Tag: Benedict Cumberbatch

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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange.

It wasn’t obvious at the time, but in 1980, one of the most significant movies in the history of American cinema was filmed in the woods around Morristown, Tennessee. The Evil Dead was the brain child of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, who scrounged together just enough money to pay a 13-person crew to live in a broke-down cabin for a few miserable months. Raimi, who was 20 years old at the time, combined the supernatural horror of The Exorcist and the slasher gore of Halloween with the slapstick comedy of The Three Stooges. In the editing room, Raimi met Joel Coen, who, inspired by the fledgeling director’s can-do spirit, convinced his brother Ethan to make their own low-budget indie film, Blood Simple. After a rapturous review by Stephen King, The Evil Dead became a wildly profitable cult classic. 

In 1990, the year after Tim Burton’s Batman, Raimi directed Darkman, an original superhero film starring a young Liam Neeson. When the now-disgraced director Bryan Singer’s X-Men films took off in the late 90s, Raimi’s innovative vision earned him the director’s chair for Spider-Man. When the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched with Iron Man in 2008, it resembled Raimi’s light-dark, comedy-drama tone more than Christopher Nolan’s gritty, sour Batman Begins. 

Raimi felt burned by the mixed reaction to Spider-Man 3 and stopped making superhero movies until Disney loaded up the money truck to lure him into helming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It’s the best investment the House of Mouse has made in a long time. 

Xochitl Gomez, Benedict Wong, and Benedict Cumberbatch go Dutch angle.

Benedict Cumberbatch returns as Dr. Stephen Strange, the former surgeon turned sorcerer who was the brains behind the world-saving operation when the Avengers took on Thanos. The film opens with Strange and America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) soaring through an aerobatic sequence recalling the beginning of Revenge of the Sith. But when the sorcerer falls to a space demon, we learn that this is not THE Doctor Strange, but merely A Doctor Strange from a different corner of the multiverse. America is a wild magic talent who can travel between realities, and someone is sending giant tentacle monsters after her. 

That someone turns out to be Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), the Avenger who has completed her heel turn into the Scarlett Witch after creating her own sitcom pocket universe in WandaVision. She is seeking a universe where the two sons she never had in this world actually exist, and that means stealing America’s power. Strange realizes she has been corrupted by the Darkhold, a tome of forbidden chaos magic, and seeks the mythical Book of Vishanti, which contains spells to counter Wanda’s newfound might. 

Rachel McAdams, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Xochitl Gomez step between worlds.

Marvel comics appropriated the concept of the multiverse from quantum physics to explain the contradictions between different writers’ versons of their heroes histories, and now, with Everthing Everywhere All At Once and Rick and Morty, the concept has invaded mainstreams pop culture. With writer Michael Waldron (who won an Emmy for the Rick and Morty episode “The Vat of Acid”), Raimi milks the multiverse for all kinds of fun romps over its spry, two-hour running time. His restless camera swoops and dives, pushes in for comic effect, and pulls back to shoot fights like MGM dance sequences—especially in a music-themed magic duel which brings super-genius Danny Elfman’s score to the fore. 

Cumberbatch is loose, playful, and supremely confident as Marvel’s resident magical curmudgeon. Olsen adds dark nuance to her sympathetic WandaVision interpretation of Scarlet Witch, creating the best super hero-villain pairing since Black Panther and Killmonger. The multiverse story creates opportunities to introduce all kinds of new characters and variations on old ones, and then kill them off without consequence. In one parallel Earth, we meet a version of Agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) who took the supersoldier serum instead of Steve Rogers, and put the Union Jack on her shield. (Why does Captain Carter get a jetpack when Captain American doesn’t?) There’s also an emotional appearance by the great Patrick Stewart as an alternate Charles Xavier, who matches minds with Wanda. And of course, the legendary Bruce Campbell has a brilliant comedic cameo.

After a series of Marvel movies that range from the bloated Infinity War saga to the ho-hum Eternals, this is an exciting, visually inventive adventure actually worth the money to see on the big screen. Sam Raimi doesn’t need $200 million to make a great film, but when he has it, he shows everyone how it’s done.   

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The Power of the Dog Named Best Film of 2021 by Southeastern Film Critics Association

Kodi Smit-McPhee and Benedict Cumberbatch ride the range in The Power Of The Dog.

The Power of the Dog swept the Southeastern Film Critics Association’s annual awards poll, earning not only the Best Picture award, but also Best Director for Jane Campion, Best Actor for Benedict Cumberbatch, Best Supporting Actress for Kirsten Dunst, Best Supporting Actor for Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Campion’s work transforming novelist Thomas Savage’s story for the screen.

“Jane Campion has been one of our finest directors for decades, and I’m thrilled that our members chose to recognize her exquisite work on The Power of the Dog,” says SEFCA President Matt Goldberg. “Campion has crafted a unique Western that gets to the core of the genre while still feeling fresh and vital. It’s an absolute triumph of mood, performances, and craft that will certainly go down as one of her finest movies in a career full of marvelous filmmaking.”

Kristen Stewart as Diana in Spencer.

