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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Kingdom of the Planet of Apes is a fun summer blockbuster.

When French writer Pierre Boulle wrote La Panéte des singes in 1963, it was meant as a wry commentary on human hubris. His most successful book to date was a war story which was adapted by director David Lean as The Bridge on the River Kwai. Boulle, who didn’t speak English, won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 1957. His novel, which was translated in the UK as Monkey Planet, became an unexpected hit in England, and was promptly optioned by 20th Century Fox. Boulle thought the book was unfilmable, so he was shocked when Planet of the Apes became a huge hit in 1968. At the Academy Awards that year, Planet of the Apes beat 2001: A Space Odyssey for Best Costume Design. (Legend has it that many Academy voters chose PotA because they thought Kubrick had used real apes in 2001’s “Dawn of Man” sequence.)

The enduring vision of Boulle’s premise has echoed across the decades, with five films and two television series in the 20th century and, beginning with a Tim Burton-directed remake in 2001, for films in this century. In this future world, the humans, who have lost the power of speech and reason, live in captivity and servitude to a society of primates. Gorillas are the warrior class, orangutans are the priestly class, and chimpanzees are scientists.

The last three PotA films, beginning with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011, tell the story of how our world got that way. A medical test chimp named Caesar (Andy Serkis) is infected with an experimental virus, designed to treat Alzheimer’s disease, that increases his intelligence. But when the virus escapes from the lab, it has the opposite effect on humans, and a global pandemic ensues which threatens the existence of humanity. Cloverfield director Matt Reeves helmed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes, drawing a long and complex portrait of Caesar as a wise leader of his people — uh, apes — while a crippled humanity fights for survival. Reeves evolved a patient, detailed style, which proved to be perfect for this version of PotA, but turned positively turgid when he took on the superhero genre in The Batman.

Wes Ball of Maze Runner fame took over for the latest film, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which picks up the story many generations after the death of Caesar. Noa (Owen Teague) is the son of the chief of Eagle Clan, a group of chimps who live in harmony with nature. When he leads an expedition to gather new falcon eggs to raise in the village aviary, he strays into the forbidden Valley Beyond. When he returns, he is followed by a group of masked gorillas armed with electric lances. Eagle Clan, having never seen electricity before, is quickly overwhelmed by the raiders and kidnapped for parts unknown. Noa escapes and sets out to find his stolen tribe. Along the way, he meets Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan who belongs to The Order of Caesar, a monastic order dedicated to their namesake’s two moral laws: Apes Together Strong, and Ape No Kill Ape. Together, they discover Mae (Freya Allan), a human who, they soon learn, can talk. They track the mysterious raiders until they are ambushed on a bridge and dragged back to an armed camp on the shoreline. There, Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) is trying to break through a huge vault door set in the side of a sea cliff. He believes there is game-changing human technology behind the door, and that Mae knows how to open it.

Kingdom is a much more conventional sci-fi adventure story than Reeves’ meditations on the responsibilities of leadership. Its sweeping vistas of Los Angeles in ruins make for some compelling cinema, and Ball knows how to concoct a good slam-bang action sequence. Unlike the old days of Roddy McDowall emoting behind a thick mask, these apes are all motion-capture CGI creations, which sometimes causes confusion, as Noa’s chimp brethren all kinda look alike. Teague’s Noa makes a serviceable and pleasingly vulnerable hero, but he can’t live up to the masterful mo-cap performance of Andy Serkis. Sure, it’s blander than its predecessors, but taken on its own terms, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes remains a fun summer blockbuster.

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Rocket’s backstory forms the emotional core for one last adventure with James Gunn’s Guardians.

The first installment of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy foreshadowed the wacky space antics to come by opening with Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), grooving to Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love” on a deserted planet. Volume 2 followed Baby Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) as he boogies to Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” blissfully unaware that his fellow Guardians are locked in combat with a giant octopus monster.

But Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 offers no such playful dance number intro from a joyful audience surrogate. Director James Gunn’s Marvel swan song (he’s now creative director for rival DC Studios) opens in darkness. A group of baby raccoons in a dirty cage hears footsteps echo from a hallway, and a silhouette emerges. All the raccoons flee from the cage door except one, his eyes wide in terror as a hand extends slowly into the cage.

That frightened face morphs into the present-day Rocket (Bradley Cooper), the anthropomorphic gunslinging raccoon (but don’t call him that) and Gunn’s preferred “secret hero” of the franchise. When the bristles on Rocket’s face come into sharp focus — the most accomplished CGI that we’ve seen in a Marvel film for quite a while — it’s clear Gunn is not interested in repeating himself.

The rage and frustration of Radiohead’s “Creep” follow Rocket in an early scene as he walks through Knowhere, the Guardians’ new HQ. His found family of oddballs are in a bad place following the events of Avengers: Endgame. A permanently drunk Quill is despondent that former teammate and love interest Gamora (Zoë Saldaña) doesn’t remember her time as a Guardian, while Nebula (Karen Gillan), Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) do their best to pick up the pieces. Meanwhile, comic relief Kraglin (Sean Gunn) is joined by newcomer Cosmo the Space Dog (voiced by Maria Bakalova), cracking wise, playing cards, and trying to keep the mood up.

The early sidelining of Quill establishes that this is Rocket’s story, with frequent flashbacks to his time as a genetic experiment under the eye of the maniacal High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a man that harbors a twisted obsession to create the perfect being. Rocket is critically injured during an early skirmish with newcomer Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), but the crew needs the High Evolutionary’s tech to save him. From there, the story gets dark and even depressing, at one point delivering the franchise’s first “Fuck.”

Previous Guardians films have explored the core crew’s backstories, but Rocket’s tragic past has only been hinted at. Guardians has always been about fatherly trauma, whether it’s Gamora and Nebula’s years of torture under Thanos, Drax’s failure to protect his late daughter, or the revelation that Quill’s father was Ego the Living Planet. Rocket’s grueling backstory gives the movie something that’s been missing from recent Marvel films: an emotional core.

Young Rocket dreams big with his fellow experimental subjects; they’re excited to be a part of the High Evolutionary’s new world, even as they undergo grotesque, body-horror alterations. Pet lovers beware: There are some pretty brutal depictions of violence enacted upon animals in this movie.

Star-Lord’s attempts to win back Gamora provide the series’ usual semi-comic tone, and we get the requisite space shoot-outs, and even a Nathan Fillion cameo. But pathos is never far from the surface; Rocket’s journey through his trauma is always front and center. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the sanitized corporate slop that has given moviegoers superhero fatigue during the MCU’s latest phase. Gunn even manages to introduce Warlock, who is set to be a big player in future MCU films, as an organic part of this story, rather than a distraction.

Guardians Vol. 3 is the most creative Marvel film in years, a fitting end to Gunn’s time with Disney. It should serve as the template going forward, but will it? It seems unlikely super-producer Kevin Feige will afford this much creative leeway to directors with lesser reputations, and with Gunn off to DC, the MCU will probably return to the assembly line approach that’s left Phases 4 and 5 feeling stale. At least Gunn, Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Nebula, Mantis, Groot, and especially Rocket can all go out with a bang.

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Disposable Soldiers Watch Democracy Crumble in Star Wars: The Bad Batch

The Star Wars prequels have been getting something of a re-evaluation lately. Maybe it’s a case of first-wave Millennial nostalgia, as the grown-up children of the ’90s reconnect with the media they remember, like the Boomers watching Happy Days. There is certainly that element, but I think the prequels are aging well because George Lucas’ overarching story of the fall of the Old Republic looks increasingly prescient.

The latest Disney+ animated series, Star Wars: The Bad Batch, begins as the prequel trilogy is reaching its climax. Like its live-action cousin The Mandalorian, The Bad Batch spins stories outside of the suffocating shadow of the Skywalker family melodrama. World-building has always been the franchise’s strong suit, so there are plenty of implied side stories in the galaxy far, far away to mine for material.

