Tag: Chris Pine

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Now Playing In Memphis: Dracula, Mario, and the Big Suit

Nicolas Cage as Dracula in "Renfield." (Courtesy Universal PIctures)

It’s a big weekend at the movies in Memphis, so let’s jump right in.

Dracula’s faithful thrall R. M. Renfield has been with him since the beginning. But this relationship is starting to show its age, as Renfeld slowly realizes he doesn’t have to live like this. This horror comedy features the casting coup of the decade with the great Nicolas Cage as freakin’ Dracula. Read my review.

In The Pope’s Exorcist, Russell Crowe stars as Father Gabriele Amorth, the real life priest and founder of the International Association of Exorcists, who claimed to have vanquished infernal hordes during his 24-year-career as the Dioceses of Rome’s official demon fighter.

Speaking of Italians, one humble plumber turned video game hero just launched a blue shell at the box office. The Super Mario Bros. Movie raking in $204 million domestic in three days means we’re going to be seeing a lot more Nintendo characters in IMAX. Get in on the ground floor of the critical backlash today!

It’s official: More people play Mario Kart than D&D. And that’s OK, because Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is actually good! (Read my review here.) Chris Pine, the superior of the Chrises, brings movie star charisma to this inventive and fun fantasy heist romp. 

The greatest concert film of all time, Stop Making Sense, just got a 4K remastering, courtesy of A24. Both Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads were at the height of their creative powers when the director shot three nights of the Talking Heads’ Speaking In Tongues tour on Hollywood Boulevard in December, 1983. On Sunday, April 16 at 7:00 p.m., Theaterworks in Overton Square will host a free screening of the film. The stage will be a dance floor for this fundraiser, so put on your big suits and sneakers and get ready to sweat. The original trailer looks just as radical now as it did in 1984.

Speaking of radical, on Tuesday, April 18 at Studio on the Square, Indie Memphis presents the controversial thriller How To Blow Up A Pipeline. Director Daniel Goldhaber’s film loosely adapts Andreas Malm’s 2021 book with Runaways‘ Ariela Barer starring as a would-be radical who gathers a team to stop a West Texas oil pipline by any means necessary.

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Justice Smith, Sophie Lillis, Chris Pine, and Michelle Rodriguez in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. (Courtesy Paramount Pictures)

In the 50 years since Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s first gaming session in a Lake Geneva, Wisconsin basement, Dungeons & Dragons has gone from weird niche hobby to Satanic plot to widely influential pillar of popular culture. Game concepts like hit points, character classes, and alignment which underlie everything from Final Fantasy to Grand Theft Auto began with D&D. Now in its fifth edition, the game is more popular than ever; current owners Wizards of the Coast estimates there are more than 50 million players worldwide. 

D&D has evolved over the years. Coming from the tradition of H.G. Wells’ Little Wars and military tabletop training exercises, Gygax and Arneson were mostly concerned with creating a set of rules for simulating medieval combat and magic. In 1980, The Straight Dope described D&D as “a game that combines the charm of a Pentagon briefing with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping.” 

But what most players found fascinating was creating characters and participating in derring-do. D&D 5E and other contemporary role playing games like Stars Without Number are primarily story creation engines. A typical D&D game in 2023 is equal parts improv theater and group problem-solving exercise — a game of craps with a plot. 

Hugh Grant as Forge the Lord of Neverwinter. (Courtesy Paramount Pictures)

The setting that Gygax and company envisioned for their game was a mix of real details from the Middle Ages (Gygax had a peculiar obsession with halberds) and Romantic and fantasy literature from Ivanhoe to The Eternal Champion. Knights and kings rub shoulders with wizards and griffons. A part of the game’s appeal is that everyone can create their own fantasy stories, but in practice, the characters and plots created rarely rise to the majesty of Tolkien or exhibit the moral clarity of Le Guin. But so what? The important part is, you’re the one who gets to make the choices, reap the rewards, and suffer the consequences. 

D&D was catapulted into the mainstream when Eliot played it in E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, but four previous attempts to adapt it for the big screen (not to mention the beloved but terminally corny animated series) have been abject failures. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves avoids the traps its predecessors fell into by taking the source material as seriously as the average player takes their gaming sessions. In other words, it’s an action comedy. 

