Tag: Patrick Stewart

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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange.

It wasn’t obvious at the time, but in 1980, one of the most significant movies in the history of American cinema was filmed in the woods around Morristown, Tennessee. The Evil Dead was the brain child of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, who scrounged together just enough money to pay a 13-person crew to live in a broke-down cabin for a few miserable months. Raimi, who was 20 years old at the time, combined the supernatural horror of The Exorcist and the slasher gore of Halloween with the slapstick comedy of The Three Stooges. In the editing room, Raimi met Joel Coen, who, inspired by the fledgeling director’s can-do spirit, convinced his brother Ethan to make their own low-budget indie film, Blood Simple. After a rapturous review by Stephen King, The Evil Dead became a wildly profitable cult classic. 

In 1990, the year after Tim Burton’s Batman, Raimi directed Darkman, an original superhero film starring a young Liam Neeson. When the now-disgraced director Bryan Singer’s X-Men films took off in the late 90s, Raimi’s innovative vision earned him the director’s chair for Spider-Man. When the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched with Iron Man in 2008, it resembled Raimi’s light-dark, comedy-drama tone more than Christopher Nolan’s gritty, sour Batman Begins. 

Raimi felt burned by the mixed reaction to Spider-Man 3 and stopped making superhero movies until Disney loaded up the money truck to lure him into helming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It’s the best investment the House of Mouse has made in a long time. 

Xochitl Gomez, Benedict Wong, and Benedict Cumberbatch go Dutch angle.

Benedict Cumberbatch returns as Dr. Stephen Strange, the former surgeon turned sorcerer who was the brains behind the world-saving operation when the Avengers took on Thanos. The film opens with Strange and America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) soaring through an aerobatic sequence recalling the beginning of Revenge of the Sith. But when the sorcerer falls to a space demon, we learn that this is not THE Doctor Strange, but merely A Doctor Strange from a different corner of the multiverse. America is a wild magic talent who can travel between realities, and someone is sending giant tentacle monsters after her. 

That someone turns out to be Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), the Avenger who has completed her heel turn into the Scarlett Witch after creating her own sitcom pocket universe in WandaVision. She is seeking a universe where the two sons she never had in this world actually exist, and that means stealing America’s power. Strange realizes she has been corrupted by the Darkhold, a tome of forbidden chaos magic, and seeks the mythical Book of Vishanti, which contains spells to counter Wanda’s newfound might. 

Rachel McAdams, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Xochitl Gomez step between worlds.

Marvel comics appropriated the concept of the multiverse from quantum physics to explain the contradictions between different writers’ versons of their heroes histories, and now, with Everthing Everywhere All At Once and Rick and Morty, the concept has invaded mainstreams pop culture. With writer Michael Waldron (who won an Emmy for the Rick and Morty episode “The Vat of Acid”), Raimi milks the multiverse for all kinds of fun romps over its spry, two-hour running time. His restless camera swoops and dives, pushes in for comic effect, and pulls back to shoot fights like MGM dance sequences—especially in a music-themed magic duel which brings super-genius Danny Elfman’s score to the fore. 

Cumberbatch is loose, playful, and supremely confident as Marvel’s resident magical curmudgeon. Olsen adds dark nuance to her sympathetic WandaVision interpretation of Scarlet Witch, creating the best super hero-villain pairing since Black Panther and Killmonger. The multiverse story creates opportunities to introduce all kinds of new characters and variations on old ones, and then kill them off without consequence. In one parallel Earth, we meet a version of Agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) who took the supersoldier serum instead of Steve Rogers, and put the Union Jack on her shield. (Why does Captain Carter get a jetpack when Captain American doesn’t?) There’s also an emotional appearance by the great Patrick Stewart as an alternate Charles Xavier, who matches minds with Wanda. And of course, the legendary Bruce Campbell has a brilliant comedic cameo.

After a series of Marvel movies that range from the bloated Infinity War saga to the ho-hum Eternals, this is an exciting, visually inventive adventure actually worth the money to see on the big screen. Sam Raimi doesn’t need $200 million to make a great film, but when he has it, he shows everyone how it’s done.   

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Film Features Film/TV

Logan

When Hugh Jackman first “snikt’ed” his Wolverine claws in 2000, his biggest accolade was an Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical for playing the lead role in Oklahoma! in London’s West End. Director Bryan Singer took the unknown song-and-dance man and cast him as the most popular character in Marvel Comics’ most popular comic series. Twentieth Century Fox was taking a big chance with X-Men: Three years before, the failure of Batman and Robin had brought the superhero genre to the verge of extinction. But the studio’s bet paid off, and Singer’s slick, new vision for comic-book films kicked off a boom that shows no signs of stopping any time soon.