To me, one of the most profound questions the universe poses is raised in one of its filmic low points. Attack of the Clones is emblematic of the prequels, in both its strengths and weaknesses. The visuals are ahead of their time — no one else in the special effects game could touch turn-of-the-century Industrial Light & Magic, and Lucas retained his sharp eye for design until he retired. But he also seemingly forgot how to delegate, and he badly needed a writer. But success is an insidious poison, and so we got one of the worst on-screen romances ever, and a jumbled presentation of what is actually a compelling story of politics and manipulation. In the early days of the War on Terror, the story was a reminder of the dangers of an out-of-control security state.

Omega (above), voiced by Michelle Ang, is a deviant clone in Dave Filoni’s Star Wars: The Bad Batch, a spin-off of the Clone Wars series.

Senator Palpatine, who is secretly the evil space wizard Darth Sidious, engineers a separatist threat to the Galactic Republic and uses the crisis to have himself declared chancellor, and as an excuse to build an army of clones. As the Clone Wars grind on, Palpatine grooms his vainglorious apprentice Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader, then orders his clone armies to ambush and kill their Jedi commanders.

That moment — known as “Order 66” — is the heart-rending climax of Revenge of the Sith; Obi Wan and Anakin’s fateful lightsaber duel pales in comparison. The clones, bred for the sole purpose of combat and forced by implanted chips to betray their comrades, become tragic figures in The Clone Wars animated series, which was finally given the ending it deserved by Disney+ last year. The Bad Batch is a group of elite clone commandos introduced in the final season. They are defective units rescued from disposal by Kamino’s clone master Nala Se (Gwendoline Yeo) for experimental upgrades. Their names are their purpose: Hunter, Wrecker, Tech, Crosshair, and Echo are all voiced by Dee Bradley Baker. The Bad Batch’s defects are their strengths, and when Order 66 comes in as they are backing Jedi master Depa Billaba (Archie Panjabi), they find that their controlling chips don’t work. Hunter, experiencing his first taste of free will in the midst of a galaxy-wide political upheaval, secretly lets Depa’s padawan escape.

The Order 66 sequence in the 70-minute pilot episode takes on unexpected relevance in the wake of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. As the assembled clones on Kamino listen to Palpatine announce the creation of the Empire, the Bad Batch realize it’s wrong but don’t quite know what to do about it. When Admiral Tarkin (Stephen Stanton, doing an uncanny Peter Cushing imitation) arrives to take command of the clones, he orders the commandos on a mission to mop up a group of separatist insurgents. When you’re a clone, nothing stops the Forever War. As they leave, a deviant female clone named Omega (Michelle Ang) begs them to take her. But the Separatists turn out to be a group of refugees from the Republic led by Saw Gerrera (Andrew Kishino), and the Bad Batch decide to desert, but not before returning to Kamino to retrieve Omega.

Led by Clone Wars and The Mandalorian writer/producer Dave Filoni, The Bad Batch expertly zeroes in on the questions of free will raised by the creation of semi-disposable, sentient clones. But more than an A.I. cautionary tale, the show’s themes could not be more relevant, such as, how much loyalty does an oppressed class owe a flawed democracy? The second episode reverts to a more conventional sci-fi escape story, but the background of a society losing its freedom and self-determination serves as a stark warning in these perilous times.

Star Wars: The Bad Batch is streaming on Disney+.

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The Dead Don’t Die

The town of Centerville’s welcome sign says it all: “A Real Nice Place.” Police chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) don’t have to work too hard to keep the peace. When The Dead Don’t Die opens, they’re checking out a report by Farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi) that old Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) has been stealing his chickens. The investigation goes pretty much nowhere, because Chief Robertson thinks Farmer Miller’s an asshole, and all Hermit Bob will say is “fuck you.”

As they head back to the station, Cliff and Ronnie notice that there’s something weird going on. This is, of course, the set up to nearly every zombie film ever made: Two people, their heads buried in the daily minutiae, slowly come to realize that their world is being overrun by the unquiet dead.

