El Conde

              
Pablo Larrain's El Conde (The Count) is a satiric horror film that portrays Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a vampire who has lost his lust for life. Pinochet's children, who are eager to seize their inheritance, hire a nun named Carmen to hasten his demise. Under the guise of auditing his estate, Carmen travels to the bleak rural farm where Pinochet is hiding in order to dispatch the ex-dictator. Plans, however, go awry.

The opening twenty minutes of the film, which traces Pinochet's genesis back to the French Revolution, is the most entertaining segment in any Larrain film, but things bog down when Carmen arrives at the farm. In her guise as an auditor, Carmen interviews Pinochet and his family about their holdings. This enables Larrain, to soporific effect, an opportunity to review Pinochet's many crimes, including widespread slaughter of his political opponents and the looting of national assets to his family's benefit. Margaret Thatcher shows up as Pinochet's vampire mother because Larrain wants to link Pinochet's fascist government with the right wing democratic leaders who helped prop up his regime. Stella Gonet, who portrayed Queen Elizabeth II in Larrain's Spencer and has portrayed the former PM on stage, plays Thatcher and drolly handles the film's narration. 

Despite its longueurs, I think El Conde is Larrain's most successful film and would recommend it for Edward Lachman's splendid black and white cinematography alone. Larrain's conceit is a thin one, but good performances by Jaime Vadell as Pinochet and Alfredo Castro as his manservant help flesh things out. Tatiana Maulen's witty art direction is also an asset. El Conde is currently streaming on Netflix. 

The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon is a handsome, well-mounted film that earned my grudging admiration, but left me cold. Haneke seems to be investigating the roots of fascism and the collective unconscious guilt of the German people by presenting an allegorical drama of mysterious crimes in a remote Westerwald village circa 1913. Haneke portrays the village as monstrously repressive. Behind closed doors lurk physical abuse, sexual abuse and misogyny. The town's patriarchs' behave with a bourgeois circumspection that masks depravity.

Haneke has stacked the deck here. No one smiles, relishes a meal or has a positive sexual encounter. The film's one romance is furtive. There is no joy in Mudville. Haneke is adept with his players, especially the young. The White Ribbon is a startling film visually in high contrast black and white. The look is reminiscent of the work of August Sander, perhaps overly so, the film feels embalmed. And too pat, even in its refusal to explain its central mystery. In Cache, Haneke was able to create an unsettling tableau informed by the realties of modern France. With The White Ribbon, Haneke is again swinging for the fences, but has created an elephantine art object that is hermetic, moribund and morbid. Nevertheless recommended. (10/13/22)

Potters at Work by August Sander

13th

Ava DuVernay

Ava DuVernay's 13th is a well made and entertaining screed against the correctional industrial complex that has arisen, partly, out of the "War on Drugs". DuVernay is expert at juggling newsreel footage, song lyrics, photos, newspaper clippings, TV commercials and all sorts of cultural bric a brac into a cohesive whole that prevents this documentary from falling into a torpid mire of talking heads.

My reservations about the film are perhaps not surprising coming from a bald white male of a RINO bent. Namely that the analysis is a Marxist one (heck, one of the talking heads is the Sweet Black Angel herself, Angela Davis) bereft of three dimensionality. The African American churches, the Vietnam war, the Moynihan Report, the Rockefeller drug laws, etc., are barely mentioned, so most of the blame can fall on corporations and Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton. The period between the signing of the 13th Amendment and the premier of The Birth of a Nation is almost completely ignored, so the links DuVernay attempts to make between the institutional racism of the 19th century and the racial flash points of today seem tenuous.

However, this film succeeds in making a visceral impact and if it helps the youth of today remember, say, Emmett Till then it is a worthy document indeed. The critique of the "War on Drugs" and mandatory minimum sentencing is irrefutable. I remember as a teenager listening to my attorney father, self-described as being to the right of Louis XIV, criticize bitterly the idea of mandatory minimums; mostly because it limited the discretionary power of judges. We are paying the price now. I can't say I learned anything from this film, but I appreciated its fervor and DuVernay's craftmanship. (10/10/16)

The Covenant

Dar Salim and Jake Gyllenhaal

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant is an unsuccessful male bonding fable set amidst the US Army's attempt to subdue the Taliban in Afghanistan. Jake Gyllenhaal portrays John Kinley, a tightly wound Master Sergeant tasked with the most difficult search and destroy missions. Dar Salim portrays Ahmed Abdullah, Kinley's interpreter, who saves his life during a raid. Abdullah then has to drag Kinley's semi-comatose carcass hundreds of klicks through the Afghan hinterlands, all the while evading the evil hordes of the Taliban. much to Abdullah's and my own exhaustion.

