Tag: film

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Asteroid City

There’s a heck of a lot going on with the many oddballs in Wes Anderson’s new film, Asteroid City.

This morning, as I was scrolling Twitter over coffee, I saw a user complaining about the avalanche of Wes Anderson parody TikToks. They posted the “Reading of the Will” scene from The Grand Budapest Hotel to prove that none of Anderson’s legion of sarcastic imitators could touch the genuine hilarity of Ralph Fiennes deadpanning, “I sleep with all of my close friends,” or the flurry of punches that ends with an iris-in on a snarling Willem Dafoe. I was low-key shocked at how many Twitter users responded with variations on “OMG, is this from a real movie?”

Anderson is now in that weird space of being famous for being famous. His distinctive style, which first came together in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, has been around long enough to be ripe for parody. Apparently, some clout chasers didn’t know what, exactly, they were laughing at. It was encouraging to see a couple of those responders chime in later to say they had sought out The Grand Budapest Hotel and found it hilarious and touching. You can imitate the surface with flat performance and fussed-over mise-en-scène, but the qualities that make Anderson one of our greatest living filmmakers are more elusive. His secret sauce remains secret — perhaps even from the artist himself.

Asteroid City is the follow-up to The French Dispatch, which is not just a career peak for Anderson, but in the running for the greatest film of the 2020s. (It’s early, I know.) So it carries a very heavy burden of expectations. Normally, this is the point of the review where I say something like, “It’s the story of blah blah, who must yadda yadda to avoid an oopsie.” But I’m not sure whose story Asteroid City is. Is it Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), the war photographer on a road trip to the 1955 Junior Stargazer Convention who must decide when to tell his kids their mother died three weeks ago? Is it Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), the closeted gay playwright whose latest play, Asteroid City, is an examination of grief and hope in a Nevada desert scarred by craters from atomic bomb tests? Or is it Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), the director so obsessed with his production of Asteroid City that he sleeps in the theater? Or maybe it’s all of their stories, as told by Bryan Cranston, the host of a Playhouse 90-style anthology TV series that is staging a broadcast version of the play.

The basic plot of Asteroid City (the play) is “a stranger comes to town.” The stranger is an alien (seen twice as stop motion animation, and once as Jeff Goldblum’s cameo), and perhaps the story is really about the sprawling cast’s reaction to its arrival. General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) reacts by imposing a quarantine on the Junior Stargazer Convention. Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) just wants to study the alien. Augie, at his lowest point in life, discovers romance in the person of Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a famous actress who likes to practice her nude scenes in front of her cabin window.

As you can see, there’s a lot going on. Each of the pieces of this sprawling puzzle works in their own way. Wright is Anderson’s new favorite monologist, and he delivers brilliantly. Schwartzman, Anderson’s longtime foil, pulls off a bewilderingly complex triple role as Augie, the actor who plays him, and Conrad Earp’s memory of his lost lover. Johansson, who has always had deeper chops than most of her roles require, lays on the affected mid-Atlantic accent of a spoiled, bored movie star reawakening her passions. Anderson goes from wide-screen to 4:3, and from a desaturated postcard color palette to stark black and white, fluidly and naturally. Practically every shot is perfectly composed joy unto itself.

The problem is, the parts don’t play well with one another. Cranston’s TV show, ostensibly the “top” layer of reality, adds too much metatextual complexity. The huge cast is fun, but it also means we don’t get to spend enough time with some of them.

Anderson superfans like me will have a grand time with Asteroid City, and hopefully, it will open up upon rewatch. But more casual viewers might end up lost in the director’s swirling cosmos.

Asteroid City
Now playing
Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Flash

Michael Keaton returns as Batman in The Flash.

If you see two animals with similar body plans — like say, a human and an ape — the theory of evolution suggests they both descended from a common ancestor which died out long ago. Unless, that is, they’re crabs. At least five separate lineages of sea life have adopted the basic crab form independently of each other. Apparently, if you live on the bottom of the ocean, a big, flat shell with multiple legs and pincers is the best design strategy. There’s even a name for this type of convergent evolution: carcinization.