You probably don’t associate director Jim Jarmusch with the genre, but he has obviously seen a few zombie movies in his time. Jarmusch’s primary directing mode has always been that of the observer. He favors letting things play out in long takes, the better to get to know his characters, warts and all. His 1989 masterpiece Mystery Train, which immortalized the down-and-out Memphis of the era, lingered on the bewildered faces of Jun and Mitsuko, the Japanese tourists who were discovering the real America. In Night on Earth, he got a career best performance from Winona Ryder by simply riding around in a cab with her.

(l to r) Bill Murray, Chloë Sevigny, and Adam Driver star in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die.

But he’s also always had a taste for genre pictures, such as his 1995 Western Dead Man, where he shot Johnny Depp in creamy duotone while demolishing the genre’s black and white morality plays. His last foray into supernatural horror was 2014’s transcendent Only Lovers Left Alive, where Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston played centuries-old vampires feeling the weight of immortality.

As one of the godfathers of independent film, Jarmusch knows how to get a project done by rounding up all of your friends and showing them a good time while they work. The difference with Jarmusch is the quality of the friends’ talents. Sara Driver, who became his partner while he was making his first film Stranger Than Paradise, appears as a zombie. Steve Buscemi, who here sports a “Keep America White Again” hat, rode with Joe Strummer in Mystery Train. Tom Waits spouted gruff wisdom in Coffee and Cigarettes. Bill Murray was the lead of Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers. The director worked with Iggy Pop for years to make a documentary on The Stooges. Tilda Swinton, so chillingly elegant in Only Lovers Left Alive, appears in The Dead Don’t Die as an eccentric coroner who is aces with a samurai sword. Adam Driver was magnificent in Paterson, Jarmusch’s last film. The list goes on.

Murray and Driver, joined by Chloë Sevigny as Officer Mindy, first try to make sense out of the dead rising from the grave with a hunger for human flesh, then try to contain the zombie contagion. They also serve as their own Greek chorus, commenting on the action as it happens around and to them, delivering sly in-jokes, and making the occasional meta foray. There are references to earlier Jarmusch films, such as the road-tripping tourists, played by Selena Gomez, Luka Sabbat, and Austin Butler (slicked up like Strummer), who pick the wrong time to hole up in a seedy room at the Moonlight Motel. Jarmusch, the consummate indie film hipster, gets a laugh at their — and his own — expense with the line “Infernal hipsters and their irony!”

In the tradition of George Romero, who invented and perfected the modern zombie picture, Jarmusch uses the walking dead as satirical mirrors of society. Like the ghouls in Dawn of the Dead, they are drawn to the things they coveted in life, only in this case it’s wifi and chardonnay.

As a zombie comedy, The Dead Don’t Die never reaches the manic heights of Shaun of the Dead; but then again, it never tries that approach. Jarmuch’s sense of humor is dry as a bone, and his pacing deliberate. Hermit Bob, who watches the zombie apocalypse gather strength through cracked binoculars, serves as the director’s alter ego. He can’t fully participate in the rapidly decaying human society, but he can’t look away, either. One line in particular from The Dead Don’t Die seems designed to resonate through Jarmusch’s entire filmmaking career: “The world is perfect. Appreciate the details.”

The Dead Don’t Die

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Chi-Raq

There’s so much to say about Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, I don’t know where to begin.

One of the film’s themes is the nature of power. Since its inception, the film industry has been characterized by a struggle for power between directors, producers, stars, and writers. As seen in Trumbo, the first to lose the battle were the writers, so they decamped to television. The power of the old-line Hollywood studios declined in the late 1960s, so the 1970s saw the ascendance of the director and, as a result, a second golden age of American film. In 1980, the directors’ power was broken on the rocks of Heaven’s Gate, and by the end of the decade, movie stars like Arnold Schwarzenneger and Tom Cruise were in charge, commanding high salaries and exerting creative control. The indie film revolution of the 1990s, which Spike Lee helped kick off, was on some level an attempt to reclaim the directors’ power. Now, in the twilight of the movie stars, power has reverted to the producers, and so resources are tied up in making endless sequels and reboots of proven properties. Enter Amazon, the internet retail powerhouse who is making a big push into video. For their first foray into theatrical film, they tapped Lee and apparently gave him free rein. Lee responded by going absolutely insane.

Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata

2015 finds Lee in a familiar state: energized with righteous rage. The director could have taken a look at widespread reports of police brutality against people of color and the resulting Black Lives Matter movement, pointed at his 1989 masterpiece Do the Right Thing, and said “I told you so!” Instead, he made Chi-Raq, which is like nothing else in theaters today. It’s a satire, a comedy, and a musical. It’s also based on a 2,500-year-old Greek play called Lysistrata, and so it is written mostly in rhyming verse. And yet, Chi-Raq is even weirder than it sounds. The first five minutes or so are essentially a lyric music video for “Pray 4 My City,” with nothing but text and an animated image of a map of the United States made up entirely of guns. When we finally do see someone on screen, it’s the rapper Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) rocking a packed club. Then the action freezes, and we meet Dolmedes, the narrator/chorus played by national treasure Samuel L. Jackson in full Rufus Thomas mode.

I would be content listening to Jackson speak in rhyme for two hours. Fortunately, Lee introduces us to Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata, a powerhouse of confidence and sexual energy. After witnessing the horrors of street violence and having her apartment burned down by a rival gang out to kill her boyfriend Chi-Raq, Lysistrata is inspired by Miss Helen (Angela Bassett) to organize a sex strike, asserting their power by “seizing the means of reproduction.” The gangs will either end their senseless violence or go without booty. The sex strike spreads until, as Dave Chappelle says in a hilarious cameo as a strip-club owner, “Even the hoes is no-shows.”

The sprawling cast includes Wesley Snipes, Jennifer Hudson, and token white guy John Cusack as a priest who shouts himself hoarse at a funeral for a little girl killed in the gang crossfire. Cusack looks more engaged and passionate onscreen than he has in years, but his big scene is also a symptom of what’s wrong with Chi-Raq. In isolation, it’s a powerful scene, as Lee and screenwriter Kevin Willmott indict the whole sociopolitical system that keeps African Americans locked in cycles of poverty and violence. But in the context of the film, it’s a momentum killer. Free to follow his wildest impulses, Lee constructs one killer image after another, but little thought seems to have been given as to how it all fits together, which means Chi-Raq adds up to less than the sum of its impressive parts.

It’s inspiring to see a talent of Lee’s caliber swing for the fences. Chi-Raq may not be perfect, but I can’t stop thinking about it.

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Film Review: The Martian

2001: A Space Odyssey regularly jockeys for position with Citizen Kane and Vertigo atop lists of the greatest movies ever made. When Stanley Kubrick set out to create what he called “the proverbial good science-fiction movie”, he tapped Arthur C. Clarke, the super-genius author who came up with the idea for the communications satellite, and the resulting masterpiece explores the space between scientific rigor and religious awe.

But sometimes it seems 2001‘s influence on the genre it sought to perfect has not been universally positive. Consider 1968’s other great sci-fi hit, Planet of the Apes. It, too, concerned itself with humanity’s ultimate fate, but its big ideas are wrapped in a fun package. There should be enough room in sci-fi for both Charlton Heston snarling “You damn dirty apes!” and Keir Dullea staring into psychedelic infinity. But too often, when directors are given free reign, they feel obligated to try to top Kubrick. Consider two recent examples of hundred-million- dollar misfires: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. Nolan’s spectacular, 2001-inspired 70-mm photography couldn’t save Interstellar from collapsing into self-important gobbledygook. For Prometheus, Scott disappointed everyone by ditching the pulpy, “haunted-house-in-space” premise that made Alien a classic in favor of wallowing in secondhand Kubrickian mysticism.

