Beauty and the Beast (2017) Review

rating: ***

summary: Belle meets and falls in love with a beast.

review: These Disney live action remakes have been such hit-and-miss affairs, it always depends on how much the director really wants to revisit the material.  Beauty and the Beast is at once a worthwhile and listless effort in the series.

It's a constant struggle to breathe free from its confines, to be the lively kind of movie it wants to be and hopelessly devoted to play-acting the animated film it's based on.  If this had been made, say, fifteen years earlier, it would've fit right alongside the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  At heart that's what it desperately wants to be.  Obviously having to be a musical puts a damper on such ambitions.  Bill Condon, who staged such a brilliant adaptation of Chicago, seems incapable of bridging the divide, staging a series of karaoke scenes instead, the songs lost to the soundtrack as they seem stubbornly unmoored from the screen material.  It begins to feel more like a tribute than anything.

One of the great signifiers of all this is Josh Gad, not because of his overblown gay element, but that he can't compete, in live action, with the voice work did as Olaf in Frozen.  Luke Evans, if he didn't have to sing, might be able to sell his part, too.  If it had been Russell Crowe (how interesting would that have been!), no critic would've thought twice to mention it (although Crowe almost certainly has more credentials than Evans on every score).  Evans is constantly being undercut by the material he chooses; in most other eras besides the ones he keeps popping up in, he'd have been a much bigger deal.

I'd be lying if I said I decided to watch for any other reason, really, than seeing Emma Watson in another big story and a role other than Hermione Granger, but she'd swallowed whole, too, by the intended pomp, and like Evans has no answer to the jukebox playing around her.  Dan Stevens plays well as the Beast, but as the Prince isn't given anything at all to work with, the very embodiment of how hollow all this is.  Ewan McGregor is barely recognizable either in voice or when we finally see him, a wasted opportunity.  Emma Thompson, let's face it, is no Angela Lansbury (although the kid voicing Chip is great, even if he doesn't get much to do, and once transformed back into a human is thoroughly undermined by the production).

The two shining lights are Kevin Kline reimagining the father and Ian McKellen as Cogsworth.  McKellen's career has been one constant string of frustration for anyone expecting any kind of consistent interest from the industry.  For every Gandalf or Magneto or Da Vinci Code, there's really almost total silence, which is a terrible shame, even when he makes it clear he outclasses everyone and thing around him in something like this.  

Stanley Tucci and Gugu Mbatha-Raw show up in undercooked supporting roles, more examples of what might have been.  I guess they can't all be David Lowery's masterful Pete's Dragon.  Well, I suppose, of course not...

Archive (2020) Review

rating: ****

summary: In the near future, memory can be downloaded in an archive for loved ones.

review: Sometimes you just don't know what's worth discovering, since these days there's very little interest in collating these things beyond "everyone seems to like it" or "everyone seems to hate it," which also demolishes the old model of cult discoveries, since you never really know if the people who hate something or love something are themselves a cult , especially if it doesn't have obvious metrics like box office results behind it.  Archive might be the last interesting find I discover on Redbox (which seems to be in death throws after a seemingly-in-hindsight ill-advised sale to new owners a few years back, not necessarily just because its model still relies on physical media).  It's the kind of movie I probably would have had no idea even existed if it weren't for Redbox or, say, the credits of an actor or two I might browse absently (Theo James, from the Divergent movies, or Rhona Mitra).  The fact that it was released in the dead zone of the pandemic in 2020 would also help account for this, although in earlier years it might've been able to enjoy a little more publicity.

Director Gavin Rothery came up with the idea when he was in the production pool for Moon, one of the great it's-probably-at-least-a-cult-classic-but-it-really-doesn't-get-enough-attention movies of the past dozen years or so, and visually it's really not much of a surprise, another lone science type trying to unravel what increasingly seems like a conspiracy against him.  There's a considerable twist at the end about just what the circumstances really are, and robot companions who are responsible for filling out the atmosphere, but Archive depends much more than Moon did on the lead character's greater narrative than just the story playing out on the screen.  He's trying to download his dead wife into a robot capable of more or less helping her live again.  His third attempts seems like it'll work out, but all three are basically incapable of reconciling to new circumstances, so it's really how any of them are willing to cope with the results.