Just as Darwinian evolution tends toward crabs, big-budget Hollywood films tend toward Batman. There’s even a name for this type of convergent evolution: Batmanization.

Take, for example, the most recent movie about Batman, The Flash. Now, you might be thinking, “Hey, The Flash is not about Batman. It’s about The Flash.” But that’s just you showing your superhero ignorance. I, an enlightened comic-book-movie-watching guy, understand that all films must be about Batman because the story of Batman is the perfect form toward which all films have been evolving since Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman.

The Flash represents the ultimate stage of Batmanization: Michael Keaton plays Batman again. I realize I may come across as a tad cynical when I write about Batman movies, but I am not made of stone. Michael Keaton stepping away from the role of Batman after Batman Returns was such a titanic psychosocial event that when Michael Keaton made a movie about it, Birdman, it won Best Picture. Take that, Wes Anderson!

In The Flash, it is revealed that Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) became The Flash because he lost his parents at a young age. Then, at a slightly older age, he was struck by lightning while being doused with chemicals, granting him the power of super-speed, which enables him to do things like save an entire neonatal ward full of babies while also microwaving a burrito.

Like Batman, he’s tortured by losing his parents. So when he accidentally discovers he can travel backwards in time by running faster than the speed of light, his first instinct is to go back to keep his mother from being killed by an unknown criminal, and his father from being convicted for the crime. Despite dire warnings against tampering with the timeline from his universe’s Batman (Ben Affleck), Barry does it anyway. But when he tries to return to his present, he is thwarted by a mysterious figure and ends up in a parallel timeline where his parents are still alive, but where young Barry Allen (also Ezra Miller) hasn’t become Flash yet. Also, there’s no Superman, so when General Zod (Michael Shannon) shows up like he did in Man of Steel, there’s no one to stop him. Flash discovers that a Batman (Michael Keaton) used to exist in this timeline, but he’s retired because he solved all the crime. Together, they try to track down Clark Kent, only to discover that Supergirl (Sasha Calle) made it to Earth instead. Can Old Awesome Batman save the planet with the assistance of The Flash and Supergirl and also The Flash?

If, unlike me, you are a cynic, you might point out that, from Warner Brothers’/DC’s point of view, it’s a good thing they backed up the money truck to Michael Keaton’s retirement villa because star Ezra Miller has recently been outed as a Messianic psychopath who was kidnapping children to build a Mansonoid cult in Vermont. Even worse, since this is a time travel/multiverse story, there’s usually two of him on screen at any given time.

And that’s why it’s good that The Flash didn’t do Flash stuff like fighting his arch enemy, the super-intelligent alien apeman Gorilla Grodd, but instead went on a time quest for Batman. Otherwise, we’d just be sitting in a theater staring into Ezra Miller’s cold, desperate eyes for 144 minutes, wondering how a creep like that was ever cast as a superhero in a $200 million movie.

Batman to the rescue!

The Flash
Now playing
Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Dalíland

Ben Kingsley plays Salvador Dalí in Dalíland.

Dalíland begins with Salvador Dalí’s appearance on What’s My Line?, the classic game show where blindfolded contestants try to guess the identity of the mystery guest. “Are you a performer? Do you have something to do with the arts?” The contestants are baffled because Dalí answers “yes” to everything. What finally gives him away is a question about his famous waxed mustache.

Dalí wasn’t lying. He was an artist, one of the greatest of the 20th century — and he was also a performer. The character he played for most of his life was Salvador Dalí, the crazy artist who is also a super-genius. “Geniuses are not allowed to die,” he said near the end of his life. “The progress of the human race depends on us!”