Michelle Rodriguez and Chris Pine in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (Courtesy Paramount Pictures)

Edgin (Chris Pine) is a bard who ditched his vows as a Harper to take a few levels as rogue after his wife was killed by vengeful Red Wizards of Thay. He finds crime pays better than heroism, and forms an adventuring party with the barbarian Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), the sorcerer Simon (Justice Smith), and charismatic thief Forge (Hugh Grant in full camp mode). They meet the warlock Sofina (Daisy Head) in a tavern, who enlists them in her quest to burgle a Harper trove which she says contains a magic item that could bring Edgin’s wife back to life. Leaving daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) behind, Edgin leads the party into the vault, only to be betrayed and left to be captured. 

Two years later, Holga and Edgin escape the slammer. Forge has parlayed his ill-gotten gains into the lordship of Neverwinter, with Sophina as his trusted advisor, and Kira his adoptive daughter. Instead of the family reunion they were expecting, Forge marks them for execution, so they’re on the run again. Such is the life of the freelance murder hobo. 

Sophia Lillis as Doric the Druid. (Courtesy Paramount Pictures)

In true D&D fashion, each new obstacle in the party’s path leads to a mini-quest. To redeem himself with his daughter, Edgin must plan a new heist that will expose Forge as Sophina’s catspaw. To do that, he needs a magic helmet. To find out where the magic helmet is, he must speak with the dead. To do that, he needs his old friend Simon, the shapeshifting druid Doric (Sophia Lillis), and the paladin Xenk (Regé-Jean Page). And so on.

The usual problem with adapting games into film is that there’s not enough plot to hang a story on (I’m looking at you, Angry Birds.) D&D is nothing but stories. Honor Among Thieves feels like something a dungeon master would cook up for a campaign. Directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who did the sleeper hit action comedy Game Night, understand that formulating an overly complex plan and then bickering about who messed up the plan is the real essence of the game. The action sequences are generally well done, and — with the exception of a bravado one-shot sequence where the shape-shifting Doric escapes from a castle —succinct. The magic duels are actually creative, not just wizards unimaginatively shooting lasers at each other like in so many Harry Potter movies. For longtime players, it’s thrilling to see Monster Manual entries like Displacer Beasts and Gelatinous Cubes come to life — proving that these classic creature designs are still superior to most modern Hollywood imaginings. 

Pine, who has been great in everything for years, finally comes into his own as a movie star. The chemistry between him and his team ultimately elevate Honor Among Thieves. What the film most resembles is the low- to mid-budget fantasies of the 80s, like Willow, Ladyhawk, and Legend. Even for the uninitiated, it’s still good fun.

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Now Playing in Memphis: Dungeons & Dragons & Pathos

Michelle Rodriguez and Chris Pine in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (Courtesy Paramount Pictures)

Break out your d20s and Mountain Dew, it’s D&D weekend at the movies.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is the fourth attempt to adapt the mother of all role playing games for the big screen. With Chris Pine in the lead, supported by an ensemble who understand the assignment, it’s the first one that actually succeeds as a movie. DMs and PC everywhere will enjoy visiting Baldur’s Gate and thrill to the Displacer Beast cameo, but it’s broadly entertaining enough for the uninitiated.

But let’s say dragons ain’t your thing. In a perfect bit of counter-programming, this is also the weekend Sundance Grand Jury Prize Winner A Thousand and One goes broad. (This is a very different “Grand Jury prize” from the one He Who Will Not Be Named just won.) Director A.V. Rockwell’s story of maternal love and systemic racism in New York City stars triple-threat Teyana Taylor (last seen opposite Eddie Murphy in Craig Brewer’s Coming 2 America) as a single mom struggling to stay out of prison and raise her son Terry, played at three different ages by three different actors. I’m issuing a Three-Hanky Cry alert for this one.

The Great Keanu continues to tear up the box office with John Wick: Chapter 4. Directed by ace stuntman Chad Stahelski, these films represent the pinnacle of action choreography. In fact, I would argue that they’re essentially dance movies, and place Reeves in the proud tradition of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly — but y’all ain’t ready for that conversation yet.