James is in a much more mature mode than the Divergent films; this is the first time, I think, I've seen him outside of them, so it's a good way to confirm he has some actual worth as an actor, although depressingly he doesn't seem to have become any casting director's favorite.  Toby Jones, one of film's great character faces this era, shows up, Mitra, Stacie Martin as the wife.  It's immediately apparent that Rothery is more than competent directing all this.  With Redbox you just never know.  Much of it is dreck with no discerning ability to know what good filmmaking looks like.  He has yet to tackle a follow-up, but I'd certainly be interested.

A great discovery.

A little about Dune: Part Two

I’m not calling this a review, since I don’t want to get a lot into the film itself, but this is more to say I can’t understand how everyone is so effusive about it. I’m going to call it the Excalibur effect. Excalibur was the 1981 grandiose take on King Arthur. Clearly a result of studios trying to figure out why Star Wars was such a hit, where a lot of other films chased, desperately and without any of the technical finesse or storytelling flare, what George Lucas did, in the genre he did it, Excalibur went in another direction, far into literary history, for another saga involving grand destinies, the sad stories of fathers and sons, and, well, swordplay. And it did it straight, no studio meddling to broaden the audience (which usually means adding in some comedic elements), full fantasy, and it’s been a cult classic ever since.

The Excalibur effect is perhaps better known, today, through Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, filled with the same purposeful earnestness (with some comedic elements), but otherwise embraced with extravagant praise, from the start, by critics and viewers, to a greater extent than Excalibur itself, thanks to its unusual, to this day, strategy of releasing three films in three years, and telling fans they were all shot simultaneously, the MCU before the MCU of getting ahead of the curve and getting to ride it the whole way.

I don’t think any of these movies, with the exception of Fellowship of the Ring, deserves the amount of praise they get. I find them to be highly indulgent, from the entirety Excalibur to how Gollum is depicted in the second and third Rings. When you go grand you have to earn it with truly great filmmaking.

Denis Villeneuve is a great filmmaker, but he’s driving himself to distraction with how long he stays on Arrakis. Here I’m specifically addressing the length of these films. If he were packing them with the kind of gripping drama or subtle intrigue of his best films, that would be one thing. But Dune: Part Two is packed mostly with dithering. Pretty dithering, but mostly an internal battle Paul Atreides fights over a destiny we’re supposed to question. It’s the whole point. But instead we’re led to hero-worship him, like everyone else. 

So it’s a movie no one else could have made. I get that. No one else has. But sometimes no one should. Maybe it’s because I’m impatient for Villeneuve to work on some of his own material. People say they love this now, but will they follow him the way they have Christopher Nolan? Nolan had his Batman films, but he always balanced them with other work. I get that Villeneuve was probably happy he got to make a second one at all, and he was rewarded for it. There’s more praise and attention this time than with the first one. 

I just wish he could have made his point better, I guess, and not worried so much that it looked good regardless. Sometimes that’s not actually the only thing you need to worry about. Some people just can’t tell the difference. It’s the Excalibur effect. But it’s the substance that really counts. Extremely competent filmmaking still needs excellent storytelling.

2023 Movies Viewed/ Ranked

Viewed/Ranked

1. Oppenheimer 
2. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant 
3. Asteroid City
4. The Creator
5. Napoleon 
6. The Flash
7. Beau Is Afraid
8. Knock at the Cabin
9. 65
10. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
11. The Equalizer 3
12. The Holdovers
13. Paint
14. American Fiction
15. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
16. Polite Society 
17. John Wick IV
18. Poor Things
19. Killers of the Flower Moon
20. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
21. The Iron Claw
22. Master Gardener
23. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
24. Barbie
25. A Good Person
26. Magic Mike’s Last Dance
27. Blue Beetle
28. Marlowe
29. The Super Mario Brothers Movie
30. Sound of Freedom
31. Fast X
32. A Haunting in Venice
33. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
34. Sisu
35. Ant- Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
36. Sweetwater
37. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
38. Chevalier
39. Renfield
40. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
41. The Pope’s Exorcist 
42. Creed III
43. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
44. Ruby Gilman, Teenage Kraken
45. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
46. Haunted Mansion
47. 80 for Brady
48. Butcher’s Crossing
49. Plane
50. Cocaine Bear