Thanks to Abdullah, Kinley makes it back to the states in one piece. However, when he learns that Abdullah and his family are still in Afghanistan and on the run from the baddies, he becomes obsessed with retrieving them and bringing them to the States. This mission provides the film with a third act. There are many clunky, repetitive scenes of flashbacks and exposition. Gyllenhaal tries to nail the thousand yard, "Still in Saigon" stare. As has been proven before, Gyllenhaal is not suited to play a jarhead. He is too laid back to capture a hard-boiled military man. For better casting of a similar type, see Sean Penn as Sgt. Welsh in The Thin Red Line. Salim is a better fit as the taciturn Abdullah. He masters the necessary stoicism that befits the action genre. 

As usual in Ritchie's films, attempts at characterization are feeble. The supporting cast does their best, but there are few ideas, themes or even quirks to work with. The attempts to evoke the sardonic banter of a military core are limp and seem bowdlerized. The score is full of feeble mickey mousing and whatever possessed Ritchie to start the film off with America's "A Horse with No Name" on the soundtrack. Maybe because it mentions the desert. Anyhow, Ritchie forte is the direction of action sequences and these make The Covenant watchable. Indeed, the film is Ritchie's best since Snatch. Truly damning with faint praise.

Personality Crisis: One Night Only

          
Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi's Personality Crisis: One Night Only is both a concert film and a survey of David Johansen's musical career. The singer, in his Buster Poindexter guise, performs his own compositions, some dating back to his early days as a New York Doll. Johansen is backed by an overly tasteful quartet and is only in middling voice. 

However, as a raconteur, Johansen has few living peers. He traces his love of music to his opera loving Dad in Staten Island. In reaction, young David embraced Rhythm and Blues. He provides incisive sketches of those artists whose work gave his own career its impetus including Charles Ludlam, Charlotte Moorman, Harry Smith, and Hal Willner. The filmmakers interweave the songs and Johansen's patter with clips that illuminate the cultural petri dish of Post World War 2 New York. One that helped germinate Johansen's talents. Personality Crisis... is just one of many Scorsese documentaries that lovingly chronicle 20th Century New York City to rousing effect.

The film begins by filling the screen with a number of Post-Impressionist paintings featuring the demimonde of Paris. This is the historical antecedent to Post World War 2 New York, which succeeded Paris as the center of the avant-garde. It also provides a visual link to the performance site in the film , the swanky Club Carlyle in Gotham. The club is filled with colorful murals from the brush of Ludwig Bemelmans, most renowned for the Madeline series of books for children. Johansen remains very much a child of the demimonde, always on the periphery of mainstream celebrity. He even refers to his most commercially successful single, a cover of Arrow's "Hot, Hot, Hot", as the bane of his existence.

Personality Crisis... is a dignified portrait of an aging dandy. Johansen has always been a cult artist, more well known among the music cognoscenti than the general public. His lounge lizard doppelganger, Buster Poindexter, is more famous than he is. For those relatively ignorant of his work, the flick provides a good introduction to this playful musical artist and composer. For longtime fans, Personality Crisis... is an ideal matching of filmmaker and subject. The film captures a man who is, as longtime champion Paul Nelson put in faux Brooklynese, a genuine poisonality. 

Mo

Madalina Craiu and Dana Rogoz

Radu Dragomir's Mo, from 2019, is a compactly structured Me Too film with superb performances from the leads. Mo (Dana Rogoz) and Vera (Madalina Craiu) are two aimless university students who have each others' backs. They are shown traveling to Bucharest to take a business exam where they plan to cheat using their cellphones. They are busted and Mo's phone is confiscated by their professor (Razvan Vasilescu). The gals confront the professor while he is having a dinner date in order to retrieve the phone. They cast pervy aspersions on the Prof and his date departs in a huff. Only temporarily taken aback, the Professor invites the duo back to his apartment for dinner. There, while baiting the two about their cultural ignorance, he begins coming on to Mo. Despite the much older man's creepy countenance, Mo is intrigued by him and the two bond over a shared love of Joy Division. Their duet on She's Lost Control, given the song a layer of meaning that Ian Curtis probably did not intend.