On Monday (April 3rd) at Studio on the Square, Indie Memphis brings the French film The Five Devils to the Bluff City. This wildly imaginative debut from director Léa Mysius looks incredible.

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Don’t Worry Darling

Florence Pugh carries Don’t Worry Darling. Harry Styles, not so much.

The new film Don’t Worry Darling has been overshadowed by the off-screen drama between director Olivia Wilde and stars Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Chris Pine, and fired star Shia LaBeouf. That’s a shame because the film’s message is applicable to contemporary feminism and society. There’s a lot more to it than just the controversy.

The story focuses on a young married couple, Jack (Harry Styles) and Alice (Florence Pugh), who are living a “perfect” life. Alice goes about her day preparing meals for her husband, having a drink ready for him when he arrives home, and satisfying his sexual needs. What Jack does when he’s not at home with Alice is the subject of some mystery. It all seems to be going swimmingly, until Alice starts asking questions: Where does he go every day? Why does she have to live subordinate to him? Why are they even there? But Alice’s questions are met with gaslighting. The men around her portray her as mentally unstable, even dangerous. When Alice’s friend Margaret (KiKi Layne) asks the same questions, she is driven to suicide and taken away from society. When Alice asks what happened, she is told not to worry, that Margaret and her husband were just having a little trouble. Alice’s curiosity about her world, that is both familiar and unsettling, will lead to shocking revelations and bloodshed.

The strength of Wilde’s direction lies in her world-building. She uses long shots of Alice and Jack’s cul-de-sac to express the habitual routines that define the societal structures that keep everyone in their place. She focuses on the details of cooking, cleaning, shopping, and ballet classes that frame Alice’s empty days. Wilde fills the film with symbols, characters, and dialogue which point to the men’s abuse of power.

Florence Pugh is the most engrossing aspect of Don’t Worry Darling. The brilliance of emotions she displays draws you deeper into this strange world. Whenever Alice felt pain, fear, or confusion, I found myself feeling the same emotions in the pit of my stomach. When Alice finally decides to act on her vague suspicions, Pugh walks us through her fear, despair, and resolve.

Another strong performance is by Chris Pine, who usually plays a clean-cut prince. He and Wilde play with your expectations, turning Pine’s character Frank into a dark, godlike figure who appears to hold the answers to the mysteries of this world. Wilde finds the hidden layers of Pine’s personality that were only glimpsed in his previous hero roles.

While Pugh and Pine are excellent, the oppressed housewife role is overplayed. What saves Don’t Worry Darling from a potentially dull plot line of suburban conformity and gender expectations is the shock ending. I won’t spoil it here, but when walking out of the theater, I found myself repeatedly saying, “Wow. Holy crap. Wow. That was —.”

The film’s biggest problem is the miscasting of Jack. Like any other Gen Zer, I have a special place in my heart for Harry Styles as a singer. But for a story so laden with meaning, casting a teenage heartthrob as the male lead turns out to be a very bad choice. Styles can sing, but he can’t act. Often, I found Styles’ facial expressions inappropriate for the emotions Jack should be experiencing. For example, when Alice says she wants to leave their life, she weeps into Jack’s arms and cradles his hands whilst tears stain her dress. Jack, two inches away from Alice’s blushed face, has not a single tear, semblance of emotion, or even eye contact with Alice. This happened many times in scenes where emotion was essential.

In the end, the positives outweigh the Harry Styles-shaped negatives. For me, Don’t Worry Darling is a must-watch for its powerful evocation of feminist values, and the lengths some men will go to in order to feel superior to the women in their lives. Wilde’s themes are best summed up by a minor character’s final words. As Shelley (Gemma Chan) uses a kitchen knife to take charge of her life, she hisses, “You stupid, stupid man.”

Don’t Worry Darling
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WTF WW? Wonder Woman 1984 Crashes the Invisible Jet

Gal Gadot takes out the garbage in Wonder Woman 1984.

