Tag: Woody Harrelson

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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing in Memphis: Scream VI, 65, and Woody

Ghostface in Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group's "Scream VI."

Good news, fans of accurate naming systems — they’re numbering Scream movies again! After the 2022 Scream, which had no number (perhaps to confuse you into believing you’re buying a ticket for Wes Craven’s 1996 masterpiece of meta-horror) but was actually the fifth Scream, the Roman numerals are back, baby! Anyway, in Scream VI, Ghostface returns, he’s got a gun, and you’re trapped on the subway with him. 

Yay, more numbers! Adam Driver stars in 65 as an astronaut who crashes on a distant planet, only to find that it’s not really a distant planet, it’s the Earth 65 million years in the past. Think the Planet of the Apes scenario, only with hordes of dinosaurs who don’t take kindly to strangers. Legend Sam Raimi produces, and A Quiet Place helm team Scott Beck and Bryan Woods wrote and directed. 

Woody Harrelson is Marcus, an NBA G-league coach who has a bit of an anger problem, in Champions. After a legal entanglement, he is ordered to perform community service by coaching a team of players with intellectual disabilities. It’s tough at first, but by golly, he’s gonna take this band of misfits all the way to the Special Olympics! 

One of the strangest high-concept films in recent memory is The Magic Flute. German director Florian Sigl takes Mozart’s opera, which debuted in 1791 and is still performed regularly today, and makes it literal, with the help of some expensive CGI and Hollywood scholockmiester Roland Emmerich. A hit in Germany last year that is just now hitting the States, it looks entertainingly weird.

Don’t hibernate on the year’s biggest sleeper hit. She’s black, she’s bad, she’s a bear, and she’s on hard drugs. Spoiler alert: She eats O’Shea Jackson Jr. But is this East Tennessee mom serving as a good role model for her cubs?

On Wednesday, Indie Memphis continues their long-running Microcinema series with A String of Pearls: The Film of Camille Billops and James Hatch. Three of the pair’s short documentaries from the 1980s and 1990, “Older Women and Love,” “Suzanne, Suzanne,” and “Take Your Bags” have been restored to spread the word about the groundbreaking documentarians. The screening at Crosstown Theatre will be pay-what-you-can.

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Solo: A Star Wars Story

In its century long history, Hollywood has produced a handful of characters that have become icons of American manhood. Nick Charles, The Thin Man, was a hard living, but elegant aristocrat. John Wayne’s Ringo Kid from Stagecoach was the archetypal cowboy: laconic, upright, uncomplicated. Rhett Butler was an irresistible scoundrel. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine was a heartbroken cynic finding his way back to virtue in Casablanca. James Dean’s teenage misfit Jim Stark was the Rebel Without A Cause. Peter Fonda rode a motorcycle named Captain America on an LSD fueled trip in search of his nation’s soul, while Chris Evan’s Captain America was thawed out of the arctic ice to remind us of the better angels of our nature. The 1990s brought us both Will Smith’s wisecracking fighter jock from Independence Day and Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt’s hallucinatory, revolutionary alter ego.

Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo and Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca

Then there’s Han Solo. When he first appeared in Star Wars, Harrison Ford was still a part time carpenter. Four years later, when he introduced Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ford was the biggest movie star in the world, and would remain at or near the top of the heap well into the twenty first century. Befitting Lucas’ postmodern pastiche approach to space opera, Solo was a mixture of Rick Blaine’s fractured romanticism, a card playing smuggler like Rhett Butler, a quickdraw gunfighter like Wayne, and unrepentant ladies man like, well, all of them. His ostensible role was to provide a counterweight to Luke Skywalker’s boundless optimism, but he was the one all the boys wanted to be and, when he won the hand of Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, the one all the girls wanted to be with.