The two withdraw to the bedroom, much to Vera's discomfort. At the last moment, Mo withdraws her consent and it is only through the intercession of Vera that she escapes being raped. All through the film, whether it is the widespread cheating in school or the Professor's disproportionate power over the future lives of his students, Dragomir pictures a Romania permeated with institutional corruption. Yet, none of his characters are wholly good or evil. The filmmaker's sympathy is wholly with his distaff duo. Yet, he is willing to show that they are immature brats. The Professor is a loathsome aging hipster who has no qualms about using his petty powers to further his own ends. He is also shown as a lonely man who fears he has frittered his life away to little effect. It is this ambivalence that gives Mo a subtle power that transcends its currency.

The film is currently streaming on Tubi under the awkward title of Indecency. It is a brisk 76 minutes. It's chief asset is Ms. Rogoz as Mo. The actress was 33 or so when Mo was filmed and in a few close-ups it shows. However, she nail from within the character's youthful confusion and awkwardness. Mo has the energy of the young, but does not know what to do with it. 

The 15:17 to Paris

           
Because of its poor reception, both critically and commercially, I had avoided Clint Eastwood's The 15:17 to Paris until recently. Eastwood's modest workmanlike virtues as a director have often been underrated in the past and I feel that the film is a solid addition to his oeuvre. The flick centers on the backstories of the three American tourists who thwarted a terrorist attack on a train headed to Paris in 2015. 

The three Americans, Spencer Stone, Alex Skarlatos, and Anthony Sadler, play themselves. This no doubt hurt the commercial prospects of the 2018 film, which was released in the commercial dead zone of February, but it jibes well with the unassuming nature of the project. Throughout the film, Eastwood stresses the ordinariness of his protagonists. He does not augur their heroism. They come from humble backgrounds and bond through a series of misadventures that border on juvenile delinquency. The film stresses the petty humiliations the trio experiences as they navigate society's institutions: school, the military, and the workplace. Eastwood doesn't overly emphasize the shame his heroic trio carry with them, (Eastwood does not over emphasize anything) but the micro-aggressions stemming from interactions with institutions are palpable. Compare Spencer Stone in his Jamba Juice uniform with Judge Reinhold in a pirate costume delivering fast food in Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Heckerling's portrayal of late adolescent male humiliation and frustration is more cartoonish than Eastwood's, but both approaches are consistent with the overall style with which the directors shape their material.

It is perhaps absurd to compare Eastwood to Robert Bresson, who often employed non-professional actors, but they both display an impassive, non-showy style. Eastwood has alternated between mythic and realistic modes. His more mythic films display a mystical bent, displaying an unremarked upon pantheism that is most obvious in Pale Rider. His film's in a realistic mode are largely celebrations of Americana and down home virtues: especially in this film, The Mule, Gran Torino, The Bridges of Madison County, A Perfect World, the damn ape pictures, and many more. Throughout, his calm authority as a director and screen presence has befitted this proponent of Transcendental Meditation.

I have to think that the critical rejection of 15:17 had something to do with its pronounced right wing slant. The flick avowedly supports God and Country, is pro-gun, and anti-Ritalin. Skarlatos eventually ran as a Republican candidate in my home state of Oregon in both the 2020 and 2022. His views proved to be too pro-MAGA for his district and he was defeated both times in the general election. The 15:17 to Paris is not a political movie, per se, but Eastwood's preference for resolute individual over institutions permeates the film. The movie is flawed, the travelogue sequences before the terrifying train ride are somewhat superfluous, but it is wholly a product of its auteur. The concluding sequences aboard the train shows that the dominant influence on Eastwood as a director of action has been Don Siegel's crisply edited style rather than Sergio Leone's operatic style. The climax of 15:17 recalls that of Siegel's The Lineup and Madigan in its tightly constructed intensity. 

BlackBerry

Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton in BlackBerry

I found the critical huzzahs accorded to Matt Johnson's Blackberry to be baffling. The film tells the rise and fall of the titular company in a fashion that is half a critique of predatory capitalism and half a celebration of techno geeks. Johnson mindlessly applies verite techniques that call to mind the mise-en-scene of The Office. Perhaps Johnson wanted to evoke a sense of immediacy, but the film is haphazardly filmed and cut. Some scenes are overly reminiscent of sketch comedy. Both the dramatic and comic beats of the film are off. Performances are all over the place with Cary Elwes and, significantly, Johnson himself overacting terribly. Glenn Howerton, Saul Rubinek, and Michael Ironside acquit themselves well. Jay Baruchel, the nominal lead, wrestles his performance to a draw.

