Tag: David Harbour

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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing in Memphis: Gran Turismo, Jurassic Park, and Indie Rock

 

Jann Mardenborough loved the auto racing simulation Gran Turismo, and was picked to compete on GT Academy, a British reality show where video game players competed to get a shot at driving in a real Formula One race. He went on to a successful career driving for Nissan. In Gran Turismo, his story has been dramatized by District 9 director Neill Blomkamp, starring Midsommar’s Archie Madekwe as Mardenborough and Stranger Things‘ David Harbour as his trainer. Expect inspirational speeches about cars that go vroom.

Blue Beetle, the latest superhero story from DC, stars Xolo Maridueña as Jaime Reyes, a Hispanic college student who is unexpectedly gifted with superpowers by an alien robot scarab. As he tries to come to terms with his new identity and new responsibilities, he has help from his large extended family, including comedian George Lopez as his uncle. 

While Barbie and Oppenheimer dominated the headlines this summer, Talk To Me, the debut horror film from Aussie YouTubers Danny and Michael Philippou has become a sleeper hit. 17-year-old Mia (Sophie Wilde) tries to use a mummified severed hand to contact the spirit of her dead brother, and gets a lot more than she bargained for. 

In Golda, Helen Mirren stars as Golda Meir, the prime minister who led Israel to victory during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.  

Speaking of biopics, here’s one about baseballer Ricky Hill, who overcame a physical handicap to … play baseball.

What would late summer be without Liam Neeson receiving a mysterious phone call which thrusts him, an everyman, into an unfamiliar world of violence and danger? Just so happens, he possesses certain skills. This time, they got a little Speed in the mix to liven things up a little.

Remember when Jurassic Park movies were good? If so or if not, the still unconquered original Jurassic Park is getting a 30th anniversary run in theaters starting Friday.

Thursday, August 31, the Crosstown Arts Film Series presents The Elephant 6 Recording Co. The music documentary traces the Ruston, Louisiana collective which produced indie wonders like Neutral Milk Hotel, The Olivia Tremor Control, and Of Montreal.

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Film Features Film/TV

Violent Night

David Harbour as Violent Night’s Santa Claus punches first, gives gifts later.

Santa Claus, that personification of Christmas beloved of children everywhere, comes with his own group of accessories and symbols: the red cap and coat, white beard, round spectacles, flying sleigh pulled by magic reindeer, and Skullcrusher, his hammer.

Not familiar with Skullcrusher? That’s because you haven’t seen Violent Night yet. Skullcrusher isn’t likely to join the Santa pantheon alongside his bag of toys for good little girls and boys, but, in the right hands, it is capable of meting out more punishment for the naughty than a simple lump of coal.

Those hands belong to David Harbour, most recognizable as Stranger Things’ Sheriff Jim Hopper, the reluctant stepdad of human weapon Eleven. He also whipped his dad bod into shape to play the Red Guardian in Black Widow, so playing an ass-kicking Santa is in his wheelhouse. When we first see him as the Bearded One, he’s knocking back beers at an English pub, commiserating with the other Santa tribute artists about the kids these days. Santa’s over the greed that has taken over his season, but he’s kept going only out of duty to the kids on the nice list. When he leaves through the roof access, it dawns on the staff that he’s the real thing.

Meanwhile, little Trudy Lightstone (Leah Brady) is on her way to Christmas at grandma’s house. It’s the first time her estranged parents Jason (Alex Hassell) and Linda (Alexis Louder) have been together in a while. The situation is even more fraught because the wealthy Lightstone family is more toxic than Presidents Island. Grandma Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo) is a predatory capitalist with a foul mouth and no time for sentiment. Alva (Edi Patterson) can’t hold her liquor as well as her mother, and her boyfriend Morgan Steele (Cam Gigandet) is only there to try to convince Gertrude to fund his movie idea.

When Santa slips into this expensive snake pit, he is distracted from his gift delivery duties by expensive sherry and a massage chair. He is awakened by gunfire. A criminal mastermind who goes by the name of Scrooge (John Leguizamo) has arrived to steal all the well-stuffed stockings hung from the chimney with care, not knowing that crunk Santa was already there.

Director Tommy Wirkola has made action hay out of fairy tales in the past, with Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, and a two-fisted Santa Claus is not that far-fetched: The real St. Nicholas was a fourth-century Christian bishop famous for punching out the heretic Arius during the Council of Nicaea. In Harbour, Wirkola has found a twisted kind of muse. Together, they riff on that classic holiday film Die Hard, with Santa crawling through the air ducts instead of John McClane. As Harbour mugs his way through some half-assed, John Wick-style fight choreography, he imbues burnt-out Saint Nick with his signature gruff charm. It’s a real movie star performance, and without it, the whole film would collapse into nonsense.