Han was the outsized focus of the franchise’s earliest spinoffs. In the 70s and 80s, Luke and Leia got one spinoff novel, Splinter of the Minds Eye. Han Solo and Chewbacca’s adventures filled three volumes, then, in the 2000s, three more. When Disney bought Lucasfilm and started cranking out Star Wars movies on the regular, it was inevitable that Han would take a starring role. It started out promising, when Lawrence Kasdan, the screenwriter for The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark put together a script, but Solo: A Star Wars Story turned into a textbook troubled production when the original directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were fired after four months of shooting. Lucasfilm honcho Kathleen Kennedy hired Ron Howard to clean up the mess, who was met with howls of derision from the fans. Lord and Miller are comedy directors who, it was hoped, would take Star Wars in a new direction. Howard was a safe choice, a Hollywood veteran with a reputation for unremarkable competence.

Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian

And that’s exactly what Howard brought to Solo. Kasdan, writing with his son Jonathan, constructed a solid series of heists gone wrong, shootouts, and chase scenes. We first meet Han (Alden Ehrenreich) as a street urchin boosting speeders on Corellia. His latest score, a batch of coaxium, a volatile spaceship fuel, is valuable enough to get him and his girlfriend Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke) off planet. But the plan goes quickly wrong, and the pair are separated. Desperate to escape his organized crime pursuers, Solo joins the Imperial Navy, hoping to become a pilot. Three years later, our hero’s washed out of flight school and is fighting with the stormtrooper grunts in the trenches of the swamp planet Mimban when he discovers a crew led by Tobias (Woody Harrelson) in mid-heist, and deserts the army to join the pirate life.

Emilia Clarke as Qi’ra

The problem with Solo does not stem from its chaotic production history. It’s that the star never fills the role. Ehrenreich is upstaged by literally every member of the supporting cast. Clarke’s performance is assured and nuanced, better than most of her work on Game Of Thrones. Woody Harrelson steals every scene he’s in. Donald Glover’s turn as Lando Calrissian is absolute, caped perfection. Even Chewbacca, played by Joonas Suotamo under the tutelage of Peter Mayhew, is more magnetic than Ehrenreich.

To be fair, filling the shoes of Harrison Ford is an impossible task that would have defeated the vast majority of actors. Take it from someone who has to sit through a lot of true crap: this is not a bad movie, and far from a return to the bad old days of Attack Of The Clones. There’s plenty of swashbuckling and primo spaceship action, but also a fair amount of box-checking fan service. The sight of the crystal skull from the tomb of Xim the Despot and Lando’s offhand mention of the Starcave of ThonBoka make my sad little geek heart grow three sizes, but will mean nothing to the casual moviegoer. Howard’s pedestrian direction gets the job done while underlining the greatness of Rian Johnson’s work on The Last Jedi. The bottom line is, Solo is a fun two hours at the movies, while also being an all-too predictable disappointment.

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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

For me, there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing a movie where everything clicks into place with utter perfection. Despite the incredible messiness of the story, situation, and characters’ lives, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is one of those films.

Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

It’s remarkable that a work of art that reaches this deeply into the soul of contemporary America would be written by an Irishman, but maybe it had to be. Maybe we’re too blinded by our own conflicts to see as clearly as Martin McDonagh, the playwright turned filmmaker most famous for the tricky crime comedy In Bruges. Three Billboards is steeped in bitter irony, but it is not by any stretch a comedy.

Come awards season, you’re going to be hearing a lot more about Francis McDormand’s performance as Mildred Hayes, the divorced, working class single mom in this rural outpost in the Ozarks. Mildred used to be a mother of two, but seven months ago her teenage daughter Angela was raped and murdered. Now she lives with her son Robbie (Lucas Hedges), stewing in guilt for her perceived failure to protect her child and simmering with rage at the police who still haven’t solved the horrific crime. Impulsively, she rents the titular advertising to send a public message to Sheriff Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), hoping to embarrass him into action.

The easy thing to do for McDonagh would be to make Sheriff Wiloughby a moustache-twirling villain. But he’s not. Harrelson’s Willoughby may not be the most woke person in Missouri, but he is a hard working public servant who takes his oath of office seriously. He’s also working on a deadline, so to speak, having been diagnosed with cancer.