You Hurt My Feelings

Tobias Menzies and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in You Hurt My Feelings

I always seem to be of two minds about Nicole Holofcener and You Hurt My Feelings, her best film, does nothing to change that. The film is a bourgeoise domestic dramedy that is winningly constructed and has no particularly bad performances. Holofcener gently satirizes her characters self-absorption. There are no explosions or broken crockery, though there is an inordinate amount of shopping Even an armed robbery leaves no physical or psychic scars, just feeble digs at mother love. Holofcener is a talented writer, not only for her own films but for such disparate projects as The Last Duel and Can You Ever Forgive Me, but she has very little visual style as a director. One is reminded of Woody Allen and James L. Brooks and countless sitcoms. Visually, Holofcener lacks passion, dynamism, and vivacity.

Holofcener does nail the Upper West Side setting and I always enjoy the walking and talking shots of female kinship in her films. Julia Louis-Dreyfus' presence probably got the project financed and she portrays the writerly aspects of her character ably. However, she is only an interesting actress from the neck up. Physically, she is too stiff and inexact for comedy much less drama. Much of her schtick on Seinfeld consisted of double takes and reaction shots. I preferred the playing of Tobias Menzies as the writer's husband, a man so disengaged that his performance as a therapist suffers. David Cross and Amber Tamblyn are outstanding as a bickering couple whose rancor is transferred to Menzies' therapist. Best of all is Michaela Watkins as Louis-Dreyfus' patient sister. Holofcener remains one of our least Dionysian directors, but You Hurt My Feelings has its mannerly charms. 

Holy Spider

Zar Amir Ebrahimi in Holy Spider

Holy Spider is another solid effort from Ali Abbasi. Saeed (Mahdi Bajestai), a devout builder, cruises the city of Mashhad at night, picking up prostitutes and then murdering them. Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), a female journalist with a more cosmopolitan and secular background, travels to Mashhad to investigate the case. The film juxtaposes Saeed's interactions with family, friends, and victims against Rahimi's pursuit of the perpetrator. The film is neither a whodunit or a whydunit, but manages to build suspense as to whether Saeed will pay for his crimes under Iranian Sharia law. The killer, dubbed the Spider by the press, builds up a following amongst fundamentalists for his "cleansing" activities. Like Travis Bickle, another righteous vigilante, Saeed is one of God's lonely men, intent on his misguided quest.

While not quite as startling in its immediacy as Abbasi's previous film, Border, Holy Spider also boasts outstanding performances and an unwillingness to judge characters no matter where they lie on a political, religious or moral spectrum. Abbasi's human exist on a plane barely above that of the lesser primates. Characters vie for dominance and are constantly sniffing out the intentions of their fellow men, sometimes literally. Whatever bourgeois facades exist in Abbasi's films soon give way to grunge.

Mute

70s Retro: Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux in Mute

Duncan Jones' Mute was almost universally reviled when it was released on Netflix in 2018, but I found the film to have more than a few redeeming qualities. Certainly the film fizzles as a mystery or thriller. The main plot and look of the film are overly beholden to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Set in a dystopian Berlin a few years hence, Alexander Skarsgard stars as a mute Amish(!) bartender searching for a girlfriend who has vanished. He scours the demimonde to fitful effect.

However, the mute bartender's quest is intercut with the misdoings of two skeevy American surgeons played by Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux. It is this sinister friendship and its connection with the bartender that is the most compelling aspect of Mute. The relationship between the two is a riff on that of Hawkeye and Trapper John's in Robert Altman's MASH, if the two had gone to seed. Martinis are present and accounted for. Mute's two have nicknames, Cactus Bill and Donald Duck, that riff on the Americana of the nicknames of the duo in MASH. Rudd's handlebar mustache even seems like a tribute to Elliott Gould's facial hair in the earlier film. Both Rudd and Theroux have a blast with their roles with Rudd, in particular, seeming to revel in escaping his nice guy persona. Sam Rockwell appears in a few puckish cameos. I will make no great claims for Mute, but the performances of Rudd and Theroux lift the film above mediocrity. 

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.

Shopping for training bras: Rachel McAdams and Abby Ryder Fortson

After too many sequels, comic book adaptations, and product advertisements disguised as films, Kelly Fremon Craig's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. is the kind of flick that restores my faith in the American film industry. I should not be too surprised, The Edge of Seventeen, KFC's debut, was not exactly chopped chopped liver and I have some respect for Judy Blume, author of the source novel. As a child, I only read Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, probably because it had a male protagonist.