Kristen Stewart won Best Actress for her portrayal of Diana, the late Princess of Wales, in Spencer. The Best Ensemble acting award went to Wes Anderson’s sprawling tribute to journalism, The French Dispatch.

Greg Frayser’s work on Dune earned him the SEFCA’s Best Cinematography award.

Best Original Screenplay went to Paul Thomas Anderson for Licorice Pizza. The sci-fi epic, Dune, won Best Cinematography and Best Score for Hans Zimmer.

Best Documentary went to Summer of Soul, which also placed #10 in the overall rankings. Best Animated Feature went to The Mitchells vs. The Machines. In what must surely be a first, the experimental documentary Flee placed second in both the documentary and animated film categories.

Sly Stone performs at the Harlem Cultural Festival, a concert series of the same caliber as Woodstock, but long buried in music history until now.

As a member in good standing, your columnist voted in the poll. You can see how my choices differed from the consensus choices in the December 23rd issue of the Memphis Flyer. Here is the complete list of awards winners for 2021:

Top 10 Films

1.     The Power of the Dog

2.     Licorice Pizza

3.     Belfast

4.     The Green Knight

5.     West Side Story

6.     The French Dispatch

7.     Tick, Tick…BOOM!

8.     Drive My Car

9.     Dune

10.  Summer of Soul

Best Actor

Winner: Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog 

Runner-Up: Will Smith, King Richard

Best Actress

Winner: Kristen Stewart, Spencer

Runner-Up: Alana Haim, Licorice Pizza

Best Supporting Actor

Winner: Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog

Runner-Up: Jeffrey Wright, The French Dispatch

Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog

Runner-Up: Aunjanue Ellis, King Richard

Best Ensemble

Winner: The French Dispatch

Runner-Up: Mass

Best Director

Winner: Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog

Runner-Up: Steven Spielberg, West Side Story

Best Original Screenplay

Winner: Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza

Runner-Up: Wes Anderson, The French Dispatch

Best Adapted Screenplay

Winner: Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog

Runner-Up: Tony Kushner, West Side Story

Best Documentary

Winner: Summer of Soul

Runner-Up: Flee

Best Foreign-Language Film

Winner: Drive My Car

Runner-Up: The Worst Person in the World

Best Animated Film

Winner: The Mitchells vs. The Machines

Runner-Up: Flee

Best Cinematography

Winner: Greig Fraser, Dune

Runner-Up: Ari Wegner, The Power of the Dog

Best Score

Winner: Hans Zimmer, Dune

Runner-Up: Jonny Greenwood, The Power of the Dog

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The Current War

The two stories of The Current War are both fascinating in their own way. The first is the actual story told by director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and writer Michael Mitnick: In 1879, Thomas Edison’s team invented the incandescent light bulb in his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory. To the masses who spent way too much of their time trying not to burn down their houses with candles or asphyxiate themselves with gas lights, the clean, steady light from the bulb seemed like magic. But the bulbs, and new applications for electricity being developed by industrialists like George Westinghouse, couldn’t run without juice. In 1880, unless you had a dynamo in your back shed, you were out of luck. Thus, the most pressing problem for engineers in the early Gilded Age was how to get electricity into businesses and private homes all over the country.

Benedict Cumberbatch (above) stars as inventor Thomas Edison in The Current War.

There were two possible solutions: direct current (DC), where the electrons flow through the circuit in one direction like water in a river; and alternating current (AC), where the electrons shuffle back and forth through the circuit like line dancers. DC is the simplest and most versatile. You can run lights, motors, and anything else you can dream up on DC, but the stream of electrons tends to peter out over long distances. AC is more complex to implement, and in 1880, you could run a light bulb, not a motor, from it. But you can transmit AC power over thousands of miles without significant power loss if you crank up the voltage high enough.

Edison had spent all of his time experimenting with DC and had developed short-range distribution systems, which he first implemented in densely populated New York City. But most of America is much more spread out, and a new coal-smoke-belching power plant every square mile was only an attractive prospect to the guy who would get paid to build them. AC transmission, which Westinghouse favored, was much more efficient, but the high voltage carried with it a danger that didn’t even have a name yet: electrocution.

Michael Shannon as George Westinghouse

The Current War is the story of how Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) waged a two-decade contest to decide how the world would be wired. It was a conflict that played out in laboratories, in boardrooms, in the media, and, in the film’s telling, climaxed at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The wild card came in the person of Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult), the immigrant super-genius who, among other things, figured out how to run a motor on AC power. Tesla first went to work in Edison’s proto-corporate invention mill, quit to go into business for himself, and then sold out to Westinghouse.

You can’t fault Gomez-Rejon and Mitnick for lack of ambition. This is a complex story with huge historical repercussions and potentially something to say about our own late-stage capitalist moment. But that’s where the other story of The Current War comes in. The film originally premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2017. Producer Harvey Weinstein was not pleased with the reception there, so he took it from the director and was re-editing it when multiple sexual assault and rape charges ended his career and collapsed the Weinstein Company. After extensive bankruptcy litigation, Gomez-Rejon regained control of the film and made his own improvements. Thus, the version that goes into wide release this week is subtitled “Director’s Cut.”