The franchise has had its ups and downs over the years, but the best X-Men movie in a decade, 2014’s Days of Future Past, came after Jackman had left for a Wolverine solo trilogy. Today’s X-Men lack a Wolverine, and all of the original actors — Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey, Halle Berry’s Storm, James Marsden’s Cyclops, Rebecca Romijn’s Mystique, Ian McKellen’s Magneto, and Patrick Stewart’s Professor X — have been replaced. Jackman, however, has been the only onscreen Wolverine. His announcement that Logan represents his retirement from the role has been the big driving force behind the film’s $244 million opening weekend — but the fantastic word-of-mouth advertising it’s been getting obviously helped. I’m here to add to that word of mouth.

Dafne Keen and Jackman

Jackman’s got the brooding, the barely concealed inner pain, and the howls of berserker rage down to a science at this point. The safe move for Logan would have been to just pick a couple of exotic locations and another set of bad guys. Evil mutants? Did that. The military industrial complex? Done. Robots? Did that, too. Yakuza? Yep.

Instead, director James Mangold and Jackman, who is the executive producer, found a way to let Logan go out in style. Superheroes usually work with unlimited resources. Batman and Tony Stark are billionaires, Superman has a Fortress of Solitude packed with what’s left of Krypton’s technology, and Professor Xavier’s sitting on a fortune he used to build his School for Gifted Youngsters, the only prep school with an X-Jet. When Logan opens, our hero, Wolverine, is hustling for bucks as a limo driver in El Paso. It’s 2029, and it looks like Trump’s presidency has gone as badly as we fear. Among Logan’s fares are groups of drunken frat boy types who hang out of the sunroof and chant “USA” at Mexicans detained by the border wall. His first dust up is with a bunch of gangbangers trying to steal his hubcaps. When he’s forced to let the air out of a few of them, he reveals his existence to Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), a cyborg working as head of corporate security for TransGen, a pharmaceutical company that is actually a front for Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant) to carry on the work of the Weapon X project that created Wolverine in the first place, back several movies ago. Pierce warns Logan to be on the lookout for a woman and a young girl who will ask him for help. In fact, they already have asked him for help, and he refused, because he’s trying to protect a bigger secret: He’s hiding Professor X down in Mexico. Charles Xavier is dying from a degenerative brain disease, but since his psychic brain is a weapon of mass destruction, his seizures pose a real public danger.

Logan and Professor X help the child, a refugee from the revived Weapon X program called X-23. Laura, as the nurses named her, is played by 12-year-old newcomer Dafne Keen, who looks something like a 2/3 scale model of Natalie Portman. The three mutants embark on a desperate road trip to North Dakota, where Laura can find sanctuary at a secret base called Eden.

Stripping Wolverine of his superhero trappings and putting him in charge of the dying Professor X and the volatile, mute Laura was a brilliant move. Logan has more in common with Sicario or No Country for Old Men than it does with Doctor Strange or Batman v Superman. Stewart and Jackman give a pair of brilliant performances, and Keen shows dazzling range for a girl younger than the franchise itself. The X-Men subtext has always been about the treatment of outsiders by the larger culture, and unfortunately, that maps perfectly with the story of a young Mexican girl struggling to find safety in a post-Trump America, imbuing Jackman and Stewart’s superhero swan song with an urgent relevance.

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Film Features Film/TV

Green Room

There’s nothing a group of musicians love to do more than swap stories about bad gigs. The guitarist got drunk and puked onstage. The promoter was a crook. A brawl broke out. But in the long and sordid history of bad shows, I dare say none comes close to what happens to the punk band the Ain’t Rights in director Jeremy Saulnier’s new film Green Room.

When we meet the Ain’t Rights — Pat (Anton Yelchin), Sam (Alia Shawkat), Reece (Joe Cole), and Tiger (Callum Turner) — their tour of the Pacific Northwest is already faltering. After a disastrous afternoon show at a pizza parlor in Seaside, Oregon, the band figures they’ve hit rock bottom and decides pack it in and go home. But to get back to the East Coast, they need money, and the pizza parlor gig only paid out $8 each. The mohawked promoter, Tad (David Thompson), feels guilty and sets them up with a show at a club 90 miles away where his cousin works. “Just don’t talk about politics, and you’ll be fine,” he warns.

As with everyone else who has ever told a punk band not to talk about politics, his warning falls on deaf ears. When they arrive, they find that the venue where they’re booked is not so much a punk club as it is a white power movement compound hidden in the middle of the Oregon woods. Naturally, they open their set with a cover of the Dead Kennedy’s “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” which is certainly the punk thing to do, but not the best choice in terms of long-term survival. Still, by the end of the set, they seem to have won over the crowd and are feeling pretty good about the situation until they return to the green room and find the lead singer of the headlining band standing over a dead girl with a knife in her head.