Mark Cousins’ Women Make Film provided some much-needed solace when it aired this autumn on Turner Classic Movies. The 14-hour documentary series traced the overlooked contributions of female directors from Alice Guy Blaché to Greta Gerwig. Using the frame of a virtual film school, Cousins narrated clips from literally hundreds of films, demonstrating how the directors achieved effects like controlling the flow of time, or how to use sex scenes to advance the story.

For the action section, Cousins presented one of the most iconic moments the superhero genre ever produced: Wonder Woman’s charge across No Man’s Land from Patty Jenkins’ 2017 film. It is the perfect encapsulation of the character’s appeal. The men are hunkered down in their trenches, insisting the problem can’t be solved. They’ve tried nothing, and they’re all out of ideas! Wonder Woman quickly assesses the situation, straps on her armor, and gets it done, exposing the men’s macho posturing as mere vanity.

WTF WW? Wonder Woman 1984 Crashes the Invisible Jet (2)

In the context of a highlight reel from legends like Ida Lupino and Agnès Varda, the scene more than holds its own. Jenkins starts out intimate, with Gal Gadot as Diana Prince doffing a drab cloak to reveal her colorful armor, then expands steadily to reveal the sweep of the battlefield, and the strength of the forces opposing our hero. The hail of bullets Diana deflects with her shield stand in for every cruel and cutting remark offered by a sneering man to every woman who knew what they doing but couldn’t get anyone to listen to her.

Where the hell was that Patty Jenkins for Wonder Woman 1984? The much-anticipated sequel comes after a horrible, superhero-less year. We could use a little uplift right now, at the end of four years of Trump’s macho misrule, and who better to deliver it than the symbol of female competence and virtue?

Gal Gadot was up for the challenge. The genetically superior super-being is a quintessential movie star, able to hold the screen by just being there. Her first turn at Wonder Woman proved that, while she may not be Meryl Streep, she’s got the chops to deliver some light comedy and pathos along with the Amazonian gravitas. After an opening flashback in which young Diana competes in a kind of Themysciran ultra-quidditch, Gadot makes her entrance in full super-mode. Some crooks in the employ of Trumpian TV rich guy Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) are busting up a jewelry store which acts as a front for international antiquities smuggling. Since we’re in 1984, the action takes place in a mall. Wonder Woman intervenes to throw out quips and tie up bad guys while preserving Reagan-era shopping enjoyment.

Emotionally balanced career woman Diana Prince enjoys a relaxing day at the mall in Wonder Woman 1984.

We last saw Wonder Woman in 1918, but since she’s a demigoddess, she hasn’t aged a day. Being an emotionally balanced career woman rather than entitled basket case like Batman, Diana’s got a day job as an anthropologist for the Smithsonian. It’s rewarding, but she faces the classic problem of an immortal living among mortals: loneliness. Her true love Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) sacrificed himself for the greater good at the end of the last movie, so despite Diana literally being the perfect woman, she sips her pinot alone.

Diana makes a new work friend in frazzled archeologist Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), and the two are called on to find the provenance of a mysterious artifact rescued from the mall robber’s haul. It’s a crystal bound with a metal band, inscribed with Latin that claims to grant wishes. Diana finds the artifact has real power when she inadvertently uses it to bring Steve back to life. When Barbara wishes she could be “more like Diana,” she is shocked to gain not only the ability to walk gracefully in heels, but also super strength and nigh-invulnerability.

Gal Gadot and Chris Pine answer the question, ‘Are they really going to bring the Invisible Jet into this movie?’

It’s about here, as we enter hour two of a film that is two minutes shorter than Apocalypse Now, that the writers of Wonder Woman 1984 discover what Dungeon Masters have known for years: If you introduce an artifact that grants wishes, you have to use it sparingly, or your narrative will quickly fly off the rails. While Diana enjoys some well-deserved (and, to be fair, well-acted) canoodling with Stevie-boy, Maxwell Lord charms the still-naive Barbara into giving up the wish crystal. He then wishes to actually become the wish crystal.

Pedro Pascal as Maxwell Lord, about to confess he has no idea what he’s doing.