I was not at Toronto in 2017, so I don’t know how much of the movie has changed since then, but something about The Current War doesn’t feel right. It somehow manages to be simultaneously undercooked and fussed-over. I generally advocate for shorter films, but this is a lot of material to pack into 107 minutes. For big chunks of its running time, it feels like a sizzle reel for The Current War mini-series. Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you made an entire picture along the lines of a Rocky training montage? If so, this is the film for you. Edison and Westinghouse take turns doffing their hats and proclaiming their latest accomplishments while years fly by. Tesla, the most genuinely interesting character, feels like an afterthought.

Nicholas Hoult as Nikola Tesla

And that’s a shame because the cast, which also includes the underrated Katherine Waterston as Westinghouse’s wife Marguerite Erskine Walker and Tom Holland as Edison’s right-hand man Samuel Insull, are clearly committed to the project. When Shannon and Cumberbatch finally confront each other at the World’s Fair, the scene crackles. The cinematography by Chung-hoon Chung is frequently exceptional, with compositions that seem to come out of a Gilded Age Harper’s Bazaar illustration.

I didn’t hate this film. There’s a great movie hiding in there somewhere, but it’s ironic that a story about capitalist greed and executive malfeasance threatening scientific advance and engineering progress seems to have been thrown off track by executive malfeasance.

Or maybe that’s not ironic at all. What’s the opposite of ironic? Expected.

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Ten Things About Ten Years Of Marvel Movies

The Paradiso is filling the traditional late summer movie doldrums with some repertory at the IMAX. For the last week it has been the spectacular presentation of 2001: A Space Odyssey providing an unparalleled cinema experience. This week, Marvel Studios is celebrating their 10th anniversary with an IMAX marathon. In the Marvel spirit of giving people what they want, here are 10 highlights from the 20 Marvel movies, arranged in the form of a numbered list to give it that little bit of extra narrative tension. Everybody loves lists, right? Let’s do this.

10. The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Marvel

Back in the lean comic years of the 1980s, a struggling Marvel sold the film right to some of its creations. Marvel’s A-list superheroes, The X-Men, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four wound up with Fox or with the Sony corporate hegemony, where films of varying quality were made in the early 2000s that whetted the appetite for comic book films. When producer Kevin Feige took over in 2007, just as the studio’s business model was changing from licensing its intellectual property to making their own films, Marvel was forced away from their flagship heroes to mine deeper into comic history. This proved incredibly freeing, and opened up new opportunities. Guardians of the Galaxy (Saturday 3:40 p.m.), for example, was one of the most fun blockbusters of the past decade, even though it comes from one of the more obscure corners of the Marvel comics library.

9. Marvel’s Biggest Failure

Of the 20 films Marvel screening this Labor Day weekend, exactly one, Ant-Man and The Wasp (Monday, 10 PM) has a titular female lead. And Evangeline Lilly as The Wasp gets second billing to the worst lead actor in the entire Marvel universe, Paul Rudd. Black Widow, portrayed iconically by Scarlett Johansson, is arguably the most interesting Avenger. If Marvel had wised up and given her a solo movie five years ago, they could have stolen DC’s Wonder Woman thunder, and we could have possibly avoided the Ghost In The Shell debacle.

8. The Most Comic-Book-y Comic Book Movie

I’m going to offer the hot take that Christopher Nolan has been bad for the superhero genre. He successfully brought gritty realism to comic book movies, but in the process he sacrificed the comic book form’s biggest strength: outlandish visuals. Marvel films, especially the later ones, have embraced the possibilities of CGI. None have veered farther from photorealism than 2016’s Doctor Strange. Director Scott Derrickson channels the Sorcerer Supreme’s creator Stephen Ditko with wave after wave of psychedelic freak outs — while also lifting some licks from Nolan’s Inception for good measure.

7. You Need A Good Villain

You know why Batman is everybody’s favorite superhero? Because he’s got the best villains. Superhero films live and die by the charisma of the bad guy, and the plausibility of their plan. The best recent example was Michael Keaton as Vulture in Spider-Man Homecoming (Sunday, 9:50 p.m.). The sotto voce threats he delivers to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man while Peter Parker is trying to bone his alter ego Adrian Tooms’ daughter Liz on homecoming night may be the single best acted scene in any Marvel movie.

6. The Guardians’ Secret Weapon

Who is the heart of the Guardians of the Galaxy sub-franchise? If you said ubiquitous hot guy Chris Pratt’s Star Lord, you’re mistaken. The correct answer is Karen Gillian as Nebula. Gillian has been low-key walking away with every movie and TV show she’s been in for the better part of a decade. She propped up Matt Smith’s mediocre Doctor Who for three years as Amy Pond, one of the best companions in the show’s 50-year history. Just last year she stole the Jumanji reboot out from under The Rock. Nebula, tortured and twisted and intensely physical, plays nemesis to her sister Gamora, and the scenes between Gillian and Zoe Saldana always crackle with emotion. When she reluctantly teams up with them, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (Sunday, 7 p.m.) her pouty sarcasm fits right in with the rest of the crew. In real life, Gillian just wrote and directed her first feature film, The Party’s Just Beginning.