Other Notable Releases

Air

Anyone But You

The Boy and the Heron

The Boys in the Boat

Dream Scenario 

Elemental

Expend4bles

Ferrari

Godzilla Minus One

The Little Mermaid

The Marsh King’s Daughter

The Marvels

Meg 2: The Trench

M3GAN

Migration

Next Goal Wins

No Hard Feelings

Past Lives

Priscilla 

Saltburn

Saw X

Scream VI

Strays

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

The Wandering Earth II

Wish

Wonka

The Creator (2023) review

rating: ****

the story: A vet in plunged into the endgame of a war between humanity and AI.

the review: Here's another movie I have no clue hasn't had far more praise than it's received.  It's damn near a work of genius.  It's close to a masterpiece.

I'm starting to implicitly trust John David Washington's instincts.  He's had a whole string of fascinating projects under his belt in recent years (Tenet, Amsterdam, and now The Creator), pushed himself well beyond dad Denzel Washington's shadow, and establishing his own definitive screen presence, not the calm cool of dad, not necessarily capable of more, but very much his own, and with the capability to fit in effortlessly into sweeping situations without being lost in them.

The Creator is more than Washington, of course.  It's Gareth Edwards' directorial follow-up to Rogue One, which is the leading candidate for Star Wars fans as best of the current cinematic era.  I personally was not a fan of Rogue One.  No, I was very much the opposite.  In context, now, however, it makes a lot more sense, since in a lot of ways The Creator is a response to and continuation of its ideas, which makes much more sense, to me, in this context.  The Creator itself also serves as that elusive concept Hollywood chased for years after 1977, a movie that evokes Star Wars without buckling horribly under the pressure, a thing that was almost impossible for twenty years.  (Incredibly, although I have no idea when I myself will be able to consider the results, 2023 potentially gave us two such movies, with Rebel Moon also clearly envisioned from the bones of Star Wars.)

This is familiar territory, whether you consider the classic I, Robot stories, the movie that eventually resulted from it, the Terminator franchise, the Matrix movies, or even current fears of emerging AI prominence (although The Creator features traditional robots, its was heavily marketed with the concerns sweeping through the culture at the moment, and viewed from that light by critics and likely audiences).  It doesn't matter.  You've never seen anything like this.

I even say this as someone who loved Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen's Descender/Ascender comics, which have a number of parallels to The Creator, including a child robot destined to play a climactic role in events desperately sought by numerous figures.  Doesn't matter.  Visually the results are astonishing, exactly what modern filmmaking should be accomplishing (and not just an endless stream of superhero movies), but narratively, the results are equally assured, deliberate, and where all the critics complaining otherwise are coming from, I haven't a clue, since the central message is as relevant as it's ever been: the oppressed just don't want to be oppressed anymore, they just want to be free to live.

And that's really what's so great about The Creator, that it finally boils the robot story to what it really always was.  We keep dreading the robot apocalypse, and yet...why?  Why assume they're just gonna want to annihilate us?  When do we figure out the best solution will always be the one that benefits everyone?  That's what intelligence tells us, and the "i" in "AI" literally means "intelligence," so again...why?  

That's what The Creator answers.  That's what pushes it toward greatness.  

Along with Washington are a few name actors, Allison Janney representing the humans and Ken Watanabe the robots.  Isn't the presence of Watanabe itself an indication of quality?  He's another actor who's consistently selected great material, always unfailingly delivering quality performances in roles intriguing and relevant to the success of the films around them.

Trust Ken Watanabe.  Trust John David Washington.  There are built-in moments just waiting to be enshrined in the pop canon.  Help make The Creator a cult sensation at the very least!

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) review

the rating: ****

the story: Indy has a chance for one last great archeological find.

the review: I now have my second favorite movie in the series.  And who knows?  It might even become my favorite.  This is not likely something you've heard about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny before.  Certainly not with someone saying their favorite is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  I don't come to the franchise as a diehard believer.  I caught up with Raiders of the Lost Ark much later than other fans.  To me it's the first movie (and Temple of Doom is just another in the series).  I liked Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, thought it was inconceivable that Lucas and Spielberg struggled to make what was such an obvious entry in the series (aliens) for the kind of careers each otherwise had.  But it took James Mangold to reach Dial of Destiny, which achieves its greatness in much the way he did with Logan.