Where the act ends and the man begins? Nobody really knows. Dalí really was a super-genius artist, the most famous of the Surrealists who terrorized the buttoned-up art world of the 1920s and 1930s. He was also his own best hype man. Ben Kingsley plays Salvador Dalí with more perfection than affection. Kingsley first came to prominence playing Gandhi in Richard Attenborough’s classic biopic, so he’s got experience with historical personages. Watching Kingsley apply his world-class chops to mimicking one of history’s great lunatics is, as you might expect, the fun part of Dalíland. The Surrealists learned the art of the high-profile stunt from the Dadaists. Dalí perfected it. At one point in Dalíland, he asks his assistant James Linton (Christopher Briney) to bring him live ants and a full suit of armor that must be Spanish in origin. “Is it for a painting?” James asks.

“No, it’s for a party.”

Dalí’s wife and muse was Gala (Barbara Sukowa), the quintessential muse and “art wife,” the reasonably sane member of the relationship who keeps the books and interfaces with the “real” world. To say they had a strange relationship is a massive understatement. Gala appeared in several of Dalí’s most famous paintings, often in the guise of the Virgin Mary. According to Dalí hanger-on Ginesta (Suki Waterhouse), they rarely, if ever, had sex — at least with each other. Gala had a fiery temper, and after one particularly intense tirade, Dalí turns to James and declares, “Isn’t she magnificent?”

There’s a lot for a filmmaker like American Psycho’s Mary Harron to work with — the story of some of the greatest visual masterpieces of the last century, the legendary eccentric who created them, and the weirdly functional, dysfunctional relationship that sustained him. Which is why it’s so puzzling that Dalíland feels like such a damp squib.

The problem (one of them, anyway) is the point of view. Dalíland is not Dalí’s story, but James’, who we meet as a gallery owner in 1985, when Dalí was denying he was dying. Then James flashes back to the early 1970s, when he was Dalí’s assistant for a few very eventful months. He first meets the Dalís in New York, where the painter is holed up in a luxury hotel, creating a new batch of paintings for an upcoming opening. The Dalís live in a constant state of cocktail party, with artists, models, and assorted rich people hungry for clout, drinking champagne and snorting coke on Dalí’s dime. The film works best when Harron gives in to the chaos: Watching Ben Kingsley trying to disco dance as 70-year-old Dalí is a particular highlight.

The Dalís only operated on a cash basis, and James becomes their bagman — which means he sees both the people who are stealing from the artist, and the extreme, often fraudulent methods Gala uses to keep the money flowing. It would be nice if Briney could have summoned some kind of recognizable emotional reaction to that or anything else. Briney was apparently a last-minute replacement for Ezra Miller, who now appears as Young Dalí in flashbacks. While the guy who will appear as The Flash in a few weeks is apparently a malevolent weirdo in real life, at least he can kinda act. Briney drags down everyone around him, killing any momentum the film builds up from Kingsley and Sukowa’s terrifying love story.

The biggest problem with Dalíland is that you never get to see the artist’s paintings, only his eccentricities. Other people tell you how brilliant he is. Even though he was past his prime when James meets him, Dalí was the real deal. But unless you’re familiar with his work, and his biography, you won’t find that out from Dalíland.

Dalíland is playing at Malco Studio on the Square through June 15th and is available on VOD.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Miles Morales’ return in Across the Spider-Verse is a masterpiece in animation.

Citizen Kane rightly has a reputation as a landmark of filmic innovation. But what Orson Welles did was not so much invent new techniques as push existing technologies to their full potential. Gregg Toland, the cinematographer whose work was so integral to Kane’s aesthetic that Welles insisted their credits appear together on-screen, had been working in Hollywood for a decade; writer Herman Mankiewicz had been punching up scripts since the silent era. Welles’ genius was synthesis. He saw new ways to put the pieces together.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is not Citizen Kane, but producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have seen a new way to put the pieces together.