5. The Third Act

The “Marvel Third Act” has become a shorthand for a big ending where our colorful heroes fight a horde of grey, identical monsters, with lots of attendant property damage, but no consequences for the heroes. It was perhaps best executed in 2012 by Joss Whedon in The Avengers (Friday, 3:40 p.m.), but its unimaginative imitators have been a plague on the multiplex ever since. Interestingly, Whedon commented on the Marvel Third Act in Avengers: Age Of Ultron (Saturday, 7 p.m.), when the destructive aftermath of the Battle of Sokovia would haunt the heroes.

4. Smaller Is Better

One of the problems with writing stories about superheroes is that they’re larger than life. That means the stakes must always be growing larger to give the overpowered protagonists a decent challenge. But after the fifth time you’ve seen someone save the world, you think maybe it isn’t that hard. The best Marvel stories turn out to the ones where the stakes are smaller, and the heroes alone. Ant-Man (Saturday, 9:55 p.m.) excels despite its flat lead because the conflict is almost beside the point. The real fun is the giddy special effects sequences that are like a jazzed-up version of The Incredible Shrinking Man.

3. The Evolving Hero

The creeping Batmanization of the world compels every lead character to be dark, tortured, and brooding. Only manly men who experience no pleasure in their lives can aspire to the title of hero. Marvel has resisted this, and their bread and butter has become redefining what a hero can be. In Captain America: Civil War (Saturday, 1 p.m.), Vision, played by Paul Bettany, wears a sensible sweater/oxford combo and cooks breakfast for his superpowered girlfriend Wanda Maximoff (Elisabeth Olsen). Then, in Avengers: Infinity War (Monday, 7 p.m.), he offers to sacrifice himself to save half the universe.

2. Killmonger Was Right

Why was Black Panther (Monday 3:40 p.m.) so good? The number one reason is that director Ryan Coogler did his homework and delivered a perfectly constructed action movie. Each scene builds on the last and leads to the next. And most importantly, both the hero Black Panther (the unbelievably charismatic Chadwick Boseman) and the villain Killmonger (the unbelievably charismatic Michael B. Jordan) have believable motivations and coherent cases to make for their sides. T’Challa is the king and defender of the status quo in Wakanda. They have been kept safe by their advanced technology for hundreds of years. But Killmonger rightly points out that while Wakanda has stayed safe, they have allowed the colonization and genocide of Africans outside their borders. Killmonger wants to use the power of Wakanda to rectify that situation and colonize the white world right back. Black Panther defeats Killmonger, but T’Challa is moved by his vision and opens Wakanda up to the world, hoping to make it a more just place. It’s a rare bit of moral complexity in a genre that is pretty much defined by its black and white ethical structure.

1. Captain America: The First Avenger

Coming in at number one on our countdown that is in no way an actual countdown is Captain America: The First Avenger (Friday 1 p.m.). Director Joe Johnson hits the superhero sweet spot with this Nazi-punching triumph. Johnson’s influence looms large over the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He is a special effects innovator whose debut film Honey I Shrunk The Kids, was basically a look book for Ant-Man. His 1990 film The Rocketeer, about a man who finds a super flight suit and battles Nazis in the 1930s, was a box office failure at the time, but provided a template for The First Avenger. Chris Evans, who had previously played The Human Torch in Sony’s failed Fantastic Four adaptation, gives a performance on par with Christopher Reeve’s Superman as the once-scrawny kid from Brooklyn who would become the moral center of the Avengers. The overriding theme of all of the Marvel movies is Stan Lee’s maxim “With great power comes great responsibility,” and no one sets a better example than Captain America. 

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Avengers: Infinity War

Doctor Who premiered November 22, 1963. It was an immediate hit, and over the years the hokey show about a time-traveling weirdo became a cultural touchstone. By 1983, the production team was at the height of its powers. The lead role was in the hands of the young and charismatic Peter Davidson, and the budgets were bigger than ever. In the post-Star Wars afterglow, the show finally made the jump to America. The BBC decided to celebrate the 20th anniversary with the greatest crossover event in television history: They would bring together all the actors who had ever played the Doctor for one universe-shattering adventure. After months of hype, “The Five Doctors” premiered on November 23, 1983. It was a disaster.

Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), newly minted beardo Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and supersoldier in perpetual distress Bucky Barns (Sebastian Sam) defend Wakanda in Avengers: Infinity Wars.

Getting the giant cast together was a nightmare of bruised egos and diva behavior. The most important actor, Tom Baker, pulled out late in the process, so writer Terrance Dicks had to rewrite around some clips of Baker salvaged from a scrapped episode. The ratings were good, but not significantly better than a normal week’s viewership.

Worst of all, “The Five Doctors” exposed the weaknesses that the show’s fanbase had learned to overlook. There were still great moments to come—in 1984, the series produced “The Caves of Androzani”, now regarded as an all time high—but viewership faltered, and before the decade was out, Doctor Who was cancelled. In the internet comment board fever swamps, this is what’s known as “jumping the shark.”