The same can’t be said for deputy Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), however. Dixon is a lazy, incompetent thug who was destined to be on one side of the carceral state or the other. His version of good police work is throwing the guy who owns the signs (Caleb Landry Jones) out of a second story window. McDonagh doesn’t let the characterization rest there, even though he could. Inside, Dixon is a weak, fearful person trapped in a toxic relationship with his alcoholic mother.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Nothing in Three Billboards is simple. As Mildred’s single minded quest for justice crosses the line into thirst for revenge, she starts to see herself in her abusive ex-husband Charlie (John Hawkes). McDormand’s performance is one for the ages, a highlight of one of the most distinguished careers in American cinema. Her facial control is at once appropriately stoic for a country woman who has worked every day of her adult life and deeply expressive of inner pain. On the outside, she’s tough as nails and determined as the tides. On the inside, she is wracked with doubt and fear. McDormand hovers in this difficult space the entire movie, even when she’s going on a date with Peter Dinklage, who is having entirely too much fun with his moustache.

The complexity and depth of McDonagh’s script reminded me of the work of Dalton Trumbo, the legendary Spartacus and Roman Holiday screenwriter who was expert at balancing social commentary with real character and down to earth drama. In the theaters as well as in real life, 2017 has been a year of extremes, with the incredible high points like Get Out and Logan Lucky putting the failure of big budget studio tentpoles in stark relief. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri is a rare and thoughtful masterpiece for our troubled times.

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Film Features Film/TV

War For The Planet Of The Apes

Have you ever dreamed of a world where you could see The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, The Great Escape, and The Ten Commandments remade with gorillas, monkeys, and orangutans? Sure, there’s a lot of horrible stuff going on right now, but at least we finally live in that world. Not since 1973, when Alejandro Jodorowsky recreated the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs with frogs, toads, and chameleons in The Holy Mountain, have we seen such epic animal action as we see in War for the Planet of the Apes.

Of course, I’m being facetious. That lede popped into my head during the closing moments of director Matt Reeves’ film, and it was just too juicy to pass up. I also thought it would be good to open with a joke, because this final installment of the rebooted Planet of the Apes series is as deadly serious as anything you’ll see in theaters this year. One of the many great things about the original 1968 film is that viewers are disarmed by the ludicrousness of the premise. Charlton Heston battling talking monkeys? Sounds like the setup for a comedy. But Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, who adapted the film’s screenplay from a French sci-fi novel, was an expert at smuggling social commentary in innocuous-looking packages. Over the course of five films and a TV series, Apes commented on colonialism, the Vietnam War, human morality, nuclear weapons, and the civil rights movement. That it all looked like stupid popcorn fare from the outside was a feature, not a bug.

Andy Serkis as Caesar, leader of the apes.

The current simian film cycle took as its jumping off point 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. In that film, which was a prequel before the term even existed, humans created super-intelligent apes to be their slaves. The inevitable primate uprising was led by Caesar, played by Roddy McDowall, who faces hard choices as his war of liberation teeters on the edge of vengeful slaughter.

Beginning with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar’s perfunctory story arc became the focus of a new film trilogy. Caesar, now played by Andy Serkis and a team of digital motion-capture artists, was raised in a research facility, the infant of a mother called Bright Eyes who gained intelligence after being given an experimental anti-Alzheimer’s drug. In 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar’s band of primates, who communicate mostly with sign language, hid out in the woods of Northern California while the human population of the world was devastated by the Simian Flu, a disease unleashed by the same research that elevated the apes’ smarts. Caesar’s struggles to do what is best for his charges while shunning the brutality of the humans who pursue them made him this century’s most compelling and complex onscreen leader.

Amiah Miller as Nova, a mute human girl adopted by the apes.