Eleven year old Margaret Simon is the protagonist of the movie. She has a number of anxieties and rites of passage awaiting her. Her father's promotion has enabled her family to move to a bigger house, sending Margaret to a new school and necessitating her to find a new peer group. She come from a mixed marriage, as they used to say. Her father (Benny Safdie) is Jewish and her mother (Rachel McAdams), a gentile. They have chosen to raise their child without religion and this generates a good deal of rancor among the surviving grandparents. Despite all this, Margaret addresses her prayers to a divine power and undergoes a genuine spiritual quest. However, Margaret's biggest anxiety concerns her burgeoning sexuality. The movie's arc is shaped around Margaret and her chums having their first periods. 

I belabor the work's themes mostly to stress that they are there. Blume balances the anxieties her protagonist faces with social observations and gentle humor. The author is as attuned to the subtle gradations of class as Jane Austen and George Eliot. Now the juvenile fiction format doesn't offer Blume too large a canvas, there is no Middlemarch in her oeuvre, but she holds her own as a quirky realist. It appears that KFC, like her co-adapter James L. Brooks, is also a quirky realist and that material and director are well matched. ...Margaret is a spritely paced adaptation that retains the original's satisfying structure.

Rarely has a director gotten so many good performances from actresses playing preteens. Most Hollywood films depict eleven year olds as flat chested sixteen year olds. Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret and her young cohorts all capture the awkwardness of girls facing puberty with anticipation and dread. The acknowledgement of such ambivalence is a milepost in psychological development. Happily, Margaret has two loving parents able to give her guidance on her journey. Rachel McAdams and Benny Safdie winningly portray imperfect paragons. The only quibble I had was in not finding Kathy Bates to be a believable Jew.

Some may find the US suburbia circa 1970 portrayed in ...Margaret to be a neverland, but I think that is part of the point. I once asked my mother-in-law what she remembered of the tumult of the Sixties and she replied that she was too busy raising children to take much notice. Most of the turmoil of the Sixties was based in cities and college towns. Life largely went on as usual in rural America and the suburbs and ...Margaret captures the Americana of wiener roasts, lemonade stands, and running through the sprinklers. The polarization of the USA, then and now, largely reflects the divide between urban and rural, just like in France in 1789. However, the revolution would not be televised in 1970. The silent majority of the burbs and the sticks had been responsible for the Thermidorian reaction of Nixon's election.

From the first chords of Paul Revere and the Raiders version of "Shake a Tail Feather", Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret gives us a vivid recreation of the sounds and sights of 1970 without resorting to cliché. Unfortunately, home décor was overly brown then. Nevertheless, ..Margaret is a future classic of female adolescence, up there with Clarence Brown's National Velvet. Check it out and liberate this film from its chick flick ghetto. 

Hannie Caulder

Robert Culp and Raquel Welch work on her draw in Hannie Caulder

Burt Kennedy's Hannie Caulder, from 1972, is one of the better Raquel Welch vehicles, but its virtues have little to do with Ms. Welch. The film was an English production shot in Spain. At least five writers worked on a script that was eventually credited to one Z.X. Jones, presumably a distant cousin of Alan Smithee. The film shows how a more traditional Western director was responding to the innovations of Peckinpah and Leone. The Spanish backdrop and the use of dubbed secondary players give Hannie Caulder a Spaghetti Western feel. The use of copious amounts of exploding red gel packs, as in The Wild Bunch, is a marked departure for Kennedy; compare this film to the relatively bloodless The War Wagon and Support Your Local Sheriff. Indeed, Kennedy show more visual bravado than usual in Hannie Caulder. There is nothing as visually audacious in his whole canon as the POV shot from Strother Martin's double barrel shotgun during the opening bank robbery sequence. 

Martin is accompanied during the course of the film by his two brothers played by Ernest Borgnine and Jack Elam. After robbing the bank, they happen upon the homestead of Ms. Welch and her husband whereupon they dispatch the husband with a shotgun blast and sequentially rape his missus. This establishes the narrative for the rest of the picture as the film cuts between the comic adventures of the miscreant sibling trio and Ms. Welch's quest for vengeance. She is aided by a guardedly humane bounty hunter named Thomas Luther Price played by Robert Culp. After dropping off a corpse for a reward and buying Ms. Welch a wash and some new duds, Culp takes her to Mexico to meet with a compadre and gunsmith charmingly played by Christopher Lee in his only appearance in a Western in a career that featured over 250 film appearances.