I think you can see where I’m going with this.

Spider-Man (Tom Holland) and Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) get lost in space.

Picking up where Thor: Ragnarok left off, Avengers: Infinity Wars gets off to a strong start. Spaceships full of refugees from destroyed Asgard are intercepted by Thanos (Josh Brolin), who slaughters them and extracts the Infinity Stone from the Tesseract held by Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) narrowly escapes the destruction and rides the Rainbow Bridge, opened by Heimdal (Idris Elba) to Earth, where he warns Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Tony Stark (Robert Downy, Jr.) of Thanos’ plan to collect all six Infinity Stones, artifacts of immense power that control Mind, Soul, Space, Time, Power, and Reality, and use them to destroy half of all life in the universe.

One thing Infinity War has going for it that other superhero movies have struggled with is a compelling villain. Brolin’s Thanos, until now a barely glimpsed, purple skinned mound of muscle, turns out to be surprisingly complex. He gets some fine scenes with his two adoptive daughters, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gilian, who has emerged as one of the best Marvel actors). Directors Anthony and Joe Russo are at their strongest when they take time to concentrate on pairs of characters, such as the doomed romance between Vision (Paul Bettany) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), or the science/magic rivalry between Stark and Strange. Chris Hemsworth’s Thor gets paired off with Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and teenaged Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), which makes for some pleasantly goofy comedy beats. But everything else seems rushed, thin, and worst of all, calculated for maximum fan service, such as when the Guardians of the Galaxy are introduced singing along to The Spinners’ “Rubberband Man”. Our heroes make a stand in Wakanda, but the snap Ryan Coogler brought to Black Panther is missing. The potentially touching reunion of Banner and Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) is completely botched.

Thanos (James Brolin) seeks radical glove improvement. Also, genocide.

What ultimately sinks Infinity War is the unsolvable problem that sank “The Five Doctors”—the need to fit in references to 19 other Marvel movies. This is a film designed for superfans, and it could please many. But there inevitably comes a moment in long, episodic serials when the audience realizes that the catharsis they seek will never come. The demands of capitalism means there can never be a satisfying ending, and each installment of the story is reduced to a commercial for the next one. One way to read the ending of Infinity War is as a bold departure from formula. Another, more accurate way to read the ending is the plot equivalent of the moment in A Christmas Story when Ralphie uses his new Little Orphan Annie decoder ring to discover that the secret message is “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”. It’s the moment when all of the superheroes team up to collectively jump the biggest, most expensive shark of all time.

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Doctor Strange

I sometimes think it’s strange when people talk about a comic book character’s “true” identity. These characters were, and are, always changing to meet the commercial needs of the publishers. I mean, She-Hulk was briefly a member of the Fantastic Four! The only rules are a complete lack of rules.

Benedict Cumberbatch is Doctor Strange

And yet, there is something about the way Doctor Strange is drawn in the latest Marvel blockbuster that bugs me. I’m not a deep expert on comics. The number of comic book superheroes I have an emotional attachment to is not very large: Spider Man, Batman (90s animated series version), Rom The Spaceknight (that one’s never getting a $100 million movie), Dr. Manhattan, The Tick, and Doctor Strange.

Hiring Benedict Cumberbatch to play the Sorcerer Supreme was the perfect casting choice, which is keeping with the generally good decisions Marvel Studios has made under Producer Supreme Kevin Feige. And, as I’ll get to in a minute, Doctor Strange delivers big time on the visual front, and holds together reasonably well on the writing front. It’s the characterization that left me cold, which is surprising, because the promise of getting the characterization exactly right is what mustered the tiny bit of excitement I have left for Marvel-branded, extruded movie-type product.

After a perfunctory, McGuffin-establishing battle between reality bending mystics, we meet Dr. Stephen Strange, a brilliant neurosurgeon whose massive intellect is outstripped only by his outsized self-regard. And how do the trio of screenwriters and director Scott Derrickson choose to demonstrate his extraordinary brainpower? Turns out he’s a master of 70s pop music trivia. Sure, they reveal this character beat while Strange is in the midst of delicate brain surgery, but wouldn’t a complete mastery of classical music history be more consistent with the character than a fondness for Chuck Mangionie? From the first introduction, they have changed Doctor Strange into Buckaroo Banzai.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Buckaroo Banzai! Far from it. (Where’s my $100 million version of Buckaroo Banzai Against The World Crime League, Hollywood?) But I can’t help but get the feeling that the real reason Doctor Strange listens to dad rock is because everybody loved Starlord’s mom’s mix tape in Guardians Of The Galaxy. Just as Batman and Superman are essentially the same character in Batman vs Superman, so too are members of Marvel’s much more varied hero stable morphing into marketing driven sameness.

Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One shows Stephen Strange what’s up.

