller done on the cheap for Republic pictures with serviceable B stars (Louis Hayward, Jane Wyatt). The flick is minor Lang, but still a tight and effective picture. 

Brian Duffield's Spontaneous, from 2020, is a predictable black comic horror film in which a class of high school seniors spontaneously combust. Bereft of wit or feeling.

Joe Swanberg's Digging for Fire, from 2015, is an ensemble drama set in Los Angeles. Boasting a stellar cast (Brie Larson, Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Anna Kendrick, Orlando Bloom), it is akin to Short Cuts, Two Days in the Valley or Pulp Fiction in that it offers a labyrinthine narrative of intersecting characters. Unfortunately, the film is an amoebic blob that evinces little of the flavor of SoCal.

Katherine Dieckmann's Diggers, from 2006, is also an ensemble drama, but it provides a believable portrait of working class Long Islanders in 1976. Sarah Paulson and screenwriter Ken Marino give especially affecting performances. 

James Curtis' new book Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life is a definitive work, the product of impressive archival research. It is exhaustive and exhausting. The casual reader may well weary of its endless litany of  negative costs and box office receipts. Curtis provides little insight into Keaton's psyche or taste. As a personality, Keaton remains a sphinx. Like Howard Hawks, another product of the Midwest, he is a prime example of 20th century American utilitarianism. Curtis' book contains memorable portraits of Fatty Arbuckle, Joseph Schenck, Natalie Talmadge, and Raymond Rohauer and is recommended for the hardcore film buff.

Love and Friendship

Kate Beckinsale

Whit Stillman's Love and Friendship, an adaptation of Jane Austen's Lady Susan, proves to be a largely amenable match of the two auteurs. Stillman is particularly helped by his leading lady, Kate Beckinsale, who gives a full blooded performance that stands in marked contrast to the overly prim Austen heroines, I'm thinking of you Greer Garson, that have drained the life out of previous Austen adaptations. I've been a Beckinsale fan since Cold Comfort Farm, but feel she has been underutilized in Hollywood. Here, she provides enough waspish malice to enliven a dozen period films. Since Stillman's camera is largely static picturing the admittedly gorgeous décor and costumes, Beckinsale's performance gives the film a welcome jolt of visceral excitement. 

Stillman tries to recapture the chemistry of his Last Days of Disco by reuniting Beckinsale with Chloe Sevigny, but Sevigny can't quite handle the period dialogue and the twosome's bitchy asides are a bit wanting. Generally, the cast is up to snuff with Tom Bennett a particular delight as the moronic Sir James Martin.

I must confess that Austen's reputation has always left me mystified. Her fans seem to adore her work because she critiques a safe target, snobbery, within a cozy genre, the romantic comedy. Her literary constructs are charming and tidy, but hold very little relation to life as I know it; which I find to be disorienting and messy. In other words, I'll take George Eliot or Dostoyevsky, please. That said, Stillman distills the most entertaining aspects of Austen and adds a post-feminist knowingness that punctures the Georgian decorum. All in all, the best Austen adaptation since Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park. (7/3/17)

The Northman

Alexander Skarsgard in The Northman

Robert Eggers' The Northman is an action filled epic that luridly conveys the brutality of the Vikings. Loosely based on Hamlet, the film boasts impressive historic verisimilitude and a sterling cast. Eggers is successful in his attempts to evoke Norse spirituality and the Viking mindset. The sparse dialogue skirts the ridiculousness found in some medieval era film.

However, as with Eggers previous films The Witch and The Lighthouse, I found the core of The Northman to be a bit hollow. The film is an impressive technical achievement, but, beneath the gory spectacle, it is yet another revenge tale culminating in a duel to the death. It ain't Andrei Rublev, Marketa Lazarova or Valhalla Rising, folks. I was never bored and would certainly recommend the strong of stomach to see the film in the theater, but The Northman is a lot of sound and fury signifying little.

The Southerner

Zachary Scott and J. Carrol Naish

Jean Renoir's The Southerner, from 1945, is not in the top rank of his movies, but is awfully close. I would rate Renoir as one of the great directors along with Ford, Mizoguchi, Murnau, and a gaggle of others. Therefore, The Southerner, is an essential picture.

