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Film Features Film/TV

The Dark Tower

Stephen King can’t catch a break.

I’m speaking filmically, of course. In all other aspects of his life, King is doing fine. He is probably the most successful writer of the last 50 years. He’s the Charles Dickens of horror, to be read widely and remembered far longer than his contemporaries, even the ones who might have had superior talent. King is a good writer, but he has had fantastic agents.

King’s work has been adapted for film (checks Wikipedia) 67 times! That’s a lot! (The Mangler had two sequels? Who knew?) But with the very notable exceptions of The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, and Stand by Me, movies based on King’s works have been pretty awful. (I admit, I have a soft spot for The Running Man, but that was technically a Richard Bachman book.)

The Dark Tower was King’s attempt at epic meta-fantasy and the project that he chipped away at between blockbuster airport paperbacks for 40 years. Clearly inspired by Tolkein, it’s not so much singing dwarves and lembas as it is a deep dive into King’s subconscious. The Dark Tower sits at the center of at expansive multiverse, protecting the multitude of realities where anything goes. Instead of knights in shining armor, the Tower — and thus, all of the multitudes of realities in the multiverse — is defended by a sacred order of Gunslingers, refugees from Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns that King was obsessed with when he started the series in the early 1970s. Bits and pieces of King’s passing obsessions and his other books float up through the more than 4,000-page narrative. At one point, King himself makes an appearance as both author and character. In the age when HBO is dropping a cool 10 mil on every hour of Game of Thrones, The Dark Tower‘s seven volumes sound like the perfect fodder for a long-running prestige TV series. Instead, we get this chop job.

Matthew McConaughey (left) fled across the desert, and Idris Elba followed.

Idris Elba was born to play Roland, the supernatural protagonist, last of the Gunslingers. He’s got the natural gravitas and credibility as an ass kicker. Roland’s gun was forged from the sword Excalibur, and he “kills with his heart,” as the Gunslinger’s credo requires. Roland’s sworn enemy is the Man in Black, played by Matthew McConaughey, so pencil thin he seems to have been existing purely on Soylent paste and self-satisfaction.

Armed with the power of suggestion, an army of demonic lackeys, a snazzy Zara for Men duster, and a variety of colored orbs, the Man in Black seeks to destroy the Dark Tower and let in the demons from the dark outer-world so he can … do something. There was a prophecy that said the mind of a child could destroy the Dark Tower, so the Man in Black’s minions prowl the multiverse finding younglings strong in the Shining to feed into his kid-powered super-laser. I was not really clear on what he was hoping to accomplish with the destruction of the multiverse, but maybe if McConaughey put more than a car commercial’s level of effort into the role, I wouldn’t mind.

The young Brooklynite Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) is the latest in a line of generic “chosen ones,” complete with evil step family and doomed mother. While in our reality, (“Keystone Earth”), he is repeatedly upstaged by his neighbor Timmy, played by Michael Barbieri of Ira Sach’s Little Men. Director Nikolaj Arcel would have been better off casting Barbieri as his audience surrogate, given how completely charisma-free Taylor is.

The literary Dark Tower is the result of a prodigious mind high on the writings of Joseph Campbell and, in the ’70s and ’80s at least, heroic doses of drugs. But instead of floating freely in Jungian archetypal space, the film just touches all the bases of another generic post-Matrix action fantasy. In the grand scheme of this summers’ colossal wastes of money, it goes down easier than, say, the Pirates of the Caribbean death rattle. But I liked The Dark Tower much better when it was called Big Trouble in Little China. At least Kurt Russell knew how to commit to the ridiculous.

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Film Features Film/TV

Little Men

Little Men proves Ira Sachs directs actors better than almost anyone else working in film today. Sachs doesn’t rehearse his actors before they come onto the set, but that doesn’t imply a lack of preparation on his part. The first step in getting career-best performances from people like John Lithgow and Alfred Molina is a spot-on instinct for casting. For example, when preparing for 2014’s Love Is Strange, he discovered that Lithgow and Molina were old friends, and he knew that even though both actors are straight, they would be perfect to play the long-committed gay couple whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they are finally able to marry. Little Men, which finishes a trilogy of Sachs films about male relationships that began with 2012’s Keep the Lights On, starts off with a strong foundation of perfect casting from top to bottom. The lead duo are Theo Taplitz as Jake Jardine, the shy, 13-year-old whose parents’ move from Manhattan begins the story; and Michael Barbieri as Tony Calvelli, the outgoing, first-generation Brooklynite who immediately recognizes a kindred spirit.

Jake’s dad Brian is played by Greg Kinnear, from whom Sachs wrings an unexpected depth of emotion. Brian is an actor whose father Max dies, leaving him and his sister Audrey (Talia Balsam) the building in Brooklyn where he lived. The building comes with a spacious apartment and a single tenant, a dress store owned by Leonor Calvelli (Paulina García). When Max bought the house, his Brooklyn neighborhood was quiet, working class, and not very desirable. By the time the Jardine family moves in, it’s in the midst of a real estate boom, pushing the average rents on the street five times higher than what Max was charging Leonor.

Sachs has been recognized as perhaps the greatest queer filmmaker of his generation, but there has always been an underlying class consciousness in his work. Little Men brings those concerns to the forefront. Jake and Michael quickly become best friends, but there’s no suggestion of romantic attraction between the two teens. Tony clearly likes girls, and one of his best scenes involves his getting his first taste of rejection when the girl he’s crushing on informs him she’s into older guys. After giving a look like he’s been hit in the stomach with a sledgehammer, Tony gathers himself up and says, “Thank you for your honesty”—which, not coincidentally, was the title of the retrospective series New York’s Museum of Modern Art ran in Sachs’ honor this summer.

Greg Kinnear (left) and Talia Balsam deliver acting gold in Ira Sachs’ Little Men.

Jake and Tony bring out the best in each other. Jake begins the film avoiding eye contact with his public school classmates and ends with a developed set of social skills. Tony takes Jake’s commitment to his drawings and discipline in schoolwork, and the aspiring actor flourishes, as seen in a blistering scene in an acting class run by Mauricio Bustamante. But as the two only children grow closer, raw economics conspire to pull them apart. Brian’s acting career is going nowhere fast, and his sister Audrey insists on raising Leonor’s rent to levels the store can’t sustain. Jake and Tony’s doomed friendship becomes a metaphor for the vanishing multiethnic, economically varied community in Brooklyn that inspired Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Sachs’ and co-writer Mauricio Zacharias’ ability to imbue a simple story about a couple of tween boys bonding over video games with such depth of subtext is breathtaking. Even the way they get into and out of scenes brings unexpected joy. Sachs and cinematographer Óscar Durán’s camera is always in exactly the right place, never sacrificing clarity even as the framing and staging veers wildly unconventional.

Sachs says Little Men was inspired in part by his experiences as a longtime member of the Memphis Children’s Theatre, and it’s clear that his actors are at the center of everything he does. García is absolutely brilliant as Leonor, a tough but kind woman fighting for her livelihood while trying to do what’s best for her son. Molina makes a cameo as Leonor’s lawyer, and even his minor turn is brilliant. Kinnear delivers the sneakiest performance of the film, surrounded by loving family, but also alone, uncertain about his action, and ultimately denied any sort of lasting satisfaction. It may not rise to the emotional highs of Love Is Strange, but Little Men is a beautiful, complex work that will stay with you long after the credits roll.