But at least Cumberbatch looks the part, and, as appropriate for an origin story, he gains gravitas as the story proceeds. Strange injures his hands in a car accident (don’t text and drive your Lamborghini, people!), ending his neurosurgery career. Medicine fails, so he heads of to Nepal (don’t want to piss off the Chinese market by using the original Tibet) in search of a magical way to restore the full use of his hands. Once there he finds Kamar-Taj, a monastery full of sorcerers led by The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton, hitting her marks with crisp perfection), who teaches Strange the arts of conjuring and inter-dimensional travel. When the magic starts flying, Doctor Strange’s real strength is revealed. There are clear visual references, like the wall- and ceiling-walking martial arts moves taken from The Matrix and the recursive, bending cityscapes from Inception. But like an original beat built out of samples, the visual synthesis feels fresh, even while it pays tribute to artist Steve Ditko’s psychedelic 60s phantasmagoria.

Strange’s journey from adept to master is hastened by the attack of Kaecillius (Mads Mikkelsen), a rogue student of the Ancient One who wants to summon a god of the Dark Dimension to Earth, offering the planet in exchange for everlasting life. Pretty standard stuff for a superhero flick, really, but at least it’s a coherent vehicle to keep the eye-popping visuals flowing.

Doctor Strange is the best superhero movie of the year, but it doesn’t do much to change my hypothesis that we reached Peak Comics with The Avengers: Age Of Ultron. The film’s sturdy competence offers a sharp contrast with the flailing nonsense of the DC filmic universe, which says to me that Disney and Marvel are the only studio today that has an actual good creative process in place. But there’s a thin line between “process” and “formula”, and despite all of its visual bravado, Doctor Strange’s reality bends too strongly towards formula.

Doctor Strange

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Sherlock: The Abominable Bride

Sherlock: The Abominable Bride (2016; dir. Douglas MacKinnon)—Sherlock co-creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat have a problem: they’ve outsmarted themselves, and they don’t know what to do or where to turn next. What else could explain the fact that three of the four Sherlock episodes since 2012’s splendid “The Reichenbach Fall,” including “The Abominable Bride,” either directly or indirectly address the fiendishly complicated rooftop standoff that ended with the apparent deaths of Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his arch-nemesis James Moriarty (Andrew Scott)? In “The Empty Hearse,” 2014’s Series Three premiere, Gatiss and Moffat did an honorable job providing a winking, plausible-enough explanation for Sherlock’s survival. But Moriarty’s demise and subsequent resurrection at the end of “His Last Vow” has apparently left the two showrunners as troubled as it has left Sherlock himself.

That’s not a good thing. But before it stumbles into a flashback/flash-forward-heavy mind palace walk that’s both too obvious and too clever in retrospect, “The Abominable Bride”—which topped the box office in China last weekend—is a funny, energetic and creepy account of the Victorian-era Holmes’ most perplexing case. And one of the most pleasurable elements of this return to the character’s imaginary roots is Cumberbatch’s restrained re-re-imagining of the Holmes persona. He exchanges his modern-day Sherlock’s high-functioning sociopathic hostility for a less confrontational yet equally supercilious set of manners and witticisms. This new-old Sherlock plays a fine, well-tuned violin, sucks at his pipe with lip-smacking self-satisfaction, and glides through prickly encounters with Dr. Watson (Martin Freeman) and Scotland Yard’s Inspector Lestrade (Rupert Graves) on a magic carpet of pragmatic, faux-prissy erudition.

In late 19th century England, Freeman’s Watson is less of a victim of Holmes’ whims and more of a collaborator. He’s also earned a measure of fame by publishing stories about his adventures with Holmes in the penny dreadfuls. Some provocative, confusing Don Quixote-esque mix-ups ensue when Watson presses Holmes about his relationship status and Holmes deflects inquiries with philosophical pontifications plagiarized from Watson’s stories. Who’s writing whom here, anyway? Larger and more menacing destabilization appears quickly enough, and soon Holmes and Watson find themselves on opposite sides of the old “ghost/not a ghost” debate when they are asked to solve the mystery of an undead bride who keeps returning to wreak havoc on unsuspecting men.

“The Abominable Bride” is perhaps overloaded with divertissements, including a Diogenes Club encounter starring a Taft-fat Mycroft Holmes (played by Gatiss himself) ringed with puddings and meats, a memorable exchange about the foolishness of the “secret twins” theory, and all kinds of nods and nudges directed at both Sherlock Holmes the myth and Sherlock Holmes the man. Yet by the end, this tenth feature-length Sherlock installment is a pleasurable if failed dramatic experiment that’s obsessed with its central character’s own failures. It’s also an addictive mess that provides many fleeting pleasures before examining the messes that addiction makes of most people’s lives. Here is the final problem with “The Abominable Bride”: as Gatiss and Moffat continue to expand and deepen Sherlock’s psychological profile, Sherlock’s ability to construct an exciting, rewarding mystery that can handle its inter-textual baggage and its own recent history continues to falter.

Grade: B

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Film Features Film/TV

Film Review: Black Mass

I’m on record as saying the gangster movie is a played-out genre, except I think I phrased it more like “If I have to watch another movie about well-dressed gangsters in the Northeast, I’m gonna puke.”