Scott learned his lesson with The Martian. The origin and fate of all humanity are not at stake, just the life of one man: NASA astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon). Adapted from a best-selling novel by Andrew Weir, The Martian‘s inspiration comes not from universe-spanning epics, but from the 1954 short story “The Cold Equations,” in which a space pilot and a stowaway must grapple with the fact that they don’t have enough fuel to land safely. Newtonian physics creates the fodder for high drama.

When an unexpected sandstorm forces the crew of the Ares 3 mission to leave the red planet in a hurry, Watney is hit by flying debris and left for dead. But Watney wakes up and drags himself back to the expedition’s abandoned, but still mostly functional, base, where he performs some gruesome self-surgery and tries to come to grips with the fact that he is more alone than anyone has ever been. The opening sequence, where the crew struggles through the storm and mission commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) must make the gut-wrenching decision to leave, are some of Scott’s best work since Black Hawk Down. The story then splits into three: the castaway’s uphill battle to survive in Mars’ harsh environment; the NASA ground team discovering they’ve still got a live astronaut on the Martian surface; and the expedition crew flying through the solar system with only enough fuel to return to Earth. Everyone must work together to rescue Watney as the world watches.

The Martian often plays out like a fictionalized, future version of Apollo 13. Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard get all the little details right, like how calling a NASA scientist a “steely-eyed missile man” is the highest compliment, and how “lock the doors” is the worst thing you can hear in mission control. But they never get bogged down in minutiae, thanks largely to Damon’s engaging and vulnerable performance. The cast is huge, and features workmanlike performances from Jeff Daniels as the NASA director, Kristen Wiig as the beleaguered PR specialist, Chiwetel Ejiofor as the mission director, and Sean Bean as the head of the astronaut corps. But even though Scott is excellent at ratcheting up the tension back on Earth, I found myself eager to return to Mars to watch Damon living by his wits while pausing occasionally to take in the otherworldly vistas Scott creates from heavily CGI’d footage of the Jordanian desert.

The Martian is a major return to form for Scott, who seems inspired by NASA’s can-do spirit. The film’s optimism is a far cry from the darkness of Blade Runner, but it has proven to be a big hit with audiences, massively outperforming box-office projections by grossing $55 million in its opening weekend. As this film and Gravity prove, science fiction is sometimes better when it concentrates on the small questions, like how to find your way home.

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Throwback August: Casino

Robert De Niro as Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein

Casino (1995; dir. Martin Scorsese)—Heavily edited, poorly dubbed, grotesquely commercial-breaked TV versions of Casino sadden me. I’m happy that Scorsese’s best film continues to rumble across the basic cable landscape in various shapes and sizes at various times of day because exhibition and syndication play a major role in pop-cultural canon formation. But a sanitized version of Casino makes little sense because indiscretion and tastelessness are two of its cardinal virtues.

Trade secrets about the gaming industry and the workings of the Midwestern mob, violent confrontations involving power tools and baseball bats, an endless parade of pastel-colored custom suits so gaudy they threaten to burn out your rods and cones —there’s simply too much in this vulgar American epic to absorb in one sitting. Add in the dueling voiceover narrations, the hold-your-breath instances when the camera rushes at characters like an attack dog, and the car-bomb explosions of raunchy absurdist wit, and you’re likely to feel lost.

Sharon Stone as Ginger McKenna

The soundtrack does its best to disorient you, too; Casino’s nonstop music (62 songs are listed in its closing credits) is analogous to the constant electronic chatter of slots and video poker machines cluttering nearly every real casino floors. Given so many opportunities to choreograph miniature music videos within the frame of his story, Scorsese engineers perhaps his greatest pop epiphany—a long sequence where a pair of card cheats get taken down as Jeff Beck’s “I Ain’t Superstitious” wails in the background.