The sojourn in Mexico is necessary so that the gunsmith can make Hannie a bespoke gun and Price can tutor her until she become an expert gunfighter. These sequences inspired the training Uma Thurman undertakes in the Kill Bill films. Lee has a passel of children and a wife lurking somewhere, but we never see her. Perhaps this was one of the many cuts initiated to bring the film down to a very lean 85 minutes. The character of Price brings out the best in Culp who nails both the warm and wary impulses of a conflicted character. It is a pity that his career never really took off after Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice gave him a shot at stardom. Ms. Welch was fairly hopeless as an actress. She did not even have the vocal skills to project her voice, as her scenes with the polished Culp reveal. A lot of the time Kennedy has her remain mute and show off some animal grace. I'll leave Ms. Welch alone as the critics of her time had already ripped her to shreds. For example, Andrew Sarris wrote that Ms. Welch was a "singularly untalented creation of the gossip columns and publicity mills." ❤

Most of what is interesting in Hannie Caulder is on the sidelines of the film. Flamenco king Paco de Lucia, Stephen Boyd, and Diana Dors all have effective cameo appearances. Heck, was Diana Dors ever in another Western? Messrs. Borgnine, Elam, and Martin have a blast playing their trio of scuzzy stooges. The landscapes and emotional tenor of the Westerns Burt Kennedy wrote and directed are bleak, but glimmers of humor and humanity remain.

❤ Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice, July 6, 1972, pg.49

Corsage

Vicky Krieps

Marie Kreutzer's Corsage puts a feminist spin on the life of Elizabeth, the last Empress of the Austria. The film focuses on Elizabeth in middle age experiencing a midlife crisis of identity. Stifled by court life and its attendant demands, Elizabeth is unable to forge a meaningful life even when she flees Vienna.

My main issue with the film is that I found it to be neither fish nor fowl. It is not humorous enough to be an effective satire, nor engaging enough for a drama. Kreutzer wants the film to be a middle fingered rebuke to the patriarchy and previous historical epics like the Sissi trilogy of the 1950s which starred Romy Schneider as the Empress. Corsage balances historic facts about the somewhat rebellious Empress, her smoking, tattoo, drug use and obsession with staying thin, with anachronisms that add little. Sissi is a bird in a gilded cage at the beginning of Corsage and that is what she remains till the end of the film. 

The film is a handsome one, as well appointed as the less subversive historical epics it mocks. It is generally well acted, Vicky Krieps as Elizabeth and Florian Teichmeister as Emperor Franz Joseph are affecting, but Corsage has little character development or narrative momentum. Its attempts to augur the oncoming Great War are feeble. Corsage is not a bad film, but it is a misguided one. 

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Chris Pine

John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein's Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is one of the more pleasant surprises of 2023. Actually, it should not be a surprise to those who saw the directorial team's previous feature, Game Night, a sleeper hit that shares Dungeon & Dragons' breezy charm. Neither film is flashily directed, but both are pleasing entertainments boasting solid ensemble work. Dungeons & Dragons... was a commercial disappointment, buried at the box office by the more cartoon-like and mechanistic Super Mario Brothers. Whether it spawns sequels or not, Dungeons & Dragons has a winning playfulness missing from most of the current era's blockbusters adapted from comic books or games.

The game of Dungeons & Dragons doesn't have a specific narrative arc, it is purposefully open ended, so the makers of the film were free to filch elements from other sources. The flick displays its influences blatantly, ranging from Ray Harryhausen, Peter Jackson, and Sam Raimi to many, many more. Lorne Balfe's snappy score has similarly varied influences, including Danny Elfman and Carl Orff. An adept leading man was needed to blend this magpie stew into a coherent whole and the versatile Chris Pine was a wise choice. This era calls for a more self-effacing leading man if that character is a cis white male and Pine is game. We first meet Pine's character knitting a pair of mittens in a dungeon. Can you picture macho asshole Captain James T. Kirk doing that? The brawn is provided, in a gender flip, by Michelle Rodriquez in the sidekick role. Dungeons & Dragons' CGI action sequences are routine and the film is twenty minutes too long, but it is a pleasant repast with Pine as the special sauce that binds all the disparate elements together.