I know gangster movies have been a staple since at least 1931, when Jimmy Cagney strutted around in The Public Enemy, and I know that, at their best, they’re a commentary on the American dream, capitalism, the immigrant experience, etc. But lately, it seems like they’re a shortcut to gravitas for a bunch of writers and directors who are obsessed with a vision of masculinity that, in 2015, seems increasingly toxic. I’ve gone beyond the point where I think it’s fun to watch jowly men scowl at each other across well-appointed tables. We get it. You liked The Godfather. Let’s move on.

It would be too much to say that Black Mass dispelled me of that notion, but director Scott Cooper’s film is good enough to suggest that maybe there’s life left in the old gangster movie carcass yet. To be fair, James “Whitey” Bulger (Johnny Depp) and his totally legitimate business associates in the Winter Hill Gang were not, by any stretch of the imagination, well dressed.

Black Mass marks a return to serious acting for Johnny Depp.

Black Mass is told in a series of flashbacks, as members of Bulger’s gang, beginning with Kevin Weeks (Jesse Plemons) are deposed by the FBI. In their memories, Bulger was just as contradictory a figure as Cagney in The Public Enemy. He was a ruthless, violent thug, but he also was kind to children, let his mother win at gin rummy, and was beloved in the South Boston neighborhood where he grew up. By the time we first meet him in 1975, he has already served nine years years in San Quentin and Alcatraz, and was a respected boss in Boston’s Irish mob.

Instead of getting mobbed up, Bulger’s childhood friend John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) joined the FBI. He reaches out to Bulger’s brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), a state senator and one of the most powerful men in Boston, to make contact with Bulger and persuade him to become an informant. Amazingly, Bulger agrees, but as the story progresses through the 1980s, it soon becomes apparent that Bulger is just manipulating Connolly to his own ends and using the FBI as his personal intelligence agency as he consolidates power.

After spending most of the last decade playing over-the-top characters like Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and whatever nutso man-child character Tim Burton was peddling that year, the buzz was that Black Mass represented Depp’s return to serious acting. He is easily the best thing about the movie. His Bulger is introduced as a demonic presence in silhouette, and he seems to remain partially in shadow the entire film, even in scenes set in Miami’s tropical sunlight. Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi never misses a shot to make Depp’s partially shaved noggin look like a death’s head skull perched atop his ubiquitous black leather jacket. Edgerton, who is excellent at playing men blind to their own flaws, follows Depp around like a puppy as he is drawn deeper into the world of criminals he’s supposed to be fighting. Also excellent are Kevin Bacon as a Connolly’s FBI boss, and Cumberbatch, whose Southie accent is so perfect you’d think he grew up there.

Unfortunately, the screenplay is not up to the level of the performances and cinematography. Part of the problem is that the real story itself is kind of flat, with no peaks and valleys, just a slow slide into degradation for everyone involved. No matter how well-rendered Bulger is, he’s still a singularly loathsome individual who may or may not have been pushed into full blown psychosis during more than 50 LSD experiments he volunteered for while in Alcatraz. Watching him run roughshod over the corrupt city government and weak-willed FBI agents is like reading about World War II’s Eastern front—you don’t want to root for either Hitler or Stalin. It makes for a bleak view of humanity dressed up in tacky 70s clothes and some of the worst hairstyles ever committed to film. But if you’re a fan of gangster movies and/or Depp, Black Mass is the best dose you’re going to get this year.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Pharaohs Rule Indie Memphis Audience Awards

Dance documentary Pharaohs Of Memphis completed a sweep of the 2014 Indie Memphis Hometowner Awards by taking home the Audience Award for Best Feature, a remarkable achievement for first-time director Phoebe Driscoll, a 22-year-old senior at Rhodes College. The just-announced awards were determined by audience members who gave the films they saw over the four-day festival grades from A to F.

Taking home the Best Narrative Feature award was The Imitation Game. Directed by Morton Tyldum, the film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, who helped develop the modern computer while breaking German codes during World War II. 

The Documentary Feature Audience Award went to Art & Craft, the story of art forger Mark Landis, which was directed by the team of Sam Cullman, Jennifer Graussman, and Mark Becker. 

The Bravest, the Boldest – Teaser Trailer from Moon Molson on Vimeo.

Pharaohs Rule Indie Memphis Audience Awards

Among the short films, the audience chose Moon Molson’s “The Bravest, The Boldest” as Best Narrative; “Leadway” by Robbie Fisher and Dudley Percy Olsson as Best Documentary, while “Space Licorice” by Nathan Ross Murphy took home the Hometowner Short award. 

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Film/TV TV Features

Watching The Detective

Cumberbitches rejoice: Your hero has returned. Sherlock, BBC One’s brilliant modern take on the continuing adventures of the world’s greatest detective, begins its third season Sunday night on PBS. Its welcome reappearance during a stretch of the calendar year when many movie studios are busy dumping their least appealing product on an unsuspecting public (see The Legend of Hercules — or, actually, don’t) is great news indeed.

Like the basic-cable dramas Justified and Breaking Bad, Sherlock‘s long story arcs and high level of craftsmanship tend to blur the line between television and cinema. Each 90-minute episode is remarkable not only for its breakneck pace but also for its striking and playful use of film technique. In fact, when compared to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, Sherlock offers a faster, smarter take on the crimefighter-criminal dynamic. And the TV show is even more perceptive about the psychology of an iconic hero who may be on the side of the angels but definitely isn’t one of them.