They have a lot of pieces to play with. There are officially three directors: Portuguese animator Joaquim Dos Santos, who cut his teeth on Avatar: The Last Airbender; Justin K. Thompson, a veteran production designer; and Kemp Powers, the playwright behind One Night in Miami and co-director of Pixar’s Soul. The animation team is by far the largest ever assembled. 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse’s credits boasted a then-unprecedented 140 animators — for the sequel, it’s more than 1,000. Pity the poor payroll people! The battalion of artists takes the audience on a 140-minute tour of everything that is possible with digital animation in 2023. The film is a nonstop flurry of visual styles, all mashed up together. The miracle at the heart of Across the Spider-Verse is that it all meshes, and somehow makes sense.

The first line spoken in Across the Spider-Verse comes from Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld). “Let’s do things differently this time,” she says, before the film blasts through your defenses with a thundering drum solo and a visually dazzling sequence that imparts more plot information than most M. Night Shyamalan movies. I briefly thought, “They can’t possibly keep up this pace,” but they hadn’t even floored the gas pedal yet.

Ostensibly, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is the lead spider, but this is Gwen Stacy’s movie as much as it is anybody’s. She comes from Earth-65, a reality where she was bitten by the radioactive spider, and her love interest Peter Parker (Jack Quaid) died in her arms. Her father George (Shea Whigham) is a police captain who thinks Spider-Woman killed Peter Parker (which is kind of true, but he had turned into a giant lizard at the time. It’s complicated). Alienated from her family, Gwen is recruited by the Spider-Society. Different versions of the same dimensionally disastrous accident at the Alchemax particle collider from Into the Spider-Verse played out in different ways over the countless realities of the multiverse. Many of the Spider-Man variants, now alerted to the possibility of multiverse travel, have banded together to address existential threats to reality. The most pressing of which is The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), a former Alchemax tech who accidentally gained quantum powers in the explosion.

The Spot’s motivation is similar to Jobu Tupaki’s in Everything Everywhere All At Once: They want to collapse the diverse existences of the multiverse into a singularity contained within themselves. It’s kind of an ultimate, all-encompassing narcissism that stands in contrast to Marvel’s wisecracking, everyman hero. There’s enough Spidey for everyone to identify with, from Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni), aka Spider-Man India, to Jessica Drew (Issa Rae), a Black, no-nonsense, motorcycle-riding Spider-Woman.

Each Spider-person is drawn in their own style, which they maintain even as they travel from world to world. Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya) is especially striking, with his cut-and-paste aesthetic. The collage effect isn’t just for show; it helps build emotion. During Gwen’s emotional confrontation with her father, her watercolor world weeps with her.

Across the Spider-Verse will be viewed as a landmark in animation, and rightfully so. In the future, it may also be seen as a standard bearer for a new artistic movement. Like Rick and Morty and Everything Everywhere All At Once, it is a multiverse story, featuring different versions of the same characters interacting over a sprawling variety of settings. But there’s something deeper going on, too; a maximalist reaction to decades of minimalism and primitivism. As seen in Moonage Daydream, Brett Morgen’s experimental biography of David Bowie, it embraces post-modernist remix, while pointedly rejecting PoMo’s nihilist tendencies in favor of an effusive humanism. I’m not sure this nascent movement has a name yet, but it’s awesome, and I want more of it. While I’m waiting, I’ll go watch Across the Spider-Verse again.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Now playing
Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Little Mermaid

Disney makes poor unfortunate souls out of its audience with this latest live-action remake.

Ever since roughly 2016, when Disney company man Jon Favreau helmed the live-action remake of The Jungle Book, the question on my mind has been, “Why?” What, exactly, is the point of trying to redo masterpieces from the golden age of Disney animation with modern CGI tech? A live-action Cinderella that uses the 2,000-year-old fairy tale as a jumping off point, sure. Go for it. But no audience ever said, “The problem with Dumbo is that the elephants weren’t realistic enough.”

The real answer is that executives who are terminally infested with late-stage capitalist brain worms want to reuse these free intellectual properties Walt Disney appropriated from the public domain because they have a whole lot of capital invested in theme park attractions based on these stories. They want the goose to lay some more golden eggs without properly feeding the goose with new stories.