War opens with a squad of soldiers searching for Caesar’s deep woods redoubt. The troopers are under the command of the Colonel (Woody Harrelson), a fanatical human species-ist determined to wipe out the intelligent apes. Meanwhile, Caesar’s scouts have found a new place for the apes to live, seemingly safe from the greatly diminished human population. But before he can lead the simian exodus, the apes are again attacked by the Colonel, and Caesar must choose between personal revenge and the needs of his … people.

Steve Zahn as Bad Ape

Reeves’ direction is sure, expanding on the strengths of Dawn while pushing into new territory. Harrelson’s mission is to reconstruct Marlon Brando’s performance as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Unlike Brando, he appears to have actually read the script. Caesar’s face is a masterpiece of CGI, capturing the nuances of Serkis’ motion-captured expressions. The other simians, notably Steve Zahn’s comic relief Bad Ape and Karin Konoval’s wise orangutan Maurice, make for the most sympathetic band of unlikely heroes this side of Guardians of the Galaxy.

Reeves spins riffs off the films I mentioned above, but the overall mood is of a Kurosawa samurai epic, with stoic heroes on snowy battlefields torn between good and evil. My only real objection to War is Caesar’s evolution — or perhaps devolution — from principled leader to more conventional Hollywood action hero. Forsaking his duty in favor of an ape-to-man showdown with the Colonel is a very un-Caesar move, but at least Reeves seems to understand the transgression. In the end, the greatest of apes can only watch as his people cross over into the promised land.

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Film/TV TV Features

True Detective Season 2

The cops in True Detective‘s second season are so world-weary, it’s a wonder they’re able to move. They’re so stern, grim-faced, and defined by work, they’re puritan. They wrap themselves in strip clubs, perps, and denial as they move about their fallen world. In real life, in the age of small cameras, cops can be terrifying. An iPhone can take corruption and put it online for all to see. But in fiction, police are vehicles for philosophy. The detectives and officers who solve the world’s mysteries on our screens always have reasons to step over the line and are always negotiating them. They’re the protagonists. The citizens they rough up are, depending on the show’s level of grit, incidental to the larger goal of getting the bad-guy-of-the-week.

Their weariness is part of the time-honored existentialism of detective noir, making sense of a world and finding your own code within it. True Detective‘s Season 1 wore this on its sleeve. Its most pure expression was its opening credits, which took images of the actors and story and mixed them like a soup. The appeal in Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle was his ability to take atheistic observations about the world, sprinkle in some nihilism, and serve them in a movie star’s mouth. Cohle and Woody Harrelson’s more lived-in Marty Hart were both fully realized characters, darkly funny amid all the Gothic imagery. Most everyone else was Southern stereotypes, and HBO-mandated nudity ate the agency of the female characters whole. But ultimately, everything was abandoned in an unconvincing last-minute switch to optimism by Cohle.

This season the grimness takes the forefront. The weary cops’ stories unwind in much more regular fashion. We have no Cthulhu mythology and unreliable narration to sift through. Rachel McAdams’ Bezzerides has problems with sex caused by her growing up in a cult her father ran. Her most prominent quality is that she smokes an e-cigarette. Taylor Kitsch’s Woodrugh’s sexual repression is defined by an unhealthy relationship with his mother. He likes to drive fast on his motorcycle, on highways we’re repeatedly shown in beautiful aerial shots. Farrell’s Velcoro is a crooked alcoholic cop who beats up the father of his son’s school bully. He works for mob boss Semyon (Vince Vaughn), after the former helped him kill his wife’s rapist years ago. They’re terse, they’re pissed off, they’re told they need therapy, and all they’ve got in the world is this case they’re obsessed with unraveling.

They aren’t different enough from the thousand previous iterations of these archetypes. Learning about their ex-wives and boyfriends feels like work. Some of the most effortless, efficient characterization so far has been Farrell’s hair. The Cape buffalo bangs and droopy moustache scream that this man has stopped caring.

Promisingly, each episode has gotten weirder, with small Lynchian touches. Water stains on a ceiling crossfade into carved-out eye sockets. A Russian trophy wife huffs pot smoke out of a bag. A character shot with rock salt hallucinates a Conway Twitty impersonator singing “The Rose.” Oral sex is a running theme.