The terrifically exciting Series 2 finale, “The Reichenbach Fall,” aired on U.S. television in May 2012, and in the meantime, Sherlock’s two leads have gotten pretty famous. Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Sherlock Holmes, and Martin Freeman, who plays Dr. John Watson, are big-time Hollywood stars now. Last year, Cumberbatch appeared in everything from Star Trek Into Darkness to 12 Years A Slave, while Freeman has starred as young Bilbo Baggins in the first two installments of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. They’ve worked together once since Sherlock, in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug in which Cumberbatch is the voice of the dragon.

I get the sense that Freeman and Cumberbatch returned to the small screen because these current incarnations of Holmes and Watson are too richly imagined to give to anyone else. No previous Sherlock I know of has gloried in his own brilliance more smugly or swung a scarf around his neck more stylishly than Cumberbatch, whose alien handsomeness reinforces his status on the show as a hyper-observant outer space being. And few Watsons have conveyed the complex nature of a friendship with Sherlock Holmes with more low-key humor or well-earned pathos than Freeman, whose grief in the new season’s premiere episode, “The Empty Hearse,” is as serious as his mustache is stupid-looking.

The sly sense of humor that occasionally surfaced throughout Series 1 and 2 is more prominent in the first two episodes of Series 3. Although there are suspenseful moments in both “The Empty Hearse” and “The Sign of Three,” this year’s Sherlock episodes are noticeably lighter in tone. The new emphasis on humor feels logical and necessary after the nerve-jangling suspense of “A Study in Pink,” “The Great Game,” and the rest of the Moriarty arc in Series 2.

Besides, the way Sherlock handles the drudgeries of daily life are as fascinating and pleasurable as the way he solves crimes. The questions posed to him by everyday existence are, if anything, more perplexing than well-dressed skeletons or unsolved murders. How does a high-functioning sociopath like him express vulnerability when every conversation becomes an interrogation and a power struggle? How would such a remorselessly logical individual plan a pub crawl? How might someone with (at best) a theoretical understanding of human emotion deliver a heartfelt best-man speech at his best friend’s wedding?

Sherlock‘s wit and insouciance are also reflected in the series’ playful handling of the Holmes mythology. The title of the premiere, “The Empty Hearse,” refers to “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original back-from-the-dead Holmes adventure; Sherlock’s own facility with disguise there and elsewhere is frequently rendered both remarkable and ridiculous. Every episode throws in a couple of sly nods to major and minor cases from the Holmes dossier as well.

In addition, Sherlock‘s memorable imagery and flamboyant editing frequently surpass much of what’s playing on bigger screens. Sherlock directors Paul McGuigan, Euros Lyn, Toby Haynes, Jeremy Lovering, and Colm McCarthy are all particularly adept at dramatizing the use of computers and other technologies: text messages float into the air and sometimes swarm into clouds of words and information on screen. One of the most innovative scenes in Sherlock occurs during the McCarthy-helmed “The Sign of Three,” when Holmes arranges a batch of laptops to identify a “ghost man” connected to a handful of seemingly random women. The cuts between Sherlock in cyberspace and Sherlock at 221B Baker Street are, like him, clever enough to elicit headshakes and grins.

But the show’s most impressive technical accomplishment lies in the way it visualizes Holmes’ quick-twitch deductive powers. His observations are often conveyed through lightning-fast montages that zero in on important physical details and label them, so you can (for a moment, anyway) notice the visible tan line and bit of foreign currency jammed in a shady used-car dealer’s wallet or peg a Buckingham palace official as a public-school graduate who rides horses and loves dogs.

Speaking of Buckingham Palace, it’s important to remember that Sherlock Holmes’ fame as a “consulting detective” thrives in part because of the tacit approval of both Scotland Yard and his older brother Mycroft (Sherlock co-creator Mark Gatiss), who works for the British government. In previous episodes, Mycroft has come off as a supercilious meddler. But in “The Empty Hearse,” Mycroft’s formidable deductive skills are highlighted during some bantering one-upmanship with his younger sibling over a knitted cap. This relatively minor scene between Cumberbatch and Gatiss is a Series 3 highlight.

Wit and technical wizardry aside, the new series should draw a large audience because Sherlocked fans everywhere want to know how their hero faked his own death. I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the big reveal in “The Empty Hearse,” although I was delighted by the ways in which Gatiss and co-writers Steven Moffat and Stephen Thompson poke fun at the numerous theories that tried to explain how Sherlock survived his apparent suicide. But, having recently rewatched “The Reichenbach Fall” with fair play in mind, I can confirm that Holmes’ alibi and rationale check out. If they don’t satisfy you, then, as Sherlock himself sneers, “Everybody’s a critic.”

Sherlock, Series 3 (Masterpiece Mystery!)

Beginning Sunday, January 19th, 9 p.m.

PBS (WKNO, Channel 10 in Memphis)