But just because you’re bringing new film technology to bear on an old story doesn’t mean that the results are going to look better. Look no further than Flounder, the best friend of Ariel in The Little Mermaid. In the 1989 Disney animated film, Flounder is a pretty simple yellow and blue fish with a friendly, humanlike face that fits his bubbly middle-schooler personality. In the 2023 version of The Little Mermaid, Flounder is an actual fish. His colors are now silver on black. His face is as impassive and free of human emotion as, well, a flounder. When he is scooped from the ocean by a passing fishing boat along with Ariel (Halle Bailey), he flops around on deck like an actual fish out of water. There’s nothing young kids like more than watching the character they’re supposed to identify with suffocate slowly!

Did the suits at Disney who have been shepherding this $250-million behemoth since 2017 think the “kids these days” don’t like hand-drawn animation? Anime is all the kids want to talk about! Disney would have been better off poaching some Japanese animators from one of Tokyo’s notoriously thrifty anime houses and turning them loose on the story of the mermaid princess who lives “Under the Sea” and wants to be “Part of Your World.” Instead, we got something that cost as much as Avatar: The Way of Water but looks like crap.

It’s a shame because Halle Bailey, half of a pop duo with her sister Chloe, gives 100 percent to the role of Ariel. She’s got vocal chops, passion, and a love for the material that shines through the crowded frames she shares with swarming sea life. But when she climbs up on a rock to recreate the poster image of “Part of Your World,” the epic wave that’s supposed to add an exclamation point to the climax evaporates like sea spray. It’s a metaphor for the entire production.

The film’s other bright spot is Melissa McCarthy as Ursula the Sea Witch. Like Bailey, she clearly understands the assignment better than her director. Her rendition of “Poor Unfortunate Souls” is the kind of camp romp you want from an over-the-top Disney villain.

Too bad director Rob Marshall treats The Little Mermaid’s music like he’s embarrassed of it. Did you think “Under the Sea,” the showstopper that earned Samuel E. Wright an Academy Award, was a little too edgy? You’re in luck, because Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs sucks all the life out of it. The new songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda, particularly the hip-hop flavored “The Scuttlebutt,” flop like a fish out of water.

The 1989 original is 83 minutes long; this one is 135 minutes long, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what they did with the extra time. Marshall and screenwriter David Magee could have explored the tragic implications of Hans Christian Andersen’s original story of lovers trapped between worlds, which ends with Ariel sacrificing herself because she refuses the Sea Witch’s order to kill her Above World paramour Eric. Nope. Disney’s regressive ending, which celebrates Ariel’s decision to change everything that’s unique about herself to please a man, remains more or less intact.

Like The Jungle Book and The Lion King before it, this flabby, dull remake of The Little Mermaid will be forgotten by this time next year — just in time for the live action remake of Moana.

The Little Mermaid
Now playing
Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Fast X

In Fast X, Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto uses a car door as a shield, as one does.

Ever since I first looked at the release schedule for 2023, I have been dreading Fast X. The tenth Fast & Furious film seems completely pointless. I love a good car chase as well as the next guy, but Dom (Vin Diesel) and his “family” long ago exceeded both the bonds of Newtonian physics and cinematic decency. In the last one, F9, they literally drove cars into space. When a long-running film series that does not take place in space suddenly decides to go into space, it means they’re out of ideas. That’s called the “Moonraker Rule.”

Given Fast X’s running time of 141 minutes, it looked like a bad weekend was brewing for me. Then, a stroke of luck. On Saturday night, my wife LJ and I went to the monthly Time Warp Drive-In for Singalong Sinema: Mad Musicals in May, a triple feature of Little Shop of Horrors, The Blues Brothers, and The Wiz. It was a perfect night to camp out at the Malco Summer Drive-In’s Screen 4 with several hundred of our closest friends. Next door, Screen 3 was also filling up with a crowd who favored muscle cars and giant trucks.