Conan O’Brien said that the key to great comedy is mixing smart and stupid in just the right ratio. Violent Night’s gross-out slapstick juxtaposed against the trappings of Christmas (Scrooge’s henchmen are named Sugarplum and Gingerbread) achieves a kind of action comedy alchemy. It’s not a holiday classic like Die Hard, but it is a decent temporary remedy for the mandatory holiday cheer.

Violent Night
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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing: Christmas Mayhem, Classics, and Kawaii

David Harbour as Santa Claus in Violent Night.

The biggest new release of the first weekend of December is a doozy. There are a lot of Christmas horror movies. Remember Krampus? Black Christmas? Silent Night, Deadly Night? The other Black Christmas? I’m not sure that’s exactly what Violent Night is. This is more like if Die Hard really leaned into its Christmas trappings. And if you’re not into watching Hooper from Stranger Things wisecrack while electrocuting bad guys with a tree topper, you probably need to seek professional help.

If you need something a little more serious, there’s The Inspection. Documentary director Elegance Bratton’s narrative feature debut stars Jeremy Pope as Ellis, a new Marine recruit going through boot camp on Parris Island. Ellis had to hide the fact that he is gay to get into the service in the first place, but his fellow fledgling soldiers figure it out, and he’s in for a world of hurt. Is it even worth it? He thinks so.

On the anime front, The Quintessential Quintuplets is a popular manga adapted for two seasons of television. The two-hour series finale was released theatrically in Japan, and cleaned up at the box office. This is teenage romance at its most kawaii.

The 2022 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Nanny finally hits wide release this weekend. Anna Diop (who is actually from Senegal) stars as a Senegalese immigrant taking care of the daughter of an affluent New York couple who begins to loose her grip on reality — or maybe she’s seeing a deeper reality.

On Sunday, Jim Henson’s masterpiece The Dark Crystal gets a 40th anniversary screening (at the Paradiso and Collierville Cinema). If you’re a fan of The Muppets or ’80s fantasy or just things that are good, this one is a must-see.

And finally, tonight at Black Lodge, what is shaping up to be an annual Sh!tfest tradition: The Star Wars Holiday Special. First aired in 1978, it’s so infamously bad George Lucas once tried to have all the copies destroyed. Fortunately, he failed. Or maybe that’s unfortunate. There’s no trailer for this infamous misfire, but it’s very telling that there are 13 minutes worth of “most disturbing moments” in one 98-minute show.

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Film Features Film/TV

Black Widow: Super-Sisters Doing It for Themselves

Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanov in Black Widow.

First of all, Black Widow should have happened five years ago. It took eleven years — from Iron Man in 2008 to Captain Marvel in 2019 — for Disney super-producer Kevin Feige’s Marvel Cinematic Universe to make a solo super-movie starring a female superhero. In the interim, Warner Brothers filled the void with 2017’s Wonder Woman, the only good movie made from a DC property in a decade. 

Considering how aggressively mediocre Captain Marvel was, it’s especially galling that it took so long for Scarlett Johansson to get her own starring vehicle as Natasha Romanoff From a character standpoint, Natasha is the most interesting of the Marvel A-team. Trauma has always inflected the best superhero origin stories. (Did you know Batman’s parents were murdered in front of him? Someone should put that in a movie.) She was trained from childhood to be an elite assassin and intelligence operative by the Red Room, a secret Soviet super-soldier program notorious for its brutal methods. Somehow, the stone cold killer’s conscience survived the ordeal, and she defected to S.H.I.E.L.D., where she became Nick Fury’s most trusted confidant. Alone among the Avengers as a non-super-powered (albeit surgically enhanced and relentlessly conditioned) human, she feels pain when she gets hit. Thor the space god is cool, but he’s one-note. Natasha’s adamantium-tough exterior hides a broken person, deprived of human connection, riven with guilt for all the “red on my ledger,” trying to balance the books with world-saving good deeds. But she’s always gotten short shrift. During The Avengers iconic Battle of New York, the prototype for all the Marvel Third Acts to come, Black Widow was fighting flying, laser-firing aliens while armed only with a pair of pistols. Couldn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. at least get her an assault rifle? 

Natasha’s emotional potential is realized in Black Widow’s unexpectedly moving cold open. It’s 1995, and she’s living in suburban Ohio with her mother Melina (Rachel Weisz) and sister Yelena (played as a 6-year-old by Violet McGraw). Just as they’re about to sit down for an ordinary, wholesome family dinner, father Alexei (David Harbour) comes home with bad news. Turns out, the family are deep-cover spies, and their cover’s been blown. As the fake family rushes to get to the escape plane to take them to Cuba, Natasha stares longingly out the window, saying a silent goodbye to the closest thing to a normal life and human connection she will ever have. Her family may be fake, but it felt real to her.

Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh as super-sisters Natasha and Yelena in Black Widow.

Fast forward to 2016. (The film itself recognizes that it’s late. Natasha died in Avengers: Endgame, so Black Widow’s story takes place while she was on the lam after the events of Captain America: Civil War.) Yelena (played as an adult by Florence Pugh) is hunting a target who turns out to be another member of the Black Widow program. After Yelena strikes a mortal blow, the dying Widow exposes her to a red gas that undoes the chemical mind control regime the Red Room has imposed on her. Yelena goes rogue, stealing the remaining doses of Widow antidote, and sending them to her estranged, faux-sister Natasha for safekeeping. Instead of spending her downtime watching Moonraker — naturally, Natasha’s an obsessive James Bond fan — she decides to track down Yelena, and the pair team up to kill the Red Room mastermind Dreykov (Ray Winstone) and dismantle the Widow program once and for all. 

With director Cate Shortland at the helm, Black Widow is the best superhero picture since Black Panther. It’s not just an acceptably entertaining Marvel product, but an actual good film in its own right. The second-act action set piece, when Natasha and Yelena break their pretend-father Alexei out of a Siberian prison, stands with the airport brawl from Civil War as an all-time, kinetic highlight of comic book cinema. 

David Harbour as Red Guardian

It’s Johansson’s movie (she’s executive producer), but she leads an ensemble cast. Natasha’s been making life-or-death decisions since she was a teenager, so Johansson plays her with a deep world-weariness. She has zero time for petty bullshit; in 2021, I find Natasha’s emotional exhaustion extremely relatable. Pugh is her kid-sister foil, knowing exactly where to needle to get a rise out of the ice queen. The comic relief is left up to Harbour as the Red Guardian, Captain America’s Soviet counterpart gone to seed, still bitter about losing the ideological struggle with the West. 

Black Widow’s ideology is overtly feminist. It’s a quintessential female gaze movie. The women are sexy, but not subject to a leering camera; the men are either buffoons or sniveling abusers. The stakes and scale are remarkably restrained by Marvel standards. Natasha, a subject of unthinkable patriarchal abuse, is fighting to give other victims the kind of agency she was denied. Left to her own devices, Black Widow doesn’t choose to save the world from xenocidal aliens. Her heroism serves a more practical, down-to-earth purpose. 

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Film/TV TV Features

Stranger Things Season 3

When it comes to film and TV, my viewing experience is different from yours. The average American sees four films in the theater every year. In 2019, I’m on pace to see well over a hundred films in theaters and probably at least an additional hundred films at home.

I’m also a filmmaker, which makes me a functionalist. When I watch something, I think in terms of what works and what doesn’t. Does a scene do what the filmmaker intended it to do? Does it transmit the information and convey the emotional impact needed at this moment in the piece? “Does it work?” is a subtly different question than “Is it good?” A film or show can “work,” but the piece itself can be bad. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper is one of the most loathsome films of the decade, but it works because it effectively uses all the little tricks of film grammar to make you sympathize with a guy we first meet slaughtering Iraqi women and children. I recognize the craftsmanship, but you couldn’t pay me to watch it again — and I got paid to watch it the first time.

(l to r) Sadie Sink, Noah Schnapp, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, and Caleb McLaughlin

It’s easy for me to crawl up my own … crawlspace and just tell everybody to pack it in and go watch Shoplifters because the modest little Japanese film about a dysfunctional family of petty criminals rocked my world. But as a reviewer who writes for a general audience, I feel like it’s my duty to be aware of and reveal my biases, so even if you don’t agree with me, you can say, “Well, he wasn’t into Fast & Furious 27: Bald Men Punching Each Other, but it sounds like something I’d like.”

All this is to say, I am an absolute sucker for Stranger Things.

Yeah, there it is. I admit it. Matt and Ross Duffer have my number. I am powerless against their Spielbergian riffing. I understand at some level that Stranger Things, whose third season premiered on Netflix on Independence Day, is basically just Happy Days if it was set 30 years later and directed by John Carpenter. I understand that I would use “cheap ’80s pastiche” as a withering criticism for most other shows. I think the level of nostalgia the show trades in is probably unhealthy. And yet, here I am, ravenously chomping down on it and then sopping up the sauce with a biscuit.

In my defense, Stranger Things still works. The ensemble cast of teenagers, led by English actress Millie Bobby Brown as the psychic superweapon known as Eleven, is one of the finest on any screen right now. And at least there is an acknowledgment of the passing of time. The first season’s core group — The Party, as they refer to themselves in D&D terms — of Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Will (Noah Schnapp), and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), with the second season addition of Max (Sadie Sink), begin season three united, then, as any group of kids do, start to slowly come apart. Dustin’s pet project Cerebro, named for Professor X’s telepathic enhancer, is really just a souped-up shortwave antenna he wants to use to contact his girlfriend from Utah he met while away at summer camp. Sure, like he’s got a girlfriend in Utah, right?