By finally just doing the kind of story that should have been told in the first place.

Henry Jones is an adventurer.  But that's just the stories he finds himself in.  He's actually, in his normal life, a professor, a lover of history, who sometimes goes on archeological searches, which happen to blow all out of proportion.  But mostly a lover of history.  I think Dial of Destiny is the first time that's really emphasized.  By the time we reach the ending (anyone quibbling about what happens is perhaps forgetting about the leaps of faith the other entries ask of us), it's what he always wanted, the thing that he was destined to experience all along.

Mangold previously achieved this with Logan, as I said, the first and to date only Wolverine appearance from the X-Men film franchise to stop worrying so much about superhero adventures and just let the guy be himself, in his own life.  The Wolverine, which was supposed to be the one that fixed that, buried him in a moody superhero adventure anyway.  X-Men Origins: Wolverine tossed him throughout the timeline, and forgot who the villain was supposed to be (Victor Creed, not Deadpool, regardless of how he was portrayed).  Logan made up for all of that.  It told a complete story, and even played out symmetrically with the first standalone movie (by having Wolverine fight himself, it finished the story the first one abandoned).  It also let him by the hero in an X-Men movie, which the X-Men movies kept dancing around, even when it was clear he was the star.

Dial of Destiny throws the accustomed Nazis at Indy, enemies and allies to work off of, but for the first time it's not the adventure that drives the plot (as with a lot of modern filmmaking the screen is too dark anyway) but rather the awareness that Indy himself is the star, which is also why Last Crusade worked so well, because it put the focus on Indy and his dad (which is what inspired the National Treasure movies).  While Disney continues to marvel at the technology that allows it to de-age faces, it's the older Indy that fascinates, and he's still very much up to the task, incredibly, all these years later.  And at five films and a little over forty years, we've gotten to see a complete arc of the good professor's life.

What's most remarkable, perhaps, is that if you were to watch only one Indiana Jones movie, you could absolutely make the case for it being Dial of Destiny.  Partisans will always default to Raiders, while Last Crusade has its selling points, too, but Destiny has young Indy, and it has old Indy, essentially a complete arc unto itself, and a single story uniting both, and a story linking his teaching life definitively to his private life.  It's all there.  That's why it's easy to sell.

Rounding out the cast this time are Antonio Banderas (I confess to missing everything but a glimpse of him), Mads Mikkelsen as the obligatory Nazi, Boyd Holbrook (who was also a standout in Logan), and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as a more youthful audience surrogate in case you're not that interested in seeing old bones revisited.  

They say this is the last one.  It should be.  What a way to go! 

Films from cheap DVD collections

20 Classic Movie Collection: Leading Ladies

Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)

Biopic of Broadway pioneer Jerome Kern (best known today for the song "Old Man River") featuring Judy Garland (her spotlight song clearly evoking "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"), Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury.  Not exactly Yankee Doodle Dandy but worth a look.

Home Town Story (1951) Marilyn Monroe has a bit part in this film that's not quite Citizen Kane or Frank Capra, but tries hard to be.

Affair in Monte Carlo (1952)

Weird editing makes this movie's timeline confusing in ways the filmmaking doesn't really support, essentially the body is flashback to a present that doesn't have much to say.  

The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

The unorthodox editing works better in this one (in other words, just plain better filmmaking) featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Donna Reed, Roger Moore, and Eva Gabor.  

The Groom Wore Spurs (1951)

A sendup of the classic celluloid cowboy featuring Ginger Rogers.

Midnight Cop (1988)

A horrible detective story featuring Michael York and Morgan Fairchild.

Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring (1975)

TV movie about Sally Field being a hippy who worries her family including Jackie Cooper (the Christopher Reeve-era Perry White) by dating and/or living with other hippies like David Carradine, who looks considerably different with all that hair.

Tulsa (1949)

A movie starring Susan Hayward (and the Ed Begley who's not Ed Begley, Jr.!) that took on new light after I saw and read Flowers of the Killer Moon, covering very similar territory from a much different vantage point.

The Deadly Companions (1961)

Sam Peckinpah directs a movie where people are crazy about Maureen O'Hara, with one good guy having to constantly defend her against all the bad guys he inadvertantly linked up with and prevent everyone from seeing the telltale clue about his past hiding beneath that cowboy hat he never removes...