At dusk, the films started. A miscommunication led to the Time Warp films being played out of order, so The Wiz rolled first. From our lawn chairs next to our parked car, we could see both screens 4 and 3. That’s when I got the idea. It’s highly unethical to review a film without watching it. But the truth is, nobody who is going to go see Fast X cares what a critic like me has to say about it. You’re either down with $350 million and 141 minutes worth of explosions and big guys in muscle cars going vroom, or you’re not. But technically, I was watching Fast X, even if the sound I was hearing was the Tony Award-winning score of The Wiz. If the other Fast & Furious films were anything to go by, it’s not as if hearing the dialogue would shed any light on the plot that was allegedly happening between car chases. I have seen at least five of them, and I have never understood what is going on. Is Dom a street racer? A bank robber? Some kind of super spy? All of the above?

The first big improvement I noticed in Fast X is that Aquaman himbo Jason Momoa is the big bad, a drug lord named Dante who is dead set on revenge for Dom’s crimes against (what else?) his family. This information comes from an extended opening flashback taken from Fast Five, where Dom and the crew steal a bank vault and drag it through the streets of Rio. Aquaman’s exquisitely-styled locks mean that, unlike earlier installments with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Jason Statham, the story does not boil down to bald guys punching each other. Momoa’s performance is so excessive it lands like a silent film actor’s pantomime — especially when accompanied by the dulcet tones of Diana Ross as urban Dorothy Gale.

At roughly the time in The Wiz when Michael Jackson is introduced as the Scarecrow, Charlize Theron is reintroduced in Fast X as Cipher. I hope she got paid a lot of money. Same for Rita Moreno and Helen Mirren, both of whom have scenes with Dom which I think are supposed to be motherly, but come off as romantic. You go, ladies!

As Diana Ross and Michael Jackson explode into the radio hit “Ease on Down the Road,” Fast X travels to Rome, where Dante is planting a bomb that looks like a giant metal ball. Naturally, automotive hijinks ensue, with Dom and fam chasing the big ball through the streets of the Eternal City. By the time Nipsey Russell is introduced as the Tin Man, the giant ball is on fire; it eventually explodes in the Tiber River in a way that is somehow both good and bad for Dom.

In conclusion, The Wiz, a box office bomb widely credited as ending the ’70s golden age of blaxploitation cinema, is flawed, but much more fun than its reputation suggests. The disco-era bass work in Quincy Jones’ soundtrack is especially choice. Fast X is elevated by the presence of Aquaman and a flagrant disregard for human constraints like “good taste.” It’s the best film in the Fast & Furious series to kind of watch out of the corner of your eye while doing something else.

Fast X
Now playing
Multiple locations
(But unfortunately not alongside The Wiz again)

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

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.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Now playing
Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

Well, the book banners are at it again. Since the good ol’ U.S. of A. was founded by a diverse (from a theological perspective, anyway) group who had just witnessed a couple hundred years of bloody religious civil war in England, freedoms of belief and expression were enshrined as fundamental rights in the new country. So those who would impose their religion on others start by whipping up moral panics about “pornography! In the schools!”

Long before the words “Ron DeSantis” first passed fascist lips, they came for Judy Blume. Her 1970 middle-school coming-of-age novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. has everything: frank talk about sex, a skeptical view of religion, and worst of all, a female protagonist learning about her period. The horror! Children should know nothing about sex except that God hates you for it.

The bannings in the 1970s made it a widely read Gen X classic. Blume resisted offers from Hollywood until The Simpsons executive producer James L. Brooks and director Kelly Fremon Craig finally convinced her it was time to film the unfilmable.

Rachel McAdams as Barbara Simon and Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret Simon in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

We first meet Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) having the time of her life at summer camp. When she returns home to her mother Barbara (Rachel McAdams) and father Herb (Benny Safdie), she’s quick to notice something is afoot. Grandma Sylvia (Kathy Bates) blurts out the news: Dad got a promotion and the family is moving from Brooklyn to the suburbs of New Jersey.