But give the movie the time and attention it needs and you’ll start to get it. Then you might start to love it. Casino is Scorsese’s Physical Graffiti, his 2666, his three-hour, thirty-course tasting menu that will set you back an entire paycheck if you add the beverage pairings, which you might as well because you’ve come this far. It is also a vision of craps-table capitalism unfolding in a multicultural American frontier where mobsters, bookies, cowboys, Italians, Jews, Arabs, Irishmen and anyone else who wants a piece of the pie can get in on the action if they’re willing to play.

Joe Pesci as Nicky Santoro

Although the three principal characters—gambler/casino boss Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro), mobster/hellspawn Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and hustler/addict Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone)—are assholes, their long, painful falls from grace matter because their bosses are much, much worse. Which is why Casino now plays as an apt and timeless statement about the apparently untouchable gangsters responsible for the current (and no doubt future) financial crises bilking us out of our money whether we like it or not. “It’s a pity in this state that we have such hypocrisy,” says Rothstein late in the film. “Some people can do whatever they want; other people have to pay through the nose. But such is life.”

Grade: A+

Throwback August: Casino

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Throwback August: Jaws

The dog days of August are upon us, so at some point, you’re going to need to sit inside with your AC blasting and recover from the heat. To help supplement your binge watching, the Memphis Flyer Film/TV/Etc. Blog presents Throwback August. Each week, myself, Addison Engelking, and Eileen Townsend will each examine a film from 40, 30, 20, and 10 years ago. This week, we’ll be talking about films from 1975.

The biggest film of 1975 was also one of the most important films of all times, both from an artistic and historic point of view. When Steven Spielberg signed on to direct an adaptation of the Peter Benchley thriller about a small coastal town that lived in fear of a giant shark, he was a 26-year-old with only one feature film to his name, The Sugarland Express, starring Goldie Hawn, and scored by a little-known composer named John Williams. Once Spielberg fully analyzed the problems involved in filming the novel, he tried to back out of the deal. But producer Richard Zanuck stood firm, and the rest is history. 

Director Steven Spielberg with Bruce, the mechanical shark star of Jaws.

Jaws is widely credited with being the beginning of the summer blockbuster, and there’s some truth to that, but elements of its successful formula were already in the air by the time it hit theaters. The Godfather, for example, had also been an adaptation of a potboiler novel that opened on an unusually large amount of screens in an age where the conventional film business wisdom was to strike as few prints as possible and then tour them relentlessly.

Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw

But Jaws is not a multi-generational family saga about America. It’s a tribute to Hitchcock’s dictum that mediocre books make the best movies. Since I was all of 4 years old when Jaws came out, I had never seen it on a big screen before a recent sold-out anniversary screening at Malco Paradiso mounted by Turner Classic Movies. The unpredictability of the sea caused major problems during the filming, but the one that struck me the most was the lighting. Blown up huge, you can tell how much Spielberg used reflectors to illuminate the actor’s faces during the bright, sunlit outdoor sequences. But the occasional clunky elements exposed by the HD projection only served to underline its general awesomeness. Spielberg’s uncanny talent for framing and deep staging are already there, fully blown, such as in the scene where a drunk Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) and Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) dissect a shark looking for the body parts of a child victim. Scheider and Dreyfuss are both great as the movie’s co-leads, but it’s Robert Shaw as the fisherman Quint who steals the show with the legendary monolog about the doomed crew of the Indianapolis. The delivery of his final words, “Anyway, we delivered The Bomb,” tell all you need to know about the character so haunted by the deaths he has seen and helped cause, so when he is finally swallowed by the shark, it’s the end he knew was inevitable. And that gets to the heart of all horror films. Like all great movie monsters, the shark is just justice delayed for the secret crimes we all commit. 

Throwback August: Jaws

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“Magic in the Moonlight” Is Less Than Magical

Critical judgments are seldom permanent; when given some time and room to breathe, an underwhelming or puzzling movie from March can end up on a best-of list in December. This is also true for filmmakers. As the years go by, some filmmakers step into the spotlight while others slowly recede from view.

Then there’s Woody Allen, who doesn’t appear to care about things like legacy and influence. Allen plugs away year after year and movie after movie, confronting the same old issues and repeating himself in the same old comic or dramatic ways no matter how badly you want him to just stop already.