The Southerner is a rural picture much like Renoir's first American feature, Swamp Water. This genre  was in serious decline by 1945, ten years after Variety declared "Sticks Nix Hix Pix". My first exposure to hix pix were the Ma and Pa Kettle films, themselves a spin-off from The Egg and I, of the 40s and early 50s which I could not abide as a child. The hayseed humor of the films seem old hat to me in the 60s.

Beulah Bondi's Granny is the comic relief here and I found her performance, which rankled contemporary critics, to be hilarious. Like Walter Brennan in Rio Bravo, Bondi's performance is a riff on the stereotype of the crusty codger. It is an outsized act which is cognizant of its own ridiculousness. Contrast her work with that of Betty Field. Field is a competent performer, but her work here seems off. She presents her character as is she were the platonic ideal of a farmer's wife and the result is not pathos, but bathos. J. Carrol Naish is wonderful as the neighbor who lacks a communitarian spirit.

Zachary Scott delivers his best performance. His Texas accent comes in handy and he seems more relaxed than usual under Renoir's guidance. This was before the success of Mildred Pierce typecast him as an oleaginous villain and it is a bit sad to consider the downward arc of his career after Flamingo Road. He had an independent nature that did not make him a good cog in the Hollywood machine. Before his premature death at 51 in 1965, he was arrested for violating segregation laws in Louisiana and proudly sported an earring.

The Southerner's rural setting brings out one of Renoir's great strengths as a director: an ability to portray men and women as creature in their environs. Renoir shared with his father a gift for portraying the beauty of the country. This is evident in The Southerner, but so is the harshness of rural farm life. Indeed, the state of Tennessee thought it was too harsh and seamy and banned the picture during its first run. 

A good point of comparison is John Ford's work on The Grapes of Wrath and Tobacco Road. Ford mythologizes the land as a barren hell or a fertile paradise. While the two directors share a humanistic view of rural folks and their plight, Renoir presents a more naturalistic view of their environment compared to the expressionistic force Ford brought to such locales as Ireland, Africa, and Monument Valley. Ford's work is most akin to Renoir's in Swamp Water, thanks to the screenplay by frequent Ford collaborator Dudley Nichols, but there is a wonderful dance sequence towards the end of The Southerner that would fit in many of Ford's films. Ford held Renoir in the highest esteem and once attempted to remake La Grande Illusion. Both filmmakers in the 30s stood as exemplars of Depression era Popular Front humanism. 

Memoria (2021)

The 1.85:1 aspect ration foregrounds the background of Memoria

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria concerns a Scottish woman named Jessica Holland (Tilda Swinton) who, when visiting an ailing sister in Colombia, begins to experience auditory hallucinations. As in his previous features, Mr. Weerasethakul (who I will henceforth refer to by his nickname, Joe) is not particularly concerned with plot, per se. Rather, his cinema is an immersive one where Joe seeks to evoke the psycho-environmental states of his protagonists. This lands Joe's work in the realm of art cinema. Indeed, one of the more provocative threads of the film is the varieties of art Jessica encounters: installations, statues, painting, music. There is much to sift through in this film. Still, if you are a cinemagoer attached to storytelling, it might be best to steer clear of Memoria.

The film is a meditation on individual and collective memory. I just lambasted The Batman for its slow pace, but Memoria is a film that benefits from its deliberately sluggish rhythms. Most shots in the film are long takes that are framed at a distinct distance from the characters. Narrative momentum is sacrificed for a serene contemplation of man in his natural and unnatural habitats. Sound is equally as important as image in the film. A prologue, which contains Joe's design sketches for the film, is completely silent. This serves to emphasize the disjunctive nature of Jessica's auditory hallucinations. Sounds trigger both positive and negative emotional responses from people in Memoria: a bus backfiring, a jazz quartet jamming, fish scales being grated. 

Do these auditory triggers prompt an individual response or one from a collective unconscious? I feel that Joe's response would be "yes"; indicative of a refutation of an either/or schism. Memoria has many threads to be pulled that lurk below its surface whereas a film like The Batman is all surface. Memoria pictures how memory, the outline of a past that leaves traces for the future, imprints itself upon all sorts of matter: wood, rock, and, especially, the brain. 