While the family is still unpacking, neighbor Nancy (Elle Graham) introduces herself. Margaret is attracted to her new friend’s self-confidence, and she gets a boost when Nancy asks her to join her girl gang. But navigating her new school’s social scene becomes Margaret’s minefield.

Meanwhile, a long-simmering situation in Margaret’s family life is coming to a boil. Barbara’s Christian fundamentalist parents disowned her when she married Herb, who is Jewish. Margaret must choose which religious tradition she wants to join, if any. Margaret prays her own way in private, and her missives to God give the film narrative structure. When Margaret finds out why she’s never met her grandparents, it fills her with horror — the more she sees of religion, the less she wants to do with it.

Craig nails the feel of the wood-paneled 1970s. Her technique is conservative, compared to The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Eighth Grade. It’s the acting that sends this adaptation into greatness. Fortson’s performance is wise beyond its years, and Graham’s a natural. Craig’s screenplay increases the role of Barbara, and McAdams makes a meal of it.

Margaret’s choices — to be a mean girl or not; to be Jewish, Christian, or none of the above; to be fake and popular or risk being real; being forced to choose between competing branches of her family — are so universal that they transcend the 20th-century setting. What has scared the pearl-clutching book banners for 50 years is that Margaret makes her own choices for her own reasons and lives more or less happily ever after. That kind of freedom is not something the reactionary mind welcomes.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Now playing
Multiple locations

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Meanwhile in Memphis Documentary Celebrates 10 Years

Interviewee Al Kapone (Photo: Alex Warble)

First and foremost, Robert Allen Parker wants you to know he is a musician, not a director. Even so, for the better part of a decade, Parker found himself consumed in making a documentary on music in Memphis. That film — Meanwhile in Memphis: The Sound of a Revolution — premiered at the Indie Memphis Film Festival in 2013, and now it’s returning to the big screen for a special 10th anniversary screening at Malco Studio on the Square.

Meanwhile in Memphis, Parker explains, is an “overview of the modern Memphis music community from the late ’70s to roughly 2008. There’s all the old history — with Elvis, the blues, and B.B. King — that’s well-documented, but there’s not much on what’s happened since then. It was a big undertaking, but I had the drive and the ambition. That was kind of a risk and a gamble because I had never done anything film-related before.”

After a meeting by happenstance, Parker enlisted videographer Nan Hackman as co-director. “We were both wanting to promote the music scene and try to get out and do something,” he says. “She had the technical perspective to make it happen. She really made this happen.”

Together, Hackman, who has since passed, and Parker interviewed over a dozen artists and bands, including, among others, Jim Dickinson, Al Kapone, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, Alicja-pop, and Mud Boy and the Neutrons. “We just wanted to tell the story of a couple of musicians, but of course then it grew bigger and bigger as we interviewed more people,” Parker says. “It basically expanded to a point to where it was really overwhelming. … And it became more of a historical document.”

With so much to work with, the direction of the film could have gone in a number of ways, Parker says, but ultimately, the through line that the filmmakers landed on was the “DIY mind” of Memphis musicians. “It doesn’t matter what genre of music they’re doing, just the fact of them being in Memphis and creating something here has an extra magical force to it. Whether it’s rap, garage, rock, blues, alternative, whatever, it’s a certain amount of DIY, like a raw passion. It’s not so much commercially driven. It’s just from the heart and soul. It’s something that you know it when you hear it and see it. … I got a new perspective on everything. It inspired me as musician.”

Because Hackman and Parker had so much footage, they ended up making a series of short films on a few of the artists interviewed, including one on Jim Dickinson which will accompany the Meanwhile in Memphis screening on Thursday. In between the short film and feature, Jimmy Crosthwait, the last living member of Mud Boy and the Neutrons, will perform with Parker and others backing him.

“When we made the documentary,” Parker reflects, “I wanted it to be made in a way where someone could watch it 10 or 20 years from then and for it to still be relevant.” So far, at the 10-year mark, the musician has found this to hold true.