Callum Turner,Anton Yelchin and Alia Shawkat in Green Room

At this point, Green Room shifts gears from Decline of Western Civilization in the PacNor to a claustrophobic cross between 12 Angry Men and Assault on Precinct 13. Just when it looks like things can’t any worse for the band, Saulnier pulls the rug out from under them again. What could be worse than being locked in a room with a murderous, 250-pound neo-nazi named Werm (Brent Werzner) by a pack of eerily disciplined skinheads? How about when Darcy, the leader of the skinheads, shows up, and it’s Sir Patrick Freakin’ Stewart. Darcy calmly takes command like the evil Mirror Universe version of Captain Picard, and the casual brutality of his evil is bone chilling. He effortlessly throws the police off the scent and proceeds to clean up the mess left on his property with the help of a squad of “red laces,” as skinheads who have killed enemies of the movement are known. As the band tries to escape first the room and later the club, they discover the secrets Darcy has been hiding, which explains why he is so eager to wipe out the witnesses.

As you would expect, Stewart’s chilling precision is the film’s acting highlight. Shawkat as the cool-girl bass player sporting an ever-fashionable Dead Kennedy’s logo shirt and Imogen Poots as Amber, a local punk desperate to escape the skinhead underground, outshine their male compatriots, most of whom read as transparent murder fodder or inhuman killing machines.

Green Room is billed as a “horror thriller,” and Saulnier, whose previous work was the acclaimed indie Blue Ruin, can throw a jump scare with the best of them. But there’s quite a bit of 1970s-era hostage movies like Dog Day Afternoon in Green Room‘s DNA, so I would hesitate to call it horror. The director’s primary concern is ratcheting up the tension, one excruciating turn at a time. His most effective weapon is his grungy sound design that he uses to incorporate wailing feedback as a plot point and the goopy plop of a disemboweling for shock points. The director clearly has a broad knowledge of and affection for this musical milieu, which makes the whole proceedings feel more real and grounded and helps audiences gloss over the occasional logical lapse. Green Room is punk as hell, and it makes me eager to see Saulnier’s next outing.

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Film Features Film/TV

X-Men: Days of Future Past: Mutatis mutan(t)dis

I forgot how thrilling the X-Men movies were until the moment in Days of Future Past when a Sentinel robot shattered Iceman’s head. So I wasn’t surprised to discover that the fifth (or seventh) installment in the franchise is as casually creative and proudly pseudo-profound as its predecessors. With the exception of a few moments of lachrymose speechifying, its unrelenting, almost sadistic intensity makes it the summer’s most ruthlessly efficient blockbuster. You will be entertained. Resistance is futile.

Although I confess an irrational fondness for Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand, bringing back two-time X-Men director Bryan Singer for Days of Future Past was a wise choice. His third entry (after the original X-Men and its first sequel) in the series satisfies serious fan expectations and respects the cinematic universe built by the previous four films. And if you don’t look too closely or think too hard, he also straightens out the previous tetralogy’s knotty timelines, gaps, and inconsistencies.

A movie this size is a big undertaking, and at times it creaks like some superhero version of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The army of recognizable faces in Days of Future Past is formidable: we see old and young Magneto (Ian McKellan and Michael Fassbender), old and young Professor X (Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy), new Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), old Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), old Storm (Halle Berry), and more fresh faces and peripheral favorites. At the center of this mutant whirlwind stands Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), an immortal tough guy for whom history is a nightmare from which he cannot awaken.

In Days of Future Past, Pryde sends Wolverine’s consciousness back to the 1970s in an effort to avoid the nightmarish future the surviving mutants now live in, where they are hunted down and obliterated by the sleek, chain-mailed Sentinels. But the fight scenes are only part of the show. Singer’s film is also a poppy, propellant gloss on Jean Renoir’s famous observation from The Rules of The Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.”

Take Magneto, whose hostility is partially rooted in his belief that fearful humans will wipe out his mutant brothers. Or take scientist and industrialist Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage). Trask believes that mutants will do the same to humans because that’s the way evolution works. And don’t forget the eternal optimist Charles Xavier, who continues to believe in human decency and human hope even when he’s a drug-addled, powerless version of his former self. Each of them is, at some point in the film, doing the right thing.

Although its most fully realized set piece is a funny slow-motion musical interlude inspired by the 2006 animated film Over The Hedge, Days of Future Past is the most serious film in the X-Men cosmology. There’s not much time for verbal grace notes, but there are plenty of visual ones, from Wolverine’s gray-streaked temples to an army of Sentinels spreading out over a stormy sky like skydiver-shaped warheads. It traduces history because its whole premise is that history is changeable bunk, and for a global $300 million smash hit, it gets awfully dark before the dawn. Good stuff.