I’m not sure why the standard “I wish for unlimited wishes” gambit wouldn’t have worked, but I’m just here to observe and report. Lord’s poor wishmanship leads to a situation where he can’t wish things for himself, but must force others to wish things to him. It turns out that the wish-granting magic balances the universe by taking away something of equal value from the wisher. Ain’t that always the way? Lord’s play is to use that “take things away” power as leverage over the wishers. This leads to a shockingly ill-conceived scene where Lord cons an Arab leader out of his oil by restoring his ancestral caliphate. It really is 1984, Iranian hostage crisis xenophobia and all!

Meanwhile, Barbara has lost the humor and humanity that made her Diana’s only friend as she becomes Wonder Woman’s arch enemy Cheetah. Wiig is, of course, an incredibly gifted comic actor. She and Jenkins seems to be going for something similar to Michelle Pfeiffer’s transformation from Serena Kyle to Catwoman in Batman Returns, but it never gels. It doesn’t help that Cheetah’s final costume makes her look like a stray from Cats.

Kristin Wiig as Jellicle supervillain Cheetah.

From there, Wonder Woman 1984 steadily loses coherence as it slogs towards an uninspired climax. Jenkins’ intention seemed to have been to resurrect the positive spirit of the Richard Donner Superman films, a worthy goal to counteract the hopelessness of 2020. Indeed, there are shades of Superman II. The price Diana pays for bringing back her lost love is the loss of her invulnerability. Like Superman, she must chose between human love and the super powers she will need to save the world. But Donner’s great gift was for the clarity he needed to tell the elemental story of Superman and Lois Lane — aided in no small part by Mario Puzo’s screenplay.

Somewhere along the line, Jenkins lost the plot. Wonder Woman never loses all of her power, never has to taste to taste human vulnerability and solve problems only with her wits. Jenkins can still conjure up a good set piece, such as the Fury Road-inspired riff where Diana and Steve drive a taxi to take on a column of armored vehicles. But it lacks emotional resonance because the movie can’t find the courage to commit to the bit. Wonder Woman fans deserve better.

WTF WW? Wonder Woman 1984 Crashes the Invisible Jet

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Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse

All superhero movies should be animation.

It’s really not that far from where we are now. For large chunks of, say, Avengers: Infinity War, everything the viewer sees was rendered by a computer. It’s only the need to have Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson appear as Captain America and Black Widow that keeps them from going totally CGI. This grounding in the real world is necessary in order for us to take seriously these stories of men in tights saving the world by punching each other.

The problem with “grounding” comic book stories in the real world is that you lose an essential element. Read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, and you’ll never look at a Spider-Man comic book the same way again. Comics are not just a storytelling medium — they’re vastly inferior to the written word in that regard. There’s also visual and design elements that are unique to comics, the most obvious being combining words and design elements to evoke sound. Pow! Thwack! Bamf!

Ultimate Spider-Man — Miles Morales is the teenage superstar of the new spider-movie.

Divorced from the vibrant page layout, superhero stories can seem goofy. When Spider-Man is just lines on a page, you know how seriously to take his battles with Mysterio, the guy with the glowing fishbowl for a head. But every live action superhero movie since Tim Burton’s Batman has had to add a line or two about how funny it is that a guy dresses up like a bat to fight crime, because it’s frankly ridiculous to pretend people act like this in real life.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse uses animation to embrace the conceits and eccentricities of comics. It takes its cues more from Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World than Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. It also takes as its jumping off point a very comic premise, the “what if?” story. Sure, everybody knows Spider-Man is Peter Parker — a white, working class college student and cub news photographer raised by his aunt in Brooklyn. But what if Spider-Man was a Brooklyn teenager named Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) raised by a Latinx nurse (Luna Lauren Velez) and a black police officer (Brian Tyree Henry). And also, there are five other spider-folk.

Now, we’re getting comic book-y! Publishers like Marvel beta testing new takes on their cash cow characters led to superhero comics being the first sci fi-adjacent genre to embrace multiverse theory, which solves some issues in quantum mechanics by positing that ours is one of an infinite expanse of parallel universes where everything that can happen, does happen. Super-mobster Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) hires super scientist Olivia Octavius (Kathryn Hahn) to build a machine to access these parallel dimensions so he can retrieve fresh versions of his deceased wife and child.