Amazingly, he can’t be entirely ignored yet. 2011’s Midnight In Paris, with its uncharacteristically loose Owen Wilson performance, its gentle insistence that there were never any good old days, its jokey depiction of Lost Generation icons, and its plentiful shots of Rachel McAdams’ ass (purely accidental, I’m sure), was his best and most playful film in nearly two decades. But Magic in The Moonlight, Allen’s latest European period piece, is a humorless reversion to a depressing norm.

Emma Stone and Colin Firth

The old-timey jazz tunes on the soundtrack, along with that unmistakably faux-classical opening title-card sequence promise more of the same old thing. Set at the end of the roaring 1920s, Magic stars Colin Firth as Stanley, a famous magician and skeptic who’s asked by an old friend to travel from Berlin to the south of France to debunk Sophie (Emma Stone), a young medium from Kalamazoo who appears to have real supernatural powers.

As everyone in the movie points out repeatedly, Stanley is the right man for the job: having sworn fealty to logic, reason, order, and nothingness, he spouts Nietzsche at people who look at him too long and smirks at anyone “desperate for a little hope in a world that has none.” But will Sophie show him the error of his ways? Well, would an Allen surrogate like Stanley dare to let some girl expand his conception of how the world works?

In this cotton-mouthed farce, Firth deserves some credit for making Stanley an insufferable prick. Strident, heedless, and almost angrily self-satisfied, Firth plows through the film like a cross between The Great Gatsby‘s Tom Buchanan and The Big Bang Theory‘s Sheldon Cooper. Emma Stone, playing the requisite ingénue, handles her diaphanous-dipsy role better than previous Allen muses. With help from cinematographer Darius Khondji’s blurry, lens-flared Mediterranean postcard work, Firth and Stone’s scenes together almost drown out Allen’s usual God-is-dead, what-does-it-all-mean bellyaching.

If you have to see a Woody Allen movie this year, John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo, in which Allen played a supporting role, is a gentler and sexier romantic comedy where the characters may have read some existentialist philosophy but have the good taste not to lecture each other about it. But never fear; Allen is already at work on his next project. Emma Stone will star.

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Film Features Film/TV

2 Days in Paris

2 Days in Paris, Julie Delpy’s intimate, exhilarating new film, doesn’t have much in common with genteel, starry-eyed rom-coms like Before Sunrise or Before Sunset. Warm, fuzzy memories of those two chatty but precious Richard Linklater films, which paired Delpy’s French intellectual fantasy chick with Ethan Hawke’s pretentious, scheming American backpacker, are effectively obliterated when we get our first glimpse of Marion and Jack (Delpy and Adam Goldberg, well-muscled and well-wrapped in a blanket of Cape Fear tattoos), a couple in their mid-30s who are taking the overnight train from Venice to Paris; Marion is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a gun that’s pointed at her boyfriend’s chest.

In interviews, Delpy has compared Marion’s impulsive, surprisingly confrontational behavior to Robert De Niro’s actions in Raging Bull, and, at times, the movie plays like an extended verbal prizefight between a sharper Jake LaMotta and an early Albert Brooks-style wiseass. Jack and Marion are older and freer with their insecurities and jealous barbs than most young lovers would ever dare, and they give in to sudden outbursts of frustration and hostility more often than couples of any age probably should. Their struggles and confessions provide most of the forward momentum of the film, which is loose, awkward, nosy, and, in the finest French New Wave tradition, dotted with eclectic movie allusions, from Last Tango in Paris to Voyage in Italy to M.

Delpy, who also wrote, produced, and directed, is as good as she’s ever been, but Goldberg is quick and vulnerable enough to match her throughout. The supporting cast largely stays in the background, although the exuberance and high spirits of Marion’s parents (played by Delpy’s real-life parents) are like something out of Renoir’s later movies, as is the fat, bored housecat whose expressionless gaze steals a scene or two.

Opens Friday, September 21st, at Ridgeway Four