Dishonored Lady (1947)

Overblown drama revolving around Hedy Lamarr, (part-time inventor).

Kill Cruise (1990)

Nonsense survival fluff featuring a young Elizabeth Hurley.

Nothing Sacred (1937)

Nonsense newspaper shenanigans featuring Carole Lombard, Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West!) and Hattie McDaniel (Gone with the Wind).

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)

An adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway story featuring Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward and Ava Gardner.

Road to Bali (1952)

The sixth of seven in the series featuring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour (in most of them).  Classic screwball comedy.

Mutiny (1952)

Ridiculous tale featuring Angela Lansbury.

Never Wave at a WAC (1953)

Screwball look at women in the military.

Jane Eyre (1934)

Adaptation starring the literary classic.

The Seducers (1977)

I watched through a lot of movies.  Some of them I did not watch very thoroughly.  Some of them just weren't worth the effort, okay?  When these things are being compiled through the public domain, they take what they can get.  

Katherine (1975)

Another darned TV hippy flick, this one starring Sissy Spacek in the role of the young future star as a hippy and Henry Winkler as the hirsute actor you'll struggle to recognize as the hippy love interest.

Power, Passion & Murder (1983)

Michelle Pfeiffer conveniently in the public domain, and also Hector Elizondo.  And Holland Taylor!

20 Classic Movie Collection: Leading Men

Constantine and the Cross (1962)

Cumbersome version of how Constantine converted himself and/or the Roman Empire.

The Night America Trembled (1957)

This right here was for me worth pursuing any of this in the first place.  A TV version of the famous Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds, featuring Edward R. Murrow, Warren Beatty, Ed Asner and James Coburn.

The Animal Kingdom (1932)

Puffle featuring Myrna Loy.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1958)

Clever musical version of the classic tale featuring Van Johnson and Claude Rains (Prince John in the classic Errol Flynn Adventures of Robin Hood).

That Uncertain Feeling (1941)

Nonsense romance shenanigans featuring Burgess Meredith.

Life with Father (1947)

Directed by Michael Curtiz (best known for Casablanca, but with a bunch of other standouts), but not worth much, a silly story about a dad played by William Powell (The Thin Man et al) and featuring Elizabeth Taylor.

This is the Army (1943)

Also directed by Curtiz (they couldn't afford any of his good movies), featuring Ronald Reagan in a movie that wishes it was White Christmas, with cameos from the likes of Irving Berlin, Joe Louis and Kate Smith.

The Amazing Adventure (1937)

Cary Grant tries to prove he can survive without relying on his massive inherited fortune...but kind of only succeeds because of his massive inherited fortune anyway.

Borderline (1950)

Fred MacMurray's the hero and Raymond Burr's the villain in this tale of uncertain identities pursuing justice.

A Bolt of Lightning (1951)

Another TV episode, a drama set during the runup to the Revolutionary War featuring Charlton Heston and very little to interest viewers.

A Tattered Web (1971)

Features Lloyd Bridges, James Hong (many small roles over the years!), and not much by way of me remembering anything about it.

Target of an Assassin (1976)

Features Anthony Quinn and another movie I don't remember much about.

The Bushwhackers (1952)

Features Lawrence Tierney, Lon Chaney Jr., and a third disc of the set that starts out with nothing much happening.

Royal Wedding (1951)

Fred Astaire to the rescue!  Featuring memorable dancing on walls, ceiling...anything at all, even dancing with a hatrack!

Made for Each Other (1939)

James Stewart and Carole Lombard can't save this.

Fighting Caravans (1931)

Gary Cooper looking so young it's like seeing a silent film version.

The Lady Says No (1952)

David Niven in not much to talk about here.

Behave Yourself (1951)

Lon Chaney Jr. in another movie I didn't spend too much time on that same day.

Port of New York (1949)

Gosh, had to pay attention to this one!  Yul Brynner's hairline makes it pretty clear why he ended up with the bald look...

David and Goliath (1960)

Orson Welles can't save this one.

I barreled through all these from October 2nd to the 29th.  It was an accomplishment of endurance and commitment when a lot of the material really didn't merit it.  Here we are finally writing this up, which was the main reason I did it at all.  Huzzah!