Naturally, Peter Parker (Chris Pine) tries to stop him from running an unlicensed particle accelerator in Kings County. But when he fails, it’s up to Miles, who has been freshly bitten by a radioactive spider, to save reality. Since Miles can’t figure out how to stick (and more importantly, unstick) to walls yet, he needs help, which comes in the form of alternate spider-people. Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), is a down-on-his-luck, freshly divorced, middle age spider-dude. Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) is from a dimension where the radioactive spider bit Peter Parker’s crush instead instead of him. Spider-Noir (Nicolas Cage) is a hardboiled, arachnid-themed crime fighter from a black-and-white universe. Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn) co-pilots a mecha with an intelligent radioactive spider. And Peter Porker (John Mulaney) was bitten by a radioactive pig.

Freed from the dubious need for plausibility, Into the Spider-Verse spins wild visuals. Each character is drawn in the style of their own comics. Peter Porker, who looks like a Looney Tunes character, drops anvils on people and assaults his enemies with a giant cartoon hammer. Peni has an anime-inspired, epilepsy-unfriendly transformation sequence. The animators sometimes divide the frame into panel-like spaces. “Thwip” and “Pow!” appear to punctuate the action. During the dizzying finale, in which a newly empowered Miles tries to stuff the interdimensional genie back in the bottle, gravity and reality fail, and abstract bits of Brooklyn float by.

Impossible shots coupled with a breezy screenplay make this the most fun superhero movie since Sam Raimi shot an upside down Toby Maguire kissing Kirsten Dunst. With Marvel building toward an illusory finale and DC dead in the water, this is the fresh approach the genre needs. Don’t just take inspiration from cartoons, be a cartoon.

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse

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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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A Wrinkle In Time

In situations such as we find ourselves in now, I like to remind readers of Alfred Hitchcock’s attitude towards literary adaptations. When asked by Francois Truffaut if he would ever make a movie of a great novel such as Crime and Punishment, he said no. “In Dostoevsky’s novel there are many, many words, and all of them have a function.”

A great book does more than just tell a story. The writer’s use of language itself is a part of the magic. Having the voice of the author whispering in your head is an entirely different experience than sitting in a theater watching a moving image with an audience. What works very well in one medium will not be as effective when translated into another medium. The best books for adaptations are tightly edited page turners with strong stories. Hitchcock’s observation is boiled down to the dictum “Mediocre books make the best movies.”

Reese Witherspoon as Mrs. Whatsit walks the meadows of the utopian planet Uriel in A Wrinkle In Time.

A Wrinkle In Time is not a mediocre book. Therein lies the problem with the Disney-produced, Ava DuVernay-directed screen adaptation.

A Wrinkle In Time was a Harry Potter-sized literary sensation when it was first published in 1962. Author Madeline L’Engle drew on her own experiences as an awkward late bloomer to create Meg Murry, the thirteen year old protagonist. Meg begins the novel in the midst of a hurricane of sadness and self doubt that seems to have become an actual hurricane outside the cozy old house where she lives with her brother Charles Wallace and her scientist mother. Her father has been missing for four years, which is the source of much of her angst. The neighbors and the kids at school gossip that he was a deadbeat who ran out on his young family, but, given that he was a rouge NASA scientist who was studying higher dimensional physics, the Murry family hopes that he went somewhere more otherworldly, and might one day return.

Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which and Storm Reid as Meg Murry

DuVernay’s casting instincts are good. Storm Reid plays Meg with a confidence that belies her age. The otherworldly trio of Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) , proto-Time Lord, alien/angel hybrids who travel the cosmos by folding space with their minds, are all spot in. But much of their work in this visually dense film was done in solitude against green screens, and it shows. The same goes for former Peter Pan, Levi Miller, who plays Meg’s companion Calvin, and Deric McCabe who plays Charles Wallace. Faring much better is Zach Galifanakis as The Happy Medium, the oracle the children consult on their search for their missing father, who is played by the ever versatile Chris Pine. The Medium’s world of precariously balanced crystals is one of several compelling visual moments DuVernay and her crew conjure, but the film is so disjointed that it cannot sustain any momentum for long.

Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who

L’Engle’s prose is masterfully compact and often lyrical. She never talks down to her young audience, but uses the limitations of the children’s book to her advantage. But the novel is very much of its time. She was a devout Christian with the education to understand cutting edge science; one way to look at A Wrinkle In Time is as her attempt to reconcile the revelations of cosmology and quantum mechanics with old fashioned American transcendentalism. Her philosophy and imagery were absorbed by the kids of the early sixties, resurfaced when those kids got psychedelicized after the Summer of Love, and later incorporated into New Age mysticism. Her descriptions of the rolling, otherworldly fields of the planet Uriel are rewards themselves. But when they’re rendered as Disney-fied CGI, and characters just stand there and look at them, they’re not so interesting.

Mega Oprah

The root of her vision of evil is the false happiness of enforced conformity, and that’s not a can of worms the capitalist Disney corporation wants to open. L’Engle’s strength is the internal struggles of her young characters, but that’s not something that translates well to the screen, which is all about external appearances. Instead, L’Engle’s admonitions to embrace your weirdness are reduced to forced whimsey.  While I have no doubt the message is needed by America’s young women of color, there’s only so much empowering affirmation you can take in one sitting, even when it’s coming from a 30-foot Mega Oprah. A Wrinkle In Time was long thought to be unfilmable, and this version suggests that conventional wisdom was right.

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Star Trek Beyond

It ain’t easy being a Trekkie.

From the beginning, we’ve been an aggrieved bunch. The fandom coalesced in 1968, when NBC threatened to cancel the original Star Trek after two seasons, prompting a “Save Trek” letter-writing campaign organized by sci-fi zines and word of mouth. It worked, but the third season had fewer classic episodes, which led to Trekkies discovering their other favorite pastime: Complaining about Star Trek.

In the 1970s, as Trekkies were successfully lobbying to have the first space shuttle named Enterprise, they backed series creator Gene Roddenberry’s quest to create a new series. After the tremendous success of Star Wars, those ideas were transported onto the big screen for 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Trekkies were gleeful, because not only did they have new Trek to watch, but, since many found the film to be ponderous and self-important, they also had new stuff to complain about. For director Nicholas Meyer’s 1982 sequel, The Wrath of Khan, the haters were drowned out by the cries of Trekkies grieving for the death of Spock. When the franchise (and Leonard Nimoy, who had his own love/hate relationship with Trek) gave them what they wanted and brought Spock back to life in the third installment, Trekkies declared that “odd-numbered Trek movies are always bad.”

Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in 1987, and for the first two seasons, Trekkies, who were tuning in religiously every week, hated Captain Picard. Then he was assimilated by the Borg, and everyone decided they had always loved him and please don’t take him away. And so it went for 25 seasons of four consecutive spin-off series until Enterprise went off the air in 2005 just as it was getting good.

Sofia Boutella (left) as Jayla and Simon Pegg as Scotty in Star Trek Beyond

At this point, it probably will not surprise you to learn that I was less than impressed with the two J.J. Abrams-directed reboot films, Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). Sure, they looked good, and the new crew, led by Zachary Quinto as Spock, was well cast, but the writing—done by the same team who wrote Transformers—was just downright stupid. Abrams ditched Roddenberry’s techno-utopian humanism in favor of post-9/11 paranoid cynicism. The tenor of the times was not a good fit for Trek.

So it was with considerable trepidation I approached Star Trek Beyond. Abrams jumped ship for Star Wars, but his replacement is Justin Lin, best known for three Fast & Furious movies. The screenplay is by Simon Pegg, the comedy writer behind Shaun of the Dead, who is also returning for his third go-round as Scotty. Pegg’s script elevates Star Trek Beyond to the best Trek movie since 1996’s First Contact. Chris Pine’s rendition of Captain James T. Kirk has been the weakest link in the rebooted cast, but in the film’s opening scene, when Kirk’s diplomatic mission spirals into farce, Pine finally finds the handle on the character. Later, when a a rescue mission to an unknown planet turns into an ambush, the Enterprise crash lands, scattering the crew. Pegg’s script pairs off Spock and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban), giving the two frenemies some great scenes together as they fight for survival in the alien wilderness. Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Sulu (John Cho) both get meatier roles, and Idris Elba provides a credible villain with the fascist space vampire Krall.