The onset of puberty is hitting The Party pretty hard. Will and El have discovered puppy love, until her guardian Hopper (David Harbour) intervenes, and Max teaches El when it’s time to “dump his ass.” This group discord comes at an inopportune time, as mysterious forces are once again messing with the portal to the Upside Down, and the spectral Mind Flayer is back, this time with a side order of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The Reagan ’80s had a lot of good movies, but there was a lot not to like. Stranger Things season three points more clearly toward the bad parts, beginning with the soundtrack. The first two seasons were awash with the rediscovery of vintage synth sounds, while the new crop of songs draws from the pop sludge that dominated the airwaves in 1985. The corporate colonization of the economy is represented by the new mall, which is shiny on the surface but evil on the inside. Joyce (Winona Ryder, effortlessly incredible) feels her job in Downtown slipping away and distracts herself with yet another paranormal investigation. Economic insecurity manifesting as creeping paranoia was a subtext in the ’80s horror and sci-fi films the show references, and that remains as relevant as ever. Maybe William Faulkner understood the real secret of Stranger Things‘ success when he said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

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Film/TV TV Features

Stranger Things

Unlike a movie studio or traditional broadcast network, Netflix is not in the business of appealing to a mass audience with each new release. Instead, for their original productions, the streaming service tries to create shows that will find a niche audience. The business model for a show like NBC’s America’s Got Talent involves delivering ads to the largest number of people at once. But Netflix doesn’t sell ads. It sells subscriptions, and its execs know that it will only take one great show to hook someone into paying that monthly fee. Netflix doesn’t release rating numbers, but shows such as Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, Sense8, and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt have enjoyed critical praise while amassing large enough loyal audiences to justify their existence. In the traditional advertising model, the interests of the networks are more closely aligned with their advertisers, but selling subscriptions directly to the audience switches that allegiance to the fans.

The latest successful product of this realignment of forces is Stranger Things. Netflix took a chance on a pair of twin brothers from North Carolina, Matt and Ross Duffer, a pair of newbies with a killer pitch: What if we remade all of the films of the 1980s at once? Well, not all ’80s movies, just the low- to mid-budget sci-fi and horror films of the type Hollywood rarely makes any more. Like The Goonies, the heart of the story lies with a group of precocious kids. Mike (Finn Wolfhard) is introduced as the dungeon master in the midst of the weekly Dungeons and Dragons session with fellow tween dweebs Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Will (Noah Schnapp). After a 10-hour bout of snack food and polyhedral dice, the boys bike home, but Will is intercepted in the dark woods of rural Indiana by a sinister, faceless monster who kidnaps the boy into a spooky parallel dimension that resembles the spirit world from Poltergeist. The next morning, Will’s mom, Joyce (Winona Ryder), calls the police, sending Chief Hopper (David Harbour) on a search for the missing boy.

Winona Ryder

Meanwhile, a young girl wanders out of the woods. Disoriented and almost mute, she has a shaved head and a tattoo on her wrist identifying her as “11.” When the owner of a diner offers her aid, a group of shadowy government agents show up in pursuit. Led by Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine), the staff of Hawkins National Laboratory seem to be somehow involved with the monster’s parallel universe and responsible for Eleven’s telekinetic powers, whose depths are slowly revealed as the series progresses through eight episodes.

Matarazzo, Brown, and Wolfhard channel ’80s horror.

The Duffer Brothers follow the Tarantino formula of creating a pastiche out of loosely related genre films, taking images and moments from films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Stand by Me, and Flight of the Navigator and sculpting them into something fresh. Stranger Things subverts as it mimics. Mike’s older sister, Nancy (Natalia Dyer), escapes the sexual punishment aspect of ’80s horror, while her prudish bestie, Barb (Shannon Purser), disappears into the netherworld. The crumbling Midwest of the Reagan era is painstakingly reconstructed, and the Duffers’ meticulous world-building pays off again and again, such as the way they luxuriate in 1983’s lack of cell phones, allowing them to keep information selectively hidden from their characters while letting the audience in on the bigger picture.

None of that would work without good characters, and Stranger Things has those in abundance, led by Winona Ryder in pedal-to-the-metal parental hysterics mode. The other adult standout is Harbour as the deeply damaged police chief, haunted by memories of his dead child. The heart of the show is Millie Brown as Eleven, whose combination of spooky intensity and wide-eyed innocence personifies the appeal of Stranger Things.