Jessica's auditory episodes and her sister's illness continue the theme of sickness in Joe's work. Heretofore, these seemed to be particularly modern malaises in his films. In Memoria, Joe traces the roots of sickness to a more cosmic origin. (Attention: Major Spoiler Alert!) I felt that the introduction of an extraterrestrial presence slightly cheapened the film. I prefer the relative ambiguity of Uncle Boonmee... or Cemetery of Splendor to Memoria. I think that Tilda Swinton's lack of vulnerability, she is always an imperious presence, worked against the film. Still, I would urge those who value questing spirits in the cinema to see Memoria in a theater. Joe's cinema is both beguiling and enervating, but it is wholly singular.

Doctor Strange

Scott Derrickson's Doctor Strange is an above average popcorn picture. The role of the doctor is Sherlock redux for Benedict Cumberbatch: a brilliant and arrogant rationalist (in this case a brain surgeon) who lacks any form of empathy. A car accident robs the Doc of his surgical skills, but a mysterious sage, a perfectly cast Tilda Swinton, gets him in touch with his hidden superpowers. Swinton and Cumberbatch have a good rapport and it is a credit to the film that their relationship and not the CGI is the most exciting thing in it.

Swinton's sage bring the Doc's ego down a notch or twelve, whilst freeing him from the tyranny of Western mind/body dualism. Mads Mikkelsen and Rachel McAdams, superb performers both, are largely wasted as "the villain" and "the girl". Ben Bratt and Chiwetel Ejiofor fare better. Director Derrickson's background is in horror and he keeps the pace brisk. (6/17/17)

The Batman

Robert Pattinson is The Batman

Despite its largely positive critical and commercial reception, I found Matt Reeves' The Batman to be a lugubrious bore. The narrative of the film is so freighted with socially significant signifiers ( class resentment, Occupy Wall Street, homelessness, vigilantism, 1/6/2021, internet paranoia, and, stretching back a bit, Hurricane Katrina) that it smothers any possibility of nuance or subtext. The pacing is extremely slow, a good fit for an opera or memorial service, but fatal to this slice of violent pulp.

The Batman has an outstanding cast, for the most part well chosen for their roles (though Andy Serkis seems too sinister to be an effective Alfred) , but they labor in vain. The film is a dark, elephantine genre piece devoid of subtlety, passion, and humanity. 

Wonder Woman

Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman marks a welcome return to the big screen for the director who guided Charlize Theron to an Oscar in Monster way back in 2003. Wonder Woman has been greeted with unprecedented hosannas by audiences and critics alike. I was diverted, but largely underwhelmed by this comic book fare. Since so many of the Marvel And DC features are pap, there is a general desire to embrace comic book films that have even a glimmer of intelligence. Wonder Woman has that glimmer and a nice dash of romance, but is largely by the numbers. 

The rote sections of Wonder Woman are its first and last parts. That the action packed finale is routine is not a surprise, but the first third is a lifeless picturing of the heroine's life among the Amazons. Even chunks of cheese like Xena and Clash of the Titans have more zip to their refashioning of Greek myths. How I longed for a femme version of Ted Raimi's Joxer to show up and enliven the overly solemn proceedings. Happily, the second act perks up and morphs into a fish out of water comedy as our heroine plunges into 1918 London. 

Wonder Woman is greatly helped by the chemistry of its romantic leads. Gal Gadot is a little stiff, but dark haired beauties such as Keanu Reeves and Gregory Peck were much more wooden at the beginning stage of what would prove to be long and fruitful careers. Chris Pine, as he did in Hell or High Water and even the wretched Into the Woods, proves he is one of our most versatile leading men. An asset to any film, Pine here underplays to make sure all eyes are on his leading lady. Unfortunately, as even the children in my multiplex audience complained, the secondary characters are under sketched and unmemorable. Talented folks like Danny Huston, Robin Wright, and David Thewlis hem and haw to little effect. The best scene Jenkins gives us is a woman and man alone on a boat. I hope Ms. Jenkins' next feature has a few less explosions and more personal moments such as this. (6/26/17)