Chris Pine as Captain Kirk


While the character moments are the best parts, Trek has never looked better. The frontier of the Federation doesn’t simply resemble rural California, and the gravity-bending design of Starbase Yorktown is an instant classic. The second-act space battle between the Enterprise and a swarm of Krall’s drones is visually inventive and harrowing. But, as the film progresses, Lin’s tics resurface. He puts Kirk on a motorcycle, his nervously roaming camera becomes tiresome, and he fumbles the climax, which seems to be on loan from Guardians of the Galaxy.

What Pegg and Lin get right is the sense of camaraderie among the diverse crew. Star Trek Beyond carries Roddenberry’s conviction that we can solve our problems by sticking together and applying equal parts compassion and logic, and its optimism is catchy.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Finest Hours

They say on the internet that excessive use of sports metaphors is the sign of a weak critic. That’s why the best thing about The Finest Hours is that it allows me to unleash a torrent of nautical metaphors while retaining my final sliver of self-respect. Fortunately for everyone, sailors have many words for failure.

The Finest Hours is becalmed from the beginning, when we see Coast Guard sailor Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) meeting cute with Cape Cod hottie Miriam Pentinen (Holliday Grainger), 1952-style. The movie wants you to believe they’re instantly falling in love, but the two actors mix like oil and water, so the clumsy sequence is just the first of many slow boats to China director Craig Gillespie books us on.

Chris Pine in The Finest Hours

Storm clouds, both real and metaphorical, start to gather about the time Miriam breaches Eisenhower-era patriarchal protocol by asking Bernie to marry her at an especially boring dance. He feeds her a line about asking permission from his commanding officer before a lucky nor’easter blows up and throws our young hero and his crew of misfits into action on the high seas.

A slow boat to boredom

The Finest Hours is based on a true story about the rescue of the crew of the SS Pendleton, an oil tanker that broke apart and sank off the coast of Massachusetts during a powerful storm. In the long history of movies about military heroes, very few, if any, concern the Coast Guard. So it’s kind of a shame that the film adaptation of the service’s bravest exploit is so dreadfully boring and uninspired.

The film’s most compelling moments come onboard the Pendleton, a rusting hulk of a tanker run into disaster by an unseen captain who goes down with the first half of his ship. The group of scalawags trapped in the stern of the broken ship find their reticent leader in engine man Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck), whose ingenuity and resolve in keeping half a ship afloat makes him a more compelling character than our alleged hero Webber. Affleck’s performance is this imperfect storm’s sole ray of light, but Pine is the one with the functioning boat, so he gets top billing. The young, untested Bernie’s mad fight through the storm should be the story’s dramatic heart, but it turns into a repetitive slog through the dark waves. There are a few good shots, such as when the tiny boat with the catchy name CG-36500 plunges underwater through giant, pounding waves, but director Gillespie spoils the fun by recycling them too often. For an $80 million Disney production, The Finest Hours‘ effects look singularly unconvincing. The men of the CG-36500 are clearly on a soundstage getting buckets of water thrown on them. Despite the hurricane force winds blowing blinding snow and freezing spray in their faces, they never look cold. Nor do they take common-sense precautions like wearing goggles, or, in Pine’s case, a hat. The one thing they do remember to bring along are clichés, so you won’t be at all surprised when Pine proclaims “Not on my watch!”

Things are bad out on the ocean, but they’re worse on the shore, where Grainger gives the worst performance of the young year. Her character Miriam is a poorly written, off-the-shelf “strong woman,” but Grainger walks her off the plank into harpy territory. Her lame subplot, which involves forgetting her coat and getting stuck in a snowbank, hits low tide when a single tear rolls down her face as she stares, bored, off into the middle distance. For that fleeting moment, it seems that she and the audience are in the same boat.