“Jim Dickinson: The Man Behind the Console” and Meanwhile in Memphis: The Sound of a Revolution Screenings, Malco Studio on the Square, Thursday, April 27, 7 p.m., free.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Evil Dead Rise

In Evil Dead Rise, maybe mother doesn’t always know best.

The release of Evil Dead Rise, the big screen reboot of Sam Raimi’s influential horror-comedy franchise, makes it obvious that the general public is woefully unprepared for the eldritch horrors which surround us.

In writer/director Lee Cronin’s wildly fun film, residents of a condemned Los Angeles apartment building make many avoidable errors in their dealings with demonic undead forces and face fatal consequences. If you or someone you know is a Person Experiencing Demonic Infestation (PEDI), these nine safety tips could save your life — or at least make your death more entertaining.

1. Satanic troves: Whether you are exploring the dark, twisted forests of Tennessee or, like Danny (Morgan Davies), entering a deserted bank vault underneath your haunted apartment building whose existence was discovered thanks to a mysterious earthquake that only seemed to affect your block, be respectful of any Satanic or necromantic ritual objects you may encounter. A good rule of thumb is, if you didn’t bring it in, don’t take it out.

2. Infernal literature: Signs the book you just found in the Satanic trove may be infernal include: A. Its cover and binding are made from human flesh. B. It is covered in insects of unknown species. C. It contains horrifying illustrations in red ink that looks like human blood. D. It has a mouth and tries to bite you. If you find any tome exhibiting one or more of these traits, return it to its putrid canvas sack and rebury it. Remember: They call it The Book of the Dead for a reason.

3. Magic words: Should I say them? In general, no, you should not say aloud magic words written in infernal literature. Precautions like recording the words backwards on a 78 rpm record which is then buried in a bank vault until years after your death from demonic possession are useless if the person recovering the record is, like Danny, an aspiring DJ. However, if you or a PEDI nearby has already read some magic words, it may be necessary to read other magic words to undo the resulting demonic infestation and/or time travel. In this case, it is vitally important that you enunciate clearly. Remember: Magical incantation is best left to the experts, and they died a long time ago.

4. Interacting with the formerly deceased: Studies agree that coming back from the dead may sound fun, but in practice, it’s extremely dangerous. If you see someone you are certain was recently dead, like single mom Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), who is now ambulatory, DO NOT ENGAGE. What if, like Beth (Lily Sullivan), it’s your sister; or like Danny, Kassie (Nell Fisher), and Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), it’s your mother? Again, DO NOT ENGAGE. It’s not them, it’s a demon driving their hideously reanimated corpse like a rental car. Remember the safety phrase: “Mommy’s with the maggots now.”

5. Beware of contagion danger: While the initial rending of the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead requires magical intervention, demonic possession, once unleashed, can spread like a disease. Signs of impending PEDI status may include wounds that turn black and sprout spiderweb-like growths, excessive vomiting, and blood spurting from the eyes. Avoid contact with all fluids discharged from a PEDI.

6. Clear your escape route: When entering an abandoned cabin or haunted apartment building, always scope out an escape route, as you will inevitably need to flee. Make sure the path of your retreat is free from tripping hazards.

7. When in doubt, destroy the brain: Normal violence will not be enough to stop the undead, as they are technically dead already. Depending on what level of undead you’re dealing with, a solid headshot may or may not solve the problem, but it will usually slow them down enough to give you time to run.

8. Don’t stick around: Look, the dead are taunting you and trying to infect you with their evil. It doesn’t matter if they’re in your house, it’s their house now. Get the hell out! If you land a successful attack, don’t stick around to see what effect it will have on the PEDI. Just run.

9. Wood chippers: Friend or foe? It depends on who is at the controls. For advanced PEDI, mere dismemberment or immolation may not be enough to neutralize the threat. Complete bodily disruption, such as that provided by an industrial grinder, may be required. But be warned that total liquidation carries significant risk of cross contamination and, thus, the potential for further sequels.