But the weirdness isn’t enough to help Vaughn’s delivery of a speech about having to crush a rat with his bare hands as a child. It’s the moment when things should come together, told in a dead-eyed close-up at the start of the second episode, when his mobster’s money worries should take center stage. Vaughn always seemed capable of more since he carried the movie Swingers 20 years ago, but instead he has gotten less and less expressive with each role. He is better irritated and frantic than mournful and sad. His flashes of anger work, but the glum nervousness about his position in life doesn’t come across.

It’s a slow burn with wet kindling. Unless the weirdness builds or the performances build — or its depiction of police corruption comes to feel as immediate as watching a viral video — it might be more interesting if the characters actually went to therapy.

True Detective Season 2
HBO
Sundays

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True Nihilism

HBO’s True Detective

Three episodes in, HBO’s True Detective has sucked viewers deep into a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in Matthew McConaughey’s best character acting ever. It’s dark, sexy, grim, fatalistic, and the most compelling new series on television this season. It has parallel plotlines 17 years apart — with the same characters — two juicy murder mysteries that inform and in turn lead to more mystery; a whodunnit squared.

The story begins in 1995. McConaughey is Rustin Cohle, a former undercover narco cop who became addicted while on the job in Texas. His young daughter was killed in a car wreck, and his marriage died after that, pushing him further off the deep end. Given a final chance to clean up and save his career, he takes a job as a police detective in small-town southern Louisiana. He’s partnered with Detective Martin Hart, played by Woody Harrelson, a plain-talking local man with all the trappings of normalcy — pretty young wife, two kids, nice house.

They are assigned to investigate a bizarre, ritual murder of a young woman. (The crime scene reveal in Episode 1 is a chiller.) As they scour the desolate rural back-roads, questioning suspects, following leads, the two men unburden themselves, fill in each other’s back-story, and learn they have little in common, except a burning desire to solve the crime.

Cohle is a tortured nihilist, convinced the human race would be better off going extinct. Here’s a typical squad car soliloquy: “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody.”

Hart is repelled and creeped out. “Keep that kind of talk to yourself,” he says. But Hart has his own demons. We learn he’s got a mistress, anger issues, and probably a drinking problem.

But the show’s genius — and where Harrelson and, particularly, McConaughey elevate True Detective to another level — is how the writers handle the frequent time-jumps to 2012. We soon learn that, 17 years later, an identical ritual murder to the one in 1995 has occurred, though the first murder was supposedly solved by Hart and Cohle. (We don’t learn any of the details; that would spoil the first mystery). We see Hart and Cohle, several times in each episode, in what can best be called “flash forwards,” as they are being questioned, separately, by cops in 2012.

Hart has lost his hair and his marriage, and is running a private security firm. Cohle is a pony-tailed, chain-smoking alcoholic who does menial work to feed his habit. McConaughey inhales this role like a Marlboro, lives it, owns it.

Much of the power of True Detective stems from, well, its weirdness: the bizarre, rural characters — revival preachers, shade tree mechanics, teenage whores, bar hustlers — and the continuing revelations about its two protagonists: Cohle’s quaalude habit, his fetishistic, sometimes violent, investigatory techniques; Hart’s drinking and womanizing. They’re an odd couple, but irresistible.

What happened to the two men in the years between the two murders is yet another mystery to savor, as small details emerge. Did Cohle have an affair with Hart’s wife? Maybe. Did either — or both — of these men cover up something 17 years ago, letting a murderer go free, somehow? We don’t know.

Like every thing else in True Detective, information comes in small bits, like a jigsaw puzzle scattered over half a county. Once in a while, you find an interesting piece, like that abandoned church with scrawled paintings. Or that weird barn with the freaky totem. Or that Twin Peaks-ish country brothel. But how does it all fit together? I don’t know, but I’m going to keep watching.

True Detective

Sundays, 8 p.m.

HBO